Amidst the doom and gloom of spending cuts and Ministerial incompetence we’re sometimes liable to forget what it’s all about. Last night provided us with a reminder, in the form of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition held at the National Maritime Museum (site of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich). There’s a varied selection of gorgeous entries on today’s Guardian, but this stunning image by Tom Lowe was the overall winner. Congratulations to him!
I’m still a bit depressed after the events I blogged about yesterday. Some days you wonder why you bother, and this has been one of them. However, at least it’s got me rattled enough to stand back and think about the state of the UK university system in more general terms so I thought I’d jot down an idea which is probably barking mad, but has been at the back of my mind for some time.
The basic point is that universities essentially do two things, teaching and research. However, when you think about it, there’s a fundamental inconsistency in the way these are funded. It seems to me that correcting this anomaly could significantly improve both the main benefits universities contribute to the UK economy.
First, research. I wrote yesterday about using taxpayer’s money to fund research in universities:
If it’s going to pay off in the short term it should be funded by private investors or venture capitalists of some sort. Dragon’s Den, even. When the public purse is so heavily constrained, it should only be asked to fund those things that can’t in practice be funded any other way.
I’ve just remembered that a similar thing was said in in the Times Higher recently, in a piece about the new President of the Royal Astronomical Society:
Notwithstanding the Royal Academy of Engineering’s “very unfortunate” recent submission to the government spending review – which argued that the need to rebalance the UK economy required public spending to be concentrated on applied science – Professor Davies is confident he can make a good case for spending on astrophysics to be protected.
Research with market potential can already access funding from venture capitalists, he argued, while cautioning the government against attempting to predict the economic impact of different subjects.
This is pretty much the opposite of what the Treasury thinks. It wants to concentrate public funds in projects that can demonstrate immediate commercial potential. Taxpayer’s money used in this way ends up in the pockets of entrepreneurs if the research succeeds and, if it doesn’t, the grant has effectively been wasted. My proposal, therefore, is to phase out research grants for groups that want to concentrate on commercially motivated research and replace them with research loans. If the claims they make to secure the advance are justified they should have no problem repaying it from the profits they make from patent income or other forms of exploitation. If not, then they will have to pay back the loan from their own funds (as well as being exposed as bullshit merchants). In the current economic situation the loans could be made at very low interest rates and still save a huge amount of the current research budget for higher education. Indeed after a few years – suggest the loans should be repayable in 3-5 years, it would be self-financing. I think a large fraction of research in the Applied Sciences and Engineering should be funded in this way.
The money saved by replacing grants to commercially driven research groups with loans could be re-invested in those areas where public investment is really needed, such as pure science and medicine. Here grants are needed because the motivation for the research is different. Much of it does, in fact, lead to commercial spin-offs, but that is accidental and likely to appear only in the very long term. The real motivation of doing this kind of research is to enrich the knowledge base of the UK and the world in general. In other words, it’s for the public good. Remember that?
Most of you probably think that this is a crazy idea, but if you do I’ll ask you to now think about how the government funds teaching in universities and ask yourself why research is handled in such a different way.
Way back in the mists of time when I was a student, I didn’t have to pay fees and even got a maintenance grant from the government that was more-or-less sufficient to live on. That system changed so that students don’t get grants any more, but may qualify for loans. They also have to pay a contribution to their fees, but the government still pays an amount directly to the university on their behalf.
This change of policy happened because the (then) Labour government wanted to boost the rate of participation in universities, but didn’t think the taxpayer should pay the whole cost. The logic goes that the students benefit from their education, e.g. in terms of increased earnings over their working lifetime, so they should pay a contribution to it.
The problem with all this is that it has led to a huge increase in enrolment on degree courses in “vocational” areas such as Leisure & Tourism, Media Studies, and Business while traditional courses, such as those in STEM disciplines, providing the sort of rigorous intellectual training that is essential for many sectors of the economy, have struggled to keep up. This is partly because subjects like Mathematics and Physics are difficult, partly because they are expensive, and partly because the UK school system has ceased to function as preparation for such courses.
