The next book: "On Interstellar Warfare"

Inspired by Herman Kahn's classic "On Thermonuclear War", read when I was a teenager, I am considering "On Interstellar Warfare" as the next book topic. Read the outline here. Feel free to email me with comments - (I truly believe there is a gap in the market in this intersection of evolutionary psychology, advanced telescopes and weapons theory ... trust me, it would sell!).

Audit 'du jour' (... a la Bridget Jones) ...

State of health.

Still recovering from bad cold (like half the world). What is it about Autumn?

State of exercise.

Poor. The bicycle project is still-born. This was the idea to buy a new bicycle and to exercise using it vigorously two or three times a week. I had to abandon jogging, which I did do regularly, on account of leg and knee pains. Result: bike bought but not much used. Reason - I guess the current consulting assignment just leaves no time for it.

Books to buy.

1. Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion
2. Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force
3. Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics
4. Edward O. Wilson's On Human Nature

Still some books from the previous Amazon round to finish first, though.

Mini-Project.

Revisit Chuang Tzu and Tao Te Ching for some insights on contemporary events. Factor in E. O. Wilson's remark (reported in today's Sunday Times) that the basic fact about humanity is that 'We are all tribesmen really' - a remark motivating evolutionary psychology (vs. the 'standard social science model' - ref). There is then something interesting to say, from that vantage point, about Taoist philosophy.

Note 1: how could Taoism either be rooted in, or consistent with, evolutionary psychology?

Note 2: I leave religion per se out of this. See Richard Dawkins.

Film to look forwards to.

'Becoming Jane' - due out next year. Biopic of Jane Austen.

Salisbury Plain in late September

This afternoon we drove to Everleigh and walked on Haxton Down. This is at the centre of army armoured vehicle training, and we mostly walked on the tank trails. Military aircraft were doing circuits above us, and parachutists dropped in the distance.

It was a remarkable late September day. Low twenties and a warm wind - still jeans and tee-shirt weather. Above our heads the clouds were laid out in cloud streets (see picture) and it was the classic Salisbury Plain ‘big sky’: like you could see for miles in all directions, and the universe filled half a dome above.


No-one makes much of the positive effects of global warming, but for England, let’s not pretend they’re not there.

Why we didn’t go to the Cinema tonight

A previous entry described our recent visit to the Vue cinema at Basingstoke. The film which attracted us then was the Internet-fuelled smash, ‘Snakes on a Plane’ - click on the link to see my review.

In the event, that movie started late due to projector problems and we were handed a couple of ‘free tickets’. Clare suggested today that we use them to go see the Helen Mirren fuelled smash called ‘The Queen’.

Look closely at the ticket. The front says we can go to a Vue cinema to see a performance of our choice. The back says that the ticket can be revoked at any time, and can’t be used to get a reservation.

I imagine some bright economics-trained marketeer at Vue decided the ticket could be used as a bulk filler where seats could not be sold anyway. The marginal cost to serve an additional customer at the cinema is essentially zero, and a seat which would otherwise be empty earns no revenue anyway.

The problem with undergraduate economics is that it misses the human factor. The implicit licence to renege makes the cinema look like a cheat. Clare said that she doesn’t much like cheats and that her chances of going to the Vue again are slim.

So there you are - they might have been better just to stick with saying sorry (or giving us a genuine ticket).

Archaeology at Woodhenge

Sunday afternoon, it's a cloudless sky and 26C, so we visit the rather beautiful Heale gardens and then drive on to Woodhenge.

Just a little to the north of the better-known Stonehenge, Woodhenge is around 4,300 years old. Concrete posts mark the old timbers in concentric ellipses as shown in the picture below (Clare to right).



We were interested to see that in the next field there was a full excavation going on. A researcher from Bournemouth University explained to us that soil from the encircling hill had built up a layer approximately 1.5 metres deep. The neolithic soil level was about an inch above the basal chalk layer, and they were excavating a neolithic round-house with poles around its perimeter (picture). About 4,500 years old.



Somewhat to our surprise, we saw Phil Harding, from the TV programme "Time Team" with a group of archaeologists to one side of the dig (he's the big guy in shorts with the hat in the centre of the picture).


We manage to make it off the site without asking for an autograph ...

Falling by the wayside is also OK

“The old man rose from his hard-won seat and offered it to the old lady. A tiny recoil - repressed suspicion - was followed by a grateful look as she took his place. The ”yoofs” thought it was hilarious.

