by Daniel Ranard

"I am in the world and at the same time in myself: is there geometry more beautiful?"
—Abdelmajid Benjelloun

When someone learns you're in academia, sometimes they ask questions you're not qualified to answer. An economist friend was asked once: "Oh, so how long do eggs last in the fridge?" And so it is, perhaps, with asking physicists about consciousness. You may as well ask a philosopher, a neuroscientist, or really anyone else – after all, we all have first-hand knowledge of that spark of life inside our skulls.

But I want to write on what physicists think about consciousness. Not because they deserve special authority, but because they provide an important point of reference. The physicist's worldview usually contains some aspect of physicalism (asserting the only "real" things are physical things, governed by physical laws), reductionism (asserting all observable phenomena are explicable in terms of their microscopic parts), and positivism or operationalism (asserting that the only meaningful concepts are empirically testable). And in recent generations more than any others, it seems, this web of attitudes permeates the zeitgeist. It is our inheritance from the success of 20^th-century physics.

This inheritance alters the way we frame questions about the mind and consciousness. While Descartes asked how the physical realm interacts with the realm of the mind and soul (his answer: the pineal gland), today we immediately privilege the physical. If the world consists only of the physical, how does the conscious mind arise? If your brain is a soup of electrons and protons, how does this soup come to harbor an interior experience? What gives rise to thoughts, feelings, and sense of being?

Philosophers have devised an intricate taxonomy of responses to the question of how consciousness relates to the physical world. Where do modern physicists fall within this taxonomy, especially as a community whose attitudes have historically shaped the framing of the question?

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by Yohan J. John

Once upon a time there was a village on the edge of a vast jungle. In it there lived a little girl who loved to explore the depths of the jungle. One day she heard a sound she had never heard before. She followed it until she came to a great old tree. High up in the branches she spotted a beautiful songbird. She sat by the tree for a time, enchanted by the bird's song. She returned home and told her friends about the bird. In a few days she became known as the Bird Girl, because she led the other children to the great old tree where the bird sang its tune. Soon enough, the adults went along too. Everyone agreed that the bird made a most wonderful music, unlike anything ever heard in those parts.

But the path to the great old tree was dangerous — there were slippery rocks and tangled roots. Wild animals prowled in the shadows. Still, the beauty of the bird's song had an irresistible pull. The village elders decided that the bird should be captured and brought to the village. Soon enough, the bird was caught, and placed in a cage. The Bird Girl told everyone that the song had somehow changed, and that something important had been lost. The elders did not pay her much attention. She went back to exploring the jungle, but rarely told the elders what, if anything, she found.

The villagers gathered every evening to behold the bird and its song. Word spread to neighboring villages, and soon curious pilgrims arrived. The villagers began selling food and trinkets to the visitors. The bird was a blessing!

One day the king was traveling through the region, on his way home from a victorious battle. He heard stories of the songbird, and decided to see it for himself. The bird proved even more impressive than he imagined. Nowhere in the kingdom was there a bird such as this!

The king decreed that such a bird could not be hidden away in an obscure village. He took it to the capital, where more people could be touched by the grace of its song. The villagers were sad to see the bird go, but they could hardly stand in the way of a king.

In the capital city, the king displayed the bird at his court. The courtiers told the king that such a bird could not possibly be placed in a crude wooden cage: it must have a royal cage, befitting its miraculous nature. And so a golden cage was built for the bird.

Over the years the king continued to embellish the cage: jewels and engravings were added to every bar. A temple was built especially for the bird. It was almost as marvelous as the king's palace. People arrived from every corner of the kingdom to behold the bird, hear its song, and marvel at its glorious cage. One day the Bird Girl came — though by this time she was called the Bird Woman. She muttered about how the bird's song had changed. As before, no one listened.

