Tag Archives: New Scientist

“Crude to the point of vulgarity, judgmental in the extreme, and bitterly punitive”

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Reading The Age of Guilt by Mark Edmundson for New Scientist, 5 July 2023

In his Freudian analysis of what we might loosely term “cancel culture”, Mark Edmundson wisely chooses not to get into facile debates about which of the pioneering psychoanalyst’s ideas have or have not been “proved right”. What would that even mean? Psychology is not so much science as it is engineering, applying ideas and evidence to a purpose. Edmundson, an author and literary scholar, simply wants to suggest that Freud’s ideas might help us better understand our current cultural moment.

In the centre of Freud’s model of the personality sits the ego, the conscious bit of ourselves, the bit that thinks, and therefore is. Bracketing the ego are two components of the personality that are inaccessible to conscious awareness: the id, and the super-ego. The id is the name Freud gives to all those drives that promote immediate individual well-being. Fancy a sandwich? A roll in the hay? A chance to clout your rival? That’s your id talking.

Much later, in an attempt to understand why so many of his clients gave themselves such a hard time (beating themselves up over trivia, calling themselves names, self-harming) Freud conceived the super-ego. This is the bit of us that warns us against misbehaviour, and promotes conformity to social norms. Anyone who’s spent time watching chimpanzees will understand why such machinery might evolve in an animal as ultra-social as Homo sapiens.

Casual descriptions of Freud’s personality model often characterise the super-ego as a sort of wise uncle, paternalistically ushering the cadet ego out of trouble.

But this, Edmundson says, is a big mistake. A power that, in each of us, watches, discovers and criticizes all our intentions, is not a power to be taken lightly.

Edmundson argues that key cultural institutions evolved not just to regulate our appetites; they also provide direction and structure for the super-ego. A priest might raise an eyebrow at your gluttony; but that same priest will relieve you of your self-hatred by offering you a simple atonement: performing it wipes your slate clean. Edmundson wonders what, in the absence of faith, can corral and direct the fulminations of our super-ego — which in this account is not so much a fount of idealism, and more a petulant, unrelenting and potentially life-threatening martinet, “crude to the point of vulgarity, judgmental in the extreme, and bitterly punitive.”

The result of unmet super-ego demands is sickness. “The super-ego punishes the ego and turns it into an anxious, frightened creature, a debilitatingly depressed creature, or both by turns,” Edmundson explains, and quotes a Pew Research study showing that, from 2007 to 2017, the percentage of 12-to-17 year olds who have experienced a major depressive episode in the past year rose from 8 percent to 13 percent. Are these severely depressed teenagers “in some measure victims of the wholesale cultural repudiation of Freud”?

Arguments from intuition need a fairly hefty health warning slapped on them, but I defy you not to find yourself nodding along to more than a few of Edmundson’s philippics: for instance, how the internet became our culture’s chief manifestation of the super-ego, its loudest users bearing all the signs of possession, “immune to irony, void of humour, unforgiving, prone to demand harsh punishments.”

Half a century ago, the anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote a book, The Denial of Death, that hypothesised all manner of connections between society, behaviour and consciousness. Its informed and closely argued speculations inspired a handful of young researchers to test his ideas, and thereby revolutionise the field of experimental psychology. (An excellent book from 2015, The Worm at the Core, tells their story.)

In a culture that’s growing so pathologically judgmental, condemnatory, and punitive, I wonder if The Age of Guilt can perform the same very valuable trick? I do hope so.

Don’t be fooled by that Grateful Dead concert

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Watching Wild Life by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi for New Scientist, 14 June 2023

Don’t be fooled by that Grateful Dead concert near the beginning. Wild Life is not about happy-go-lucky hippies who fell backwards into money.

It’s about three major outdoor apparel companies, and the minds that founded and controlled them. And it’s the story of how two of those minds, Doug and Kristine Tompkins, spent their middle years engineering the largest ever private land donation in history, all to save diverse and rapidly degrading ecosystems.

