Listening to Golem

Eminence and demise

2011-12-11T09:43:00.001-08:00

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence)

William Blake, Book of Urizen, 1794

I have been, in one capacity or another, associated to the world of science for about twenty years. In this span of time I have come across all the possible forms of human nastiness hidden behind the pretense of objectivity of the scientific enterprise, and at the same time I have also repeatedly come into contact with the beauty of science itself. It is because of the latter that I am still engaged in this profession, despite the increasingly impossible task of dealing with the first.

"The eminence of a scientist is measured by the length of time he can hold up progress in his own field."

It is hard to locate the exact source of this much quoted aphorism. Personally, I heard it mentioned for the first time back when I was a young physics student. At that time I heard it attributed to one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. Later, I stumbled upon it repeatedly, with various attributions, ranging over a broad spectrum of distinguished representatives of various scientific disciplines. Some may think it is an expression of cynicism, but in fact hardly ever anything more truthful was said about the community of scientists.

Science, by its very own nature, is in the strongest possible terms a denial of any position of power and authority. By definition science is about questioning, about the rigorous scrutiny of all assertions, about skepticism, about bold creativity balanced by the utmost respect for intellectual honesty. In principle, in science there is no room for self aggrandizing fantasies.

In principle... that is the problem. In reality, this truthful spirit of science is continually deceived by the darker side of human nature. Despite all the mechanisms in place in the functioning of the scientific community that are designed to prevent exactly this happening, there is an endless supply of ego-obsessed power-hungry narcissists out there, who would rather run over all established conventions of correct professional behavior in order to reinforce their own feudal power structure.

Unfortunately, in certain fields of science, one such person in a position of power suffices to ruin the whole community, by actively pushing bright young people away from the field, and only tolerating those who readily submit and never dare to challenge the ruler. This can lead easily to disastrous situations by which important opportunities for scientific discoveries are lost, missed or actively prevented, because of the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the dominant ruler, who, in his "knows-it-all" self-proclaimed infallibility attitude, will readily dismiss what could have been important directions of development.

Picasso, King of Minotaurs, 1958

A monstrous minotaur trapped in the center of his labyrinth of mirrors, endlessly looking at his own distorted, multiplied, and reflected images, which are all he will ever be able to see. Science, if it ever was of any importance, is reduced to a mere tool of self-affirmation. The key to the scientific spirit is that we do not project our prejudices upon what we are trying to understand. This is impossible for the kind of narcissistic character I am describing. In the way of example, if this "little father of the nation" had not been breaking into a childish tantrum whenever he would hear the word supersymmetry, and if most of the people working in the field for the past twenty years had not been shitting in their pants at the thought of crossing him, we would have had by now a much broader range of possibilities in our models and we would have credible estimates now that the relevant data are coming in. People with reasonable guts are on it now, but it won't make up for all the time lost. Or, if the same person had not been always so frightened at the thought of possibly encountering people who are smarter than he is, we would not have two completely separate branches of the same field that hardly communicate with each other and we would have made a lot more progress much faster.

"Empty space is a place where man wishes to find asylum... In this empty space he wishes to stand outside views, images, and conceptions, outside struggle and existence which has shattered into little pieces like ice that hinders his movements, pushing him in different directions... He seeks spaciousness... he will find a location that is without path..." (Kasimir Malevich)

As anyone who's been reading my blog (or who's been paying attention to what happened in the field) surely knows, I've been locked into an all out war for the past three years. I did not want it. I did not initiate it. I did not even imagine that it could ever happen, but it did, and I have learned the hard way that it is here to stay. It has worn me out, endlessly, transforming my waking hours into an inescapable battlefield and my sleep into a panoply of monsters. And it escalates, continuously, like all the strategies of tension inevitably do. My own existence has indeed been shattered into endless fragments, and I wish I could find a way to step out of all this, into that "empty space" Malevich so powerfully evoked in his paintings, where only beautiful geometry exists, away from all this meaningless struggle. "The location that is without path", without rulers who try to impose on everyone their cheap revelations. I am tired. Tired, exhausted. Tired of having to fight around every single paper, around the fate of every student. Tired of the endless negotiations with conference organizers to avoid direct (and potentially violent) confrontations. Tired of trying to anticipate the next move, or having to respond to the previous one. My mind has stalled, locked in this impossible endless siege, forever balancing a precarious equilibrium over the edge of the abyss in the middle of a raging storm.

William Blake, Book of Urizen, 1794

In a last desperate attempt to set boundaries to the conflict, and to avoid more and more people being unwillingly dragged into the battlefield, I argued, about students and younger people caught in the crossfire, that "it is not just professionally incorrect but profoundly unjust that they should become collateral casualties in this war". There was no answer, but within days a very concrete retaliatory act aimed precisely at those people I was hoping to spare provided an eloquent answer and signaled a further escalation of tension. So, I have no choice but to escalate too, which is what I am presently doing.

Meanwhile, there are journal editors who would not handle my papers for fear of retribution, and others that are so inactive that young collaborators are losing their jobs because of papers being buried for years in the refereeing process. I cannot blame them though for chickening out: I know how impossible a struggle it is to sustain, and I understand very well how others may fear going through it themselves. I would not wish this nightmare upon anybody else. I would have gladly avoided it too, if only I had been given the choice, but not at the cost of having to disappear.

There are conference volumes (for which, incidentally, I did the entire editorial work) in which the official photographs of the event were printed so carefully cut, that neither I nor persons close to me would any longer appear in the same frame with the overlord (I have the originals of the pictures for anyone who cares to compare). I mistakenly thought that only Stalin was in the habit of making people disappear from official photographs, once they had fallen out of grace. From what I hear, at the conferences in the field, where I no longer go, it has become highly undesirable for my name to be publicly pronounced. There is a very interesting book, called "The commissar vanishes" dedicated to the Stalinist art of "removal" of undesired former comrades from all the official records. I could easily write a similar volume: "The collaborator disappears".

The problem is exactly that I did not dutifully disappear when the ruler so wished: in an unexpected act of defiance, I continued to exist. Surprisingly, I am still here, alive and working.

...hija de una voluntad para la que no se conocen palabras de este lado del delirio... (Julio Cortázar, La prosa del observatorio)

Well, if one can really call this working, this desperate rush to fight back on all fronts. It has very little in it left of what I always felt scientific work should be. It has none of the pleasure of savoring the learning of new things, the slow developments of new ideas, the sudden burst into light of unexpected connection, the flash of recognition, none of the exhilarating sense of freedom in thinking about what one likes, in doing what one enjoys doing. There is hardly any room left for that, when one is locked into a fight like this: there is no way one can lower the guard for even a single moment, to create room for oneself to enjoy the peaceful contemplation of a thought. One can only fight on, blow after blow, bloody wound after bloody wound.

...de otra manera, desde otro punto de partida, hacia otra cosa hay que emplumar y lanzar la flecha de la pregunta... [op.cit.]

An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind, the Mahatma rightly said, but here it is an impossible lose-lose situation. If I quit the field, he wins. That's what he's been trying to achieve all along over the past three years. Plus, I give up nearly fifteen years invested in this work and I leave behind younger people who have put their trust into the mentoring I promised to offer them, for what it's worth. If I don't give up, the struggle carries on, which is all very well as a political program, but in practice it means he wins also, because he's keeping me prisoner of a defensive structure inside a world of his own creation.

...sus máquinas hicieron frente a un destino impuesto desde fuera, al Pentágono de galaxias y constelaciones colonizando al hombre libre, sus artificios de piedra y bronce fueron las ametralladoras de la verdadera ciencia, la gran respuesta de una imagen total frente a la tiranía de planetas y conjunciones y ascendentes; el hombre Jai Singh, pequeño sultán de un vago reino declinante, hizo frente al dragón de tantos ojos, contestó a la fatalidad inhumana con la provocación del mortal al toro cósmico... [op.cit.]

The only possible future is in the continuation of the present. The only hope is in trying to hold the ground, one day at a time, while slowly trying to explore other less threatening territories, not yet littered with corpses, without the acrid stench of a bloodied battlefield. Holding out, day after day, for as long as it will take for time to run its course, orchestrating eminence's demise (egestatem, potestatem, dissolvit ut glaciem), provided I can survive that long. It already felt like an impossible task to hold out for these past three years. I cannot bear to imagine how this can continue to drag on, day after day, for a decade. My own creativity, not to say anything of general mental well being, has already suffered an enormous amount in getting this far.

...habrá que seguir luchando por lo inmediato, compañero, porque Holderlin ha leído a Marx y no lo olvida; pero lo abierto sigue ahí, pulso de astros y anguilas, anillo de Moebius de una figura del mundo donde la conciliación es posible, donde anverso y reverso cesarán de desgarrarse, donde el hombre podrá ocupar su puesto en esa jubilosa danza que alguna vez llamaremos realidad. [op.cit.]

The struggle carries on, because there is no other choice, really. And in the process of attending to my survival, maybe, just maybe, I can still try to rediscover, once again, what it was really all about, to begin with. What it really meant to do science. I am still hoping to find the door that will lead outside of this impossible situation, and back to that healthier state where science can once again be science, and be filled with pleasure and not with anguish.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence)

Jaipur, Observatory

the challenge of Job

2011-12-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Antonio Negri, better than anybody else, is the philosopher who can speak the words of Job in our modern time. The atheist, communist philosopher who spent a good part of his life in jail for crimes he never committed, gives us a compelling reading of the biblical text as a metaphor of labor relations, of relation to power and authority. In Negri's reading Job views God as the Antagonist, as the exercise of an empty and unjust command, as the ultimate abuse of authority, unmitigated by any moral value. In that, he sees the struggle of Job against God as an image of the struggle of labor against capital. At the same time, of course, one reads everywhere in between the lines the more personal suffering of the author at the hands of and unjust and repressive power that locked him away for decades, to eliminate an uncomfortable intellectual presence. Job is "beyond Stakhanov" in surpassing the socialist retributive theory of justice and in his determination to challenge the measure of value, in the face of God's sarcasm. He remains unmoved in his challenge, in calling out the injustice of God, in front of a world of Behemoths and Leviathans. In Negri's words: "Every illusion or utopia of a common measure has dissolved. Hence the relationship is one of conflict, of war."

William Blake, Behemoth and Leviathan, Book of Job, plate 15 (detail), 1826

Job has the courage, in the face of immense suffering, to challenge God, to call him out for the brutal dictator he really is, the Great Fascist, the ultimate self centered Narcissist who does not care about what damage he unleashes in the world, how much suffering he causes. Job stands his ground against the omnipotent: first by speaking out and then by holding his indignant silence and not breaking down, despite the immense and completely undeserved suffering that the divinity imposed on him, purely to prove his own indifference to human suffering and total lack of empathy. What kind of a divine being is that? Can't one imagine a more benign divine form? Part of the message of Job is that this is an inevitable part of the structure of power embodied in the divine principle. When Yahweh appears in the whirlwind and mocks Job asking him whether he has ever had the experience of authority that God has, he is precisely making the point: what makes the divine a Great Dictator, an authoritarian principle gone horribly bad is precisely his grip on power, his position of absolute unchallenged ruler. The challenge of Job is at the cost of immense and unbearable pain, of the kind that in all real life situations those who challenge dictators and narcissist rulers are likely to suffer endlessly. Yet, revolutions happen and dictators fall, when finally the lone voice of Job challenging the absolute ruler is joined by the many, until the challenge becomes a chorus of voices so loud and so powerful that it forces change and the absolute God finally crumbles and dissolves.

C.G.Jung also had his take on the book of Job, in his famous "An answer to Job", where he comes out full force about "the evil face of God" and the landmark position of this ancient text as the first open "criticism of God". In terms of Jungian psychology, the evil side of God is the shadow, the fourth person of the trinity or the fourth function of the psyche. Perhaps he has a point there: the exercise of power brings out the shadow, the inner darkness. As Victor Serge recalls in his beautiful novel "The conquered city", about the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, when the revolutionary Anarchists victoriously entered Ekaterinoslav, they carried large banners with the words "No Poison is More Deadly Than Power!". They were right, but if it is so, then an omnipotent God has no other face but the evil face and no other substance but shadow. There is but the evil god and it is the duty of humankind to fight against him for their own existence.