“Is that the best you could get off with Granddad?” was one of their more printable remarks. The oldster was imperturbable. “Courtesy to others is how we nourish the bonds of our community” was his short response. This irritated the pair - they did so hate to be patronised. “Eff-off, you f***er” was delivered with real menace as their mood turned.

Not to be intimidated, he replied thus. “I do not address your present selves, for I see that you are beyond considering what I am saying. I speak only to plant a small memory for your future.“

At this, they eased themselves from their seats and roundly kicked the living sh*t out of the senior. As he lay on the floor of the train, clutching his ribs and spitting blood he choked out: “We get crushed by falling rocks and judge it an accident of fate. Perhaps you two are only an accident of fate. I spoke to you as one does not speak to rocks, because there may, now or in the future, be something human in you. But I could be wrong: some seeds are cast by the wayside. It is a possible outcome, and not to be complained about.”

Whether the old one died or not is immaterial. He had come to terms with all possible consequences of his situation.”

Samuel L. Jackson on a plane (with snakes)

Went to see "Snakes on a plane" last night in Basingstoke (Timeout film review here).

It is mildly interesting to speculate why this film is still watchable, despite a plot with so many holes that it resembles a fisherman's net; cardboard characters cut from the book of standard aircraft/police-movie stereotypes; and a lack of any viewer-involvement with the fate of anyone in this film (not excluding the snakes).

I must admit I thought the most moving moment was right at the beginning, when the upside-down-suspended public prosecutor's head becomes the target of a baseball bat wielded by the chief bad guy, in Hawaii. I thought he was quite noble (the former, I mean).

No, on reflection, I believe the film kinda works because the director so doesn't care about any of the standard stuff. He just wants to (a) showcase lots of snakes doing Freudian things with generally well-turned-out-but-frequently-only-semi-clad young people of both sexes and (b) showcase Samuel L. Jackson giving a cool masterclass in the art of being the man.

These two objectives are enough to keep the film flying at about the same level as the South Pacific aircraft itself in the latter stages of its journey.

The film is also recommended if taking your best gal, as she is likely to gasp, with her hand over her mouth, and hold onto you tightly at some of the more gory serpent moments. Perhaps that accounts for the Internet hype. Two hours of CGI-fuelled intermittently-pleasurable nonsense out of your life.

Review of 'Deep Down Things' by Bruce Schumm

Review posted at Amazon.com here.

Fed up with useless metaphors which equate the Higgs particle with hangers-on at a party slowing a celebrity’s passage? Exasperated at continual references to Lie algebras and gauge theories, which are never explained?

In Peter Woit’s recent book ‘Not Even Wrong’, he comments (p. 205) that relativistic quantum field theory is not even studied until the second or third year of graduate school. For the rest of us, there is ‘Deep Down Things’.

Schumm’s objective is to take us on a conceptual tour of the Standard Model of quantum mechanics, without requiring a mastery of the technical apparatus. The first half of the book introduces the four fundamental forces, wave-particle duality and the wave function itself. The approach is historical and visual - plenty of Feynman diagrams - and Schumm assumes the reader is happy with complex exponentials. By chapter 5 we are deep in the eightfold way, and the classification of quarks, leptons (electrons, muons, neutrinos) and bosons (the force quanta).

Chapter 6 begins the process of diving deeper with a discussion of Lie groups and Lie Algebra, motivated by plenty of examples. A Lie group is defined via: (i) a continuous set (i.e. a real or complex manifold such as R^n or C^n) with (ii) operators which are continuous functions over the manifold. Chapter 7 introduces Noether’s theorem: ‘to every differentiable symmetry generated by local actions, there corresponds a conserved quality’ and this is linked with symmetries under transformations by the Lie group operators (such as rotations in isospin space which interchange protons and neutrons).

Introductory quantum mechanics courses talk about the physical irrelevance of the phase of the wave function when it comes to the calculation of probabilities of observables. We thus have the concept of global phase invariance. However, this is unphysical - we cannot have the universe adjusting phase by the same amount everywhere at the same time. Yang and Mills in the mid-50s proposed to force the wave function to be invariant under local changes of phase: it turns out the only way to achieve this is to add a new term of the form gA(x)psi(x) where g is a charge parameter associated with the particle, psi(x) is the wave function and A(x) is a new term which turns out to be the field potential function for the relevant force field (electromagnetic in chapter 8). The freedom of choice in choosing the function A is called a gauge freedom, hence gauge theory.

