Philip Ball at Prospect Magazine:

If it weren’t for the fact that my fellow science communicators relish a challenge, I would say that the physics Nobel committee has done them no favours. The work of this year’s laureates—Duncan Haldane, John Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, all of them British but all now working in the USA—concerns processes called topological phase transitions, and you could spend precious column inches explaining both the adjective and compound noun here without inching much closer at all to an explanation of what they are doing in conjunction or what the subject is all about.

I am duty bound to have a crack at it. But there is, frankly, no point in doing so without first digging down to a deeper stratum. I could end up saying vague things about weird electrical behaviour and offering a probably false promise that some fancy new electronic devices might emerge from it all, and I would only thereby be colluding with the pernicious myth that the value of science lies with its applications. (I call it pernicious not so much because it is what we are often told but because funding criteria increasingly force scientists to maintain the pretense too, which is far worse.)

There’s no point in denying that the field that Haldane, Kosterlitz and Thouless have helped to excavate lies far from everyday experience, and could thereby easily seem as esoteric as the frozen-nitrogen plains of Pluto. But this is the tip of a branch that joins the core of physics very close to the trunk. This trunk is rarely glimpsed, because there is a tendency to portray physics as a process of dissection and reduction whose ultimate quest is the fundamental particles of reality. It is not.

more here.

Pádraig Murphy at The Dublin Review of Books:

There is a very rich memoir literature covering Stalin’s life and times, written after his death by those centrally involved. The most prominent part of these works are the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Like all memoirs, these sources have to be treated carefully – self-interest or failing memory affects all of them, although it is accepted that Svetlana’s memoirs are in a separate class in this regard. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Russian archives relating to the Soviet period were opened, providing new material on that period, and in particular on Stalin himself. These lives of Stalin and his entourage draw on this, as well as drawing carefully on the memoir literature.

In Oleg Khlevniuk’s view, too many sources for biographies of Stalin have been made available over the last twenty years, if one bears in mind the need to sift their sheer volume. In his words, the dilemma consists either of covering the hero without the context, or the context without the hero. He emphasises that many of the documents on which Stalin worked directly are in the former archive of the politburo, now the Russian Presidential Archive, which has not yet been completely opened to researchers. Pending such opening, perhaps a fully definitive biography cannot yet be written. For the time being we’ll have to content ourselves with the results of research on the documentation available, of which these are the most notable.

more here.

Uri Friedman in The Atlantic:

By one measure, the U.S. presidential campaign will be 597 days old on Election Day in November. That’s 14,328 hours, for those accustomed to CNN’s Countdown Clock. Parents who were rocking a newborn when Ted Cruz declared his candidacy are now running after a toddler. In this timeframe, Emma Roller reckons in The New York Times, “we could have instead hosted approximately four Mexican elections, seven Canadian elections, 14 British elections, 14 Australian elections or 41 French elections.”

It’s difficult to say definitively that the United States has the longest election process in the world. Some countries have legally defined campaign periods—typically several weeks or months—while others do not. In parliamentary democracies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the prime minister can call early elections, shaking up the timeline. And even in those nations with a fixed period for the official campaign, there is frequently an extended unofficial campaign. Yes, in the time that elapsed between Cruz announcing his presidential bid and Cruz endorsing Donald Trump, France technically could have elected 39 presidents. But that’s comparing pommes to oranges. France has a specified campaign length while the United States doesn’t. And in France, the unofficial campaign starts well before the two-week official campaign, especially now that French political parties are experimenting with U.S.-style primary elections.

More here.

Linda Geddes in Nature:

Jeanne Calment outlived her daughter and grandson by decades, finally succumbing to natural causes at the ripe old age of 122. Calment, who was French and died almost two decades ago, is thought to be world's longest living person. But if subsequent advances in medicine have lulled you into thinking that you might exceed this record, think again. An analysis of global demographic data published in Nature¹ suggests that humans have a fixed shelf life, and that the odds of someone beating Calment’s record are low — although some scientists question this interpretation. They say that the data used in the analysis is not unequivocal, and that the paper doesn’t account for future advances in medicine.