William Blake, Book of Job, plate 16 (detail), 1826

While in the biblical text Job falls short of cursing God, the reader inevitably goes one step forward and recognizes the divine principle portrayed in the scriptures as harmful to humankind. This already happened in antiquity.
In the Gnostic tradition (by which Jung himself was profoundly influenced) the Biblical god is transformed into a lesser god of the inferior world, the ruler over matter, sometime diluted into the plurality of the Archons. This lesser ruler, Yaltabaoth, is "ignorant of the force of Pistis", the higher principle of knowledge who reigns in the higher worlds above the veil of Maya (a concept conveniently borrowed from Hinduism), and whose personification is Sophia. The Biblical god is here a dark and almost malignant entity. In "The hypostasis of the Archons" and "On the origin of the world", the two main texts of the Nag Hammadi library, one finds a very interesting twist of perspective on the book of Genesis. Adam is a lesser creation of the lower gods, while Eve is the higher manifestation of Sophia. They are saved from captivity in the garden of Eden, imposed on them by the ruling Archons, through the serpent (who is the hero in this version of the story), who gives them access to the tree of Knowledge, which is also the tree of Life.

Mondrian, horizontal tree, 1911

In the higher world there is Knowledge, that is where the Science we wish to pursue for its intrinsic beauty resides, the attractive and peaceful world of Pistis and Sophia. Its image reflected on the waters of the lower world attracts all the Yaltabaoths, the power hungry Archons, who see the beauty of knowledge reflected in the pool of water and imagine that they see themselves. They imagine themselves gods because they have the strength of power. They see the embodiment of Sofia and they can only think of defiling her. They live of power and of their own aggrandized self image. In this world beneath there is no more pursuit of knowledge for its own beauty, no more pleasure or enjoyment in the making of science, but only struggle and suffering for those who follow the call of Sofia and eat of the tree of Knowledge, so that they may see the deception of Yaltabaoth, or fake earthly paradises for those who wish to remain ignorant and continue to follow blindly the dictatorship of the Archons.

Antonio Negri's book on Job is dedicated "to the few who did not repent" and "to the new generations". This is indeed what one can hope for: the last survival of resistance that cannot be crushed, joining forces with those who will have the advantage of time, because the omnipotent but not immortal Yaltabaoth will eventually have to disappear and give way to the future. Let Pistis return.

Books not t-shirts!

2011-09-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

There is an online petition whose text reads as follows:

Caltech used to have one of the very best scientific bookstores in the country. Three years ago the Caltech administration, without consulting faculty and students, decided to close it down. Not only the bookstore was important to the faculty in their research and to students for the selling of textbooks and other reference books, but closing down the bookstore in one of the most prestigious universities also sends a terribly wrong signal to the general public and the community. We increasingly live in a time where anti-scientific and anti-intellectual feelings and attitudes are on the rise, and where cultural and intellectual values need the strongest possible endorsement from our centers of scientific excellence. Caltech had a model bookstore that delivered to its community of scholars and to the general public the best of our scientific and technological culture. Despite requests from the faculty and the recommendation of the appointed committee, and despite a promise from the administration that the bookstore would reopen, three years have gone by with no credible sign of its reopening. Its place has been occupied by a travesty of store selling t-shirts and flip-flops. Tell Caltech: Books not t-shirts!

I urge all to add their signatures to this petition who agree with the statement that a world-renown university without a hint of an academic bookstore is a tragic sign of a very worrisome anti-cultural trend that is taking hold of even the places that should stand firm in defense of intellectual values. You can sign the petition here:

Caltech Bookstore Petition

The petition is by no means restricted to members of the Caltech community. It is of direct interest to anyone who values books and values culture and who understands the importance of having a place where one can browse real books and make those precious random serendipitous encounters with unexpected books, encounters that have the power to ignite our creativity, to spark a new direction of thought, unexpectedly.

People these days easily object that one can buy books online and Amazon has better prices. Sure thing it often does, but in order to buy something there you need to know which book you want to buy. The automated generator of recommendations works rather poorly and, especially when it comes to the scientific literature, the possibility to browse the whole text and not a selected handful of pages from the introduction makes a crucial difference. There is more: in a physical bookstore books are arranged on shelves according to some criterion of proximity, which (except for literature, where it is often nothing else than the alphabetical order of the author's name) often is arranged to reflect proximity of content. This is what often produces new mental associations and leads us to new encounters and discoveries, in ways that are impossible to reproduce in online retailers of physical and electronic books.

I can supply from my own experience at scientific research a large collection of examples of ideas that became research papers that were generated by random encounters with books in physical bookstores. This is why, whenever I visit a university or a city anywhere, the very first thing I check out are the bookstores.

The US have seen the recent collapse of the Borders national chain of bookstores. They were quick to blame the economic crisis, the competition of the online stores like Amazon, and the rise of the e-books. That all of these may have contributed is likely true, but they completely failed to see one other major cause: in the last few years the quality of the books available in Borders stores around the country has consistently gone down the drain! What can beat the online competitors is not a mediocre lousy bookstore with more expensive prices, obviously, but a high quality and highly selected bookstore that offers the alternative to the online stores where you have to sort through endless crap to get to find in their catalog the valuable books (which you will never find unless you knew already exactly what you were looking for). This is what Borders utterly failed to comprehend. Not surprisingly, when their stores began to liquidate, the "good quality products" (the few serious science titles, the philosophy and linguistics section, the best picks in the literature, the Oxford series of the Latin and Greek authors, the Criterion Collection DVDs, foreign movies, etc) where gone within hours, while the piles and piles of unsellable crap they filled the rest of their stores with stayed on the shelf up until the moment when they started selling it off at more than 80% discount. I have observed this happening in exactly the same way at several different locations I had the occasion of visiting in different parts of the country.

What this says is clear: the public (at least in the US) is becoming more polarized, like the whole of American society. The few who read are those who are highly educated and want high quality products. Those are the ones a bookstore can live off, because they are those who buy books frequently. The others don't read, period. There is no point having large bookstores filled with crap that can be found in every magazine stand in any regional airport, and which can easily be located online at lower prices, but it does pay to have smaller, very high quality, somewhat more specialized bookstores that aim at a particular kind of public (which exists, at least in the proximity of any university campus, or in any sufficiently urbanized area).

Those who claimed that the book is dead are mistaken. The book plays a fundamental role in culture and learning and in the fostering of our intellectual curiosity and pleasure, as much now as it ever did, but it demands attention and intelligence in the handling of its distribution and selling. Intelligence is exactly what the big chains like Borders lack, and what the bureaucrats that administer universities are also sadly deprived of.

Dream and the Underworld

2011-09-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting modern developments of Jungian style psychology can be found in James Hillman's book "The Dream and the Underworld". Starting from the classical psychoanalytic premise of dreams as the bridge between the conscious mind and the depths of the unconscious, Hillman moves away from concepts like Freudian repression or Jungian compensation, towards a different and perhaps more intriguing view, that links the inward journey into the dream world to the soul searching journeys to the Underworld of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Eliot.

Whether or not dreams really belong to the world of Hades and our experience of them compares to the famous descents to the Underworld of the literary masterpieces of antiquity and of our time, certainly the Underground exists in our minds as a pervasive metaphor of the Underworld and of the unconscious, in compensatory opposition and tense dialog with the conscious mind that lives out in the daylight its above-ground existence.

The Underground is a place of hiding, or resistance, to the point that it has become the very synonym of the Resistance movements that fight against oppressive regimes, starting from the heroic World War II anti-nazi resistance movement across Europe. The Underworld, on the other hand, is not only the realm of the dead. It has also become, in our modern city life, a synonym of the low life, the one that we imagine intent at carrying out shady deals in dark alleys, the living dead of the urban frontier, cast at the margins of society. Exclusion, resistance, opposition, diversity, hunted souls living in hiding, plotting in the darkness: this is all that the world below our world suggests to the imagination.

The Underground is also an image of highly elaborate structures: the subway lines that form the arteries of transportation in our big cities and the intricate texture of pipes and cables that form the nervous system of the information age and the functioning infrastructure of our daily life.

How the emergence of modern society shaped the imagination of the Underground is a theme beautifully analyzed in Rosalind Williams' remarkable book "Notes on the Underground", where the evolution of modern technology goes hand in hand with the evolution of the symbolic significance that our minds project onto the Underworld, while human beings came to penetrate more substantially the space below and transform it with the indelible signature of human presence and intervention. Starting with the dawn of the industrial era and moving on into the information age, the mineshaft, the sewer, the subway, and the more and more extensive urban infrastructure have accompanied the literary worlds created by Verne, Wells, and Hugo, in providing us with the modern imagination of the Underworld.

Yet our dealings with the darkness of caves and the world below the earth surface date as far back as the dawn of humanity and so is, possibly, its connection to dreams and the inner journeys of the mind. The earliest signature of human culture we can trace back into the ages is in the Chauvet Cave in southern France, recently beautifully portrayed in Herzog's documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". In the depth of this cave a human hand of 30,000 years ago drew spectacular images: groups of galloping horses, cave lions, woolly rhinos, bears, bisons. Animal species that no longer are, but whose traces are still preserved, fossilized in the cave rocks, as well as narrated by the hand of the human being who dared to penetrate a dark nest of predatory bears to live a signature of our presence, an act of triumph over fear, or symbolic conquest of animal souls and spirits captured in an immortal narrative.

(paintings of Chauvet Cave from Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams")

The birth of art, of culture, of human expression could only happen in the darkness of an Underworld populated by monsters. That was the very first descent into the Underworld and the one to which all others, conjured in more modern literate times, ultimately conform to. We are all that 30,000 years old human being who walked into the depths of the underground caves and drew paintings on the walls, and signed that acts with ochre colored palm prints.

(paintings of Chauvet Cave from Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams")

A hand, a signature, repeated many times on the rocky surface, a cluster of signs, a form of writing, a cry, a name. We are the same human beings who used to walk in those caves so far back in history that the word "history" itself ceases to make sense. We carry those dreams in our minds, in our species' mind. Call it "the collective unconscious" if you wish, or "the collective psyche", as Jung used to. It is part of us and it lives on.

Our "collective conscious" has evolved above the surface of the earth and in the daylight of our conscious minds. It has generated our modern scientific and technological world. Below the surface, we continue to visit caves, confront our monsters, conduct our rituals of artistic creation, and leave our signature there.

Under the surface of one of the focal points of our solar scientific dream, one of the world's best and most selective universities, powerhouse of scientific research and technological invention, there lies a network of tunnels and steampipes, ventilation systems that feed the labs, a net of infrastructure made of dark labyrinths of concrete and steel, water leaks, abandoned pieces of equipment, discharged office furniture, gaping holes and narrow passages.

Every night, the young men and women, who are going through the harsh and rigorous training of their scientific education in the classrooms and labs of the university above the ground, descend deep beneath the surface. They meet and travel together along the steam tunnels.

They draw paintings on the walls and write poems in many languages of the past and present time. They sign with their hand prints like their ancestors did on cave walls 30,000 years ago.

They perform rituals in dark passageways to prove their courage, running and screaming in dark tunnels, or to prove their cleverness, setting up complicated labyrinths of laser beams. The modern mind and the ancient mind find their meeting ground.

The pressure accumulated in the days of harsh challenges that constitute our modern initiation rites to the elite of the scientific world come to find their nocturnal release down the tangle of pipes in the hot and wet tunnels below the surface. The images and words on the walls tell stories not unlike those Ur-stories of the ancient caves. Bears and lions have been replaced by other monsters, by other fears, but the Underground remains the ritual place of descent, where fears are conquered by a creative act and where our human wholeness is finally restored.

The Underground is the place where life and death come face to face, the place for conquering fear, for gaining the strength of Resistance and endurance. A descent to the Underworld is a rite of passage: for Dante it was the crossing of that middle point of our life, for Odysseus and Aeneas the dialog with the shadows of the Underworld brought knowledge, in Eliot's "Waste Land" it is already our modern psychic Underworld, though still populated by the ancient Sybil and Tiresias. It is no coincidence that the entrance door to the Caltech Underground, in the basement of the undergraduate dorm, is inscribed with Dante's words, "Lasciate ogni speranza, o voi che entrate". It is the gateway to Dante's Inferno that opens the doors to the transformative experience that leads one on, eventually, to the discovery of worlds: conquering fear, facing the darkness without and within, just like our ancestors did, in the cave of the bears. We are modern and ancient, our mind is primitive and intellectual, and each needs the other for the alchemy of the creative process to take place. Science is a world of refined marvels and of cruel conflicts and we need an adequate language to express both.