I’m by no means against universities supplying training in vocational subjects, but because these are the areas where the primary beneficiary is indeed the student, I don’t think the government should subsidise them as much as the more rigorous courses that we really need to encourage the brightest students to take up.
The fix I’d propose for this within the current tightly constrained budget is to cut government funding for vocational subjects and use the money to subsidise those courses contributing to the intellectual wealth of the country. I don’t mean just science, incidentally, I think we have a big problem with participation many other areas, such as modern languages. The best students – in chosen areas – should not only get their fees paid, they should also get maintenance grants as in the old days. Students should not be prevented from doing, e.g., a Business studies degree, or from doing anything without a state scholarship, but should understand that they have to pay for it.
If it’s fair to ask students to contribute to their teaching, it’s fair to ask commercial companies to pay for the research that they exploit. Just as student grants should be re-introduced for certain disciplines, so should research loans be introduced for others. You know it makes sense.
However, if you want to tell me why it doesn’t, via the comments box, please feel free!
I woke up this morning with the Vince Cable Blues, owing to an item on the BBC News concerning a speech by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills that clearly signals that the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review will entail big cuts to the UK’s science budget.
It was a depressing way to start the day, but I for one wasn’t particularly surprised by the news. We all know big cuts are coming, the only remaining questions are “how big?” and “where?”. However, when the text of the speech was released, I was shocked by what it revealed about the Secretary of State’s grasp of his brief. Read it for yourself and see if you agree with me.
Vince Cable: Out of his Depth
Of course there are the obligatory platitudes about the quality of the UK’s scientific research, a lot of flannel about the importance of “blue skies” thinking, before he settles on the utilitarian line favoured by the Treasury mandarins who no doubt wrote his speech for him: greater concentration of research funding into areas that are “theoretically outstanding” (judged how?) or “commercially useful” (when?). In fact one wonders what the point of this speech was, as it said very little that was specific except that the government is going to cut science. We knew that already.
For what it’s worth I’ll repeat my own view that “commercially useful” research should not be funded by the taxpayer through research grants. If it’s going to pay off in the short term it should be funded by private investors or venture capitalists of some sort. Dragon’s Den, even. When the public purse is so heavily constrained, it should only be asked to fund those things that can’t in practice be funded any other way. That means long-term, speculative, curiosity driven research. You know, science.
So was Cable’s speech was feeble-minded, riddled with clichés, and totally lacking in depth or detail? Yes. Was it surprising? No.
What was surprising, at least to me, is Cable’s deliberate use of spurious numbers to back up his argument. For example,
Its is worth noting in the last RAE 54 per cent of submitted work was defined as world class and that is the area where funding should be concentrated.
This appears to be what Cable was referring to when he stated on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme that “45% of research grants were not of excellent standard”.
For one thing, there’s a difference between a research grant and the money allocated by HEFCE through the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE); more about that in a moment. Moreover, at least in England, RAE funding is only allocated to grades 3* and 4* anyway, so the concentration he talks about is already happening. The comment is made all the more meaningless, however, because the 54% was actually imposed on the assessment panels anyway; they were told to match the outcome of their deliberations to a target profile. The figure quoted is therefore hardly an objective measure of the quality of scientific research in the UK.
When it comes to research grants – usually obtained from one of the Research Councils, such as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) scientists apply for funding and their proposals are assessed by panels. In the case of STFC I can assure every one that the only proposals funded are those graded excellent, and there isn’t anything like enough money to fund all the proposals graded that way. Further cuts will simply mean that even more excellent research will have to be scrapped, and even more excellent scientists will go abroad.