Human life expectancy has steadily increased since the nineteenth century. Reports of supercentenarians — people such as Calment who live to older than 110 — together with observations of model animals whose lifespans can be extended through genetic or dietary modifications, have prompted some to suggest that there is no upper limit on human lifespan. Others say that the steady increase in life expectancy and maximum human lifespan seen during the last century will eventually stop. To investigate, Jan Vijg, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and his colleagues turned to the Human Mortality Database, which spans 38 countries and is jointly run by US and German demographers. They reasoned that if there’s no upper limit on lifespan, then the biggest increase in survival should be experienced by ever-older age groups as the years pass and medicine improves. Instead, they found that the age with the greatest improvement in survival got steadily higher since the early 20th century, but then started to plateau at about 99 in 1980. (The age has since increased by a very small amount).

More here.

Lamenta: 423

“peacekeeping troops”
“tanks beneath the windows”

The inside of someone else’s dwelling visible — a table and some chairs.

You start to count one, two, three, four . . . until the explosion is near your neighborhood.
You can guess the position of mortar by this counting and try to find a safe place.

If the windows are gone, weak plastic is taped up but the strong wind comes and we stay
awake.

In this South Cholla Province where all vehicles had been confiscated, we resorted to
walking, the method of travel of the Yi Dynasty. We reverted back 300 years.

Kwangju, 1980

It’s the same to be in the house, at the shelter or anywhere. There is no safe place.
When we have no electricity, we are sitting in the dark and we know what life looked like
before Christ.

Sarajevo, 1992

by Myung Mi Kim
from Commons
University of California Press, 2002
.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

The 2016 Nobel Prize for physics recognises a set of breakthroughs starting in the 1970s that breached parts of the complexity barrier using techniques borrowed from mathematics. Specifically, the new laureates – Duncan Haldane, John Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless – were able to use ideas from geometry to understand some exotic forms of matter made possible by the effects of quantum mechanics. They were able to provide their peers with a set of techniques that could be used to explain why the forms behaved the way they behaved, and build upon their results to think about applications.

The efforts of the trio is exemplified by a famous experiment that two of them, Kosterlitz and Thouless, performed in the 1970s. Their goal was demonstrate that the theories of their time that were used to explain the properties of superfluids were incomplete. Superfluids are fluids that flow with zero viscosity; liquid helium is a notable example: it can even flowup walls. This is explained by the fact that helium atoms start behaving like the fundamental particles called bosons at very low temperatures, forming a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate. The theoretical foundation for this was developed by Satyendra Nath Bose and Einstein in 1924.

More here.

Julien d'Huy in Scientific American [h/t: Simon During]:

The Greek version of a familiar myth starts with Artemis, goddess of the hunt and fierce protectress of innocent young women. Artemis demands that Callisto, “the most beautiful,” and her other handmaidens take a vow of chastity. Zeus tricks Callisto into giving up her virginity, and she gives birth to a son, Arcas. Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, turns Callisto into a bear and banishes her to the mountains. Meanwhile Arcas grows up to become a hunter and one day happens on a bear that greets him with outstretched arms. Not recognizing his mother, he takes aim with his spear, but Zeus comes to the rescue. He transforms Callisto into the constellation Ursa Major, or “great bear,” and places Arcas nearby as Ursa Minor, the “little bear.”

As the Iroquois of the northeastern U.S. tell it, three hunters pursue a bear; the blood of the wounded animal colors the leaves of the autumnal forest. The bear then climbs a mountain and leaps into the sky. The hunters and the animal become the constellation Ursa Major. Among the Chukchi, a Siberian people, the constellation Orion is a hunter who pursues a reindeer, Cassiopeia. Among the Finno-Ugric tribes of Siberia, the pursued animal is an elk and takes the form of Ursa Major.

Although the animals and the constellations may differ, the basic structure of the story does not. These sagas all belong to a family of myths known as the Cosmic Hunt that spread far and wide in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas among people who lived more than 15,000 years ago. Every version of the Cosmic Hunt shares a core story line—a man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals, and the creatures are changed into constellations.

Folklorists, anthropologists, ethnologists and linguists have long puzzled over why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar. In recent years a promising scientific approach to comparative mythology has emerged in which researchers apply conceptual tools that biologists use to decipher the evolution of living species. In the hands of those who analyze myths, the method, known as phylogenetic analysis, consists of connecting successive versions of a mythical story and constructing a family tree that traces the evolution of the myth over time.

More here.