The rites of passage, as the journeys to the Underworld, and deeply personal and yet they are shared experiences. They are transmitted on from one generation to the next. The art of painting on the cave walls in the early days of humanity was taught and learned and transmitted across the generations. The modern language of science is taught and learned and we hope to transmit it and preserve it across the encroaching obscurantism of the dark ages. Those who have already experienced their rite of passage also act as guides to the routes of the Underworld, like Dante's Virgil or Homer's Tiresias, who, without seeing, could see with the mind.

Another apt metaphor of our time for the journey to the Underworld is Tarkovsky's movie "Stalker", where the theme of the guide that offers a safe passage across the Waste Land and its obscure perils is expanded in its most profound and captivating form.

The premise is the story in the Strugatsky brothers' novel "Roadside picnic": amidst the destruction brought to "the Zone" by a encounter with an alien civilization, whether leftovers of a brief passage or accidental wreck, the "stalkers" guide people deep into the territory affected by frightening and incomprehensible phenomena. Its margins populated with mutated and traumatized people, its inaccessible interior scattered with strange artifacts, the zone is an Underworld of the nuclear age and the voyage described in "Stalker" a poetic retelling of the descent, of the facing of fear and death, and of ultimate transformation.

City Lights

2011-04-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

Choose your enemies carefully, for they will define you.
Make them interesting, 'cause in some ways they will mind you.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends,
they're gonna last with you longer than your friends.
(U2 - Cedars of Lebanon)

Physics conference standoff seemingly resolved. Los Angeles night: beer and Spinoza. The script Tariq Ali wrote for the theater play "The trials of Spinoza", later turned into a short documentary movie, gives a poignant portrait of a philosopher struggling for a defense of reason in a society crippled by superstition and in the grip of the religious wars that ravaged Europe in his time, and proposing a striking view of "the divine" that denied the supernatural of the personal god of traditional religions in favor of the immanent and natural marvel of an impersonal universe.

Up again at 4 am, heading to San Francisco, the last refuge of the troubled minds. First stop, Anarchist Bookfair, trying to get hold of the elusive small Anarchist publisher to whom I entrusted the manuscript of my first novel, dating back to other standoffs and other enemies ten years back. My recent trip back to the Ivy League environment that originally inspired it made me all the more aware of how good people are, some years down the line, at rewriting history. So I want all the more to have it out, that old crappy science fiction novel of mine, because at least that's a tangible record that history cannot be rewritten, just as my blog posts of these more recent years will prevent others, who are already trying to rewrite everything as if I had never existed, from attempting the same murky game. That old novel is not just a story of a dysfunctional scientific community in a distant but not so unrecognizable future. It is also a reflection on the difficult historic dialog between Communism and Anarchism throughout the tradition of the workers movement struggles, and that's why it ended up in the hands of my Anarchist comrades up in the Bay Area.

The plane flies low for an hour over the Californian coast: Santa Barbara, the islands, Big Sur, Monterey, the Bay: all this tragic beauty of landscape, this breath-taking marvel of mountains and reefs, is just a deep powerful scream of rock emerging from the depths of a moving Earth. Meanwhile, I read Gerald Raunig's "A thousand machines". As all the postmodernist writings, the book wanders around between loosely connected themes, all vaguely linked by the "machine" theme, first traced back to the treatment Marx gives both in the Grundrisse and in Das Kapital, and then jumping around between movies, psychoanalysis and philosophy, ancient texts, modern activism and all that. I generally don't much like this style, but this short book made for a good reading. Three of the themes touched upon seemed to resonate with me at this particular time: bicyles, the theater machines, and what the author calls the "war machines".

Regardless of the author's specific viewpoint and examples, bicycles are a statement of resistance: resistance to the imposition of motorization, a statement of personal courage and the strength to face up to coercion, the courage to say "No" to the car bullies and to a society that tries to silence dissent. The theater machines of ancient Greece, from which the word "machine" itself derives, the "deus ex machina" of the Latins, was the trick Euripides used to get his tragedies to some kind of resolution after a complete impasse had been reached in an impossibly complicated situation. From the theater machines of antiquity, the author moves on to those of modernity, especially to the Soviet avant-garde theater of the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, with its fragmentation of the bourgeois theater, its use of the Dadaist and Constructivist elements, the body-machines, the "Theater of Illusions". The "war machine" the author refers to is not, as one may at first think, the big apparatus of war maneuvered by the Nation States in their aggression tactics, but rather the small and spontaneous arising of strategies of anarchist resistance based on the micro-political, artistic-activist practices of intervention. In the words of the author, "the martial dimension of the war machine consists of the power of invention, in the capacity for change, in the creation of other worlds". The modest and unassuming nature of these assaults perpetually operated on a line of flight, nonetheless allow it to become an effective weapon that can carry out a siege of the seemingly impenetrable walls of power. In the words of the anonymous author who treated the war tactics of the barbarians challenging the suffocating rule of Rome, "machina multa minax minitatur maxima muris". My whole scientific work in the past three years has been a "war machine" in this specific sense.

San Francisco: N-Judah rolls its metal wheels and cranks its music of steel up the hills and down again towards the ocean. Off at Golden Gate Park, and there they are, black clothes, bicycles only (the Revolution will not be motorized), vegan food, and book stands, lots of them, on the floor outside and on the tables indoors, the whole archipelago of the radical anarchist publishing scene. I get hold of my publisher: yes, of course, my science fiction is not science fiction, that much I knew. It wasn't meant to be, otherwise I would have given it to a different kind of publisher. Alright, things seem to be moving forward anyway, in some direction, in the way you expect it to happen in the anarchist world: the spontaneous emergence of ordered structures and complexity from chaotic dynamical systems. That's the way Anarchy works.

Second stop, inevitably, City Lights Bookstore, the publisher of Howl and cradle of the Beat Generation. Two years ago, during my Berkeley months, when I was just beginning to understand how tragically misplaced my trust and friendship had been for so many years, I often ended up here, this side of the Bay, down in the basement of City Lights, where more than half a century ago Ginsberg gave his first public reading of Howl. Now things are different: I am no longer at the stage where I still have to recognize and accept what is happening. I am no longer shocked at anything, I am only fighting an endless and meaningless war of survival. So I can now come here again, with eyes that have become accustomed to looking upon the ugliness of personality cults and sickening ego complexes disfiguring the face of science. I can now finally sit on the stairs leading to the attic of City Lights, where the largest collection of the Beat literature is housed, and read slowly from Ginsberg's "Plutonian Ode".

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning
black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?
[...]
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger
birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion
of metal empires!
Destroyers of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous
Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
[...]
I dare your Reality, I challenge your very being! I
publish your cause and effect!
I turn the Wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!
Your name enters mankind's ear! I embody your
ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This
breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your
form at last
(Allen Ginsberg - Plutonian Ode)

Berkeley in the afternoon: the small street market down Telegraph Avenue, selling psychedelic accessories, the sweet smell of pot in the air. I am here to deliver another general audience lecture on my scientific work at Revolution Books, the small alternative bookstore run by the Revolutionary Communist Party of America. I slowly go through my slides presentation on mathematics and cosmology. The audience asks very intelligent questions: for a non-scientifically trained public, this is the best you could hope for in terms of an audience that really cares about every word you say. I go out with the Party members for drinks after the talk, and some conversation. Lots of questions still about my talk, nice intelligent questions: people who care about learning science in every way they can. Then more talking, political. The historic seeds of distrust between Communists and Anarchists are all too painfully evident even today, even in this stronghold of the radical Left that is the Bay Area. "So, your novel is with the Anarchists? Oh, it's in good hands: they haven't lost it yet?" Come on, comrades, we did this mistake many times before. If Communists and Anarchists hadn't started fighting each other out in Barcelona, instead of putting their energies into fighting the Fascists, maybe we wouldn't have lost the Spanish Civil War, as Orwell so sharply and convincingly documents in his "Homage to Catalonia".

As usual in my life, I am caught in between two worlds, sharing too much of both to be partial to either. Communism is, down to its crude essence, about believing in the future - the Radiant Future. One thing you can count on with communists is that they will be ready to defend science with their lives, which is a rare quality in the increasingly obscurantist world of today. I would not have become a scientist, had it not been for the Communist Party back home, and the effort it made to help us get the good science books, pumping up the enthusiasm, helping the young generation see in science the key to a better future for humankind. Now, when I give these simple lectures here, for the restricted audience of the Berkeley Communists, just blocks away from the shiny big science of UC Berkeley, I see again the same enthusiasm, the same uncontaminated trust in the beauty and the revolutionary mission of science. I bask in the shining light of their untarnished optimism.

My optimism was murdered, leaving behind a dark phantasm. This is why, by now, I tend to consort more easily with the complex darkness of Anarchy than with the radiant sun of Socialism. The dialog on science with the anarchists is considerably more complex, for one thing, because a good number of them actually do have a science background. Many of the movers and shakers behind the Californian anarchist scene are trained in science and technology and belong to that vast area of cyberculture that emerged directly from the counterculture. They are the super-hackers, who live by day as software developers in the sunny silicon valley glamour of advanced technology and construct by night a network of resistance and insurgency. Some of them have turned viscerally anti-scientific, advocating various forms of green-anarchist neo-primitivism, not because they do not have enough knowledge of science, but because they have seen too much of the inner workings of the scientific community. That's what makes the discussion so complicated: I know what they know that I know about the structures of power enmeshed within the apparent beauty and purity of science. There is no optimism to appeal to there, no radiant future left to build, just an endless struggle of resistance: the war machine. They speak directly to what I have become.

Love wears down to bare truth
My heart hurt me much in youth
Now I hear my real heart beat
Strong and hollow thump of meat
(Allen Ginsberg - Lack love)

As in Tariq Ali's Spinoza script, I have learned what it is like to be excommunicated by the vanity of the official orthodoxy of this dusty corner of scientific paradigm, and yet I still long for that old socialist vision, for its untarnished optimism, for the absolute trust in the beauty of science. That's why I came, on my knees, to knock at the door of the Revolutionary Communist Party, asking them to allow me to talk to them once more about science, asking them for a share of their optimism, of the brightness of their radiant sun. Despite all the pain and disillusionment, I still believe that there is beauty in truth and truth in beauty and that science is the last remaining form of poetry in which we can still sing an ode to the universe.

Mixing memory and desire

2011-04-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

April is the cruellest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)

Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)

Yes, it is conference season once again, that cruel season when the dead are being dug up from their shallow and restless graves. This year the choice is between the conferences I should have been invited to and was not because the Lord and Lady Macbeth do not like their banquets disturbed by bleeding ghosts, and those I was forced to turn down myself, because, after some time, even a ghost runs out of blood to smear more banquets with. So far I had kept only one last conference in the list, a small physics conference I had erroneously thought would be a safe space for me to go to, until I realized that even that last corner of existence is denied. I'll let that go as well: I am tired of this endless war, this endless bleeding out. Tired of perennially fighting back, with the last hope gone of a moment in a future history of the universe, a remote corner of space and time, where I may finally be at peace.

Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
you cannot say, or guess, for you know only
a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)

Where is the Birnam wood? Why comes it not? Or have the witches now deceiving words for us, the dead, as well as for the living? We, ghosts, will keep on fighting, will keep returning to haunt the Thane of Cawdor, because there is nothing else that keeps us afloat between this world and the night. When all is done and said, when all my blood is drained and all your talks are given, and the curtain falls once more upon this darkness, there will be left but a barren landscape of desolation, a scanty meal for the worms, and the same unspoken question: "What for?" Were your insatiable ambitions, your unrelenting egos, worth the destruction of friendship, trust, intellectual affinities, and ultimately human lives?

Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Birnam wood)

When fight is to life what ghosts are to shadows, when the swamps of memory harbor a decaying hostage conscience and desire, and blind windows stare upon a petrified world of nightmares -the burnt out desert that you casually and carelessly left behind you- all that survives is a long and meaningless wait for improbable signs of walking forests.

Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men,
or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)

Of waves and particles

2011-03-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

The devastating magnitude 9 earthquake with tsunami that hit the Northeast of Japan, and the unfolding nuclear crisis at the Fukuchima Daiichi power plant, is a human tragedy of immense proportions, and at the same time a powerful reminder of how limited our understanding of nature and our predictive power really is. It was long known that subduction zones can generate the most powerful earthquakes on the planet, but it was mistakenly assumed that only those corresponding to a younger oceanic crust (see the recent article on Nature) could reach the magnitude 9 level. An accurate (or more accurate) modeling of earthquakes determines our capacity to prepare and withstand the possibility of natural disasters, minimizing casualties: the Pacific coast of Northeastern Japan was perhaps the best prepared to face a tsunami (containment walls, escape routes, etc) yet not one with ten meters high waves.

The ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis is arguably the most transparently reported nuclear accident in history, yet how well is the technical information being transmitted to the general public? Is the accident really showing that nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe? There is a factual observation: the Fukushima reactors did not break down under a magnitude 9 earthquake, which is coming near the maximum intensity of earthquakes ever recorded on this planet: the reactor did switch off correctly. All through this crisis, the reactors had not been fissioning (another issue is to make sure that criticality, hence a new chain reaction in the fuel, is not ignited now, for example by the fires and overheating in the spent fuel ponds). It was the tsunami, not the earthquake that caused the most serious problems: while the facility had a tsunami wall, it did not stop a wave of that magnitude, which damaged the cooling system and started the overheating problems. So what does this mean? Are the reactors safe or unsafe? There is a meltdown happening: how bad will that be? In the last few days, there were a few sources of scant but reliable news (World Nuclear News, the International Atomic Energy Agency) and a lot of wild speculation by journalists with contradictory reports and little respect for technical reliability.

Finally, about a week after the earthquake and tsunami event, a very clear and detailed talk by nuclear physicist Benjamin Monreal, delivered at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, was made available as video with accompanying slides on the web. Why is this reporting so much better than anything that made it to the press? It is not a specialized talk for nuclear physics experts, but a presentation directed at a reasonably science-literate general public. It conveys precisely defined concepts, quantitatively meaningful notions of units of measures and their meaning, valuable and detailed comparisons with other situations of nuclear crisis (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl). Overall, what matters is the sense of conveying, as much as one possibly can in a potentially out of control and rapidly evolving situation, reliable and verifiable quantitatively stated and qualitatively unambiguous information. If one wants to strip it all down to the back bone, this is what science is about. Events like the ones being discussed bring to the forefront more forcefully than ever the sensitive issue of scientific literacy. We live in a world where things like nuclear energy and the functioning of nuclear reactors, plate tectonic and the likelihood of earthquakes, the complicated dynamics of nonlinear waves and tsunamis, as well as many other scientific issues involving medicine, energy, the environment, are or should be part of our daily preoccupations as informed citizens of the world.

The fascist current prime minister of a Southern European country delivered a highly embarrassing televised speech in which, while addressing the current situation in Japan, he revealed that he does not understand the difference between an atom and a cell and gave public display of several ridiculous misunderstandings of basic elementary school science. I wish I could ascribe this gross ignorance of science just to his being a fascist and a complete moron (at least he didn't try to claim that the Japanese earthquake was a communist conspiracy like he claims everything else in the world to be), but I am afraid that, unfortunately, not a few people who would recognize themselves with the political left would also, if pressed, sport an equally cavalier attitude towards scientific literacy. How comes? We may be all, at least those of us who are citizens of democratic or semi-democratic countries, be one day or another called to vote on issues like nuclear energy. Earthquake preparedness requires the investment of public funds: is it acceptable in Southern California to have nuclear reactors made to withstand intact a magnitude 7 earthquake? Because it is a logarithmic scale, the cost of upgrading from magnitude 7 to magnitude 9 escalates accordingly: is it needed? desirable? can one effectively evaluate the risk factor? Answering this question, in the positive or the negative, requires getting some technical knowledge: even that may well not be enough, as in the case of the present Japanese earthquake that defeated the known models of earthquake dynamics in subduction zones, but certainly gross misunderstandings can only make decisions worse.

The risk of criticality and of a chain reaction in spent fuel on fire in a nuclear facility may be faced effectively using the fact that the isotope 10 of the element boron is especially good at absorbing thermal neutrons and can be refined to near pure form out of the initial 20% occurrence in natural boron, and can be mixed, in the form of boric acid, with the reactor water based coolant. This type of intervention may or may not succeed in resolving the problem, depending on how serious the situation is. However, it is clear that the problem will not, by any means, be solved by some postmodernist mumbo-jumbo about different context-dependent truths and ontological relativism, not by invoking divine wrath (two faces of the same irrationalist coin). Like it or not, science is the only effective way humankind has ever had to face the uncertainties of the world and try to make reasonably informed decisions about it.

Let us then look more closely at some of the issues involved in the present crisis: how would a reasonably scientifically literate person go about getting some more specific information on the matters at hand? To define my terms let us say that, by "scientifically literate" I mean someone who would not run screaming at the sight of something that requires some basic calculus to understand. I will argue later on why in the world of today one should aim at this level of understanding of science at least, for a democratically engaged and informed population.

Earthquake and tsunami first: in the wake of the 2006 tsunami, a couple of quality books were published, which survey the present understanding and models of nonlinear waves and tsunami phenomena. Two volumes of this type that I (as a non-expert) am aware of are "Tsunami and nonlinear waves" by Anjan Kundu, and "Physics of tsunamis" by Boris Levin and Mikhail Nosov, the latter coming out of the Russian school of fluid dynamics.

The interested reader who may be willing to take a closer look at this kind of literature, however, will immediately encounter one of the most obvious obstacles in increasing general literacy on scientific topics of wider societal impact: scientific literature ain't cheap! Each of the two volumes mentioned above sells at around $150, used or new. If you are an even more mathematically inclined reader, you may in fact be luckier, and get away with "just" around $60 for "Tsunamis and hurricanes: a mathematical approach" by Ferdinand Cap. You are similarly "lucky" if you decide that you don't really care about the dynamics of anomalous waves and you only want to get a good idea of plate tectonics. In that case you may for instance get, again for around $70 bucks, a book like "Plate tectonics" by Wolfgang Frisch, Martin Meschede, and Ronald Blakey.

I am not suggesting that you should run off to your nearest bookstore or jump on your favorite web browser and online store and get hold of these expensive books if you want to read something about how tsunamis and earthquakes actually happen. Fortunately, most of us have a less expensive alternative to buying science books, which is to walk over to the nearest university library and hope that, if not the exact title you're looking for, they would have something along those lines you can browse and read (though probably not borrow if you don't have a university affiliation). However, how likely is that to happen? How often do people actually go and look for technical literature at a university library when they want to know more about some piece of news involving natural phenomena? I can only guess, not having any data or statistics available, but I am doubtful that this would be a frequent occurrence.

What I am trying to argue here is that the out-of-control prices of technical and scientific literature and the monopoly that a few publishing houses have on the market of specialized scientific literature is one of the factors that contribute to hinder wider dissemination of science. Given the generally prohibitive prices of good scientific literature, all people are left with is the cheaper alternative of popular science, which is generally a low quality product, full of inaccuracies if not outright misconceptions. Part of the unfulfilled dreams of socialists and communist visions of the future of humankind was to achieve a widespread high level of scientific literacy all over the population (see Yefremov's "Andromeda" for a powerful literary representation of that dream in a science-fictional context). This ideal at least brought about the existence, in those days in the Eastern European block, of a broad range of easily accessible, low cost, high-quality scientific publications, at all levels of specialization. The trickling of many of those books across the Iron Curtain made it possible for many of us who grew up in Western Europe to achieve a degree of scientific literacy that would have otherwise remained inaccessible. If any of the books mentioned above would cost between 5 and 15 dollars instead of costing between 60 and 150, it would be reasonable to imagine that a reasonably scientifically literate person, who's had a minimum amount of calculus level education in science, may be willing to invest the time and mental energy needed to read at least the more accessible parts of a real scientific book on a topic close to immediate real-world events. Subsidizing the cost of scientific publishing would perhaps be one of the best investments towards increasing the rate of scientific literacy.

Let me comment briefly on the "calculus level" remark I made above. The capacity to understand what a derivative, an integral, or a differential equation mean is a fundamental and basic skill that allows people to make sense of systems evolving in time, rate of change, averages, conservation properties: all concept that are absolutely necessary in order to make any kind of quantitative prediction about the future behavior of a simple or complex system on the basis of data available at a given time. This is three hundred year old science, which was once the frontier of human understanding (at the time of Newton and Leibniz) but is now so well understood that it can be routinely taught to any high school kid. So it is not an unreasonable pretense to expect that the scientific literacy level of a well informed population of a democratic country should start out from what one may call the "calculus level" and grow from there towards more advanced topics, cultivating the capacity of people to routinely access and read scientific text (real ones, not crappy popularization!). People should not be puzzled at why one should put water in a nuclear reactor or on what boron is and what it has to do with it; they need not wonder on whether the lunar perigee represents a danger, or on what is or is not an issue worthy of attention. Scientific information is available of course: there is now plenty of information online which is not restricted to subscribers: scientific journals are sadly under control of the same publishing monopolies that impose on them far more outrageous prices than for books, but freely available preprints abound and more and more lectures by scientists are freely available as videos, as in the case of the beautiful lecture by Benjamin Monreal on the Fukushima reactor mentioned above. The problem with this type of online information is that it is often difficult for the non-specialized public to be able to locate and pick up the real scientific information in the middle of the veritable deluge of crap and pseudoscience of which the web is routinely inundated. This calls for some intervention on the side of scientists, in finding ways of making repositories of reliable scientific information online clearly visible and accessible to internet users that do not naturally gravitate around the academic sources of information. How to create "pointers" that can effectively guide people towards serious science resources is an important issue, probably one of the most pressing in the current social implications of science and science literacy.

The riddle of the anarchist watermelon

2010-09-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

The anarchist movement is, by its own definition, an extremely composite and heterogeneous entity. Still, one can trace certain broad currents as they developed and differentiated along its roughly two century old history. Some political analysis and historians of the workers movement then like to talk of "Anarcho-communism", "Anarcho-syndacalism", "Anarcho-primitivism", "Anarcho-feminism", and the like. A coarser, and possibly more fundamental, distinction can be made between "green" and "red" anarchism, which essentially separated between those anarchist movements that put their emphasis, in many different ways, around ecologism and environmentalism, and those who view their roots and their ideology as more closely tied with the history of the socialist and (some versions of) communist ideology. Separating these two tendencies out does not do justice to the complexity of the anarchist archipelago, naturally, where often these components coexist and combine in intricate patterns. However, a distinction clearly exists and it is so deeply rooted as to have brought about the existence of a separate anarchist flag, with the same black diagonal half, but with the red one replaced, naturally, by a green area.

An old saying in my country of birth has it that the environmentalist movement is like a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside, and everywhere spotted with the black seeds of anarchy.

My sympathy naturally goes primarily to the "Red Anarchy" variant, that which is more closely tied up in its history to the workers movement, the socialist and communist tradition, and the industrial society. Abandoning industrial society not only does not seem in any way feasible but also not in the least attractive. We do live in an advanced technological world and our way of confronting society and our dreams of transforming it must be measured against the fact that technology is going to play an increasingly prominent role in the lives of people all over the globe. What we can and we must try to influence is how the interaction of human beings and technology does and will take place, not if. But at heart I am a communist and communism is a creature born of technological society and forever entangled with its destiny.

I am also a scientist, and as such I am especially concerned about the attitude towards science that the various forms of anarchist thought have taken.

If we take a step back to the early history of the anarchist movement and ideology, we find a very interesting text, written in 1903 by "the Anarchist Prince" Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, called "Modern science and Anarchism". It was written at the turn of the century, when in fact science had just started on the way of the great revolutions of quantum theory and relativity, which, however had not yet percolated down to the general public. So the "modern science" talked about in the text is eminently the mid to late 19th century science of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, the science that seemed to promise a nearly complete and entirely deterministic vision of the world. Imminent change of paradigm notwithstanding, the main point of Kropotkin is to reiterate the pledge of alliance to science of the anarchist thought. Kropotkin identifies the scientific method of inquiry used in the physical sciences as superior to the "dialectic materialism" approach favored by the orthodox marxists, which he sees as marred in preconceived ideas derived from idealistic philosophy and never realistically tested for effectiveness. Science works, science gives us a reliable way of looking at the world, of making predictions and testing them against data and facts. Kropotkin advocates an anarcho-communist thought based upon the results and the methods of the hard sciences, and subject to adjusting its ideology to the results of scientific inquiry, modifying what is proved wrong and confirming what stands the test of scientific inquiry. He admits, naturally, that when it comes to the realm of the social sciences it is difficult to apply the same level of rigor of the deductive scientific method as one can maintain in the hard physical sciences, but in his mind the goal is to model the social sciences on the hard sciences, and in that way eliminate the element of prejudice based on the tacit unquestioned assumption of a class based society that marred the general viewpoint on issues involving economics, social studies and similar disciplines. Within a few years of his writing, it became clear to everyone that even the hard sciences themselves where much more intrinsically complex in their view of the world than the late 19th century triumphs of physics appeared to imply and the new wonderful triumphs of 20th century physics opened the door to a fascinating view of modern science, but one less prone to adapt to dreams of reductionism. Nonetheless, the main point of Kropotkin certainly stands the test of time: that progressive political ideology stands hand in hand with scientific progress and scientific thought. This would seem to be an unshakable pillar of our philosophical history. And so it was, for quite a long stretch of time across the 20th century.