This basic misunderstanding convinces me that Vince Cable is completely out of his depth in this job. That’s very unfortunate because it means he will probably be susceptible to manipulation by the dark side (i.e. the anti-science lobby in Whitehall). Already someone – most likely a Civil Service mandarin with an axe to grind – seems to have duped him into thinking that 45% of taxpayer’s money funds mediocre research. What with him already singing so enthusiastically from the Treasury hymn sheet, I fear they have got him exactly where they want him. Rarely has a new arrival in the Whitehall jungle gone native so quickly.
Another remark of his that was quoted today is that “the bar will have to be raised somewhat” in terms of science funding. At the next General Election I hope the British people, especially those foolish enough to opt for the Liberal Democrats last time, will “raise the bar” when it comes to deciding who is worthy of their vote. I’m sure of one thing, though. The fraction of British politicians who are “mediocre” is an awful lot higher than 45%.
Just a quick post to share a picture taken at last night’s Twenty20 International in Cardiff between England and Pakistan. We had the entire spectrum of Welsh weather to contend with, but the worst of yesterday’s rain was over well before the match started and the SWALEC stadium, just ten minutes’ walk from my house, was a fine sight under a variety of peculiar cloud formations and the floodlights, as you can tell from the picture I took on my phone.
Pakistan won the toss and batted first, but didn’t make a very good fist of it and were bowled out for a mere 89 from their 20 overs. England had a little wobble during the run chase but in the end won comfortably by 6 wickets.
Unfortunately, the crowd numbered only a few thousand so the atmosphere was a bit flat and Pakistan’s poor showing with the bat made it all a bit of anti-climax, but it was still a good way to precede a nice curry. I’ve heard various theories as to why the attendance was so poor, but I think it’s pretty obvious: at £45 for a game whose format ensures it can last no longer than about three hours, tickets for this match were just too expensive. I think the authorities should think again about their pricing strategy.
I don’t know why, but last week was my most popular week ever, at least in terms of blog hits! I was going to follow up with a foray into the role of spin in quantum mechanics, but decided instead to settle for a less ambitious project for this evening.
Yesterday I walked past the cricket ground at the SWALEC Stadium in Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, during the Twenty20 international between England and Pakistan. There is another match of this type tomorrow night which I’ll actually be going to, as long as it’s not rained off, but I have too many things to do to go to both games. Anyway, England’s excellent off-spinner Graham Swann was bowling when I watched through a gap in the stands at the river end of the stadium. He seemed to be getting an impressive amount of turn, and I got wondering about how fast a bowler like “Swannee” actual spins the ball.
For those of you not so familiar with cricket here’s a clip of another prodigious spinner of the ball, Australia’s legend of legspin Shane Warne:
For beginners, the game of cricket is a bit similar to baseball (insofar as it’s a game involving a bat and a ball), but the “strike zone” in cricket is a physical object ( a “wicket” made of wooden stumps with bails balanced on the top) unlike the baseball equivalent, which exists only in the mind of the umpire. The batsman must prevent the ball hitting the wicket and also try to score runs if he can. In contrast to baseball, however, he doesn’t have to score; he can elect to play a purely defensive shot or even not play any short at all if he judges the ball is going to miss, which is what happened to the hapless batsman in the clip.
You will see that Warne imparts considerable spin on the ball, which has the effect of making it change direction when it bounces. The fact that the ball hits the playing surface before the batsman has a chance to play it introduces extra variables that you don’t see in baseball, such as the state of the pitch (which generally deteriorates over the five days of a Test match, especially in the “rough” where bowlers have been running in). A spin bowler who causes the ball to deviate from right to left is called a legspin bowler, while one who makes it turn the other way is an offspin bowler. An orthodox legspinner generates most of the spin from a flick of the wrist while an offspinner mainly lets his fingers do the torquing.