Kristine (then McDivitt) met rock-climber Yvon Chouinart in 1965 and went on to help him turn his blacksmithing business (turning out pitons and other climbing gear) into a world-leading outdoor brand, Patagonia. Chouinart conceived Patagonia as an “anti-corporation”, campaigning to preserve the environments its products let you explore.

by the early 1990s Chouinart, despairing of the garment industry’s environmental footprint, had started promoting advertising copy that all but urged customers not to buy his clothing.

That was the moment Kristine decided there had to be more to life. She quit her role as Patagonia’s first CEO. She wanted something “wild”. Something “outrageous”. And by marrying Doug Tompkins, she got it.

Doug and his wife Susie were long-time friends and rivals. They were the ones who got Grateful Dead to play at the opening of their first store, called North Face. Later, they founded Esprit. Now Doug was divorced and out of the business, living in Chile, haemorrhaging money on experiments in sustainable agriculture and trying to buy his way into the conversation game, one acre at a time.

He had set up home in Chile, was widely mistrusted, and didn’t seem to care. Once, when word went round that he had set a bounty on a man hired by salmon farmers to shoot sea lions, he had to hide out in the US embassy.

Chile was emerging from the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The last thing ithe country needed was to see its land bought up and (many suspected) parcelled off by an American tycoon. Chile is narrow — a strip of land between the Andes and the coast, just 90 km wide at its thinnest point. Doug’s plans for a public nature reserve not only looked unfamiliar; they also split the country in two.

Doug died in 2015 from hypothermia following a sea kayaking accident. His death, Kristine says, nearly finished her. Instead she dedicated herself to expanding on what he had started.

She has triumphed. For every acre Kristine has donated up to 2018, Chile’s federal government has set aside nine acres of unused land. 17 wildlife parks have been created, covering 14.7m acres. That’s more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined. About the size of Switzerland. And the work continues, in Chile and in neighbouring Venezuela.

Wild Life is billed as a love story. Kristine’s presence on camera, her passion, and her continuing grief, are visceral.

The directors are out to capture breathtaking shots of unfamiliar coastal and mountain ecosystems. They’re out to assemble an intimate portrait of a remarkable couple through interviews and archive. They are not in the business of asking difficult questions about the role of capital in conservation. But Kristine proves more than capable of asking a good number of those questions of herself. She’d be the first to tell you that the adventures of Tompkins Conservation over the last quarter-century have been anything but plain sailing.

Ultimately, Wild Life succeeds because it treats the Tompkins’s success as a laudable highlight of the conversation movement — not some sort of blanket solution to all the world’s problems.

We’re not going to save the world by buying it. But someone saved a corner, and filled it with giant anteaters, jaguars, red-and-green macaws, and giant river otters, and that is worth remembering, and should be, for all of us, both a provocation and a challenge.

An explosion in a radioactive cotton candy factory

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Reading Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait for New Scientist, 7 June 2023 

You may know him better as “the Bad Astronomer”, whose blog demolishes misconceptions and frauds about the cosmos. Now the tireless Phil Plait is taking us on a journey, to our satellite moon and beyond, past Mars and the Belt, past Saturn and Pluto, to other stars, to binaries and clusters, to nebulae and to the end of all things, as he sends us spiraling past the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. Throughout (and with a few tiny exceptions), he and we see only what poor, bare forked humanity is equipped by nature to see. This is the cosmos as we would feel, hear and see it. Some measure of security and comfort is provided by spaceships and starships of ever-increasing unlikelihood but, deep down, we’re on our own out here, and trembling at the magnificence of it all.

This artful premise gives Plait licence to discuss what our real future in the solar system might look like, while at the same time exploring some startling stellar exotica. (Finally, I understand the Orion Nebula!)

In the final chapters, on star clusters, nebulae and black holes, our suspension of disbelief starts to come unstuck. This is partly to do with the fact that there’s nothing for us to smell, hear, walk on or trip over. (By contrast, Plait’s evocations of our own solar system are superbly sensual.)