Enter postmodernism. Much of the theoretical foundations of left wing ideology was swept away by the postmodernist wave of the eighties: a flood of "soft thought" and aggressive relativism that started to look at science as an enemy instead of an ally. One can understand historically how some of the hostility against science grew out of well grounded concerns over its role in the service of the military-industrial complex, in decades of Cold War, and an equally justified concern over the looming specter of an environmental catastrophe, caused by an accelerated industrial development that seemed to care little for sustainability and preservation of the natural resources. In addition to these valid concerns there was another perfectly well justified reason for criticizing the sociological makeup of the scientific community, which appeared to be excluding from its ranks certain groups of population like women and ethnic minorities. However, the response to all these reasonable concerns was completely unreasonable and it had the overall effect of severely damaging leftist ideology and completely undermining many of its major achievement, gained as a result of long and painful struggles across the history of the 19th and 20th century.

Let's be more specific: the postmodernist "left" accuses science of being intrinsically a patriarchal construct of male domination, a discourse with no intrinsic validity other than the task of perpetuating its prejudices and suppressing other forms of thought, which are equally valid but more intrinsically feminine and based on essentially unverifiable systems of primitivistic beliefs. This type of claim essentially destroys completely two centuries of had won achievements of the feminist and women liberation movement, which struggled precisely against this type of idiotic prejudice according to which there is a male thought and a female thought and that rational thinking is the exclusive property of the first and the latter is relegated to the domain of wishy-whasy nonsense. Try as you may to flip the coin around and pretend that rational thought is bad and wishy-washy nonsense is all we should be aiming for (which is a completely moronic point of view, contrary to anything we, as progressive left-wing people had always believed in), you will still be left with the same discriminatory association of one type of thought to men and one to women. How on earth did anyone manage to brainwash people into believing that a point of view of this sort could be called progressive?

One of the basic tenants of socialist (and with it anarchist and communist) ideology was always defending reason against superstition. We traditionally opposed organized religions because they used supernatural beliefs to subjugate people, in the service of the ruling class. We opposed them because they prevent people from thinking rationally about causes and effects, we opposed them because they opposed science. Yet, the postmodernist "left" has no hesitation in supporting all types of nonsensical superstitions, from New Age baloney to astrological crap, to a revival of witchcraft and magical thinking. Who is calling this "the left"? Why? How did anyone manage to propagate the idea that promoting superstition against rationality is anything we would accept to call progressive?

I am sorry neo-primitivist, nature seeking, horoscope reading green anarchists, my dear comrades, I stand by our red flag of progress and reason!

I submit that one of our greatest struggles today is to regain science, to claim it back as our own! We live in a technological world where all the more those who control science control the world. If we choose to turn our back to science, we will be simply accomplishing a self fulfilling prophecy, leaving behind us a scientific community that will become all the more conservative, male dominated, in the service of the capitalist system of exploitation and tied up to the military apparatus. It need not be so, however, for if we claim science as our own, as it always was in the history of our ideology, we can turn the tide towards a scientific community that is inclusive, conscious of the needs of the environment (and with the knowledge needed to actually do something about it), that helps

Already, fortunately, despite the twisted portrait that the postmodernist "left" (which has never actually seen a real scientist in close quarters) tries to depict, the scientific community is already generally very left-wing and progressive, and if we (the left) don't screw that up, it will continue to be so in times to come. The underrepresentation of certain groups is still real and worrisome, but not due to an intrinsic nature of science itself, but to the residual existence of an order of things in our society at large (not in the scientific community itself) that creates impediments to its enlargement and broader inclusiveness. It is the traditional society we must fight, with the help of science, not the other way around. One should also point out that the postmodernist attitude of the "left" itself contributed to making the scientific community even more unbalanced in terms of its composition, thus perpetuating the exact same prejudices it should supposedly be fighting against.

Anarchists, communists, socialists, let's reclaim science as our own mode of thought as Kropotkin advocated. Let's return to that progressive rational view of humankind our long struggle for a society of equality and justice was always based upon.

The ashes of memory

2010-06-21T01:30:00.001-07:00

In the late spring of 1945, a group of resistance fighters watch the Brenner Pass, hidden in the forest, on the steep mountain range dividing occupied Northern Italy from annexed Austria. A long column of military convoys is heading north: a defeated army on the run, a heavy march of infantry, armored vehicles, artillery. A human mass in disarray, the tentacles of conquer hastily retreating, the invincible army that terrorized Europe finally crushed. Hour after hour, they watch the German army go by, the mass of tired soldiers, the acrid smell of defeat, the metal rattling of tanks, the shouting. They watch for an endless time, until the human river begins to dry out. Fewer soldiers now pass and the noise dies out in a shower of faint echoes bouncing around the mountain tops. It is cold at this altitude in the Alps, even that late into the spring. Silence. The partisans keep watch. The Brenner Pass is empty and silent, as if all that immense retreat had been but a passing dream in the much larger river of history. Then silence is broken once more. A single military vehicle advances on the same road. A different color, a different flag. American. The end of World War II.

One of those partisans was my father. He was fifteen at the time. During those five years of war he saw the sealed trains heading slowly north along that same route, that cut through the majestic wall of dolomitic rock. The trains carrying their human cargo to the furnaces of Birkenau. They fought a guerrilla war, barely more than children at the time, against the most powerful and technologically advanced army of Europe. They fought in the name of that Socialist future they were hoping to create... "to conquer our red spring, where the sun of our radiant future rises". Songs, memories, words transmitted and repeated. My father passed away some ten days ago. With his ashes we bury a part of our memories, of our connection to the defining moments of European history.

Memory is the most precious possession of human civilization. We keep historical records, we create literature and art, to the purpose of maintaining a link to our collective and individual past, preserving human history near and far, recording, whenever possible, not only the facts, but a sense of the feelings that went with them. Memory fades away slowly, until it passes suddenly into nothingness, in that transition of substance from alive to inanimate. What stays behind are not the improbable afterlives depicted by religions, but the gestures that enriched the lives of others, and a few scattered thoughts, collected in writings and in whatever other forms of artistic expression we leave behind when we depart. Ultimately, all human acts are transitive and impermanent, but the larger texture of history, to which they all contribute their part of the thread, grows on and transforms.

There will be still, one day, young guerrilla fighters watching powerful invading armies from the mountaintops. They will not be the same men and women who fought the resistance war against the Nazi back in 1945, as my parents did. Whoever and wherever they will be, they will share similar songs and similar thoughts, and will pass on their memories to their next generation. Meanwhile, we, the descendants of those partisans, who knew the postwar Europe they helped to create, will continue their fight in whichever way our time permits.

... Con lo stesso impegno che si chiama, ora e sempre, Resistenza
(Piero Calamandrei)

The filth and the fury

2010-06-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ...
(Allen Ginsberg - Howl)

In the academic year 2007-2008 I used to work for a research institute in Germany, trying to take care of eight graduate students, along with my own research, which was just about to hit full speed against a wall (of which too much has already been said in this blog). That was the time when I first reached that breaking point I have by now permanently sunk into. I owe madness in equal parts to my former friends and collaborators of many years (enough said on that) and the other half to the German University.
Here comes their share!

... who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull ...

If you've never fallen through the rabbit hole into the world of Alice in Wonderland, and you've never really seen what absurd means, you should take a quick tour of the graduation procedure for students of the German University. Here's a quick comparative anthropological analysis of the same procedure in the Californian Institute and in the German University. Student A is a graduate student of, say, mathematics, in the Californian Institute, while student B is also a graduate student in the same subject, and with the same supervisor, but in the German University.

... with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares ...

Around October-November of the year X, both students, having nearly completed their PhD thesis, apply for postdoctoral jobs. Typically a postdoctoral job that starts in July, August, or September of the year X+1 is advertised in the fall of the year X, with a deadline usually around December. Offers are made out during the spring of the year X+1. Since students typically defend their PhD thesis around May or June of the year X+1, the offers come a few months before graduation. At the time when offers are made and the student signs the job contract, the student's advisor more or less formally guarantees to the postdoctoral employer that the student will defend the thesis and complete the PhD by the starting date of the postdoctoral job. Should the student not finish by the established date, not only the student risk losing the job, but, since postdoctoral jobs in mathematics typically come with teaching duties, the employers will find themselves with a missing instructor and classes that need to be covered and with the enormous difficulty of finding a last minute replacement. Thus, for the whole system of postdoctoral jobs to function smoothly, it is necessary that the assurance the PhD supervisor gives at the time when job offers are made out, that the student will graduate in time, is considered reliable and dependable. PhD supervisors put their reputation on the line when they give assurance to postdoctoral employer regarding the predicted graduation dates of their students.

... who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts ...

Coming back to student A and student B, they both go through the job application procedure and both secure a good postdoctoral employment, for which their supervisor promises that graduation will take place in time. What does graduation consist of? Well, to begin with, the final manuscript of the PhD thesis has to be submitted to the appropriate office of the university. This is what is required:

- Items required in order to submit a PhD thesis to the Californian Institute:

(1) - The electronic file of the PhD thesis.

- Items required in order to submit a PhD thesis to the German University:

(1)- Five typed and printed copies of the PhD thesis, including a CV of the student, signed by the PhD supervisor.

(2)- A separate copy of the student's CV.

(3)- A notarized copy of the student's passport and birth certificate.

(4)- Five copies of any published paper authored by the student, related to the thesis content.

(5)- A police clearance report.

(6)- A signed application formula with one passport photograph.

(7)- A separate abstract of the thesis.

(8)- Official proof of enrollment for two terms at the German University...

and so on.

Assuming that student B can promptly and timely produce all these documents and takes no more time than student A to submit the thesis, we come to the next step.

... who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts ...

After the thesis is submitted one needs a thesis committee.

- In the Californian Institute a thesis committee consists of at least four faculty members:

(1)- Any of the Institute faculty including postdocs can serve on the committee.

(2)-The committee can be formed, its members changed or new members added at any time until the moment when the thesis defense takes place.

(3)- The only thing thesis committee members have to do is be present at the student's talk on the days of the thesis defense.

(4)-Only one week of time is needed between thesis submission and thesis defense.

- In the German University the thesis committee consists of four faculty members with the following regulations:

(1)- The first member of the committee is the thesis supervisor who has to write a thesis report, and give a numerical grade to the thesis.

(2)- The second member of the committee has to be a permanent professor in the Pure Mathematics Department of the German University. There are only six or so of those and if all of them say no, everything stalls.

(3)- The second member of the committee also has to read the thesis, write a report, and assign a numerical grade.

(4)- If the numerical grade of the second member differs from that of the first member the graduation SIMPLY CANNOT PROCEED, until the committee reconvenes and agrees on a common grade.

(5)- The third and fourth member of the committee have to be permanent professors in the Applied Mathematics and Physics Departments of the German University, respectively. Again, if all the eligible candidates decline, the graduation cannot take place.

(6)- The appointed third and fourth members of the committee have to read the thesis and the reports of the first two members and transmit their approval to the university.

(7)- A period of FOUR WEEKS has to pass between the time when both reviews (with matching grades) AND the approvals of the remaining two members of the thesis committee are transmitted to the university and the time when the actual thesis defense talk can take place.

... who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury ...

Student A at the Californian Institute goes through the process of submitting the thesis, appointing the thesis committee, scheduling the thesis defense talk and completing his thesis defense in less than ten days, with no foreseeable obstacle and with no need of any particular intervention from the PhD supervisor. Here is, instead, what typically happens to student B at the German university. (I say typically because, in the period between 2006, when my first PhD student graduated from the German University, up until now the experience I am about to describe happened NINE TIMES.)

... who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks oh the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion ...