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by Paul Braterman

Translations change the course of civilisations. The translation project begun by Caliph al-Mansour in the 8^th century CE, and accelerated under his grandson Harun al-Rashid, made available in Arabic scholarly writings from Greek, Aramaic (Syriac), Persian, and Indian sources, and laid the foundation for the flowering of science and philosophy in the Islamic world during Europe's Dark Ages. A second translation project, from the 10^th century onwards, was in the other direction, from Arabic to Latin. Among its initiators was Gerbert d'Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II, and it reached its height in Toledo in Spain where for a while Christianity and Islam came into close contact and where Gerard of Cremona translated al Khwarismi and Avicenna (ibn Sina), as well as Arabic versions of works by Ptolemy and Aristotle. It refreshed Europe's contact with classical learning, while also conveying what was then current scholarship. It was the pathway through which Christian Europe rediscovered Aristotle, while Avicenna's clinical expertise is mentioned in the Canterbury Tales. His writings on geology, which I have discussed elsewhere, were among those translated at this time, but originally misattributed to Aristotle.

R: Avicenna expounding pharmacy to his pupils, from the 15th century "Great Cannon [sic] of Avicenna"; Wellcome Library via Wikimedia. Click to enlarge.

Happily, if belatedly, another translation project is now under way, from English to Arabic, focused largely on science-related topics of general interest, with special attention to evolution.

Why evolution? Not only because of its central role in modern life sciences, but because the response to evolution is a test of willingness to accept reality. Not just to accept that sacred texts require interpretation (we all know that anyway), but that human beings are part of nature. And because the teaching of evolution is under attack in the Arabic-speaking world (as it long has been next door, in Turkey, where last June it was dropped from the textbooks).

Acceptance of evolution is low throughout much of the Islamic world. In Saudi Arabia, school texts describe "Darwin's theory" as blasphemous and unscientific. In territory controlled by ISIS, the teaching of evolution was banned. In July, ISIS was finally driven from Mosul, its last major stronghold in Iraq. In August, Iraq itself dropped evolution from the school syllabus, on the grounds that the syllabus was overcrowded and that evolution was never really taught anyway. The Iraqi Education Minister, Omar Mahmoud Mohamed Iqbal Al-saydali, has religious party connections and while he has a degree in education (more that can be said for his opposite number in the US, or the UK or Scotland, for that matter) he has no special training in biology.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A few years ago, historian of science Steven Shapin had a review of Steven Gimbel's capsule biography of Einstein. The biography itself is quite readable, but Shapin also holds forth with some of his more general thoughts on the art of scientific biography and the treatment of famous scientific figures. He mulls over the tradition of writing about scientific lives that initially tended to treat its inhabitants as scientific heroes but which in recent times has sought more to illuminate their human flaws. Pointing out the triumphs as well as the follies of your subjects is of course an important thing to keep in mind for preventing a biography from turning into a hagiography, but as Shapin points out, one can bend over backward in doing this and err on the other side:

"The “human face” genre was an understandable response to hagiography, but more recently it has lapped over into a commitment to dirt-digging. Some modern scientific biographies mean to show great scientists as not just human but all-too-human, needing to be knocked off their pedestals. Galileo—we are now told—was a self-publicizing courtier, sucking up to his Medici patrons; Robert Hooke was a miser who molested his niece; Newton was a paranoid supervisor of torture who cheated in a priority dispute; Pasteur was a careerist power broker who cut ethical corners; even gentle Darwin was channeling laissez-faire capitalist ideology and using illness as an excuse to get colleagues to face down his scientific opponents on his behalf. Weary of stories about the virtues attached to transcendent genius, biographers have brought their scientific subjects down to Earth with a thunderous thump."

This view does not quite conform to the post-modernist ideal of treating every achievement as a subjective product of its times rather than as the unique work of an individual, but it does go a bit too far in discounting the nature of the few genuinely intellectually superior minds the human race has produced. The approach also tends to conflate people's scientific achievements with the social or personal aspects of their lives and somehow asks us to consider one only in the "context" of the other. But it seems odd to say the least to declare that Feynman is not a role model for science communication when millions of young people of all colors, nationalities, genders and political views have been deeply inspired by his teaching, books and science (more on this later). When it comes to being a successful model for science communication, shouldn't the product speak for itself rather than some preconceived ideology?