Sooner or later we will be overwhelmed by a universe a lot bigger than we are. Here Plait describes our likely response as we witness the birth of stars:

“Your mind tries to comprehend what you’re seeing, churning out analogies rapid-fire — it’s like an explosion in a radioactive cotton candy factory, like being suspended in a frozen fireworks display, like flying through a million auroras — but in the end you fail. Humans never evolved to comprehend magnificence on a scale like this.”

Some of the grandest wonders in his arsenal are simply invisible to the naked eye. Just now and again, then, the valiant captain of our imaginary starship tweaks the viewscreens, showing us things we wouldn’t have seen by just leaning out the window; and on those rare occasions we may reasonably begin to wonder: what on eartyh are we doing out here? Why did we come all this way, just to watch a video? Couldn’t the same veritée have been achieved, sitting in front of a 5K screen in our pyjamas?

You could argue that Plait should have stuck to his guns, and even in the chapter on black holes, described only what human beings would see with their own eyes. But this is a game we abandoned centuries ago. Our machines have better access to the world than we do, and this has been true at least since Dutch lens grinders invented the telescope.

Much more telling, I think: virtually every wonder in this book is to do with scale. Bigger, brighter, heavier things dominate this account. But where are the stranger things? Is there anything in this account as abidingly weird as — oh, I don’t know — a tree? A house cat? A plate of fish and chips?

Earth beats the rest of the known cosmos hands down for complexity and change. And, yes, there may well be other biomes out there — but Plait can’t just invent them out of whole cloth. That would be fantasy, and this is a book rooted, however speculatively, in the known.

Plait is an able, resourceful and, on occasion, downright visionary guide to the far reaches of outer space. If this book leaves a few readers feeling very slightly disappointed, it’s not Plait who fell short; it’s the cosmos.

For 300 exhilarating pages, short-lived, fragile and under-equipped reader have relied upon imaginary technology to get them places they don’t belong. It is no bad thing if a few of them close this exhilarating book with a renewed feeling of reverence for their own world.

“So off we go to the future”

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Watching Alastair Evans’s A Crack in the Mountain for New Scientist, 17 May 2023

“Everyone on a bicycle wants to be on a motorbike. Everyone on a motorbike wants to be in a car. And everyone in a car wants to be in a helicopter.” A wry smiles creeps across the face of local business owner David “multi” English: “So off we go to the future.”

Ten years ago Phong Nha in Quang Binh province was arguably the poorest region in Vietnam. English arrived during the 2010 floods and remembers the region’s air of despondency. People fished the rivers and grew a little rice. Hunger was commonplace.

But the arrival of British caving expedition the previous April already signalled a big change. They had arrived to explore a cave system known to local farmers since 1991 but very remote, and up until then, entirely ignored.

Following a 5 kilometre-long fault through limestone, they discovered chambers that could each quite happily contain an entire city block. In places the ceilings are 200 metres high. Here and there, where the roof has fallen in, there are sunken forests boasting unique species of tree fern and other plants.

With its two jungles, two rivers and a waterfall, Hang So Doong is not just the largest dry cave in the world; “it doesn’t feel like you’re on planet Earth any more.” So says Meredith Harvey, who visited the cave in 2017.

Now the local government wants to put a cable-car through the site, opening it up to 1000 tourists per hour. Conversations with UNESCO have won a reprieve to 2030, but no-one seriously believes the site will remain pristine forever. Jonathan Drake, who visited in 2019, puts it this way: “Just imagine if the Grand Canyon was just discovered this week and it didn’t belong to anyone… how would that go?”

Alastair Evans’s documentary tells a story we have heard before, many times. In 1968 biologist Garrett Hardin coined the expression “tragedy of the commons” to describe a situation in which individuals use a shared resource in their own self-interest, leading to its eventual depletion. Will this happen to So Doong?

Certainly. It’s impossible to imagine the rulers of an Asian Tiger economy simply writing off their most potentially lucrative natural wonder, just so that a handful of wealthy foreign tourists can continue to enjoy its untouched charm.

It is not unreasonable to want an adventure. It is not unreasonable to make the most of one’s birthplace. It is not that unreasonable, after a lifetime riding to work on a motorbike, to want your children to be able to afford a car. This is what makes the tragedy of the commons a actual tragedy.

