Category Archives: reviews and opinion

Just a nuclear-powered dinosaur

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Pondering the science of Godzilla for New Scientist, 12 June 2019

FOR Japanese children, Godzilla is the ultimate scary adult: fierce, honourable, clumsy and a bit out of control. For their grandparents, he’s the irradiated embodiment of wartime tragedy, a bad memory come to life. For the rest of us, I suppose, he’s “just” a nuclear-powered dinosaur.

Godzilla is also a pay cheque. Films featuring the epic creature, almost all by the Japanese studio Toho, have been produced since 1954, a cinematic franchise record. The current release, Godzilla: King of the monsters, is the 35th, and the third to be produced entirely within the Hollywood system.

Its human stars play the shattered Russell family. Millie Bobby Brown from TV hit Stranger Things is Madison, whose brother Andrew was killed during a 2014 kaiju (monster) attack on San Francisco. Her dad Mark is literally living with wolves; her mum Emma prefers kaiju to people.

Terroristic eco-warriors are out to awaken Godzilla’s subterranean cousins in an effort to bring the planet “back into balance” – and Emma is inclined to help them. Newsreel images of ruined San Francisco make her point: in five short years it has turned to jungle, accelerated by ionising radiation spilling from Godzilla’s insides.

Why do movies, stretching back to the giant ants of Them!, assume that excess radiation promotes growth? The evidence has always pointed the other way. Ionising radiation weakens and breaks up DNA, damaging cells enough to kill them, or cause them to mutate in ways that, somehow or other, lead to the grave. In humans, epidemiological studies show that even low doses of radiation increase the risk of cancer.

Still, human nature being what it is, whenever a new kind of ray is detected, we speculate about its magical properties. Radium, a radioactive metal, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, and though it eventually killed her, it still found its way into the food chain thanks to products like Hippman-Blach bakery’s Radium Bread (made with radium-laced water, which was supposed to cure everything from arthritis to impotence to wrinkles).

Is there more to this accelerated-growth idea than magical thinking? “Hormesis” is the controversial notion that things that are dangerous in high doses might be beneficial to human health at lower levels. Some lab studies have shown the effect in action. Whether there is radiation hormesis, however, is a big question – and a timely one.

China’s space programme has studied the ability of plants to develop and thrive in conditions of microgravity and exposure to cosmic radiation in space. Since 1987, 66 mutant varieties have been cultivated through its space-breeding efforts.

So far, so workaday: “atomic gardening” has been around since the 1950s, exposing plants to radioactive sources (typically cobalt-60) to generate mutations, and over 2000 new varieties of agriculturally useful plants have been created this way.

The Chinese results, however, are a bit weird. Plants positively mutated during space flight have grown faster than their irradiated Earth-grown counterparts. Space-bred mutations do better than their “atomically gardened” controls, and no one is sure why.

Is there something magical about cosmic rays? Probably not, though if I were Godzilla (traditionally Earth’s first line of defence against alien attack) I would watch my back.

“And it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth…”

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Visiting Raw Materials: Plastics at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, for the Spectator, 1 June 2019

Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip at £3) would have it, ‘Plastics have no intrinsic form or texture, thus they are not materials that can be true to themselves.’ They exist within inverted commas. They can be shell-like, horn-like, stony, metallic — they do not really exist on their own behalf.

Mind you, the first vitrine in Raw Materials: Plastics at the Nunnery Gallery in east London contains an object of rare beauty: a small, mottled, crazed, discoloured sphere that looks for all the world like the planet Venus, reduced to handy scale.

It’s a billiard ball, made of the first plastic: cellulose nitrate. Its manufacture had been keenly anticipated. In the US, a $10,000 prize had been offered for anything that could replace ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls (and no wonder: a single tusk yields only three balls).

Under various brand names (Celluloid, Parkesine, Xylonite), and in spite of its tendency to catch fire (colliding snooker balls would occasionally explode), cellulose nitrate saved the elephant. And not just the elephant: plastics pioneer John Wesley Hyatt reckoned that ‘Celluloid [has] given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.’

The whole point of plastic is that it has no characteristics of its own, only properties engineered for specific uses. Cheaper than jade. Less brittle than bone. It’s the natural material of the future, always more becoming than being. Hence the names: Xylonite. Bexoid. Halex. Lactoid.

Unable to nail the material in words, one writes instead about its history, sociology, industrial archaeology or ecological impact. On remote islands in the Pacific, thousands of albatross chicks are starving because the parents mistake floating plastic debris for food. Stories like this conjure up a vision of vast islands of discarded plastic coagulating in the Pacific Ocean, but there aren’t any. Instead, plastics eventually fragment into ever smaller pieces that are ingested by marine animals and carried to the sea bottom. In the Mariana Trench, all crustaceans tested had plastics in their guts. So plastics rise and fall through the food chain, creating havoc as they go — a bitter irony for a material that saved the elephant and the turtle, made fresh food conveyable and modern medicine possible, and all for less than 15 per cent of global oil consumption.

What can be gained from looking at the stuff itself? Raw Materials: Plastics transcends the limitations of its material by means of a good story. The first plastics were made in the Lea Valley, not from crude oil, but from plant materials, in a risky, artisanal fashion that bore, for a while, the hallmarks of older crafts including baking, woodcutting and metalwork. Fast-forward 140 years or so and, under the umbrella term ‘bioplastics’, plant-based and biodegradable synthetic products promise to turn the wheel of development full circle, returning plastics to their organic roots. (Designer Peter Marigold’s FORMCard plastic, used here in an excellent school art project, is a starch-based bioplastic made from potato skins.) Then, perhaps, we can break the bind in which we currently find ourselves: the one in which we’re poisoning the planet with plastic in our efforts not to further despoil it.

This is the third and for my money the most ambitious of the gallery’s ongoing series of small, thoughtful exhibitions about the materials, processes and industries that have shaped London’s Lea Valley. (Raw Materials: Wood ran in 2017; Raw Materials: Textiles last year.) The show is more chronicle than catalogue, but the art, scant as it is, punches above its weight.

I was struck, in particular, by France Scott’s ‘PHX [X is for Xylonite]’, a 13-minute collage of photogrammetry, laser scanning and 16mm film. It ought, by all logic, to be a complete mess and I still haven’t been able to work out why it’s so compelling. Is it because digital artefacts, like their plastic forebears, are themselves prisoners of contingency, aping the forms of others while stubbornly refusing to acquire forms of their own?