Another difference that’s worth mentioning with respect to baseball is that the ball is bowled, i.e. the bowler’s arm is not supposed to bend during the delivery (although apparently that doesn’t apply if he’s from Sri Lanka). However, the bowler is allowed to take a run up, which will be quite short for a spin bowler, but long like a javelin thrower if it’s a fast bowler. Fast bowlers – who can bowl up to 95 mph (150 km/h) – don’t spin the ball to any degree but have other tricks up their sleeve I haven’t got time to go into here. A typical spin bowler delivers the ball at speeds ranging from 45 mph to 60 mph (70 km/hour to 100 km/hour).
The physical properties of a cricket ball are specified in the Laws of Cricket. It must be between 22.4 and 22.9 cm in circumference, i.e. 3.57 to 3.64 cm in radius and must weigh between 155.9g and 163g. It’s round, made of cork, and surrounded by a leather case with a stitched seam.
So now, after all that, I can give a back-of-the-envelope answer to the question I was wondering about on the way home. Looking at the video clip my initial impression was that the ball is deflected by an angle as large as a radian, but in fact the foreshortening effect of the camera is quite deceptive. In fact the ball deviates by less than a metre between pitching and hitting the stumps. There is a gap of about 1 metre between the popping crease (where the batsman stands) and the stumps – it looks much less from the camera angle shown – and the ball probably pitches at least 2 metres in front of the crease. I would guess therefore that it actually deflects by an angle less than twenty degrees or so.
What happens physically is that some of the rotational kinetic energy of the ball is converted into translational kinetic energy associated with a component of the velocity at right angles to the original direction of travel. In order for the deflection to be so large, the available rotational kinetic energy must be non-negligible compared to the original kinetic energy of the ball. Suppose the mass of the ball is 
Approximating the ball as a uniform sphere of mass 
or 
This estimate is obviously very rough because it ignores the direction of spin and the efficiency with the ball grips on the pitch – friction is obviously involved in the change of direction – but it gives a reasonable ballpark (or at least cricketground) estimate.
Of course if the bowler does the same thing every time it’s relatively easy for the batsman to allow for the spin. The best bowlers therefore vary the amount and angle of spin they impart on each ball. Most, in fact, have at least two qualitatively different types of ball but they disguise the differences in the act of delivery. Offspinners typically have an “arm ball” which doesn’t really spin but holds its line without appearing to be any different to their spinning delivery. Legspinners usually have a variety of alternative balls, including a topspinner and/or a flipper and/or a googly. The latter is a ball that comes out of the back of the hand and actually spins the opposite way to a legspinner while being produced with apparently the same action. It’s very hard to bowl a googly accurately, but it’s a deadly thing when done right.
Another thing also worth mentioning is that the rotation of the cricket ball also causes a deviation of its flightpath through the air, by virtue of the Magnus effect. This causes the ball to curve in the air in the opposite direction to which it is going to deviate on bouncing, i.e. it would drift into a right-handed batsman before breaking away from him off the pitch. You can see a considerable amount of such movement in the video clip, away from the left-hander in the air and then back into him off the pitch. Nature clearly likes to make things tough for batsmen!
With a number of secret weapons in his armoury the spin bowler can be a formidable opponent, a fact that has apparently been known to poets, philosophers and astronomers for the best part of a thousand years:
The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;
And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,
He knows about it all — He knows — HE knows!
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam [50]
Just a quickie today, as I have a lot to do this afternoon. Last night I stayed in and listened to Prom 66, the penultimate Saturday evening concert of the 2010 season of BBC Promenade Concerts from the Royal Albert Hall in London. In fact it was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and then shown on BBC television a bit later, a strange arrangement but one that at least let me listen to some of the music twice.
I haven’t listened to all that many of the Saturday concerts this year – on a weekend the scheduling is often somewhat orthogonal to my tastes – but this one was one I’d been looking forward to for ages. It didn’t disappoint. The performance featured the Berlin Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle in a very varied programme of music, including the Prelude to Act I of Parsifal by Richard Wagner and three marvellous orchestral suites by Arnold Schoenberg (Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16) and two of his students from the 2nd Vienna School Anton Webern (Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6) and Alban Berg (Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6). All of these were played quite beautifully by an Orchestra whose name is synonymous with the highest standards of musicianship.