Of course, it is still possible to watch A Crack in the Mountain simply for its beauty, and for this, some credit must go to the local expeditions company Oxalis Adventure, founded by businessman Chau A Nguyen to put considerable sums (enough to buy schools, anyway) back into the local economy. The production values on show here are extraordinarily high. The expeditions through the cave appear very well managed. One might wish that Nguyen and his kind could simply be left alone to tailor the region’s development according to the needs of local people.

But then, that’s to forget the ravages of Covid-19, that closed down 90 per cent of Phong Nha’s small businesses, not to mention a series of recent floods that brought what little activity that remained in the region to a standstill. Big government, big finance and big engineering can weather such storms — but their activities come at a price.

This is a film about a wicked problem, sure to despoil a wonderful location, if not today then tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. By then, if a way to square this impossible equation ever does present itself, it will surely have been inspired by films as intelligent and passionate as this one.

On not being a horrible person

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Reading The Human Mind by Paul Bloom for New Scientist, 11 May 2023

Inspired, he tells us, by The Origin of the Universe, John Barrow’s 1994 survey of what was then known about cosmology, the Canadian American psychologist Paul Bloom set about writing an introductory tome of his own: a brief yet comprehensive guide to the human mind.

Emulating Barrow’s superb survey has been hard because, as Bloom cheekily points out, “the mysteries of space and time turn out to be easier for our minds to grasp than those of consciousness and choice.”

The first thing to say — though hardly the most interesting — is that Bloom nevertheless succeeds, covering everything from perception and behaviour to language and development; there’s even a small but very worthwhile foray into abnormal psychology. It’s an account that is positive, but never self-serving. Problems in reproducing some key studies, the field’s sometimes scandalous manipulation of statistics, and the once prevailing assumption that undergrad volunteers could accurately represent the diversity of the entire human species, are serious problems, dealt with seriously.

Of course Bloom does more than simply set out the contents of the stall (with the odd rotten apple here and there); he also explores psychology’s evolving values. He recalls his early behaviourist training, in a climate hostile to (then rather woolly) questions about consciousness. “If we were asked to defend our dismissal of consciousness,” he recalls, “we would point out that intelligence does not require sentience.”

Intelligence is no longer the field’s only grail, and consciousness is now front and centre in the science of the mind. This is not only a technical advance; it’s an ethical one. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham asked whether the law could ever refuse its protection to “any sensitive being”, and pointed out that “The question is not, Can [certain beings] reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Suffering requires consciousness, says Bloom; understanding one enables us to tackle the other; so the shift in interest to consciousness itself is a welcome and humanising move.

This strong belief in the humanitarian potential of psychology allows Bloom to defend aspects of his discipline that often discomfort outside observers. He handles issues of environmental and genetic influences on the mind very well, and offers a welcome and robust defence of Alfred Binet’s 1905 invention, the measure of general intelligence or “intelligence quotient”. Bloom shows that the IQ test is as robust a metric as anything in social science. We know that a full half of us score less than 100 on that test; should this knowledge not fill us with humility and compassion? (Actually our responses tend to be more ambiguous. Bloom points out that Nazi commentators hated the idea of IQ because they thought Jews would score better than they would.)

Bloom is concerned to demonstrate that minds do more than think. The privileging of thinking over feeling and intuiting and suffering is a mistake. “A lot depends on what is meant by ‘rational.’ Bloom writes. If you’re stepping outside and it’s raining and you don’t want to get wet, it’s rational to bring an umbrella. But rationality defined in this manner is separate from goodness. “Kidnapping a rich person’s child might be a rational way to achieve the goal of getting a lot of money quickly,” Bloom observes, “so long as you don’t have other goals, such as obeying the law and not being a horrible person.”

Bloom’s ultimate purpose is to explain how a robustly materialistic view of the mind is fully compatible with the existence of choice and morality and responsibility. This middle-of-the-road approach may disappoint intellectual storm-chasers, but the rest of us can can be assured of an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the field, full of unknowns and uncertainties, yes, and speculations, and controversies — but guided by an ever-more rounded idea of what it is to be human.