Choose a fundamental particle. Write down its wave function. Identify the spaces in which the particle participates (space-time, isospin, ...). Identify the Lie group which rotates the wave function (state vector) in each of these spaces - U(1), SU(2), SU(3). By the principle of local phase invariance, adjust the original wave function with gauge terms gA(x)psi(x) as above. From making this work mathematically, out pop the corresponding force quanta (= the number of generators of the corresponding Lie algebra above). As the chapter heading puts it: ‘Physics by Pure Thought’!

Chapter 9 explains how the standard model assigns a mass of zero to all force-field quanta. Any attempt to add mass destroys the local phase invariance that we just discussed. The only way to retrieve the situation is to assume the existence of a new field (the Higgs field) which somehow pervades the universe and which interacts with non-zero-mass force quanta (via the weak force) in a ‘screening’ way which gives them mass. The Higgs field is also responsible for the masses of quarks and leptons. If this is true, there should be a Higgs particle within reach of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2007.

This is a really excellent book. If you dimly recall how to solve a differential equation, and are unfazed by the notion of an abelian group, then this book is accessible. By book-end you have the sense that you ‘get’ the big picture of the standard model and its remaining conceptual weaknesses. I would say that if you were an undergraduate interested in theoretical physics and wanted a tour d’horizon, this is the one book which will give it (Penrose’s ‘The Road To Reality’ is still too difficult for this purpose).

Newsnight opens the door a chink

Professor Robert Pape, who has analysed the motives of hundreds of suicide bombers, said on Newsnight (BBC Television news analysis show) that their motives are not religious. Instead, the bomber harbours a deep resentment that the country he or she is attacking has an unwanted and unjust presence & influence on the land with which the bomber emotionally identifies.

Professor Pape said this view was not popular with western leaders, but was compellingly supported by his reseach (he has a book - link here).

On another recent Newsnight programme, a speaker from the radical muslim group Hizb ut Tahrir unreservedly condemned alleged british suicide bombers, but agreed that his organisation stood for the restoral of the caliphate across the middle-eastern Sunni community.

Recall that Osama bin Laden's original justification of al Qaeda attacks was the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, home of two of the sacred sites of Islam.

Thought experiment. The west gets its tanks off the lawns of the Sunni umma in Iraq, Afghanistan and ceases support for regimes in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi etc. What is the likely outcome as desired by radical Islam?

1. An (oil-fuelled and very rich) caliphate built along Taliban lines adhering to Wahhabi doctrines across the middle-east.
2. An exterminatory war against Israel, which could go nuclear.
3. A powerful force polarising muslim communities in every European country with sizeable muslim populations (at least England, France, Spain, Italy) and bent on imposing sharia law locally.
4. Secularised Turkey is in real trouble.
5. Spiralling Sunni-Shia antagonism leading to wars of religion.

Perhaps the west, which had the benefits of the renaissance and the enlightenment (which were absolute, and not relative advances for humanity), has some responsibilities not to let this outcome occur by default, even putting aside the material interests of the economics of oil and those of national security?

I think I'm saying that the easy option to let these guys have what they want is worse than the current policy (flawed as it is due to over-reliance on hard power; incompetent execution; and the wilful disregard of the need of Palestinians for a viable state, regardless of the concerns as to who would end up running it).

Balloons over Basingstoke

This afternoon to Basingstoke for the balloon festival.

Here is a picture of the most risque balloon.

The event, at the War Memorial Park, was hard to find through Basingstoke's one-way system, but after we had parked-and-rode, the first thing we saw was a parachute display team - you can see it on the video here.

[10.6 MB in .wmv format, keep watching at the blank section in the middle].

The balloons launched en masse after 6 p.m. Here is a picture of me in front of one of the balloons. The joke goes that you are meant to figure which is which.

We had a good afternoon, and on the way back to the car we were over-flown by three paramoteur pilots (paragliders with back-mounted engines to keep them up) . Sounds like fun.

The video, BTW, has a few seconds of black in the middle - don't have too much time to edit well. Stay with it for the second half, where the launching balloon's basket collides with a nearby balloon: cue gasps from the audience at this near tragedy ...

It's 28 centigrade this evening and humid - I just knew this Greenhouse Effect would be double-edged ...