After having submitted the thesis well ahead of the graduation deadline agreed with the postdoctoral employer, student B goes through the list of all the faculty members of the German University eligible to be second member of the thesis committee, showing them the thesis and the thesis report written by the advisor and already submitted to the university. All of the eligible members say NO, on the ground that they have better things to do. (Being in a thesis committee evidently does not seem to be a normal part of their academic duties: one wonders whether they apply the same conscientious attitude to, say, their teaching duties.) At that point the process stalls. Time passes and the graduation deadline approaches. The advisor intervenes and begins to contact the faculty members, begging, threatening, teasing, shouting, until someone agrees to be the second member and write the second report. Time keeps passing and the second report does not materialize. Again the advisor sends several reminders, pointing out clearly the fact that the student will lose the postdoctoral job if not graduating in time by the agreed date. Finally, after a humiliating process of many requests in increasingly desperate tone, the second report is submitted to the university. Time passes and nothing happens. A few days later, when inquiring on why things are not moving forward, the advisor finds out that there is a discrepancy between the grades assigned to the thesis in the two reports. Typically, the second report intentionally gives a grade that is about one decimal point below the grade assigned by the supervisor, so as to be sure to stall everything. A long discussion begins between the supervisor and the second referee, until an agreement is reached on a common grade. Meantime several more days have passed. At this point, with the thesis and both reports, student B starts to go through the list of all the eligible faculty of the German University who can be third and fourth member of the committee. Once again the same pathetic scene repeats itself, with people refusing to be on the committee, or formally accepting and then not sending in their reports. Time passes and the agreed graduation date approaches even more. When finally, after repeated interventions from the supervisor resulting in very stressful confrontations with the faculty members of the German University, all the members of the thesis committee have been appointed and the reports and approvals have all been transmitted to the university, one STILL NEEDS TO WAIT FOUR WEEKS before the thesis defense can finally take place! SEVEN TIMES over the past years this process resulted in the student being able to defend AT THE VERY LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT BEFORE LOSING THE JOB! Each time, this was possible only at the cost of an immense amount of stress on both the student and the supervisor. The remaining two cases of student-B-type experience are still ongoing.

... with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Of course, someone may ask at this point, yes but why, knowing that the graduation procedure is so hazardous and unpredictable, the students don't submit their thesis several months ahead of the graduation? After all, at the time when they apply for jobs they already have the results of their thesis, and one can surely speed up the writing process to leave a safe margin of time before graduation. Ah, no! Because the German University has thought of this possibility as well, and they included an additional regulation stating that, if the thesis defense does not take place within three months of the time of the thesis submission, then THE THESIS EXPIRES! This is a very interesting concept in itself: the idea of scientific results that are no longer valid after a period of three months challenges even the most relativist of postmodern philosophers. In other words, the graduation procedure of the German University has been explicitly and carefully designed to be a no-win situation and a byzantine maze with no exit route.

Ground where mere survival
requires
a desperate struggle,
where without
a desperate struggle
we perish,
that is
Death ground.
(Sun-Tsu, The Art of War)

In the fall of 2007 I realized that I was breaking down completely, partly due to the traumatic experience of having to ram several PhD students through the graduation procedure of the German University and partly due to the stress of trying to take care of one of the students who suffered from a severe psychiatric condition, for which the German University (unlike its overseas counterparts) provides no support structures (psychological counseling, student health insurance covering psychiatric care), so that the full burden falls entirely on the advisor's shoulders to do damage control and try to prevent the worst from happening. So I decided to escape and seek refuge in the Californian Institute. I thought I managed to escape barely in time to avoid a major collapse and breakdown. Unfortunately, precisely at that time my dear former friends and collaborators decided to deliver their blow and, even more unfortunately, the ghosts of the past came back and the remaining students who still need to finish their PhD with the German University forced me to a continued exposure to the same impossible nightmares, magnified by the additional difficulties of dealing with them at a distance.

On death ground,
fight.
(Sun-Tsu, The Art of War)

Postscriptum: When it comes to the point where a student, after finishing his PhD thesis two months ahead of the deadline required by his postdoctoral employer, faced with the impossible task of getting it through the graduation procedure of the fucked up German University in time not to lose his job, is brought to the point of attempting to take his own life, the grotesque obtuse stupidity of the German bureaucratic establishment acquires much more monstrous proportions, and begins to echo of that same stench of rotten authoritarian fascism that has been lingering on everywhere in its academic establishment. When it comes to the point where, knowing that the student in question is still in critical conditions in hospital, and nonetheless asks to be allowed to complete his thesis defense by a videoconference link (which would be a completely standard procedure in any overseas university), the dean of the German University does not even bother to speak in person to the head of the thesis committee who is asking for the official permission to proceed with the thesis defense by videoconferencing, and finally refuses to proceed on the ground of "maintaining their standards", then the medieval barbaric and idiotic procedure devised for the promotion of graduate students begins to stink of that same horrid stench of the rotting corpse of fascism that permeates the environment of German Universities... and someone had the guts to call this sewer a "center of excellence"?

¡Qué viva México!

2010-04-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

Off to Mexico for five days... out into the thin polluted air of Mexico City... the Periférico, usually loaded with the evening commute, is flowing steadily on a Wednesday afternoon. Out at Insurgentes, South and West, past the mountain rim, and down the green slopes towards the city Alexander von Humboldt called "of the eternal spring". Luxury tropical vegetation and swimming pools, Diego Rivera's mosaics, tropical birds, and the sweet smell of the night. The Institute on the hill, seminar room in an outdoor bungalow, just missing a round of cocktails served to the merry crowd. Old friends who surprisingly still remember me. Lectures, long, intense. One gets quickly into a semi-hallucinatory dream, conjured up by the heat, the intensity of the spices, the altitude air, the abundant flow of cervezas and tequilas.

And all of a sudden everything begins to make sense: the thin layer of volcanic ashes deposited on my laptop keyboard, flying away into the clash of new hopes and old despairs that mixes in with the lectures, two new and one old. Finally sawing together again the gaping hole torn in the texture of my existence. Finally whole, like the Earth trembling beneath us. And now for the first time I understand why Mexico is the final refuge and exile of all tired revolutionaries, a place for troubled beat poets on the run to lose themselves into a nameless crowd, and at the same time a rumbling echo of a power enormous and suppressed, like that towering volcano overlooking the city, like the old pyramids of Tenochtitlan, smeared with human blood. Heat and immobile agave stems: am I dreaming the thoughts that form inside my mind? Curfew in the evening, the army rolls into the city on tanks and armored convoys. Life returns the next morning in the street markets of Tepoztlan, under dark mountains shaped like human hands. One can understand how Eisenstein couldn't stop filming, until he lost himself inside the gigantic movie he never made. Here I am, eating fried grasshoppers in market stalls. Here I am, giving a lecture series that finally, for the first time, is really about what I am.

Off to the City again, a short bus ride away. Ciudad de México is a gigantic living organism that stretches from mountain range to mountain range, filling in entirely the land between. The 22 million megalopolis, counted by some as the most liberal and left-wing city in the world, is a treasure trove linked by a network of subway systems. I pay a respectful visit to Trotsky's house, comme il faut, and to the nearby Frida Kahlo museum. I never felt any particular affinity to her paintings before, but now for the first time I fully understand what it was all about, and I see the impressive beauty with which she was able to give form to the same kind of suffering I have now become so familiar with.

Two paintings in particular caught my attention at this time: in her "Love embrace of the universe", the much loved much hated Diego Rivera appears very significantly characterized as the child wanting to be at the center of the universe, while the artist, in her co-dependent role, accepts to act as the mediator between this repulsive solipsistic ego and the double embrace of Earth and a distant, more impersonal, Cosmos. In another equally powerful painting "Without hope", Kahlo, lying sick in bed is force fed a cocktail of nightmarish monsters. Not only I now finally understand perfectly the meaning of these paintings, but I can also see why Kahlo refused the label of Surrealist: what she was painting was merely an excruciatingly realistic account of life.

The battle for the future is worth fighting

2010-02-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. (Lenin)

I had forgotten how hard the way up can be. The literature on bipolar disorder repeatedly stresses how the moment when the mood vector turns and begins to point upward again can be one of the most dangerous: energy returns much faster than thoughts and feelings can start to move away from the bottom of the pit. It's a hell of a ride this heavy lift off.

It comes at a good time though, to give me a fighting chance to meet some deadlines: ICM talk to write, nice and very patient collaborators rightly expecting to see some answers (unlike those two former collaborators who'd rather see my obituary ... you won't get it, you hear me, not so easily: I am still alive!), long stalled projects to jump-start again, new ones that need to get going. Four months of hibernation to catch up with, and quickly.
Life again, in short, life on the fast lane.

Struggle is the key word. We are born with it, raised and educated in the glorification of struggle as the only existential state worthy of consideration. Who knows? Maybe all that Leninist propaganda of our youth did pay off in the end. Maybe it really taught us to never let go, to accept that struggle is, after all, a way of life.

So I am at it again, climbing up the well, gaining ground slowly night after night. With the decreasing need for sleep that accompanies the rising mood phase, I have been giving a good push at finishing writing some papers, including the text of my talk for next summer's International Congress before the March submission deadline.

There are not all that many occasions for reward in the life of a scientist. Most of the time it's a constant struggle (yes, there we go again, comrade Lenin, back to your favorite occupation) lashing out blindly at an incomprehensible universe, trying to bring it down to the size of the human mind. A struggle against our own limitation, against ourselves, in the attempt to reach beyond the boundary of human nature and intelligence. To go one small step further, to push back ever so slightly the frontier of the unknown. The scientific community creates, among its rituals, that of providing occasional gratification to its practitioners. These officially sanctioned rewards are few and far between, and they all consist of highly symbolic gestures, which would have no meaning at all outside of this strict circle of adepts, but around which too much attention seems to coalesce among those who belong to the relevant community. So it happens that quite a bit of anticipation builds up around certain especially prestigious conferences that take place once every few years and are supposed to present the state-of-the-art in our international research community, therefore inevitably sanctioning with a much coveted stamp of approval the inevitable arbitrariness of the selection process.

In my field, or what is considered to be my field (not that I feel any particular sense of belonging there), the last such event was the European Congress two years ago and the next, broader and more grandiose in scope, the International Congress that will take place next summer in Hyderabad. Thanks to my mind getting finally unstuck from the marshes of desolation it got marooned into four months ago, I could somehow manage to put together the text for what should be my ICM talk of next summer, and even submit it in time before the deadline. It wasn't exactly smooth. Given how a good part of the work I have been doing over the past few years got inextricably entangled with the painful breakdown of human relations with my former collaborators, my first attempt at putting down some kind of a text for my future lecture nearly landed me in the emergency room. That taught me two very important lessons: the first is, indeed, that one should never underestimate how rough the coming up from the bottom of the pit can be, and the other, perhaps more important, is that one should teach oneself how to avoid the continuous sliding down of thoughts and action into the same repeated memory traps.

I cannot help thinking of Max Ernst's painting "Garden, airplane trap" as a powerful symbolic view of those memory traps lying in wait, ambushing passing thoughts, like airplanes trying to catch flight, caught in a web of entangled memories, holding them down. The oppressive perspective of a landscape with no access to the sky, the obsessive thoughts that keep returning to the mind, keeping it from freeing itself, from taking off on new voyages: the portrait of a mind forever trapped into the labyrinth of painful memories that refuse to let go.

So I started all over again and tried a different approach. Just as with dream analysis in psychotherapy one always approaches the unconscious dream images from the point of least resistance, I tried the same strategy applied to the preparation of my lecture. I chose as my center focus a paper I wrote a couple of years ago, no coauthors, a limited amount of entanglement with painful memories. I slowly built context around that focal point, moving backward in time to less painful periods of work I can talk about without suffering too much, then forward again to new things in the making, again hopefully free of pain. In between, I even managed to give a balanced account of some of those aspects that are more closely associated to now painful memories. In the end I tried to focus on the future more than on the past, on the assumption that there is a future worth fighting for. If this extremely painful experience with my former collaborators managed to largely spoil my experience of the European Congress two years ago, I am determined not to let it destroy this coming ICM experience as well. I am not overly thrilled by the resulting fifteen pages or so of text I managed to put together now - I could have produced something better in other circumstances - but at present the fact itself of having made it to the end in a single stretch of two days and one night of uninterrupted writing, without getting too sick again in the process is a success. Moving on, moving away from memory traps. Moving to safer ground.