Phillip Cole in Eurozine:

There are thus profound obstacles to introducing an ethical dimension to this debate, but my object here is simply to introduce that ethical dimension – so that it is at least visible – and to see what impact it has on the argument. And I want to begin with one more essential point of clarification: although there may well be economic and cultural concerns about the impacts of immigration, the ethical concerns are not so much about immigration but about immigration controls. In other words, even if some of the concerns about immigration are legitimate, immigration controls may be an illegitimate means of addressing them. This focus on immigration controls brings to the fore the question of power, because they involve an exercise of power, by certain agents over other agents. Who is exercising that power, over whom and for what purpose, and is that exercise ethical?

There are two key arguments that make the case that immigration controls are unethical. The first is based on the assertion that the exercise of coercive power by a democratic state is made legitimate by the opportunities of those subject to that power to participate in political decision-making – those subject to the law have had the opportunity to shape that law. Any other exercise of power is illegitimate. Immigration controls are coercive laws enacted against people who have had no such opportunity, and therefore immigration controls are illegitimate. Of course, in a legitimate democracy we may end up being subjected to laws which we object to, but would-be immigrants are not on the losing side of a democratic process – they are excluded from that process altogether. That men wielded political power over women in the United Kingdom before 1918 was a profound injustice, as was the fact that the white population of South Africa exercised political power over the black population until 1994. And the injustice here was not the exclusion of those parties from the franchise, but the enactment of law and therefore coercive power over the excluded, with no opportunity for them to participate as equals in the formation of that law. And the scale of that injustice is profoundly accentuated when we realise that the purpose of those laws was to determine the political status of the excluded, to deprive them of political membership as such.

The second argument is based on the principle of moral equality, and questions the right of exclusion itself. According to this principle, all people are to be treated as moral equals – no person is more morally significant than any other. It does not follow from this that everybody must be treated exactly the same, because some differences may be morally relevant and so justify different treatment. But what is ruled out is that a person's life chances should be determined by morally arbitrary features.

More here.

Caroline De Gruyter in Carnegie Europe:

The Habsburg Empire, formed in 1526 and later known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had much in common with the European Union. It was a complex international construction that aimed to bring security and prosperity to several nations by eliminating borders and pumping money around. The Habsburgers had a well-functioning internal market, set up as a tool to foster political cohesion. Each nation in the empire had its own distinct arrangement with Vienna, just as every EU member state nowadays carves out its own deals (and exceptions) with Brussels.

Habsburg was also an advanced bureaucracy, albeit on a much bigger scale than the EU. Even after Empress Maria Theresa’s reforms in the eighteenth century, the Habsburg Empire was known—and ridiculed—for its huge, centralized administration. Likewise, many perceive and despise the EU as a giant bureaucracy. In reality, the union has fewer civil servants than Paris’s town hall, but most of them are in the same business as Roth’s fictional weights and measures inspector: administering and monitoring the functioning of the internal market and other agreements between member states.

The similarities between the EU and the Habsburg Empire do not end there. Most Habsburg emperors loathed warfare, just like the Europeans who, traumatized by two world wars, set up the European Economic Community in the 1950s. The emperors preferred to acquire territories peacefully by marrying off family members all over Europe. And like in the EU, small nations felt relatively safe and protected in the empire: being part of it meant being protected from invasion by bigger neighbors. All nations were granted equal rights under the Crown.

More here.

Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books:

The three books under review describe space activities belonging to the Big Space and Little Space cultures that are now competing for money and public attention. Each book gives a partial view of a small piece of history. Each tells a story within the narrow setting of present-day economics and politics. None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species.

Julian Guthrie’s How to Make a Spaceship describes the life and work of Peter Diamandis, a brilliant Greek-American entrepreneur. Diamandis cofounded the International Space University, bringing together each year an international crowd of students and professors to its campus in Strasbourg, and providing a meeting place where academic thinkers and industrial doers exchange ideas. He founded the ISUwhen he was twenty-seven years old, less than half the age at which Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The ISU has been growing smoothly for twenty-eight years. It is successful not only as an educational institution but as a job market where young people interested in space can find employers.