Even better than these, however, was the centrepiece of the concert, Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, sung by the wonderful Finnish soprano Karita Mattila. I particularly wanted to hear this because the very first recording I bought of the Four Last Songs was by her (conducted by Claudio Abbado). It got mixed reviews when it came out about 10 years ago, but it’s still one of my favourites. Anyway, I thought her performance last night was as moving as any I’ve heard. Ten out of ten.
I’ve always known that the Four Last Songs were published after his death, so Strauss never heard them performed. What I didn’t know before the discussion on TV during the interval immediately after the performance was that the very first time they were performed was in 1950 at the Royal Albert Hall, by the London Philharmonia, so this was an occasion especially redolent for those who love this exquisite work. One can only imagine what it must have been like for the orchestra making this music live for the very first time. Apparently the first time any of them had seen the score was when they turned up for the rehearsal. I’m sure they knew as soon as they started playing that it was a masterpiece.
Anyway, I’ve posted a version of one of the Four Last Songs already – the last one, which happens to be my favourite. I thought I’d put up another one today and, given the historical connection, it seemed apt to pick a recording of the World Premiere of the work from 1950, by the London Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler and featuring the legendary Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad. You have to make some allowance for the sound quality given that it’s such an old live recording, but it’s fascinating to listen to it. For one thing it’s a very different tempo to that of most modern recordings. Here they are performing the second song which, appropriately enough given the time of year, is called September.
The blogosphere, even the tiny little bit of it that I know anything about, has a habit of summoning up strange coincidences between things so, following EM Forster’s maxim “only connect”, I thought I’d spend a lazy saturday lunchtime trying to draw a couple of them together.
A few days ago I posted what was intended to be a fun little item about the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. Basically, what I was trying to say is that there’s no real problem about thinking of an electron as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle because, in reality (whatever that is), it is neither. “Particle” and “wave” are useful abstractions but they are not in an exact one-to-one correspondence with natural phenomena.
Before going on I should point out that the vast majority of physicists are well away of the distinction between, say, the “theoretical” electron and whatever the “real thing” is. We physicists tend to live in theory space rather than in the real world, so we tend to teach physics by developing the formal mathematical properties of the “electron” (or “electric field”) or whatever, and working out what experimental consequences these entail in certain situations. Generally speaking, the theory works so well in practice that we often talk about the theoretical electron that exists in the realm of mathematics and the electron-in-itself as if they are one and the same thing. As long as this is just a pragmatic shorthand, it’s fine. However, I think we need to be careful to keep this sort of language under control. Pushing theoretical ideas out into the ontological domain is a dangerous game. Physics – especially quantum physics – is best understood as a branch of epistemology. What is known? is safer ground than what is there?
Anyway, my little piece sparked a number of interesting comments on Reddit, including a thread that went along the lines “of course an electron is neither a particle nor a wave, it’s actually a spin-1/2 projective representation of the Lorentz Group on a Hilbert space”. That description, involving more sophisticated mathematical concepts than those involved in bog-standard quantum mechanics, undoubtedly provides a more complete account of natural phenomena associated with the electrons and electrical fields, but I’ll stick to my guns and maintain that it still introduces a deep confusion to assert that the electron “is” something mathematical, whether that’s a “spin-1/2 projective representation” or a complex function or anything else. That’s saying something physical is a mathematical. Both entities have some sort of existence, of course, but not the same sort, and the one cannot “be” the other. “Certain aspects of an electron’s behaviour can be described by certain mathematical structures” is as I’m prepared to go.