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by Carol A Westbrook

Did you give any Christmas presents this year? Or Hanukkah or birthday presents? Did the lucky recipients send you note by post, email, text, or at least a phone call? No? Well where, then, are their manners!

Yes, where, actually, are their manners?

It is true that our lifestyles have changed considerably since the days that the etiquette books were written. Many of the old rules are no longer relevant, while there are many new circumstances that Emily Post did not consider: cell phones, social media, gender equality, unconventional marriages, to name a few. This does not mean you have a license to ignore all of the etiquette rules that your parents taught you.

The rules of common courtesy make it possible for us to live together in harmony, without misunderstanding, insult, or hurt. These rules are there for a reason: to allow us be kind and polite to everyone without having to think about it–even if we can't stand them. As every etiquette book will tell you, if you are uncertain what is proper, then use common sense, treating everyone with kindness and respect.

Forgetting to say "thank you" is just one of example social rules that people break without thinking. There are many others that are especially important in getting along in today's society, and many which particularly vex me. I began to compile a list, which began to sound like Ko-Ko's song in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado,

"I've got a little list
Of society offenders
Who might well be underground
And who never would be missed"

Rather then sending this list to the Lord High Executioner, I will share it with you.

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by Christopher Bacas

There’s a sidewalk grate in Beverly Road station. Train sounds rise; squealed intervals evaporating as you pass. Underground, sun squeezes through the grid like skin pressed on a window screen. On the brightest day, its gutter brims gold, but never overflows. During heavy rains, the station’s walls sluice water that puddles next to the benches. When trains pass, delicate ripples ply their surface. On a grey April morning, feet bridging two platform lakes, I heard a heavy thud. The whoosh of air preceding it didn’t register. Three days of rain swelled my skull. Between the tracks, garbage sank in oily swamps. Over a dry stretch, a man lay face down; nylon backpack listing across his tan jacket. Instantly, a horizontal window opened and time upended.

Matter is quite un-material. Atoms are flickering emptiness. In that chasm, cosmic forces act on infinitesimal scale. Particles unravel and reconstitute; their paths, limitless sorcery. Mass doesn’t tally the apple’s downward push, but the warp of gluons lacing quarks into its nuclei. Ancient eyes tuned to vibrations of air and earth, not dancing voids, we see only objects, immobile and too, too solid.

I looked left for an oncoming train. The tracks ran straight to “The Junction”, terminus of the 2 and 5 lines. From the intervening stop, an approaching train’s headlamps tilt down, then steadily rise. In front, on the rails, parallel mercury streams advance. Now, two oncoming lights shimmered, guttering ahead, backlighting people near the turnstiles.

“Stop the train! Stop it!”

I jumped to the tracks. A man further down joined me. We rolled the body face up, then grabbed handfuls of clothing and ankles. He was heavy and the platform shoulder high. We couldn’t heave past the bumper at its edge. From above, hands pulled the jacket and dragged him across concrete.

Leaning into the bumper, I discovered it was soft underneath; a rubber Mille Feiulle. In its layers, street grit and countless bug carcasses, the sour delta of 21st century Flatbush delivered by gushers of spring rain. I pushed down and couldn’t clamber onto the platform. Hands grabbed mine, and I stumbled up. Behind us, the stopped train, unblinking.

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by Max Sirak

(Rather listen? Go right on ahead…)

Ho, ho, ho!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Praise, Pelor!

Last year for my December column, I borrowed a Steve Martin bit from SNL about wishes and riffed on it. (Here) This year, in the spirit of giving, I'm going to offer up a useful lens and associated vocabulary you can use to analyze behavior and decisions. But before we get to the goods, I'm going to take a moment and explain how I got familiar with this system.

Back In The Day

Ah, the year was 1993. Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey, debuted. Bill Clinton became President. The Unabomber was running amuck. David Koresh was holed up in Waco, TX. And, because I was twelve years old, none these events garnered much of my attention.

Computer camp did.