The mind unlocked

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Reading The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany for New Scientist, 19 April 2023

Iranian-American ethicist and lawyer Nita Farahany is no stranger to neurological intervention. She has sought relief from her chronic migraines in “triptans, anti-seizure drugs, antidepressants, brain enhancers, and brain diminishers. I’ve had neurotoxins injected into my head, my temples, my neck, and my shoulders; undergone electrical stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, MRIs, EEGs, fMRIs, and more.”

Few know better than Farahany what neurotechnology can do for people’s betterment, and this lends weight to her sombre and troubling account of a field whose speed of expansion alone should give us pause.

Companies like Myontec, Athos, Delsys and Noraxon already offer electromyography-generated insights to athletes and sports therapists. Control Bionics sells NeuroNode, a wearable EMG device for patients with degenerative neurological disorders, enabling them to control a computer, tablet, or motorised device. Neurable promises “the mind unlocked” with its “smart headphones for smarter focus.” And that’s before we even turn to the fast-growing interest in implantable devices; Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech and Elon Musk’s Neuralink all have prototypes in advanced stages of development.

Set aside the legitimate medical applications for a moment; Farahany is concerned that neurotech applications that used to let us play video games, meditate, or improve our focus have opened the way to a future of brain transparency “in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will.”

Think it can’t be done? Think again. In 2017 A research team led by UC Berkeley computer scientist Dawn Song reported an experiment in which videogamers used a neural interface to control a video game. As they played, the researchers inserted subliminal images into the game and watched for unconscious recognition signals. This game of neurological Battleships netted them one player’s credit card PIN code — and their home address.

Now Massachusetts-based Brainwave Science is selling a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. At least, suspects are shown pictures related to crimes and cannot help but recognise whatever they happen to recognise. For example, a murder weapon. Emirati authorities have already successfully prosecuted two cases using this technology.

This so-called “brain fingerprinting” technique is as popular with governments (Bangladesh, India, Singapore, Australia) as it is derided by many scientists.

More worrying are the efforts of companies, in the post-Covid era, to use neurotech in their continuing effort to control the home-working environment. So-called “bossware” programmes already take regular screenshots of employees’ work, monitor their keystrokes and web usage, and photograph them at (or not at) their desks. San Francisco bioinformatics company Emotiv now offers to help manage your employees’ attention with its MN8 earbuds. These can indeed be used to listen to music or participate in conference calls — and also, with just two electrodes, one in each ear, they claim to be able to record employees’ emotional and cognitive functions in real time.

It’ll come as no surprise if neurotech becomes a requirement in modern workplaces: no earbuds, no job. This sort of thing has happened many times already.

“As soon as [factory] workers get used to the new system their pay is cut to the former level,” complained Vladimir Lenin in 1912. “The capitalist attains an enormous profit for the workers toil four times as hard as before and wear down their nerves and muscles four times as fast as before.”

Six years later, he approved funding for a Taylorist research institute. Say what you like about industrial capitalism, its logic is ungainsayable.

Farahany has no quick fixes to offer for this latest technological assault on the mind — “the one place of solace to which we could safely and privately retreat”. Her book left me wondering what to be more afraid of: the devices themselves, or the glee with which powerful institutions seize upon them.

Not our Battle of Britain

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Watching Andrew Legge’s film Lola for New Scientist, 12 April 2023

Two sisters, orphans, play among the leavings of their parents’ experiments in radio, and by 1938 the one who’s a genius, Thomasina (Emma Appleton), is listening to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on a ceiling-high television set that can tune in to the future.

The politics of the day being what it is, Thom’s sister Martha (Stefanie Martini) decides that this invention (named Lola after their dead mother) cannot remain their personal plaything — it belongs to the world. With the help of Sebastian, a sympathetic army officer (soon enough Martha falls in love with him) the sisters are soon collaborating with British intelligence to fox Nazi operations a day before they happen.