Pushing deeper than quantum mechanics, into the realm of quantum field theory, there was the following contribution:
The electron field is a quantum field as described in quantum field theories. A quantum field covers all space time and in each point the quantum field is in some state, it could be the ground state or it could be an excitation above the ground state. The excitations of the electron field are the so-called electrons. The mathematical object that describes the electron field possesses, amongst others, certain properties that deal with transformations of the space-time coordinates. If, when performing a transformation of the space-time coordinates, the mathematical object changes in such a way that is compatible with the physics of the quantum field, then one says that the mathematical object of the field (also called field) is represented by a spin 1/2 (in the electron case) representation of a certain group of transformations (the Poincaré group, in this example).I understand your quibbling, it seems natural to think that “spin 1/2″ is a property of the mathematical tool to describe something, not the something itself. If you press on with that distinction however, you should be utterly puzzled of why physics should follow, step by step, the path led by mathematics.
For example, one speaks about the ¨invariance under the local action of the group SU(3)” as a fundamental property of the fields that feel the nuclear strong force. This has two implications, the mathematical object that represents quarks must have 3 ¨strong¨ degrees of freedom (the so-called color) and there must be 32-1 = 8 carriers of the force (the gluons) because the group of transformations in a SU(N) group has N2-1 generators. And this is precisely what is observed.
So an extremely abstract mathematical principle correctly accounts for the dynamics of an inmensely large quantity of phenomena. Why does then physics follow the derivations of mathematics if its true nature is somewhat different?
No doubt this line of reasoning is why so many theoretical physicists seem to adopt a view of the world that regards mathematical theories as being, as it were, “built into” nature rather than being things we humans invented to describe nature. This is a form of Platonic realism.
I’m no expert on matters philosophical, but I’d say that I find this stance very difficult to understand, although I am prepared to go part of the way. I used to work in a Mathematics department many years ago and one of the questions that came up at coffee time occasionally was “Is mathematics invented or discovered?”. In my experience, pure mathematicians always answered “discovered” while others (especially astronomers, said “invented”). For what it’s worth, I think mathematics is a bit of both. Of course we can invent mathematical objects, endow them with certain attributes and proscribe rules for manipulating them and combining them with other entities. However, once invented anything that is worked out from them is “discovered”. In fact, one could argue that all mathematical theorems etc arising within such a system are simply tautological expressions of the rules you started with.
Of course physicists use mathematics to construct models that describe natural phenomena. Here the process is different from mathematical discovery as what we’re trying to do is work out which, if any, of the possible theories is actually the one that accounts best for whatever empirical data we have. While it’s true that this programme requires us to accept that there are natural phenomena that can be described in mathematical terms, I do not accept that it requires us to accept that nature “is” mathematical. It requires that there be some sort of law governing some of aspects of nature’s behaviour but not that such laws account for everything.
Of course, mathematical ideas have been extremely successful in helping physicists build new physical descriptions of reality. On the other hand, however, there is a great deal of mathematical formalism that is is not useful in this way. Physicists have had to select those mathematical object that we can use to represent natural phenomena, like selecting words from a dictionary. The fact that we can assemble a sentence using words from the Oxford English Dictionary that conveys some information about something we see doesn’t not mean that what we see “is” English. A whole load of grammatically correct sentences can be constructed that don’t make any sense in terms of observable reality, just as there is a great deal of mathematics that is internally self-consistent but makes no contact with physics.
Moreover, to the person whose quote I commented on above, I’d agree that the properties of the SU(3) gauge group have indeed accounted for many phenomena associated with the strong interaction, which is why the standard model of particle physics contains 8 gluons and quarks carrying a three-fold colour charge as described by quantum chromodynamics. Leaving aside the fact that QCD is such a terribly difficult theory to work with – in practice it involves nightmarish lattice calculations on a scale to make even the most diehard enthusiast cringe – what I would ask is whether this description in any case sufficient for us to assert that it describes “true nature”? Many physicists will no doubt disagree with me, but I don’t think so. It’s a map, not the territory.