Wer noch lebt, sage nicht: niemals!
Das Sichere ist nicht sicher.
So, wie es ist, bleibt es nicht.
Wenn die Herrschenden gesprochen haben
Werden die Beherrschten sprechen.
(Bertold Brecht)

There is something about that old idea of struggle as the focus of life. We were indeed taught never to let go, no matter how hopeless the future looks. That was an ideological standpoint designed for the "wretched of the earth", whose future did look bleak in the world then as it does in the world today. Even in the most desperate circumstances, the idea was, the battle for the future is worth fighting. We scientists of today live generally in very comfortable material conditions: interesting jobs, good salaries, a lot of freedom to pursue our interests. Nothing that can possibly compare to the hardness of the struggling working class. The lesson, however, is still useful as a guide through the debacles of life. There is still a battle for the future worth fighting. It is not unrelated to that same old struggle for progress of our communist upbringing. The sense of despair does come ultimately from the same sources of oppression that are at work in the society at large: authority, patriarchy, conservative societies. My own breakdown had its origins primarily in the oppressiveness of German society and the toll it took over a few years of nearly continuous exposure to it, witnessing day after day its load of xenophobia, of overt sexism, the mistreatment of anyone who is in a more vulnerable position, like the systematic ethnic discrimination towards those foreign students who had come to work with me there. That at the crucial time, when I was holding myself together by a very narrow thread trying to make my escape to a more stable and comfortable environment, I was also forced to face the collapse of a human relation I had hoped would help me through that moment, was indeed what made the collapse happen in the end. Perhaps without that last traumatic event I would have made it to my new life without having to go through all this, but the fact remains that the struggle for the future is primarily the struggle against those same oppressive forces that still mold our societies.

Our best struggle is in the strength of vision. To maintain the capacity to dream, to enjoy the beauty of the science we are doing, despite of the ugliness of the human beings involved with it. There is in what we are doing something which belongs to all humanity, something which lives on beyond the monsters that created it and acquires a life of its own, a beauty of its own. It becomes the collective consciousness of humanity at large, delocalized, international, common heritage of all. This is what science truly is. This is the future worth fighting for.

In den finsteren Zeiten
Wird da auch gesungen werden?
Da wird auch gesungen werden.
Von den finsteren Zeiten.
(Bertold Brecht)

Year of the Tiger

2010-02-15T17:29:00.001-08:00

It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight
Risin' up to the challenge of our rival
And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night
And he's watchin' us all with the eye of the tiger
(Survivor - Eye of the Tiger)

Chinese New Year is coming, one of the biggest festivities here in California: the golden dragon parade will soon be welcoming the Year of the Tiger in the streets of Los Angeles. New year celebrations are meant to be rites of passage and this new year is a good moment to mark the end of what has been far too long a phase of passive suffering. There's no better symbolic image than the rising of the tiger to prepare oneself for the challenge of rising up again and getting ready to fight back. I've been always a fighter by nature and I know in essence no other way to deal with life.

Risin' up, back on the street
Did my time, took my chances
Went the distance now I'm back on my feet

The chemistry is changing, the tide is turning. Once again I have survived to the other side. There is nothing like the surge of power that accompanies the crossing of the critical point, the change of sign of the derivative: it's a unique feeling, this sudden upward drive. Getting through the lowest point becomes more and more difficult with time, especially when some of the people you turn to for help at that crucial time do their best to ensure you will not make it. And yet, there it goes, once again: the swing turns, the energy returns. I am back on my feet and ready for the fight.

In the old days people believed that there is destiny written in names. My real life name is the name of a warrior, who in the years 1092-1095 lead the largest army of Europe against the emperor of the time, twice defeating him in battle and changing the course of European history forever, opening up the new era of city-states that would herald, in the centuries that followed, the whole cultural blooming of the Renaissance. Like her I am getting ready for battle, and if the challenge is to bring down an emperor, then so be it.

Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

This fight is indeed primarily about keeping a dream alive, despite all the attempts made at murdering it. Finding again the motivation to go on, to hold on to the ideal that got me through all these years. It's an act of willpower that requires recovering the right amount of strength. If I have come so close to abandoning the fight, it is only because I came under attack at the time of highest vulnerability. It served some purpose to hit rock bottom: it forced me to see the truth about the people who surrounded me, tell friends from foes. Went the distance, now I am back on my feet, with the rage of the will to survive.

I am regrouping my scattered forces into an army of growing size: old thoughts are starting to live again, all dreams return with renewed strength, connections are being drawn, alliances formed. I am testing the ground, laying out tactics and strategy, choosing my terrain. I will bring the fight to all fronts, from the open camp down to the smallest alley, to every single one of the ideas that were once a shared fruit of a paradise lost, and far beyond. I am coming.

Risin' up, straight to the top
Had the guts, got the glory

Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop
Just a man and his will to survive

Untenured Alabama professors notwithstanding, the present setting of human civilization prevents us from fighting back against our enemies with the brute force of weapons, as people used to do in the not so distant history of mankind. No duel outside the city gates at dawn. Our fighting, today, is a fighting of ideas. The sharpest sword is in our words, and that duel is fought, no less fiercely, with the creativity of our minds. The modes of expression have changed through the ages, but in the end it is that same powerful surge of our primordial instinct for survival that guides the more refined and sophisticated parts of our mind to live up to the challenge and engage in the decisive battle.

Face to face, out in the heat
Hangin' tough, stayin' hungry
They stack the odds, still we take to the street
For the kill, with the skill to survive

It's the eye of the tiger
It's the thrill of the fight
Rising up to the challenge of our rival
And the last known survivor
Stalks his prey in the night
And he's watching us all
With the eye of the tiger

Urwald

2010-02-12T05:16:00.000-08:00

I am at the other end of the world once more, heading back home in a couple of days, heavy snow storms permitting. Here in the silent heart of the Schwartzwald, the black forest that covers a good part of the South West of Germany, a former secret military research facility was converted, at the end of the second world war, into a more innocent use as a conference center for mathematicians. The location stayed the same: an isolated elegant glass and steel building surrounded by thick, once impenetrable, conifer woods. At this time of the year, encrusted in a shiny glass of frost and snow, they make a suggestive view. Darkness, slow moving descend of fluffy snow flakes, forest, and games of cozy indoor lights in libraries and lecture halls.

I was afraid of showing up here, on the ground of how painful my last visit to this place had been, a good three years ago. I refused to come to a meeting last fall, just to avoid incurring in more of the same pain. At this point, I only wanted to throw in the towel and stop going to any conference at all, stop having to fight, stop trying. I just wanted to prevent the pain from getting every time worse, by now nearly impossible to control: an immense unbearable pain now forever associated in my mind to names of places like Baltimore, Nashville, Bures-sur-Yvette. Nevermore, says the raven, nevermore.

What made me come here, in the end, was the promise I made to my co-organizers, to help them arrange this workshop, to give it a try. Surprisingly, for the first time in so many years, despite my fears coming from the bad memories of this place, I was able to breathe. I was able to sit in talks and listen. I was able to think about what was being said, instead of just trying all the time to control my immense desire to run away. I was able to give a talk and not feel sick while doing so. I hardly remember the last time it felt like that before.

And yet, every few hours and without warning, I still get into one of those fits of despair when I just collapse under the weight of too much pain. It comes less frequently though, it is starting to be bearable again. The dark pine trees encased in a crust of bright white snow are cast like an army of skeletons against the milky background of the sky. Those dark lines draw the shape of mountains. Snow keeps falling in slow motion over the frozen stillness of this landscape, while indoors we conjure improbable images of quantized spacetimes.

I leave one last message to the master of incommunicability, signed on the inner cover of our book in the institute library:

Ibitis Aegeas sine me Messalla per undas.
O utinam memores ipse cohorsque mei.

I was sixteen years old last time I thought of this elegy of Albius Tibullus. In the year 28 BC, the poet joined his best friend, commander Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, who was sailing to the East with his entourage of mercenaries and lackeys. Somewhere along the way, Albius Tibullus falls sick, and his "best friend" promptly abandons him to die on the island of Corcyra and sails on. The hexameters and pentameters of the poem cry out the poet's deepest anguish, as he lies dying on the shore of Corcyra: "you will go on sailing without me, Messalla, on the waves of the Aegean sea. Oh, I wish that at least you and your entourage will remember me". Yet Tibullus does not die. He recovers and finds a way to return to Rome, and in the end all that went down in history about Messalla is that he was the one who left his best friend for dead and sailed away. The elegies of Tibullus, on the other hand, remained, preserved across the centuries among the finest heritage of the Latin literature.

Quartz pillars for the guardian of forever

2010-02-06T12:26:00.001-08:00

I am flying out of Los Angeles once more, heading half a way across the world for just a week. Every time I come to the gates of this city, beautifully represented by the powerful symbolic presence of the kinetic installation of the pillars of light in the LAX gateway monument, I cannot help thinking of the "guardian of forever" in that old and very quaint Star Trek episode, "the city on the edge of forever". The gateway to the turbulent stream of time, with all the interwoven strands of past and future histories, with their parallel and interlocked courses, is a passage back to our past and the opening of our future.

There is no better choice than Los Angeles for a city on the edge of forever. Geographically, there is no sharpest edge on earth than the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the ultimate frontier of human habitat beyond which 170 million square kilometers of water surface cover 46% of the globe. This is the last shore upon which all dreams come to rest before the immensity of the ocean.

The 1990 book of Mike Davis, "City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles", provides a deep analysis of the history and sociology of the city, from a Marxist perspective. A city of utopia and dystopia, of extreme class warfare, of urban sprawls stretching in the night like a shining lava flow from ocean to mountains. The policy of real estate across neighborhoods, the disappearance of public spaces in favor of a collection of private hidden gardens, the dismantlement of the railroad system, the tense race relations and brutal police repression, all contributed to make Los Angeles the vanguard of assault capitalism, and yet at the same time there is a sense of something undefined, which makes the struggle for the future worth fighting, something that makes the fortress of displacement impossible to conquer. Its undefined structure can become fertile ground for a very different type of undergrowth, the spontaneous clustering of a myriad of identities, an anarchist's paradise of loosely associated collectives, of actions, insurgencies, rebellions and acts of creative invention and revolt.

There is full scale war in Los Angeles, with armies counting tens of thousands of foot soldiers facing each other in urban battlefields. A lucid historical analysis of the gang wars is given in another seminal book dedicated to our city on the edge of forever, "Street Wars", written by a main figure of American political activism, Tom Hayden. From the bloody wars of the 1980s to the truces of the 1990s, Hayden describes the parabola that can lead from a spiral of increasing violence to the transformation into peacemaking and community rebuilding. Stressing constructive solutions and prevention against the myopic punitive law-and-order approach generally favored by the American public, Hayden's book illustrates how the creation of opportunities, rather than the ballooning inflation of the punitive structures, can stop the course of violence.

Both Mike Davis' "City of quartz" and Tom Hayden's "Street wars" featured prominently at the recent annual Anarchist Bookfair in West Hollywood, along with all a full display of the high browse philosophical collection of Semiotext(e) and a whole kaleidoscope of smaller anarcho-socialist Californian publishers. The rich underground of political movements here in LA is less openly visible and concentrated than in Berkeley. It has no obvious center of aggregation in this large delocalized urban structure, where space and time lose their intrinsic coherence. Yet this fluid nature makes it more mobile and transformative, and if we are indeed looking at a history of our future, that history carries within itself strong currents of change and revolution.

The last scattering horizon

2010-01-22T16:42:00.000-08:00

(In memory of Andrew Lange)

In cosmology, the surface of last scattering is the "wall of light", the last horizon from which the CMB, the cosmic microwave background we measure today comes to us from the depth of cosmic time, when the photons of the microwave background radiation decouple from matter. In more metaphorical terms, people too have their own last horizon, a boundary of the observable universe, beyond which one cannot directly probe and which represents that external surface from which all information we can access is collected, shielding away a core destined to remain forever out of reach. One tries to guess shapes and structures hidden beyond the horizon through the feeble signs that emerge, inscribed on that last scattering surface.

Some of the most exciting discoveries that brought cosmology to a central role at the frontier of science have come from probing the cosmic microwave background. We recently learned that the global geometry of the Universe is flat, or nearly so. A natural question that scientists and philosophers have pondered about at least since the times of Giordano Bruno, but which, until so very recently, appeared to be completely out of reach of any experimental verification. Now, for the first time in history, we know. This amazing piece of knowledge came to us through the so called Boomerang experiment (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics, that is). The suborbital balloon flights of the telescope in the Boomerang experiment provided a precise measurement of the angular diameter distance to the surface of last scattering. Combined with data on the Hubble constant, these sufficed to pin down the constraints on the geometry of the Universe. A most beautiful story.