Bringing London’s buried rivers to light

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Exploring London’s hidden rivers for the Financial Times, 8 June 2019

Early in the eleventh century, King Cnut sailed his troops from the Thames all the way up the river Effra to Brixton. But by the time Victoria took the throne, a millennium later, the Effra had vanished: polluted; canalised; in the end, buried.

The story goes that once during Victoria’s reign, a coffin from West Norwood Cemetery was found bobbing out to sea along the Thames. The Effra had undermined the burial plot from below, then carried the coffin four miles to its outflow, under what is now the MI6 building in Vauxhall.

It’s stories of this sort which make Londoners grateful for Joseph Bazalgette, the civil engineer who got London’s rivers working again. Following the Great Stink of 1858, he was given the job of turning them into closed sewers. By integrating the Thames’s tributaries into his underground system, Bazalgette sealed the capital’s noisome waterways from view, and used them to move London’s effluent ever eastwards and away.

The problem Bazalgette solved was an old one. London’s Roman founders also had trouble with its rivers. They’d first camped along the banks of the Walbrook, between the two low lying hills of Ludgate and Cornhill. “At first the river was full and reasonably fast-flowing,” explains Kate Sumnall, archaeologist and co-curator of the Secret Rivers exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands. “Twenty years later, the character of the river had completely changed.” River levels dropped dramatically while, at the same time, floods became more frequent. The Romans tried to manage the river by raising ground levels, building revetments, and straightening its course, all with the idea of getting flood waters away as fast as possible. It’s an approach urban planners copied, with refinements, well into the 1960s, and all over London the consequences run, unseen, below people’s feet

I’ve met Sumnall and her co-curator Thomas Ardill at a cafe in Smithfield Market, not far from the banks of the noisome Fleet river — a stretch of waterway no one in their right mind would ever want to uncover; a ditch that inspired Ben Jonson’s coprophilic masterwork “On the Famous Voyage”, once dubbed the filthiest and most deliberately and insistently disgusting poem in the English language.

After the Great Fire, Christopher Wren wanted to turn the Fleet into a sort of Venetian canal: the sheer number of dead dogs floating in the ooze defeated his plans. It’s has since been given a decent burial under Farringdon Road.

In the company of Sumnall and Ardill, the vanished Fleet Ditch comes to life beneath our feet. Every side street was once a wharf. Coal was piled up in Newcastle Close. Dig under Stonecutter Street and you come up with whetstones and knives. Every hump in Farringdon Road marks an old bridge.

Could things have turned out differently for London’s lost rivers? Probably not, but it’s fun to tinker. Ardill tells me about a group of artist-activists called Platform. In 1992 they set up a mock Effra Redevelopment Agency to consult the residents of Brixton about their plans to open up the local river. A sylvan wonderland awaited those who didn’t mind losing their houses.

Compare this mischievous exercise in grass-roots democracy with the paralegal shenanigans of the Tyburn Angling Society, which explores the legal aspects of restoring the river so that it flows freely through the more exclusive enclaves of west London. Levies charged on newly river-fronted properties will pay for the compulsory purchase orders. Buckingham Palace is one of the buildings the Society has earmarked for demolition.

Real-world efforts to restore stretches of London’s rivers began in 2009. Of London’s nearly 400 miles of river network, just twenty have been restored, but developers and councils are beginning to appreciate the cachet a river can add to an area, plus the improvements it can bring by way of social cohesion and well-being. Sixty more miles of waterway run through the city’s public parks and existing urban regeneration schemes, and can be restored at relatively low cost.

Dave Webb, the ecologist who chairs the London River Restoration Group, began his working life trying to ameliorate the effects of engineering projects that canalised and culverted “unsightly” and “dangerous” watercourses. Now he’s bringing these formerly dead rivers back to light and life.

One difficulty for advocates like Webb is in conveying what restoration actually entails. “Architects have a habit of dreaming up a lovely wildlife space, only to insist that it mustn’t then change. Restoring a river is not like restoring a table. You’re reawakening a natural process. You’re enabling the river to adjust and move around.”

Webb has been energetically promoting London Rivers Week, a festival to promote London’s stretches of restored river. The point is not just to prettify the city. It’s to make London sustainable as the climate changes. If the capital leaves its waterways running underground in concrete channels much longer, flash flooding will start to erode its infrastructure. Toxins concentrated on road surfaces during droughts will enter the water system after a single downpour, poisoning everything downstream. Not that much would survive a drought anyway, since smooth concrete surfaces do not provide plants and animals with sanctuary in dry weather, the way a river’s pools and puddles will.

Webb shows me an alternative to London’s existing bleak, brutalist riverine architecture: the restoration of the Quaggy River in Sutcliffe Park, in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The park works as a giant sponge, against the day a flood-swollen Quaggy threatens to inundate the neighbouring borough of Lewisham. In normal weather the Quaggy also overflows, less spectacularly, to feed a small wetland which you can enter along a boardwalk. There are dragonflies and mayflies. There are fish, and kingfishers to eat the fish. Above all there are people — twice as many as there used to be when the park was flat and dry. Plus they spend double of the amount of time here that they used to.

“I remember walking along one London river when it was still a concrete channel,” Webb recalls. “I asked what all the iron railings were for and I was told it was to stop kids falling into the water, which was about five inches deep. ‘Well,’ I was told, ‘there’s also the business of them throwing shopping trolleys in it.’ I’ve found that if you give people a river, they won’t spoil it.”

And sure enough, in this not very affluent and fairly unprepossessing stretch of south London, the river shimmers under the dappled shade of self-seeded willow trees. Webb reckons there was nothing particularly heroic about the engineering involved: “In a lot of cases, there’s not even any need for planting. The ecologies of the river’s headwaters will work their way downstream in the course of a few seasons, and birds and insects follow very quickly.”

Webb also recommends a walk along the Wandle, which passes through Croydon, Sutton, Merton, and Wandsworth to join the River Thames. This chalk stream was once the heaviest-worked river in the capital, driving mills to produce everything from paper to gunpowder, snuff to textiles. Declared dead in the 1960s, now it’s a breeding spot for chub and dace and brown trout. From certain angles, it will fool you into thinking you’ve hit a particularly idyllic nook of the South Downs. Turning a corner will quickly remind you of the city’s presence, but that’s the peculiar, liminal charm of an urban river.