Drunk on success, Thom lets her ambition get the better of her, and starts sacrificing the civilians of tomorrow in order to draw out the Wehrmacht. When a horrified President Roosevelt catches wind of this, it spells the end of Churchill’s efforts to draw the US into the war against Hitler.

Good intentions, ambitious plans and unintended consequences usher the world into Hell in this often stunning piece of micro-budget science fiction. As high concept movie ideas go, Lola’s counterfactual 20th-century history is up there with Memento and Primer and Source Code.

Attentive readers will feel a “but” hovering here. For some reason the director and co-writer Andrew Legge took a day of rest after fleshing out this winning idea; he seems neither to have finished the script, nor given his actors much directorial guidance. Lola is more a short story narrated to a visual accompaniment than a fully fledged film. Thom and Mars are supposed to be nice 1930s gals transfigured by their access to glimpses of 1960s pop culture — but it’s impossible not to see them for what they are, personable young actors from the 2020s let loose to do their thing in front of the camera.

This makes Lola a good movie, rather than a great one — and it’s a shame. Some extra scriptwork and a spot of voice coaching would have added hardly anything to Lola’s admittedly tight budget. In 2009, Legge made The Chronoscope, a 20-minute foray into the same territory. Lola is more solemn than that short outing, but no more serious, as though Legge were intimidated, rather than inspired, by the possibilities offered by the feature format.

Elsewhere, the film’s resources are deployed with flair and ingenuity. The film is an historically and technologically impossible but highly convincing assembly of found footage and home movie. (Among Thom’s other incidental inventions is a hand-held camera that records sound.) Famous radio broadcasts of the period are repurposed to chilling effect. (Lola’s “Battle of Britain” is not our battle of Britain). The Zelig-like manipulations of newsreel footage are fairly crude in purely technical terms, but I defy you not to gasp at the sight of Nazi invaders waving their Swastika over a bombed-out London, or Adolf Hitler being driven in state down the Mall. And Neil Hannon (the maverick musical talent behind The Divine Comedy, not to mention Father Ted’s “My Lovely Horse” song) has a quite indecent amount of fun here, cooking up the beats of a counterfactual 1970s fascist Top 10.

These days the choice confronting British and Irish filmmakers is stark: do you want to make your movie as quickly as possible, on the lowest possible budget, get it seen, and generate interest? Or do you want to spend twenty years in development hell, working with overseas production companies who don’t know whether they can trust you, and — with many millions of dollars on the line — are likely to homogenise your project out of all recognition?

I wish Lola had impressed me less and involved me more. But in a business as precarious as this one, Legge’s choices make sense, and Lola is an effective and enjoyable industry calling card.

The sirens of overstatement

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Visiting David Blandy’s installation Atomic Light at John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, for New Scientist, 22 March 2023

The Edge of Forever, one of four short films by Brighton-based video and installation artist David Blandy, opens with an elegaic pan of Cuckmere Haven in Sussex. A less apocalyptic landscape it would be hard to imagine. Cuckmere is one of the most ravishing spots in the Home Counties. Still, the voiceover insists that we contemplate “a ravaged Earth” and “forgotten peoples” as we watch two children exploring their post-human future. The only sign of former human habitation is a deserted observatory (the former Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex). The children enter and study the leavings of dead technologies and abandoned ambitions, steeped all the while in refracted sunlight: Claire Barrett’s elegiac camerawork is superb.

The films in Blandy’s installation “Atomic Light” connect three different kinds of fire: the fire of the sun; the wildfires that break out naturally all over the earth, but which are gathering force and frequency as the Earth’s climate warms; and the atomic blast that consumed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

There’s a personal dimension to all this, beyond Blandy’s vaunted concern for the environment: his grandfather was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore during the second World War, and afterwards lived with the knowledge that, had upwards of 100,000 civilians not perished in Hiroshima blast, he almost certainly would not have survived.

Bringing this lot together is a job of work. In Empire of the Swamp
a man wanders through the mangrove swamps at the edge of Singapore, while Blandy reads out a short story by playwright Joel Tan. The enviro-political opinions of a postcolonial crocodile are as good a premise for a short story as any, I suppose, but the film isn’t particularly well integrated with the rest of the show.