I have never known much about cosmology. It was only in the past year that I made a first attempt at wandering about this glorious landscape, with small uncertain steps. A case of peer pressure probably, given where I am now working. I still know very little, naturally, I am just a silly mathematician borrowing other people's toys and foolishly playing around with them. I enjoyed it, though: it gave me an excuse to begin to learn something completely new to me, and also a way to begin to feel somewhat more at home in my new surroundings, to start creating that sense of belonging I had missed so much for so long. On a more personal level, engaging in the act of learning something new and different from anything I had been doing before was also a way for me to try to get out of a creepy depression I have been trying to come to terms with for several months.

When I first got here last year, to my new job, to the tragic beauty of California and its morbidly sensuous breathtaking landscapes, one of the first people to welcome me into the local scientific community was that same cosmologist responsible for the Boomerang experiment and the discovery of the flat geometry of the Universe: Andrew Lange was also the head of our division, in charge of the Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy section of Caltech. I was not a close friend of Andrew's, I did not have the time to get to know him well enough, but we exchanged thoughts several times, on mathematics and theoretical physics, on mundane matters of everyday concern, hiring, such things. I told him one day that I was thinking of submitting a grant proposal on some admittedly very weird mathematical thoughts about cosmology: I felt awkward about it, as if I had been in the process of trespassing on someone else's territory. There is always that fear we carry around in our work, of publicly exposing our inadequacy. And yet, he listened to me and he was very encouraging. Not much came of my work, one new paper, big deal. No major breakthrough to write home about, I know, but the encouragement that he offered at that time did matter a lot to me, when so many things had seemed suddenly so difficult to cope with. It helped.

Andrew killed himself last night. We were all informed today during an emergency faculty meeting. He, we learned, had been struggling with mood disorder and a severe depression. And yet, all along, he was always there: for his research group, for the pressing demands of his administrative job, for all the needs and duties. He had nice words to offer, thoughtful scientific comments to make. Helpful, considerate, understanding. How much did it cost him, I wonder, to maintain all that intact until the very last? I know something about those dark psychological spaces, of what it feels like inside: it is the growing weight of the soul that drags you down, the endless pain that keeps exploding in the mind and never stops, the shadow that walks with you, and yet every day one needs to find the strength to live another day, to appear as the world expects you to appear. To act as your role demands. To live up to all the expectations, to be better and more efficient than ever until all the inner strength and resilience is consumed. In truth, I know nothing about what happened to him, I was not close enough to know. We only ever saw the smooth reassuring appearance of his last scattering surface, beyond which we could not probe. Perhaps, we should have paid closer attention to the feeble warning signs inscribed on that horizon: we should have searched it for clues to the inner core of suffering, to the hidden geometry of that very personal universe.

Andrew Lange's Segre Lecture: How did the universe begin? Berkeley, November 9, 2009.

The raft of the medusa

2010-01-21T03:29:00.001-08:00

"No time, no space
another race of vibration,
the sea of the simulation"
(Franco Battiato - "No time, no space")

There are strange moments in life when, all of a sudden, one finds oneself writing a paper about loop quantum gravity. No, not even that. Mostly I am just drifting along the currents of the open sea, waiting for an improbable sighting of a distant shore or a passing ship. With no goal at hand, time passes in a mesmerizing dilation of slow movement and thoughts fail to coalesce around any solid object. Like the survivors portrayed in Théodore Géricault's "Le Radeau de la Méduse", I feel like I am ready to resort to cannibalizing my own work, just to get going with one apparent step in some random direction, while waiting for the shipwreck to run its course, back to firm land or to the ocean depths. So I am trying to get by these days, by reformatting in the language of loop quantum gravity some old thoughts. What for? Nothing, letting time pass.

In the loop quantum gravity approach, space-time is quantized by a procedure that encodes it in a discretized structure, consisting of spin networks and spin foams. A spin network consists of an oriented embedded graph in a 3-dimensional manifold with edges labelled by SU(2) representations and edges labelled by intertwiners between the representations attached to incoming and outgoing vertices. These representations relate to gravity in terms of holonomies of connections, and the formulation of Einstein's equations in terms of vierbein, or tetrads, and dual co-tetrads. Thus, to a spin networks, or the 1-skeleton of a triangulation by tetrahedra, one assigns operators of quantized area and volume, coming from counting intersection points of a surface, or 3-dimensional regions, with the edges or vertices of the spin network with a multiplicity given in terms of the spin representation attached to the edges and the intertwiners attached to the vertices.

This quantized version of embedded graphs and tetrahedra of a triangulation, developed within loop quantum gravity, gave rise to very interesting topological applications, such as the Turaev-Viro invariants of 3-manifolds. A spin foam is a 2-dimensional simplicial complex, which gives a geometric transition amplitude between two spin networks, and provides a "sum over histories" approach to loop quantum gravity. Like spin networks provide a formalism for quantized versions of 3-dimensional geometries, spin foams are the discretized version of 4-dimensional spacetimes. A "sum over geometries" weighted by the Einstein Hilbert action, as in a semiclassical Hartle-Hawking approach, becomes in this point of view a sum over spin foams, weighted by a "group field theory" type of action.

So far so good, and then what? I mean, what am I doing with all this other than trying to keep the raft afloat? I still don't know, mostly just playing around with it. I'll see where the flow goes, whether it is rip currents or peaceful stream. For those who seek a milder type of entertainment with the ideas of loop quantum gravity, there is always Greg Egan's novel "Schild's ladder", an action-adventure story of quantum gravity vacua and dynamical triangulations. Not a typical sci-fi bestseller, and sufficiently unusual to be genuinely entertaining.

Man and history

2010-01-18T18:18:00.000-08:00

"It is man and man alone who creates history" (Jyoti Basu, 1914-2010)

It is appropriate to pay respect to the departed comrades: Jyoti Basu, who passed away yesterday in Kolkata at the age of 95, was a historic figure of the communist movement worldwide. I will not be getting into an analysis of what his tenure as the longest serving head of a democratically elected communist government achieved in West Bengal. There are people who are more expert and closer to the local reality to judge. It is clear, however, that the fact itself that a state with a population of over 80 millions, which makes West Bengal larger than any single one of the main European nations, had been governed for half a century by a democratically elected communist party, is a fact of crucial significance in world history. Too often the dominating Cold War propaganda, which dragged on, in Europe and elsewhere, well beyond the end of the Cold War era, had tried to persuade the general public that a Marxist version of Communism would be strictly incompatible with a political system based on an elective democracy. Well, perhaps the biggest contribution of Jyoti Basu to world history lies in having proven that this claim is simply wrong. Basu served as Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000, the longest-serving Chief Minister of India, and a record time in office compared to any democratically elected leader worldwide. What made the fortune of the Communist Party of India (Marxists) and its Left Front government coalition was a mixture of massive land reforms, the general support with the population gained after the difficult experience of West Bengal in the 1970s, torn by the experience of war, of the refugee crisis and of the Emergency. The two states of India with the strongest communist tradition, West Bengal and Kerala, have also the highest literacy rate, the lowest incidence of communal violence, and the best profile on issues such as women rights. West Bengal has additionally retained its leading role in culture and the arts, as well as a rapidly expanding presence on the scene of the current Indian scientific blooming. The CPI(M) has its opponents, to the right and to the left: among the latter, most prominently, a very composite archipelago of Maoist movements. Nonetheless, Basu has been highly regarded as a political figure by supporters and opponents alike.

The historic heritage of communism around the world is very diverse and very fragmented. Perhaps the most serious criticism that communist intellectuals can raise against what they would regard as their own political culture is this tendency to continuously split along the fault lines of ideological differences: Marxists-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Anarcho-Socialists, and so on. The label of "Revisionist" has been thrown infinitely many times at one or another target, akin to "traitor" or worse. In the end, these endless cracks opening up in the body of the international workers movement have only had the effect of weakening it, diluting it to an impotent homeopathy of ideology. The reaction, which efficiently created all the monstrous European and South American Fascisms of the 20th century, all finding their "justification" of existence in the need to stop the advancing of Communism, does not waste time in debating subtle ideological differences: they just go in straight for the kill, while we waste most of our energies deciding whether an already minuscule communist faction in this or that country should further split into two even more ineffective groups over a difference of interpretation of a line in the Grundrisse. The communist leaders who really make history are only those who have the intelligence to adopt an inclusive viewpoint on ideology. This is not the much feared "revisionism", comrades, it is reality knocking loudly at the door!

The international workers movement has a rich tradition which encompasses Anarchy, various version of 19th century Socialism, Marxism and all its historic derivatives throughout the 20th century, as well as the practical, empirical, experience of trade unions, women rights activism, the civil rights movement, the students movement of 1968. We come from very far and if we want to have a fighting chance to keep going very far, we better accept that all of these experiences are with us to stay and they do not have to form a water tight package of ideological consistency in order to be effective. There will always be contradictory stands anyway, there is no way to avoid it, except the repressive one which does not lead anywhere. Our strength is in unity, but "unity in diversity". The experience of India can hopefully teach something to the rest of the world, which is struggling with the burden of being unaccustomed to diversity. This is why the Indian experience of Communism is so relevant to the world. There is no perfect solution, no silver bullet, not even the Revolution and the "final struggle" our fathers sang about. The Bengali solution is also, like everything, a compromise, one that works and doesn't work, one that has good sides and bad ones. We are not building a workers paradise, nor are we seriously changing the deeper nature of humankind, not as our culture had once hoped to do. The youth of ideology is a landscape of dreams, but the struggle that matters in our everyday life is the one that diminishes exploitation of the poor by the rich, that contributes to give to all human beings equal dignity, regardless of their race and gender, that broadens people's access to good education, to good medical care, it is the act of standing up against wars, against brutality and oppression wherever they manifest themselves. These are not secondary tasks, this is the essence of what makes us "progressive", a progress conquered step by step, with the burden of all our contradictions.
The struggle carries on.

Golem XIV

2010-01-17T20:53:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of my previous blog Welcome to the machine. I decided to stop that blog and restart it under a new heading to mark the turning point I have come to and restart my cybernetic life again as a blank slate. I should have given it a phoenix inspired title perhaps, so why Golem?

When Stanislaw Lem wrote "Golem XIV", collected in English as one of the stories in "Imaginary magnitude", he envisioned a sentient machine that grows to transcend the human nature. Built by humans with warfare applications in mind, Golem quickly dismisses its intended task and moves forward, gradually increasing its own intellective capacity, until it loses all possibility of communication with human beings, evolving into an entirely new life form. Just before disappearing out of the cognitive range of humanity, the machine delivers a series of lectures, in which it philosophizes upon human nature, evolution, and intelligence. Golem is the self consciousness of our scientific and technological world, which speaks about itself, its origins, its future. We are there to listen. I called my new blog here "Listening to Golem" because there are times in life when one reaches a profound state of disillusionment about the human nature and, at those times, one should pause and listen. The shortcomings of human hubris and pretension slowly disappear, when projected against the larger landscape which is the greatest of human creations: our science, like Lem's Golem, takes up a life of its own and, dismissing the base motivation of self gratification that guided the human beings who initially attended to it and transcending their smallness, it takes on a cognitive life beyond the reach of any single individual. Our science, our golem, lives on as our collective consciousness, and we the human, the scientists, listen on. Like the golem of Prague legends, our collective golem also bears Emet, truth, written on its forehead. What will restart in us the process of creativity and guide us safely back to the road of life is the awakening of our creature of stone and mud, its capacity to take on life and awareness.

Listening to Golem is what I will be doing in the near future. The capacity to listen is the key to human sensitivity, but nature, which as Heraclitus pointed out loves to hide, talks to us mostly in whispers. A golem is not a large frightening monster, it is a creature of stone alright, a creature as old and slow moving as a geological phenomenon, echoing into the depth of the world's past existence, and yet the golem is a stone that comes alive and moves forward into the future. A metaphor of evolution, slow in its process but of marvelous complexity in its outcome. So is Lem's Golem whose final evolution brings it to disappear into the distant future of humanity: from the stones to the stars, a path precluded to individual human beings but walked upon by our collective endeavor, which we call civilization.