While Thames 21, the charity behind London Rivers Week, organises citizen science projects, clean-ups and campaigns, the Museum of London Docklands’ Secret Rivers exhibition has scheduled a series of guided walks to enjoy over the summer. On 8 June you can follow the track of the the Walbrook, the river that made Londinium possible. In July you can sneak off from the line of the Tyburn to go shopping in Bond Street, or follow the gruesome Neckinger, the foul, lead-poisoned stream in which Bill Sykes got his just desserts in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. And I’m particularly looking forward to mid-August, when stretches of the Wandle will dazzle in the sun.

100 minutes of immersive terror

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I interviewed Carl Guyenette, the creative intelligence behind The War Of The Worlds: The Immersive Experience, for New Scientist, 23 May 2019.

It’s six years since the Martian invaders succumbed to a microbial infection, leaving us once again in possession of our planet. Carl Guyenette has repaired to The Spirit of Man to raise a glass to Earth’s victory, and to take stock of his new production, a 100 minute-long immersion in Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds.

The pub, which is part of the set and an integral part of the show, comes with its own meticulous backstory. On its walls, animated paintings record famous scenes from humanity’s first interstellar conflict. Remnants of Martian technology loom over the patrons. The effect is amusing for the first few minutes, but the aura of threat is unmistakable: pleasingly, the guts from one of the invaders’ war machines turn out to have been re-engineered to dispense gin.

Wayne’s musical retelling of H G Wells’s sci-fi shocker was released as a double album in 1978, and remains a hit, having sold over 2.5 million copies in the UK alone. There have been spin-offs a-plenty: video games, DVDs, stage shows, live tours. Nothing quite like this, though: “When I’ve been trying to explain this show to people,” says Guyenette, “I say it’s like walking into a cinema, except that once you’re there, you just keep on walking, into the screen. Into the movie itself.”

The full effect of Guyenette’s experiment in “layered reality” can only really be experienced at first hand. Nothing stays still, and neither does the audience, as it moves in groups of a dozen through over 2000 square metres of unlikely theatrical space – two floors of the old Metal Exchange in the City of London.

Visiting this venue mid-development, it had looked like somebody’s open-plan office: bad fluorescent lighting, grey carpet tiles; bins full of sandwich-shop litter; plastic water bottles in cardboard trays; laptops everywhere. Now, as the cast and crew set about unkinking the show’s phenomenally complicated logistics, the space is coming alive, fully dressed in both real and virtual light. Everything trembles. Everything moves, especially the air. Everything has a temperature. Everything has a smell.

Some of the experiences on offer in this show use VR headsets. Others use projection mapping. Some involve puppetry. Almost all manage to work in one of eight different holographic effects. Reality intrudes on the virtual world in unsettling and shocking ways. Things grab you – things you had thought were only in the headset. In VR, meanwhile, figures that seem to be fellow theatre-goers are plucked into the sky by Martian harvesting machines, their eyes meeting those of the participants (thanks to a neat eye-tracking algorithm) as they rise and perish.

Carl Guyenette talks about how he created the show.

New Scientist: What do they call you here?

Carl Guyenette: My job description’s a nuisance. When I called myself the CTO, the technologists on the show insisted I was actually the creative director. Then the creative people told me I’m a technologist. What I actually do is bring things together and makes new things out of them. So I suppose I’m an inventor.

NS: How did you come to work in theatre?

CG: I studied computer science, then joined the film visual effects industry, compositing for big Hollywood films. From there I moved on to making creative technological applications for the British Museum and other venues and festivals. I worked on Viens!, a virtual-reality piece by Michel Reilhac, which then went to Sundance and Cannes. This shot me into the centre of things. And now with the production company dotdotdot I’m trying to bring new media technologies and general audiences together through immersive theatrical experiences like this one. Not that we’ve worked at quite this scale before.

NS: Which of these new media are making the biggest impact on live performance at the moment? 

CG: Projection mapping is really interesting. There are systems now that will project images and textures over objects even as you move them. This is edging us towards VR experiences that won’t require us to wear headsets. And there are domes which you can projection-map from the inside which give you immersive video experiences. There’s a massive one that is going up in Madison Square Garden in 2020 which has a capacity of around 20,000 people: that’s going to be fun!

NS: How did you select the technologies for War of the Worlds?

Stability was essential. Because we’re splitting the audience up into groups of a dozen, and leading them from set to set, and from experience to experience, we’re effectively putting on 70 shows a day. The bottom line is, you want to be using kit that doesn’t break or fall over, so we’re using the HTC Vive Pro. We try out more exotic machinery in our prototyping and experimental work — everything from Hololens to Magic Leap, which I’d dearly like to use in a theatrical setting. But augmented reality systems are still a generation behind VR in terms of stability.

NS: Even with a workhorse VR platform, you’ve been able to mix the real and the virtual in clever ways. Was achieving that mix always an important aspect of the production?

CG: More important for us was to make sure that the technologies worked well with the storytelling. At one point we place our audience in a small boat and set them afloat on a computer-generated sea. The graphics are just one element to the experience. The mechanisms that move the boat, the breeze, the drop in temperature: these elements are just as important. And timing’s the most vital element of all, not just to provide seamless experiences, but also to give the audience breathing space between experiences.

NS: A lot of the technology you’re using is old…

CG: I wanted this show to be an homage to old media: Pepper’s Ghost illusions, and zoopraxiscopes, pyrotechnics and animatronics. It’s a show set over a hundred years ago, after all, at the birth of photography and cinema. In The War of the Worlds, all these technologies feel new.

NS: VR was said to be a medium that would isolate us from each other but you’ve used it to create a social experience. Is this the future of VR?

CG: I think there’s still money to be made from the home VR market. But building something big, in a spacious venue, layering technologies together so you can let audiences do things they couldn’t do anywhere else, means that you can also add a social dimension to the experience. There are not many places where you can be with 12 people in the same room in VR, firing cannon at Martian invaders, fighting off tentacles, befriending and losing people as you struggle through a besieged city.

