James Clerk Maxwell on TV

BBC2 in Scotland had an hour-long documentary earlier this week presented by Prof Iain Stewart, a geologist. The programme was probably not bad for a general audience. After all, how do you explain Maxwell's equations to anyone without a good background in vector calculus?

I think you should try. Maxwell himself constructed an elaborate edifice of cogs and mechanisms in space to aid his intuitions about the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields (div and curl). The eponymous equations followed, and his newtonian-physicalist model was thrown away; it took a major cultural shift in physics to accept the validity of equations that seemed to have no intuitive or obvious underlying interpretation.

Of course, modern physics is all like that: no-one has a good intuitive model of Minkowski spacetime, its variably-curved analogue in GR or most particularly for what the equations of quantum mechanics are telling us about 'reality'.

The BBC programme carefully took the lower path, more travelled. But at least they showed Maxwell's equations on a blackboard with a competent professor 'explaining' them to the hapless Stewart. A geologist faced with differential equations! He explained to camera that he understood none of it - he gave a convincing impression of a man whose head hurt.

He could be right. Geologists are, I would guess, less bright than biologists these days ... and how bright are they? Razib Khan had a post about that with this diagram ...

This diagram is from the science journal Nature

and this explanation (noting that green is not good) (and also see this):

"The above is from an article in Nature, A test that fails. ...

"My physicist friends always enjoy a chuckle whenever I honestly state that physicists are smarter than biologists, as I am a biologist. There are rare cases, such as Ed Witten, of people entering physics from other fields, but in general it’s the physicists who are the imperialists. And that’s because they’re smart, able to decompose general problems rapidly and decisively. In contrast, biologists are somewhat narrow in their focus, and plodding in their reasoning.

"These are generalizations, but I think they’re roughly correct (I had a friend at a prominent non-profit who was irritated with how difficult it was to find Ph.D. biologists who were flexible thinkers in interviews). And standardized tests bear out my generalization (though honestly, it is a pleasure talking to physicists and mathematicians about out of topic fields compared to biologists partly because they’re so mentally acute; you don’t need GRE stats to get this)."

So Professor Stewart, shape up or ship out of this presenting lark!

Is 'n' ought

A giant asteroid is hurtling towards the planet of technologically-sophisticated aliens. Physics allows us to predict the trajectory of the incoming rock as well as the effects of any possible mitigation attempts. But it doesn't recommend any particular course of action. Morality is out of scope for physicists.

Let's turn to biology. The aliens are survival machines: they respond to threats with countermeasures. The biologist predicts the aliens ought to deal with the problem. Morality has entered the building.

The aliens won't be calculating rationally what they should do to keep their genes in play (far too slow and unreliable in an open environment). They'll decide on their hopes, fears, sense of social cohesion and egalitarianism - all the stuff which worked over their evolutionary history. They'll encode these emotional norms as their morality.

Doubtless to get their advanced society to work at all (featuring capitalism, 'bourgeois democracy' and wars) the aliens will have to compromise their emotionally-grounded moral principles. They will invent hypocrisy and politics and muddled public intellectuals.

Evolutionary biologists will analyse all of this: no-one will be interested, however, in their rooting of morality in evolutionary science.
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Note: Just to clarify. Formal moral positions are relative, not absolute - that's why they can change (this point is never understood by many in the media who confidently believe their own elevated moral positions are normative across time and space). But morality can never stray too far or too long from its basis in human biological values; while our morality is rooted in our emotional value systems these themselves are complex, can be in conflict and can generate different moral conclusions.

Example: suppose there is an activity which some people indulge in which results in little harm but causes feelings of disgust in most other people (drugs and certain kinds of sexuality come to mind). This could lead to a moral repudiation of such activities and indeed, the people themselves (hate the sin, not the sinner is a step too far for most people).

But the 'sinners' naturally feel stigmatised and rejected, which violates another of our values: social solidarity, fairness and egalitarianism. So the moral fatwa may be reversed and the deprecated activity abstracted and rebranded ('a lifestyle choice') to damp down the majority's natural repugnance. Intellectuals and libertarians, who rather naturally lead with their intellects, and idealists, who lead with visions of social solidarity and empathy, are often found in the vanguard of such rebranding.

Such people are often, of course, found in politics and the media.