Soil, Sinew and Bone, a visually arresting game of digital mirrors composed of rural footage from Screen Archive South East, equates modern agriculture and warfare. That there is an historical connection is undeniable: the chemist Franz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method of synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. That ammonia, a fertiliser, can be used in the manufacture of explosives, is an irony familiar to any GCSE student, though it’s by no means obvious why agriculture should be left morally tainted by it.

Alas, Blandy can’t resist the sirens of overstatement. We eat, he says “while others scratch for existence in the baked earth.” Never mind that since 1970, hunger in the developing world has more than halved, and that China saw its hunger level fall from a quarter of its vast population to less than a tenth by 2016 — all overwhelmingly thanks to Haber-Bosch.

Defenders of the artist’s right to be miserable in face of history will complain that I am taking “Atomic Light” far to literally — to which I would respond that I’m taking it seriously. Bad faith is bad faith whichever way you cut it. If in your voiceover you dub Walt Disney’s Mickey “this mouse of empire”, if you describe some poor soul’s carefully tended English garden as the “pursuit of an unnatural perfection wreathed in poisons”, if you use footage of a children’s tea party to hector your audience about wheat and sugar, and if you cut words and images together to suggest that some jobbing farmer out shooting rabbits was a landowner on the lookout for absconding workers, then you are simply piling straws on the camel’s back.

Thank goodness, then, for Sunspot, Blandy’s fourth, visually much simpler film, that juxtaposes the lives and observations of two real-life solar astronomers, Joseph Hiscox in Los Angeles and Yukiaki Tanaka in Tokyo, who each made drawings of the sun on the day the Hiroshima bomb dropped.

Here’s a salutary and saving reminder that, to make art, you’re best off letting the truth speak for itself.

A finite body in space

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Reading Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander and the Nature of Science for New Scientist, 8 March 2023

Astronomy was conducted at Chinese government institutions for more than 20 centuries, before Jesuit missionaries turned up and, somewhat bemused, pointed out that the Earth is round.

Why, after so much close observation and meticulous record-keeping did seventeenth-century Chinese astronomers still think the Earth was flat?

The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, writing in 2007 (this is an able and lively translation of his first book) can be certain of one thing: “that the observation of celestial phenomena over many centuries, with the full support of political authorities, is not sufficient to lead to clear advances in understanding the structure of the world.”

So what gave Europe its preternaturally clear-eyed idea of how physical reality works? Rovelli’s ties his several answers — covering history, philosophy, politics and religion — to the life and thought and work of Anaximander, who was born 26 centuries ago in the cosmopolitan city (population 100,000) of Miletus, on the coast of present-day Turkey.

We learn about Anaximander, born 610 BCE, mostly through Aristotle. The only treatise of his we know about is now lost, aside from a tantalising fragment that reveals Anaximander’s notion that there exist natural laws that organise phenomena through time. He also figured out where wind and rain came from, and deduced, from observation, that all animals originally came from the sea, and must have arisen from fish or fish-like creatures.

Rovelli is not interested in startling examples of apparent prescience. Even a stopped watch is correct twice a day. He is positively enchanted, though, by the quality of Anaximander’s thought.

Consider the philosopher’s most famous observation — that the Earth is a finite body of rock floating freely in space.

Anaximander grasps that there is a void beneath the Earth through which heavenly bodies (the sun, to take an obvious example) must travel when they roll out of sight. This is really saying not much more than that, when a man walks behind a house, he’ll eventually reappear on the other side.

What makes this “obvious” observation so radical is that, applied to heavenly bodies, it contradicts our everyday experience.

In everyday life, objects fall in one direction. The idea that space does not have a privileged direction in which objects fall runs against common sense.

So Anaximander arrives at a concept of gravity: he calls it “domination”. Earth hangs in space without falling because does not have any particular direction in which to fall, and that is because there’s nothing around big enough to dominate it. You and I are much smaller than the earth, and so we fall towards it. “Up” and “down” are no longer absolutes. They are relative.