“A wonderful moral substitute for war”

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Reading Oliver Morton’s The Moon and Robert Stone and Alan Adres’s Chasing the Moon for The Telegraph, 18 May 2019

I have Arthur to thank for my earliest memory: being woken and carried into the living room on 20 July 1969 to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

Arthur is a satellite dish, part of the Goonhilly Earth Satellite Station in Cornwall. It carried the first ever transatlantic TV pictures from the USA to Europe. And now, in a fit of nostalgia, I am trying to build a cardboard model of the thing. The anniversary kit I bought comes with a credit-card sized Raspberry Pi computer that will cause a little red light to blink at the centre of the dish, every time the International Space Station flies overhead.

The geosychronous-satellite network that Arthur Clarke envisioned in 1945 came into being at the same time as men landed on the Moon. Intelsat III F-3 was moved into position over the Indian Ocean a few days before Apollo 11’s launch, completing the the world’s first geostationary-satellite network. The Space Race has bequeathed us a world steeped in fractured televisual reflections of itself.

Of Apollo itself, though, what actually remains? The Columbia capsule is touring the United States: it’s at Seattle’s Museum of Flight for this year’s fiftieth anniversary. And Apollo’s Mission Control Center in Houston is getting a makeover, its flight control consoles refurbished, its trash cans, book cases, ashtrays and orange polyester seat cushions all restored.

On the Moon there are some flags; some experiments, mostly expired; an abandoned car.

In space, where it matters, there’s nothing. The intention had been to build moon-going craft in orbit. This would have involved building a space station first. In the end, spooked by a spate of Soviet launches, NASA decided to cut to the chase, sending two small spacecraft up on a single rocket. One got three astronauts to the moon. The other, a tiny landing bug (standing room only) dropped two of them onto the lunar surface and puffed them back up into lunar orbit, where they rejoined the command module and headed home. It was an audacious, dangerous and triumphant mission — but it left nothing useful or reuseable behind.

In The Moon: A history for the future, science writer Oliver Morton observes that without that peculiar lunar orbital rendezvous plan, Apollo would at least have left some lasting infrastructure in orbit to pique someone’s ambition. As it was, “Every Apollo mission would be a single shot. Once they were over, it would be in terms of hardware — even, to a degree, in terms of expertise — as if they had never happened.”

Morton and I belong to the generation sometimes dubbed Apollo’s orphans. We grew up (rightly) dazzled by Apollo’s achievement. It left us, however, with the unshakable (and wrong) belief that our enthusiasm was common, something to do with what we were taught to call humanity’s “outward urge”. The refrain was constant: how in people there was this inborn desire to leave their familiar surroundings and explore strange new worlds.

Nonsense. Over a century elapsed between Columbus’s initial voyage and the first permanent English settlements. One of the more surprising findings of recent researches into the human genome is that, left to their own devices, people hardly move more than a few weeks’ walking distance from where they were born.

This urge, that felt so visceral, so essential to one’s idea of oneself: how could it possibly turn out to be the psychic artefact of a passing political moment?

Documentary makers Robert Stone and Alan Andres answer that particular question in Chasing the Moon, a tie in to their forthcoming series on PBS. It’s a comprehensive account of the Apollo project, and sends down deep roots: to the cosmist speculations of fin de siecle Russia, the individualist eccentricities of Germanys’ Verein fur Raumschiffart (Space Travel Society), and the deceptively chummy brilliance of the British Interplanetary Society, who used to meet in the pub.

The strength of Chasing the Moon lies not in any startling new information it divulges (that boat sailed long ago) but in the connections it makes, and the perspectives it brings to bear. It is surprising to find the New York Times declaring, shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that Kennedy isn’t nearly as interested in building a space programme as he should be. (“So far, apparently, no one has been able to persuade President Kennedy of the tremendous political, psychological, and prestige importance, entirely apart from the scientific and military results, of an impressive space achievement.”) And it is worthwhile to be reminded that, less than a month after his big announcement, Kennedy was trying to persuade Khrushchev to collaborate on the Apollo project, and that he approached the Soviets with the idea a second time, just days before his assassination in Dallas.

For Kennedy, Apollo was a strategic project, “a wonderful moral substitute for war ” (to slightly misapply Ray Bradbury’s phrase), and all to do with manned missions. NASA administrator James Webb, on the other hand, was a true believer. He could see no end to the good big organised government projects could achieve by way of education and science and civil development. In his modesty and dedication, Webb resembled no-one so much as the first tranche of bureaucrat-scientists in the Soviet Union. He never featured on a single magazine cover, and during his entire tenure he attended only one piloted launch from Cape Kennedy. (“I had a job to do in Washington,” he explained.)

The two men worked well enough together, their priorities dovetailing neatly in the role NASA took in promoting the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the government’s equal opportunities program. (NASA’s Saturn V designer, the former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, became an unlikely and very active campaigner, the New York Times naming him “one of the most outspoken spokesmen for racial moderation in the South.”) But progress was achingly slow.

At its height, the Apollo programme employed around two per cent of the US workforce and swallowed four per cent of its GDP. It was never going to be agile enough, or quotidian enough, to achieve much in the area of effecting political change. There were genuine attempts to recruit and train a black pilot for the astronaut programme. But comedian Dick Gregory had the measure of this effort: “A lot of people was happy that they had the first Negro astronaut, Well, I’ll be honest with you, not myself. I was kind of hoping we’d get a Negro airline pilot first.”

The big social change the Apollo program did usher in was television. (Did you know that failing to broadcast the colour transmissions from Apollo 11 proved so embarrassing to the apartheid government in South Africa that they afterwards created a national television service?)

But the moon has always been a darling of the film business. Never mind George Melie’s Trip to the Moon. How about Fritz Lang ordering a real rocket launch for the premiere of Frau im Mond? This was the film that followed Metropolis, and Lang roped in no less a physicist than Hermann Oberth to build it for him. When his 1.8-metre tall liquid-propellant rocket came to nought, Oberth set about building one eleven metres tall powered by liquid oxygen. They were going to launch it from the roof of the cinema. Luckily they ran out of money.

The Verein für Raumschiffahrt was founded by men who had acted as scientific consultants on Frau im Mond. Von Braun became one of their number, before he was whisked away by the Nazis to build rockets for the war effort. Without Braun, the VfR grew nuttier by the year. Oberth, who worked for a time in the US after the war, went the same way, his whole conversation swallowed by UFOs and extraterrestrials and glimpses of Atlantis. When he went back to Germany, no-one was very sorry to see him go.

What is it about dreaming of new worlds that encourages the loner in us, the mooncalf, the cave-dweller, wedded to ascetism, always shying from the light?