That's right. The summer between sixth and seventh grade, me and two buddies, Josh and Andy, went to a weeklong, overnight programing camp. C++. BASIC. Visual BASIC.

I wasn't a strong coder. I never made it past your basic BASIC, but the week I spent at Cleveland's own, Ursuline College, influenced me greatly. It was there, amongst the caffeine- fueled, acne-riddled adolescents, who spent all their time staring at screens (long before it was cool…), I was introduced to a lifelong hobby.

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by Thomas R. Wells

“[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention….By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV.2.9)

Doing right by others is difficult and time-consuming. Hence the attraction of what I call ‘invisible hand ethics’. This is modelled on Adam Smith’s famous account of how the overall outcome of lots of self-interested actions in the economic sphere can be good for society as a whole. Bakers just want to make a buck, but their self-interest produces the bread that feeds the people. Their competition for sales keeps prices down. The customers in turn just want the cheapest best bread, but wind up helping the best bakers make a good living. You get the idea. Smith claimed that in the economic domain this could be a far more reliable mechanism for achieving good outcomes than good intentions.

Invisible hand ethics has long since conquered economics. We no longer worry, as theologians did (they still do – but we don’t listen anymore), about whether it is ethical for businesspeople to make a profit beyond what they deserve for their work; whether prices should be proportionate to people’s ability to pay; whether a life of money making is a good one. The duty of the businessperson – as taught in every business degree, magazine, and TV gameshow – is to help her company win the game and take home the profit prize.

The idea of moral desert is still there. But now merit is decided by economic outcomes (price and demand), not by the moral inputs (the character or intentions of those concerned). Economic ethics has been outsourced to the markets. It is now a property of the system rather than of individuals.

Invisible hand ethics has spread. It can now be found far beyond the economic domain, especially in the professions organised around antagonistic competition, such as politics, science, sport, academia, law, and journalism. Lawyers strive to tell the story that best suits their client’s interest; scientists race to make discoveries first; politicians compete for votes so as to gain power; etc. The invisible hand is supposed to transmute this aggressive pursuit of self-interest by individual players into values like truth and justice and prosperity. For example, competition between politicians keeps them subservient to the people and encourages a vigorous public debate about where our society should go. Thus, democracy.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Just as the distribution of wealth exhibits dramatic skews – a small percent owns a disproportionate share of the total wealth – so too does the distribution of healthcare expenditures. When individuals in the US population are ranked based on their healthcare expenditures in a particular year, then it turns out that:

1. The top 1% of individuals account for 22.8% of the total healthcare expenditures

2. The top 5% of individuals account for 50.4 % of the total healthcare expenditures

3. The bottom 50% account for only 2.8% of total healthcare expenditures

https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/publications/st497/stat497.pdf

(Healthcare expenditures refer to all payments made related to health events – either by insurer or out-of-pocket.)

The estimates are from 2014, but the trends remain quite consistent from year to year. It is true that older individuals are more likely to have higher expenditures. But even if we look only at those over 65, we will still find that a small percent has an outsize impact. There is a fractal-like consistency to the pattern: if we narrowed our search down to the top 1% in a population of 10,000, then among these 100, the top 1-5 individuals will still account for a large percent of the total.

A similar trend emerges when we look instead at the prevalence of health conditions. If we were to plot the percent of individuals in a population (y-axis) who had no health conditions (count=0 on the x axis), exactly 1 health condition (count=1), exactly 2 health conditions (count=2) and so on, we would get something like the graph to the right. About 45% of the population has no apparent health conditions; about 25% has exactly one health condition; 12% has exactly two health conditions. The percentages start to decline as the count of conditions increases, indicative of the few who have 6, 7, 8, 9 or more conditions. We are now at the tail of the distribution where healthcare costs are most likely to be concentrated.

Because most of us in any particular year are healthy, the challenges faced by this small segment of the population can remain somewhat distant. Yet at some point in our lives – hopefully later than earlier or even better not at all: who can say – there is always a chance that we might join their ranks.