The second half of Rovelli’s book (less thrilling, and more trenchant, perhaps to compensate for the fact that it covers more familiar territory) explains how science, evolving out of Anaximander’s constructive yet critical attitude towards his teacher Thales, developed a really quite unnatural way of thinking.

Thales, says Anaximander, was a wise man who was wrong about everything being made of water. The idea that we can be wise and wrong at the same time, Rovelli says, can come only from a sophisticated theory of knowledge “according to which truth is accessible but only gradually, by means of successive refinements.”

All Rovelli’s wit and intellectual dexterity are in evidence in this thrilling early work, and almost all his charm, as he explains how Copernicus perfects Ptolemy, by applying Ptolemy’s mathematics to a better-framed question, and how Einstein perfected Newton by pushing Newton’s mathematics past certain a priori assumptions.

Nothing is thrown away in such scientific “revolutions”. Everything is repurposed.

Wandering off into a blizzard for no reason

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Watching Creature, directed by Asif Kapadia, for New Scientist, 5 March 2023

In an isolated research station, lost amid snow and ice, a highly disciplined team of would-be astronauts are putting an experimental animal through its paces. Will their Creature survive the tests they throw at it? The cold, the isolation, the asphyxia? A punctilious Doctor (Stina Quagebeur) palpates and measures the creature, summons handlers and equipment and calls for urgent aid when it looks as though an experiment has gone too far. She is meticulous, not malevolent, and when the Major in charge tears the creature from its one source of comfort, the station cleaner Marie (Erina Takahashi), and abuses her, the Doctor fears for the whole team.

It’s up to the captain to calm his superior officer down, and goodness knows he tries. Since this is a ballet loosely based on 19th-century dramatist Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck — about the mental deterioration of a soldier so utterly beholden to his commanding officers, he agrees to medical experiments — it’s not likely that things will end well.

Jeffrey Cirio plays the Creature in this unusual project from English National Ballet — a collaboration between choreographer Asif Kapadia and filmmaker Akram Khan, best known for the documentaries Senna (2010) Amy (2015) and Diego Maradona (2019).

It’s a grim fable of human ambition and ruthlessness, superbly performed, and shot in a way that draws the audience fully into the action, capturing moments of private emotion and the subtlest of gestures without losing any of the spectacle of an ensemble piece.

For almost its entire length (the last five minutes are rotten) Creature explores its extreme set-up with tenderness and intelligence, slowly eroding the distinction between a somewhat simian test subject and its hardly less simian handlers. The Creature wants to copy its masters. We don’t have very long to wait, however, before its masters are learning to copy the Creature. Though the hierarchies of this isolated, militaristic society are clear, and the Creature’s expendability is never in doubt, the piece holds out the possibility of real communication here, and even trust, and even love.

And then, out of nowhere, all that subtle, clever, sensitive work gets thrown away. The Captain (Ken Saruhashi), who’s been keeping the Major contained, wanders off into a blizzard for no reason, and the Major (a jaw-droppingly arrogant turn by the dashing Fabian
Reimair) makes merry hell and gets away with whatever he likes.

Creature wants to be an indictment of cruelty, obedience and power, but its central metaphor will not hold. First, astronauts are notoriously disobedient. Second, space agencies are chronically underfunded. Really, only the point about cruelty might stick, and even here, I have my reservations. Do we sacrifice experimental animals to further our research goals? Certainly, though much less than we used to. And even in the bad old days, these creatures were honoured. Look at the statues to the space dog Laika (I know of at least two), or the remains of NASA’s chimp Ham, interred at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico. You can argue that these gestures were insufficient, but you can’t say they were empty.

By the end, did Creature leave me impressed? Thrilled? Moved?

Yes, all three. It also left me aggrieved.

Here I was, preparing to sing the praises of a science-fiction ballet about our difficult relationship with other primates, and what I was left with, at the end, was a by-the-numbers glimpse of how horrid people can be.

It may be that expanding human efforts into outer space is a silly idea, but the show’s censoriousness left me cold. A shame, because the dancing — ironically enough — was out of this world.