Diamandis also encourages competitive space projects by offering substantial prizes for clearly specified achievements. The latest and biggest of his prizes was $10 million for a privately funded spacecraft to reach an altitude of one hundred kilometers and land safely on the ground twice with a human pilot. The money came from Anousheh Ansari, a young Iranian-American computer engineer who had founded with her husband and brother-in-law the company Telecom Technologies. They sold the company for $440 million, of which they donated a small piece to Diamandis. The winner of the Ansari Prize was Burt Rutan, a legendary designer of weird-looking airplanes. He designed and built the SpaceShipOne vehicle that won the prize in 2004. Many other competitors made plans and built rocket ships. The total amount of money invested, by the winner and the losers, was many times the value of the prize.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

For the most part, we read a work of nonfiction for two intertwined reasons — to learn about a particular subject and to enjoy the intellectual company of the book’s author. I started “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School” because I’d long wanted to know more about the careers and thought of social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and their loosely affiliated fellow thinker, the literary critic Walter Benjamin. I steeled myself for a hard slog — these were, after all, German theorists — but almost immediately discovered that British journalist Stuart Jeffries could summarize complex arguments so clearly that even a bear of little brain could grasp them. He was, moreover, witty, skeptical and an active presence on the page, questioning and probing each of the Frankfurt School’s various hypotheses, assertions and insights. As a result, this seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner.

The Institute for Social Research, as the Frankfurt School was formally called, initially came into existence in 1923 to explore why Germany failed to produce a successful socialist revolution in the years immediately following World War I. Its members were virtually all Jewish, the sons of well-off bourgeois families, and they viewed themselves as analysts rather than activists or revolutionaries. Nonetheless, they relied on Marx’s ideas about class, alienation and capitalism for the tools they needed to interpret and understand contemporary society.

more here.

Kathleen Rooney at Poetry Magazine:

Many poets have recognized the connection between urban walking and poetry, but perhaps the first to do so in any kind of systematic way was Charles Baudelaire. He posited in both his nonfiction and his poems, particularly those in Paris Spleen(posthumously published in 1869), that such close observation and curiosity ought to be among the governing emotions of the urban walker and artist. In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire lays out much of his theory of flânerie, or aimless walking through a city; he writes of the titular painter and archetypal flâneur Constantin Guys that “to begin to understand M. G., the first thing to note is this: that curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius.”

To be curious can mean to be eager to learn or know something, or it can mean strange or unusual, and Baudelaire’s literary output offers examples of both definitions. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin curiosus, meaning “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly”; it is also related to cura or “care.” In other words, paying attention to the city outside you and what it evokes within you can be a form of care.

more here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

In 1980, the philosopher Peter Singer published a short book on Marx in which he listed some of Marx’s predictions: the income gap between workers and owners would increase, independent producers would be forced down into the ranks of the proletariat, wages would remain at subsistence levels, the rate of profit would fall, capitalism would collapse, and there would be revolutions in the advanced countries. Singer thought that most of these predictions were “so plainly mistaken” that it was difficult to understand how anyone sympathetic to Marx could defend them. In 2016, it is harder to be dismissive.

“Economists today would do well to take inspiration from his example,” Thomas Piketty says about Marx, in the best-seller he published in 2013, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.” The book did for many twenty-first-century readers what Marx hoped “Capital” might do for nineteenth-century ones. It uses data to show us the real nature of social relations and, by doing that, forces us to rethink concepts that have come to seem natural and inevitable. One of these is the concept of the market, which is often imagined as a self-optimizing mechanism it is a mistake to interfere with, but which in fact, left to itself, continually increases inequality. Another concept, closely related, is meritocracy, which is often imagined as a guarantor of social mobility but which, Piketty argues, serves mainly to make economic winners feel virtuous.

more here.

From Avidly:

This week in Ferrante, all men should stop talking forever. Or, at least for this week. Stop talking for a week, all men. This week, do not talk. Whatever you have to say, wait until next week. If it still seems important after being quiet about it for a week, next week we will listen to you. Perhaps you would like to talk this week about Ferrante. No! Especially, men, do not talk about Ferrante. Perhaps there are some other men who would like to hear what you have to say about Ferrante. Do not tell them, though. This week, men have said all they get to say about Ferrante. Men are done now. We cannot listen to any more men say anything else about Ferrante, forever. Or definitely not for this week. We see from your silent expression that you are concerned that, if you do not talk, about Ferrante, no one will understand how wrong it is for other people to talk about Ferrante, or her identity. Don’t worry. Everyone actually understands exactly how wrong it is, without you saying anything. You can look at each other mutely, but ask yourself: is my mute expression, the aggressive twitching of my eyebrows, in fact a form of talking? Men: bring your faces down like 30%. Eyebrows: shhh.