After the first Moon landing, the philosopher (and sometime Nazi supporter) Martin Heidegger said in interview, “I at any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the earth… The uprooting of man has already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which man lives.”

Heidegger’s worries need a little unpacking, and for that we turn to Morton’s cool, melancholy The Moon: A History for the Future. Where Stone and Anders collate and interpret, Morton contemplates and introspects. Stone and Anders are no stylists. Morton’s flights of informed fancy include a geological formation story for the moon that Von Trier’s film Melancholy cannot rival for spectacle and sentiment.

Stone and Anders stand with Walter Cronkite whose puzzled response to young people’s opposition to Apollo — “How can anybody turn off from a world like this?” — stands as an epitaph for Apollo’s orphans everywhere. Morton, by contrast, does understand why it’s proved so easy for us to switch off from the Moon. At any rate he has some good ideas.

Gertrude Stein, never a fan of Oakland, once wrote of the place, “There is no there there.” If Morton’s right she should have tried the Moon, a place whose details “mostly make no sense.”

“The landscape,” Morton explains, “may have features that move one into another, slopes that become plains, ridges that roll back, but they do not have stories in the way a river’s valley does. It is, after all, just the work of impacts. The Moon’s timescape has no flow; just punctuation.”

The Moon is Heidegger’s nightmare realised. It can never be a world of experience. It can only be a physical environment to be coped with technologically. It’s dumb, without a story of its own to tell, so much “in need of something but incapable of anything”, in Morton’s telling phrase, that you can’t even really say that it’s dead.

So why did we go there, when we already knew that it was, in the words of US columnist Milton Mayer, a “pulverised rubble… like Dresden in May or Hiroshima in August”?

Apollo was the US’s biggest, brashest entry in its heart-stoppingly exciting – and terrifying – political and technological competition with the Soviet Union. This is the matter of Stone and Anders’s Chasing the Moon, as a full a history as one could wish for, clear-headed about the era and respectful of the extraordinary efforts and qualities of the people involved.

But while Morton is no less moved by Apollo’s human adventure, we turn to his book for a cooler and more distant view. Through Morton’s eyes we begin to see, not only what the moon actually looks like (meaningless, flat, gentle, a South Downs gone horribly wrong) but why it conjures so much disbelief in those who haven’t been there.

A year after the first landing the novelist Norman Mailer joked: “In another couple of years there will be people arguing in bars about whether anyone even went to the Moon.” He was right. Claims that the moon landing were fake arose the moment the Saturn Vs stopped flying in 1972, and no wonder. In a deep and tragic sense Apollo was fake, in the sense that it didn’t deliver the world it had promised.

And let’s be clear here: the world it promised would have been wonderful. Never mind the technology: that was never the core point. What really mattered was that at the height of the Vietnam war, we seemed at last to have found that wonderful moral substitute for war. “All of the universe doesn’t care if we exist or not,” Ray Bradbury wrote, “but we care if we exist… This is the proper war to fight.”

Why has space exploration not united the world around itself? It’s easy to blame ourselves and our lack of vision. “It’s unfortunate,” Lyndon Johnson once remarked to the astronaut Wally Schirra, “but the way the American people are, now that they have developed all of this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it all away…” This is the mordant lesson of Stone and Andres’s otherwise uplifting Chasing the Moon.

Oliver Morton’s The Moon suggests a darker possibility: that the fault lies with the Moon itself, and, by implication, with everything that lies beyond our little home.

Morton’s Moon is a place defined by absences, gaps, and silence. He makes a poetry of it, for a while, he toys with thoughts of future settlement, he explores the commercial possibilities. In the end, though, what can this uneventful satellite of ours ever possibly be, but what it is: “just dry rocks jumbled”?

 

 

Venice in interesting times

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Visiting May You Live In Interesting Times, the 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, for New Scientist, 16 May 2019

BETWEEN now and 24 November, half a million people will visit May You Live in Interesting Times, the main art exhibition of the Venice Biennale. More than 120 years old, the Biennale is the world’s biggest and most venerable art fair. This year’s offering overflows its historical venue in the gardens on Venice’s eastern edge and sprawls across the city.

In a 300-metre-long former rope-making factory in Venice’s Arsenale, a complex of former shipyards and armouries, it is hard to miss data-verse 1 by Japanese DJ and data artist Ryoji Ikeda: the first instalment of a year-long project to realise an entire universe on a gigantic, wall-sized high-definition screen.

Back in Paris, in a studio that consists of hardly more than a few tables and laptops, Ikeda and his programmers have been peeling open huge data sets, using software they have written themselves. From the flood of numbers issuing from CERN, NASA, the Human Genome Project and other open sources, they have fashioned highly detailed abstract animations.

Ikeda is self-taught. He came to visual art from making animations to accompany DJ sets in the squats, clubs and underground parties of Kyoto, Japan. While his own musical taste was eclectic in the extreme, “from classical to voodoo”, Ikeda was drawn to house and dub: forms in which he says “the sound system is the real subject, not the music being played”.

His own “music” reduces sound to sine waves and impulses – and the animations to accompany his sets are equally minimal. “If the sine wave is the simplest expression of sound, what’s the simplest expression of light? For the scientist, that’s a complicated question, but for the artist, the answer is simple: it’s the pixel,” he says.

Ikeda’s project to reduce the world to its essentials continues: “I wondered what would happen if matter were reduced the same way.” Now Ikeda has turned himself into one of art’s curious beasts, the pure “data artist”.

Each of data-verse 1‘s 15-minute-long abstract “dances” explores the universe at a different scale, from the way proteins fold to the pattern of ripples in the cosmic background radiation. However, Ikeda’s aim is not to illustrate or visualise the universe, but to convey the sheer quantity of data we are now gathering in our effort to understand the world.

In the Arsenale, there are glimpses of this new nature. The Milky Way, reduced to wheeling labels. The human body, taken apart and presented as a sequence of what look like archaeological finds. A brain, colour-coded, turned over and over, as if for the inspection of a hyperactive child. A furious blizzard of solar images. And other less-easily identified sequences, where the information has peeled away entirely from the thing it represents, and takes on a life of its own: red pixels move upstream through flowing numbers like so many salmon.

Ikeda differs from his fellow data artists. While a generation has embraced and made art from “big data” – the kind of dynamic information flow that derives from recording a constantly changing world – Ikeda remains wedded to an earlier, more philosophical definition of data as the record of observed facts. Chaos and complexity for their own sake do not interest him. “I never use dynamic data in my work,” he says.