So why am I boring you all with this rambling dissertation? Well, it brings me to my other post – about Stephen Hawking’s comments about God. I don’t want to go over that issue again – frankly, I was bored with it before I’d finished writing my own blog post – but it does relate to the bee that I often find in my bonnet about the tendency of many modern theoretical physicists to assign the wrong category of existence to their mathematical ideas. The prime example that springs to my mind is the multiverse. I can tolerate certain versions of the multiverse idea, in fact. What I can’t swallow, however is the identification of the possible landscape of string theory vacua – essentially a huge set of possible solutions of a complicated set of mathematical equations – with a realised set of “parallel universes”. That particular ontological step just seems absurd to me.
I’m just about done, but one more thing I’d say to finish with is concerns the (admittedly overused) metaphor of maps and territories. Maps are undoubtedly useful in helping us find our way around, but we have to remember that there are always things that aren’t on the map at all. If we rely too heavily on one, we might miss something of great interest that the cartographer didn’t think important. Likewise if we fool ourselves into thinking our descriptions of nature are so complete that they “are” all that nature is, then we might miss the road to a better understanding.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
I woke up this morning to the news that, according to Stephen Hawking, God did not create the Universe but it was instead an “inevitable consequence of the Law of Physics”. By sheer coincidence this daft pronouncement has come out at the same time as the publication of Professor Hawking’s new book, an extract of which appears in todays Times.
It’s interesting that such a fatuous statement managed to become a lead item on the radio news and a headline in all the national newspapers despite being so obviously devoid of any meaning whatsoever. How can the Universe be “a consequence” of the theories that we invented to describe it? To me that’s just like saying that the Lake District is a consequence of an Ordnance Survey map. And where did the Laws of Physics come from, if not from God?
Stephen Hawking is undoubtedly a very brilliant theoretical physicist. However, something I’ve noticed about theoretical physicists over the years is that if you get them talking on subjects outside physics they are generally likely to say things just as daft as some drunk bloke down the pub. I’m afraid this is a case in point.
Part of me just wants to laugh this story off, but another part is alarmed at what must appear to many to be an example of an arrogant scientist presuming to pass judgement on subjects that are really none of his business. When scientists complain about the lack of enthusiasm shown by sections of the public towards their subject, perhaps they should take seriously the alienating effect that such statements can have. This kind of thing isn’t what I’d call public engagement. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In case anyone is interested, I am not religious but I do think that there are many things that science does not – and probably will never – explain, such as why there is something rather than nothing. I also believe that science and religious belief are not in principle incompatible – although whether there is a conflict in practice does depend of course on the form of religious belief and how it is observed. God and physics are in my view pretty much orthogonal. To put it another way, if I were religious, there’s nothing in theoretical physics that would change make me want to change my mind. However, I’ll leave it to those many physicists who are learned in matters of theology to take up the (metaphorical) cudgels with Professor Hawking.
No doubt this bit of publicity will increase the sales of the new book, so I’ve decided to point out that I have written a book myself on precisely this question, which is available from all good airports bookshops. I’m sure you’ll understand that there isn’t a hint of opportunism in the way I’m drawing this to your attention. If you think this is a cynical attempt to cash in then all I can say is
I also noticed that today’s Grauniad is offering a poll on the existence or non-existence of God. I noticed some time ago that there’s a poll facility on WordPress, so this gives me an excuse to try repeating it here. Anything dumb the Guardian can do, I can do dumber. However, owing to funding cuts I’ve decided to do a single poll encompassing several topical news stories at the same time.
Well, the summer’s over and soon we’ll be welcoming the new academic year. I thought I’d mark the occasion of the First of September with a piece of music that celebrates the genius of Django Reinhardt, the great Belgian-born gypsy guitarist who overcame the terrible injuries he suffered as a child (in a fire in his caravan) to become one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. He had an unparalleled gift for melodic improvisation and a unique style of playing the guitar he invented himself to get around the fact that the third and fourth digits on his left hand were so badly burned he could effectively only use two fingers. Add him to your list of famous Belgians right away!
Here he’s playing the beautifully poignant September Song, by Kurt Weill:
Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
In the Dark 