Isn’t it, you ask, okay to talk, or at least talk about Ferrante, if you are saying nice things about Ferrante? Aren’t men supposed to be allies, especially about Ferrante? Aren’t men supposed to amplify women, like Ferrante? These are reasonable questions and we would like to discuss them with you. Next week. Next week is also a good time to discuss any other reasonable questions about gender, anonymity, and the print public sphere. Not this week, though.

More here.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was split, with one half going to David J. Thouless at the University of Washington, and the other half going to F. Duncan M. Haldane at Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz at Brown University. The Prize was awarded for the theorists’ research in condensed matter physics, particularly their work on topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter, phenomena underlying exotic states of matter such as superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic films. Their work has given new insights into the behavior of matter at low temperatures, and has laid the foundations for the creation of new materials called topological insulators, which could allow the construction of more sophisticated quantum computers.

Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies properties that only change incrementally, in integer steps, rather than continuously. Thors Hans Hansson, a physicist at Stockholm University who served on this year’s Nobel Committee, explained the core concept of topology during the awards announcement by pulling a cinnamon bun, a bagel, and a Swedish pretzel from a bag. “I brought my lunch,” he joked, then explained that, to a topologist, the only difference between the three foods was the number of holes in them, rather than their taste. A cinnamon bun has no holes, while a bagel has one and a pretzel has two. To a topologist, then, the bun would fall in the same category as a saucer, while the bagel would be paired with a cup, and a pretzel with a pair of spectacles. Thouless, Kosterlitz and Haldane’s prize-winning insights revolve around the idea that these same sorts of “topological invariants” could also explain phase changes in matter, albeit not familiar ones such as a liquid freezing to a solid or sublimating to gas. Instead, the phase changes the theorists studied took place chiefly in thin two-dimensional films cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

More here.

From The Economist:

The phrases “ethic of conviction” and “ethic of responsibility” mean little to most English-speakers. In Germany the equivalent terms—Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik—are household words. Pundits drop them casually during television talk shows. Hosts use them as conversation-starters at dinner parties. The concepts draw on the opposition between idealism and pragmatism that runs through politics everywhere. But they also capture a specific moral tension that is “very German”, says Manfred Güllner, a sociologist and pollster. Anyone interested in understanding German politics, on anything from the euro to refugees, would do well to get a handle on them.

The terms come from the sociologist Max Weber, who used them in a speech he gave in January 1919 to a group of leftist students at a Munich bookstore. Germany had just lost the first world war. The Kaiser had abdicated, the country was in the throes of revolution and Munich was about to become the capital of a short-lived “Bavarian Soviet Republic”. Armed with only eight index cards, Weber gave a talk that would become a classic of political science. (“Politics as a Vocation” was published in English only after the second world war.) The lecture ranged broadly through history, but its main purpose was to curb the Utopian romanticism then gripping the ideologues fighting over the direction of the new Germany, including those sitting in front of him.

Weber described an “abysmal opposition” between two types of ethics.

More here.

Researchers have developed a device that can track the mysterious organ in real time, and may help unlock the key to a healthy pregnancy.

Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic:

Placentas get kind of a bum rap.

This is possibly because of all the hoopla about the mothers who blend their placentas into smoothies and eat them, which is not a thing most women do. Even beyond the organ’s ritualistic associations, the way people talk about the placenta is implicitly dismissive.

“It is described as the ‘afterbirth,’” said Catherine Spong, an obstetrician/gynecologist and the acting director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). “Like it’s just a thing that comes out afterward. It is an underappreciated organ, and has been understudied.”

To appreciate the placenta, you have to recognize that it’s responsible for sustaining a fetus as it grows into a baby, which is tethered by the umbilical cord to the placenta embedded in a pregnant woman’s uterine wall. Through this arrangement, the placenta provides nutrients and oxygen to the fetus, eliminates waste, regulates fetal temperature, produces hormones, and performs other crucial pregnancy tasks. For one organ to perform so many jobs—duties that would otherwise be handled by separate organs—is extraordinary.

Just as remarkable is the fact that doctors and scientists know so little about the placenta, relative to its importance.

More here.