He did try, once. In 2014, he won a residency at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland. But he found the data overwhelming. “They have supercomputers and one experiment takes two years to analyse and compute,” he says, “and still it’s not really enough. They proposed I use this dynamic data, but how could one single artist handle this? We talk of ‘big data’ but no one imagines really how big it is.”

So Ikeda’s data-verse 1 project, which will take a year and two more productions to reach fruition, is founded on that most old-fashioned of ideas, a record of objective truth. It is neither easy nor cheap to realise, and is being supported by watch-makers Audemars Piguet, an increasingly powerful patron of artists who operate on the boundaries between art and science.

Last year, the firm helped Brighton-based art duo Semiconductor realise their CERN-inspired kinetic sculpture HALO. Before that, it invited lidar artist Quayola to map the Swiss valley where it has its factory.

While Audemars Piguet has an interest in art that pushes technological boundaries, Ikeda fights shy of talk of technology, or even physics. He is interested in the truth bound up in numbers themselves. In an interview with Japanese art critic Akira Asada in 2009, he remarked: “I cannot help but wonder if there are any artists today that give real consideration to beauty. To me, it is mathematicians, not artists, who epitomise that kind of individual. There is such a freeness to their thinking that it is almost embarrassing to me.”

Other highlights at the Arsenale include Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Endodrome, (above) a purely virtual work, accessed through a HTC Vive Pro headset. The artist envisioned it “as a kind of organic and mental space, a slightly altered state of consciousness”. Manifesting at first as a sort of hyper-intuitive painting app, in which you use your own outpoured breath as a brush, Endodrome’s imagery becomes ever more precise and surreal. In a show that bristles with anxiety, Gonzalez-Foerster offers the festival-goer an oasis of creative contemplation.

Also at the Arsenale, and fresh from her show Power Plants at London’s Serpentine Gallery, the German artist Hito Steyerl presents This Is the Future, (above) a lush, AI-generated garden of the future, all the more tantalising for the fact that you’ll probably die there. Indeed, this being the future, you’re sure to die there. Steyerl mixes up time and risk, hope and fear, in a wonderfully sly send-up of professional future-gazing.

The Giardini, along the city’s eastern edge, are the traditional site of La Biennale Art Exhibitions since they began in 1895. They’re where you’ll find the national pavilions. Hungary possesses one of the 29 permanent structures here, and this year it’s full of imaginary cameras. They’re the work of cartoonist-turned media artist Tamás Waliczky. Some of his Imaginary Cameras and Other Optical Devices (above) are based on real cameras, others on long-forgotten 19th-century machines; still others are entirely fictional (not to mention impossible). Can you tell the difference? In any event, this understated show does a fine job of reminding us that we see the world in many, highly selective ways.

There’s quite as much activity outside the official venues of the Biennale as within them. At the Ca’ Rezzonico palazzo until 6 July, you have a chance to save an internationally celebrated artist from drowning (or not- it’s really up to you). A meticulously rendered volumetric avatar of Marina Abramović beckons from within a glass tank that is slowly filling with water, in a bid to draw attention to rising sea levels in a city which is famously sinking. Don’t knock Rising (above) till you’ve tried it: this ludicrous-sounding jape proved oddly moving.

Back at the Arsenale, Ed Atkins reprises his installation Olde Food, (above) which had its UK outing at London’s Cabinet gallery last year. Atkins has spent much of his career exploring what roboticist Masahiro Mori’s famously dubbed the “uncanny valley” — the gap that is supposed to separate real people from their human-like creations. Mori’s assumption was that the closer our inventions came to resembling us, the creepier they would become.

Using commercially purchased avatars which he animates using facial recognition software, Atkins has created his share of creepy art zombies. In Olde Food, though, he introduces a new element: an almost unbearably intense compassion.

Atkins has created a world populated by uncanny digital avatars who (when they’re not falling from the sky into sandwiches — you’ll have to trust me when I say this does make a sort of sense) quite clearly yearn for the impress of genuine humanity. These near-people pray. They play piano (or try to). They weep. They’re ugly. They’re uncoordinated. They’re quite hopeless, really. I do wish I could have done something for them.

In the realm of mind games

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By the end of the show, I was left less impressed by artificial intelligence and more depressed that it had reduced my human worth to base matter. Had it, though? Or had it simply made me aware of how much I wanted to be base matter, shaped into being by something greater than myself? I was reminded of something that Benjamin Bratton, author of the cyber-bible The Stack, said in a recent lecture: “We seem only to be able to approach AI theologically.”

Visiting AI: More Than Human at London’s Barbican Centre for the Financial Times, 15 May 2019.

Planck comes to Marvel’s rescue

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Watching Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Endgame for New Scientist, 15 May 2019

AFTER a spectacular false start, the heroes of Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: End Game gather around a cobbled-together time machine. They’re out to stop Thanos, a supervillian whose solution to the universe’s resource depletion problem is to annihilate half of all life.

Stopping Thanos will not be easy, since the film — the capstone on 21 other interconnected movies in the Marvel cinematic universe — opens with Thanos having already achieved his goal. Many of our favourite characters are already dead. Given that vases do not unbreak themselves, how then will the surviving Avengers bring half the world back to life?

Revisiting and resetting past narratives is a necessity for long-running drama franchises. And as the deceased Bobby Ewing discovered when he stepped out of his shower in 1986, erasing two whole seasons of Dynasty’s soapy story arc, it can be a hard pill for viewers to swallow.

You’d think science fiction franchises would have an easier time of it, armed as they are with all manner of P T Barnum tricks, but the truth’s more complicated. The world of the X-Men draws to a close this year with two films, Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants. The franchise’s constant, piecemeal reinventions have been sloppy, but only so as to stay half-way faithful to their even more sloppy comic-book sources. On the plus side, we’ve had the passage of time, and the price paid for wisdom, brought to life by the unaging, unkillable, and ever more excruciatingly lonely figure of Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman.

From the always mindbending Doctor Who to the unforgettably weird final seasons of the Battlestar Galactica retread, it’s clear that you can tell truths about time, age, mortality, loss and regret in playful ways without ever opening a science textbook, and I wish to heaven someone had pointed this out to Star Trek, notorious for being the franchise where overblown popular science goes to die.