In this column, I will present visualizations of healthcare use by individuals at the tails of the cost and health condition count distributions. I started creating these visualizations while researching a publicly available dataset called the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey – MEPS for short. This is the same dataset that was used to characterize the expenditure distribution above. Aggregate trends are valuable, but it is by looking closely at individual cases that one can begin to sense what is going on. Each year MEPS collects granular data on health events for members of thousands of households across the United States. Households are chosen in the survey to represent the national demographic; each household is compensated for the time spent filling out questionnaires. To protect the identities of those surveyed, the data is anonymized before it is released to the public.

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by Emrys Westacott

This Christmas millions of people will no doubt watch Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. In many cases this will be their umpteenth viewing. The film is a popular Christmas entertainment for many reasons. The main action takes place on Christmas Eve. The final scene is of family and friends singing carols and making merry round a Christmas tree. The story is uplifting since love triumphs over despair and virtue is rewarded. Like Christmas itself, part of its appeal is nostalgic: fairy lights, tinsel and turkey are indelibly associated with an enjoyable time in childhood; and Bedford Falls, the small town where the action takes place, is presented as a friendly, spirited, cohesive (albeit almost entirely white) community where everyone knows their neighbors and whose center hasn’t yet been hollowed out by highways and suburban malls. Last but not least, there are angels. True, the angels are portrayed humorously, tongue in cheek. But the plot does hinge on their intervention. So the singing of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” at the end can be understood as expressing a kind of gratitude for and faith in benevolent supernatural powers that are watching over us and looking out for us.

Given all that, cynics and skeptics, especially those who have not seen the film for a long time, are often inclined to dismiss the film as so much sentimental slush. This is a mistake. For the film is not primarily about Christmas or angels. It’s about money. And it’s about the danger to society if avarice, greed, and egotism come to rule the roost. Just possibly, this is a morality tale that might still have relevance in Donald Trump’s America.

The central conflict in the drama is between George Bailey (James Stewart), who runs a small, struggling Building and Loan company, and Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a rich banker and slumlord. Potter, we are told at the outset, is “the meanest and richest man in the county.” His guiding passions are for making money and wielding power. He is contemptuous of people like George who, since they care for things other than the bottom line–e.g.helping ordinary people to become homeowners–are not true businessmen, but “losers.” As for the hardworking, ordinary folk, Potter dismisses them as “rabble,” or “suckers,” and with a glancing ethnic slur against immigrants, "garlic eaters.” His limited, self-centered outlook is underscored by the closed carriage in which he travels, by the wheelchair to which he is confined, and by his only ever appearing inside the confines of paneled offices.

Potter’s callousness toward others is explained as the actions of “a frustrated old man who is lacking something.” That something seems to be friends. His lack of friends is mentioned several times and is linked to his extreme egotism. When asked to show concern for the children of people who have been dispossessed, he coldly replies, “they’re not my children.” To him, other people are simply a means to his own mercenary ends. In one angry exchange, George nails what seems to be Potter’s essence: “You think the whole world revolves round you and your money.” In short, Potter is a greedy, callous, self-centered egotist without any real friends. Remind you of anyone?

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by Samir Chopra

Like every human being on this planet, I speak with an accent. In my case, I speak the English language with a hybrid, mongrelized Indian variant that bears the impress of thirty years spent on the US East Coast—in New York City and New Jersey—with a two year stint in Australia in between. It is distinct and unmistakable and clear in its lilt and inflection; no American, listening to me, will think I have grown up in the US. My ‘looks’—perhaps vaguely Hispanic, Middle-Eastern, or Southern European—might confuse some Americans about my ethnic and national origins; they receive instant confirmation, once I begin speaking, that I’m some kind of ‘foreigner.’ The way I speak makes clear I’m from ‘elsewhere:’ I mix up my ‘W’s and ‘V’s, occasionally inducing double takes in bartenders when I specified vodka-based cocktails during my drinking days; I do not always pronounce vowels in the clipped and muddied style so distinctive of American English; I emphasize syllables in my own idiosyncratic way. Sometimes, when I travel in Europe, locals peg me as ‘American’ because they have picked up on an Americanism or an acquired American twang in my speech—they, for their part, seem to think I have an ‘American accent.’ Because the Indian accent has intonation patterns similar to that of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, I’ve sometimes been asked—in the US—why as a brown man, I’m speaking in a brogue. (In the opening scenes of the 1990s British crime film, Twin Town, the Lewis brothers, from Swansea, Wales, are shown talking to their mother; their conversation is only partially audible but from the up-and-down sing-song intonations, I could have sworn I was listening to Indians.) Sometimes American listeners will insist I have a ‘British’ accent because I’m Indian, because India was an English colony and I attended so-called ‘English medium public schools,’ the Indian equivalent to the English or American private school. And so it goes.