Since The Next Generation, Star Trek has saddled itself with a science bible that almost makes sense. And why not? Einstein’s equations do allow for the existence of time machines. And physicist Kip Thorne’s work in the 1980s on time-space wormholes does allow for the transmission of information through time. But hang on a minute: time machines aren’t practical, and the kind of messages you can actually send from the future aren’t ever going to be interesting, and the more you cite real science, the more you leave yourself open to people who begin sentences with phrases like “Yes but…” and “I think you’ll find…”

Avengers: Endgame’s hokey solution to time travel works far better, I reckon, by colliding two chunks of utter nonsense at high narrative speed. Take one master thief, Scott Lang (played by the always affable Paul Rudd), give him a suit that lets him shrink small enough to enter “the quantum realm”, point out (correctly) that at this scale time and space cease to mean very much, and hey presto, you have yourself a time machine powered entirely by jazz-hands and flim-flam. Smart-alec viewers can’t contradict the science, because there is no science here, and hasn’t been since 1899.

This was the year German theoretical physicist Max Planck evolved a model of the physical universe that relied upon ratios (which are timeless and universally true) rather than measurements (which depend upon who’s making the ruler). In the universe Planck drew up, the speed of light, the electromagnetic wave function, and the gravitational constant all have a value of 1. From this fiendish piece of dimensional analysis, you can work the shortest distance imaginable — the point at which the terms “here” or “there” cease to have meaning.

In a space smaller than the Planck length squared, information cannot exist — which is why a single photon entering a black hole, increases the area of the event horizon by 10-66 cm2. As Ant Man, understandably, did not say.

Asking for it

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Reading The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau (Polity Press) for the Times Literary Supplement, 30 April 2019 

Imagine Steffen Mau, a macrosociologist (he plays with numbers) at Humboldt University of Berlin, writing a book about information technology’s invasion of the social space. The very tools he uses are constantly interrupting him. His bibliographic software wants him to assign a star rating to every PDF he downloads. A paper-sharing site exhorts him repeatedly to improve his citation score (rather than his knowledge). In a manner that would be funny, were his underlying point not so serious, Mau records how his tools keep getting in the way of his job.

Why does Mau use these tools at all? Is he too good for a typewriter? Of course he is: the whole history of civilisation is the story of us getting as much information as possible out of our heads and onto other media. It’s why, nigh-on 5000 years ago, the Sumerians dreamt up the abacus. Thinking is expensive. How much easier to stop thinking, and rely on data records instead!

The Metric Society, is not a story of errors made, or of wrong paths taken. This is a story, superbly reduced to the chill essentials of an executive summary, of how human society is getting exactly what it’s always been asking for. The last couple of years have seen more than 100 US cities pledge to use evidence and data to improve their decision-making. In the UK, “What Works Centres”, first conceived in the 1990s, are now responsible for billions in funding. The acronyms grow more bellicose, the more obscure they become. In the UK, the Alliance for Useful Evidence (with funding from ESRC, Big Lottery and Nesta) champions the use of evidence in social policy and practice.

Mau describes the emergence of a society trapped in “data-driven perpetual stock-taking”, in which the new Juggernaut of auditability lays waste to creativity, production, and even simple efficiency. “The magic attraction of numbers and comparisons is simply irresistible,” Mau writes.

It’s understandable. Our first great system of digital abstraction, money, enabled a more efficient and less locally bound exchange of good and services, and introduced a certain level of rational competition into the world of work.

But look where money has led us! Capital is not the point here. Neither is capitalism. The point is our relationship with information. Amazon’s algorithms are sucking all the localism out of the retail system, to the point where whole high streets have vanished — and entire communities with them. Amazon is in part powered by the fatuous metricisation of social variety through systems of scores, rankings, likes, stars and grades, which are (not coincidentally) the methods by which social media structures — from clownish Twitter to China’s Orwellian Social Credit System — turn qualitative differences into quantitative inequalities.

Mau leaves us thoroughly in the lurch. He’s a diagnostician, not a snake-oil salesman, and his bedside manner is distinctly chilly. Dazzled by data, which have relieved us of the need to dream and imagine, we fight for space on the foothills of known territory. The peaks our imaginations might have trod — as a society, and as a species — tower above us, ignored.

“The English expedition of 1919 is to blame for this whole misery”

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Four books to celebrate the centenary of  Eddington’s 1919 eclipse observations. For The Spectator, 11 May 2019.

Einstein’s War: How relativity triumphed amid the vicious nationalism of World War I
Matthew Stanley
Dutton

Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s eclipse to images of black holes
Ron Cowen
Harvard University Press

No Shadow of a Doubt
Daniel Kennefick
Princeton University Press

Einstein’s Wife: The real story of Mileva Einstein-Maric
Allen Esterson and David C Cassidy; contribution by Ruth Lewin Sime.
MIT Press

On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s Burlington House, the stars went all askew in the heavens.
That, anyway, was the rhetorical flourish with which the New York Times hailed the announcement of the results of a pair of astronomical expeditions conducted in 1919, after the Armistice but before the official end of the Great War. One expedition, led by Arthur Stanley Eddington, assistant to the Astronomer Royal, had repaired to the plantation island of Principe off the coast of West Africa; the other, led by Andrew Crommelin, who worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, headed to a racecourse in Brazil. Together, in the few minutes afforded by the 29 May solar eclipse, the teams used telescopes to photograph shifts in the apparent location of stars as the edge of the sun approached them.

The possibility that a heavy body like the sun might cause some distortion in the appearance of the star field was not particularly outlandish. Newton, who had assigned “corpuscles” of light some tiny mass, supposed that such a massive body might draw light in like a lens, though he imagined the effect was too slight to be observable.

The degree of distortion the Eddington expeditions hoped to observe was something else again. 1.75 arc-seconds is roughly the angle subtended by a coin, a couple of miles away: a fine observation, but not impossible at the time. Only the theory of the German-born physicist Albert Einstein — respected well enough at home but little known to the Anglophone world — would explain such a (relatively) large distortion, and Eddington’s confirmation of his hypothesis brought the “famous German physician” (as the New York Times would have it) instant celebrity.

“The English expedition of 1919 is ultimately to blame for this whole misery, by which the general masses seized possession of me,” Einstein once remarked; but he was not so very sorry for the attention. Forget the usual image of Einstein the loveable old eccentric. Picture instead a forty-year-old who, when he steps into a room, literally causes women to faint. People wanted his opinions even about stupid things. And for years, if anyone said anything wise, within a few months their words were being attributed to Einstein.