The partial Americanization of my accent has been a subtle process; I have not been conscious of it being molded and shaped as I spoke English in the US. Instead, as I have participated in conversations, my spoken English has, in a kind of sympathetic dance, aligned itself with that of the speaker’s. My wife points out that when I converse with a good French friend, I start throwing around Gallic shrugs by the dozen; and when I lived in Australia, I picked up, quite quickly, many distinct Australianisms, and delighted in deploying them in my speech to my Australian friends (especially when it came to matters of shared interest like cricket). When I speak to Indians visiting the US from India, they make note of how impressed they are by the fact that I still comfortably trade in street-level colloquialisms in my conversations in Hindi/Urdu. I have, in a way, retained my Indian accent in my Indian languages; some Indians tell me I speak Hindi/Urdu with a Delhi accent; some Pakistanis assure me I speak Punjabi with a Pakistani accent. I do not belong anywhere; my accents give me away. My accent reflects my mixed-up nature, part Indian, part American, part migrant, part itinerant wanderer, part stable resident.

Because I speak English with an accent, it is a common enough suggestion—often made to my face, in all kinds of social settings, professional or personal, formal or informal—that English is not my ‘first language’, that rather, it is my ‘second language.’ But English is my first language in every relevant dimension; I speak, read, think, and write better in English than any other language.

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by Richard King

The Harvey Weinstein affair cannot be brushed aside as the culture of the casting couch. It is not one more story from the Hollywood fiction factory. It must not be allowed to be another tawdry milestone. It must be the watershed.

Reading these lines in The Guardian one week after the New York Times published the first explosive allegations about the former co-chairman of The Weinstein Company, I have to say I was sceptical, not to say dismissive. The Weinstein affair, a watershed? Really? The allegations came on the back of stories about Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, both exposed in 2016 as sexual harassers and workplace bullies, and just four months after the Bill Cosby saga had reached the trial stage in Pennsylvania. Notwithstanding that the Weinstein allegations had expanded in the course of that week from claims of sexual harassment/shakedowns to claims of sexual assault and rape, it was difficult to see why this particular controversy should be regarded as a tipping point.

Well, that's a win for The Guardian, I guess. For whatever else the Weinstein scandal tells us about our culture, there is no denying that it is "a watershed" of sorts – that the reaction to it has catalysed a particular way of doing politics (and, I would argue, further marginalised others). I still can't envisage a future tome entitled, oh, The Women's March: A History of the Struggle for Female Equality from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Harvey Weinstein Scandal. But I am beginning to see this moment as a significant one on the liberal/progressive side of the aisle.

Why has l'affaire Weinstein so captured the progressive mood? The answer, surely, can be given in three words: "Donald", "J.", and "Trump". Trump, the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, was not supposed to win the election, not least because of his taped admission to a busload of media boofheads and hangers-on that his fame afforded him pussy-grabbing privileges. But not only did he win the election, he won it against a very "qualified" woman, whose success was supposed to blaze a trail for women and girls the world over. The Women's March was in many ways an expression of profound frustration that a man with such regressive attitudes could win an election in 2016, and much of the commentary of the past ten months – from the characterisation of Bernie Sanders and his followers as "brogressives" and "brocialists" to the remarkable reaction to an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale – betrays a comparable exasperation. That is the essential difference between the Weinstein scandal and its analogues. It has come to light in the year of the Donald.

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