“Why is it that no one understands me and everyone likes me?” Einstein wondered. His appeal lay in his supposed incomprehensibility. Charlie Chaplin understood: “They cheer me because they all understand me,” he remarked, accompanying the theoretical physicist to a film premiere, “and they cheer you because no one understands you.”

Several books serve to mark the centenary of the 1919 eclipse observations. Though their aims diverge, they all to some degree capture the likeness of Einstein the man, messy personal life and all, while rendering his physics a little bit more comprehensible to the rest of us. Each successfully negotiates the single besetting difficulty facing books of this sort, namely the way science lends itself to bad history.

Science uses its past as an object lesson, clearing all the human messiness away to leave the ideas standing. History, on the other hand factors in as much human messiness as possible to show how the business of science is as contingent and dramatic as any other human activity.

While dealing with human matters, some ambiguity over causes and effects is welcome. There are two sides to every story, and so on and so forth: any less nuanced approach seems suspiciously moralistic. One need only look at the way various commentators have interpreted Einstein’s relationship with his first wife.

Einstein was, by the end of their failing marriage, notoriously horrible to Mileva Einstein-Maric; this in spite of their great personal and intellectual closeness as first-year physics students at the Federal Swiss Polytechnic. Einstein once reassured Elsa Lowenthal, his cousin and second-wife-to-be, that “I treat my wife as an employee I can not fire.” (Why Elsa, reading that, didn’t run a mile, is not recorded.)

Albert was a bad husband. His wife was a mathematician. Therefore Albert stole his theory of special relativity from Mileva. This shibboleth, bandied about since the 1970s, is a sort of of evil twin of whig history, distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness. It does no one any favours. The three separately authored parts of Einstein’s Wife: The real story of Mileva Einstein-Maric unpick the myth of Mileva’s influence over Albert, while increasing, rather than diminishing, our interest in and admiration of the woman herself. It’s a hard job to do well, without preciousness or special pleading, especially in today’s resentment-ridden and over-sensitive political climate, and the book is an impressive, compassionate accomplishment.
Matthew Stanley’s Einstein’s War, on the other hand, tips ever so slightly in the other direction, towards the simplistic and the didactic. His intentions, however, are benign — he is here to praise Einstein and Eddington and their fellows, not bury them — and his slightly on-the-nose style is ultimately mandated by the sheer scale of what he is trying to do, for he succeeds in wrapping the global, national and scientific politics of an era up in a compelling story of one man’s wild theory, lucidly sketched, and its experimental confirmation in the unlikeliest and most exotic circumstances.

The world science studies is truly a blooming, buzzing confusion. It is not in the least bit causal, in the ordinary human sense. Far from there being a paucity of good stories in science, there are a limitless number of perfectly valid, perfectly accurate, perfectly true stories, all describing the same phenomenon from different points of view.

Understanding the stories abroad in the physical sciences at the fin de siecle, seeing which ones Einstein adopted, why he adopted them, and why, in some cases, he swapped them for others, certainly doesn’t make his theorising easy. But it does give us a gut sense of why he was so baffled by the public’s response to his work. The moment we are able to put him in the context of co-workers, peers and friends, we see that Einstein was perfecting classical physics, not overthrowing it, and that his supposedly peculiar theory of relativity — as the man said himself –“harmonizes with every possible outlook of philosophy and does not interfere with being an idealist or materialist, pragmatist or whatever else one likes.”

In science, we need simplification. We welcome a didactic account. Choices must be made, and held to. Gravity’s Century by the science writer Ron Cowen is the most condensed of the books mentioned here; it frequently runs right up to the limit of how far complex ideas can be compressed without slipping into unavoidable falsehood. I reckon I spotted a couple of questionable interpretations. But these were so minor as to be hardly more than matters of taste, when set against Cowen’s overall achievement. This is as good a short introduction to Einstein’s thought as one could wish for. It even contrives to discuss confirmatory experiments and observations whose final results were only announced as I was writing this piece.

No Shadow of a Doubt is more ponderous, but for good reason: the author Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and historian of science, is out to defend the astronomer Eddington against criticisms more serious, more detailed, and framed more conscientiously, than any thrown at that cad Einstein.

Eddington was an English pacifist and internationalist who made no bones about wanting his eclipse observations to champion the theories of a German-born physicist, even as jingoism reached its crescendo on both sides of the Great War. Given the sheer bloody difficulty of the observations themselves, and considering the political inflection given them by the man orchestrating the work, are Eddington’s results to be trusted?

Kennefick is adamant that they are, modern naysayers to the contrary, and in conclusion to his always insightful biography, he says something interesting about the way historians, and especially historians of science, tend to underestimate the past. “Scientists regard continuous improvement in measurement as a hallmark of science that is unremarkable except where it is absent,” he observes. “If it is absent, it tells us nothing except that someone involved has behaved in a way that is unscientific or incompetent, or both.” But, Kennefick observes, such improvement is only possible with practice — and eclipses come round too infrequently for practice to make much difference. Contemporary attempts to recreate Eddington’s observations face the exact same challenges Eddington did, and “it seems, as one might expect, that the teams who took and handled the data knew best after all.”

It was Einstein’s peculiar fate that his reputation for intellectual and personal weirdness has concealed the architectural elegance of his work. Higher-order explanations of general relativity have become clichés of science fiction. The way massive bodies bend spacetime like a rubber sheet is an image that saturates elementary science classes, to the point of tedium.

Einstein hated those rubber-sheet metaphors for a different reason. “Since the mathematicians pounced on the relativity theory,” he complained, “I no longer understand it myself.” We play about with thoughts of bouncy sheets. Einstein had to understand their behaviours mathematically in four dimensions (three of space and one of time), crunching equations so radically non-linear, their results would change the value of the numbers originally put into them in feedback loops that drove the man out of his mind. “Never in my life have I tormented myself anything like this,” he moaned.

For the rest of us, however, A little, prophylactic exposure to Einstein’s actual work pays huge dividends. It sweeps some of the weirdness away and reveals Einstein’s actual achievement: theories that set all the forces above the atomic scale dancing with an elegance Isaac Newton, founding father of classical physics, would have half-recognised, and wholly admired.