The Atheist's Guide to Reality

The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg


Independent, 18 April 2012

There are plenty of books that make the case for atheism, but Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality isn't one of them. The American philosopher maintains that religious belief is immune to rational objection. There's little point, argues Rosenberg, in preaching to the unconverted. His aim is to enlighten the converted by arguing for what an atheist should believe, since there's more to atheism than simply "there is no God". He begins by rebranding atheism as "scientism" so as to better describe what atheists "do believe". First, an atheist has to understand the science, then accept its "irrefutably correct answers to the persistent questions". What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

Rosenberg's scientism is built on accepting well-established laws of physics as the basic description of reality. He argues that the physics tells us just about everything we need to know about how the universe works. We can extend this to chemistry and biology, and then, with an appeal to Darwinian processes, everything else. For Rosenberg, almost everything we think of as having inherent value or meaning, from morality to the idea of a self, does not. He wants us to let go of our many illusions, such as the concept of free will. Being "scientistic" means treating science as the "exclusive guide to reality" and accepting that it "enables atheism to answer life's universal and relentless questions".

Rosenberg argues that atheists are assailed on all sides by attempts to sow doubt about the completeness and credibility of science. Worse still, some of those questioning the reach of science are people with impeccable scientific qualifications. Rosenberg wants to clarify "what our attachment to science... really commits us to".

There's much that Rosenberg writes one can agree with; as for the rest, it's at least thought-provoking. If you can't swallow science's answers as interpreted by Rosenberg, he has one last piece of advice: "Take a Prozac or your favourite serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and keep taking them till they kick in."

Art of Science

The Art of Science: A Natural History of Science by Richard Hamblyn

Independent, 4 November 2011                     

is a thing of beauty. It's the inscription carved on the memorial stone in Westminster Abbey commemorating the life and work of the greatest British physicist of the 20th century, Paul Dirac. By accounting for the spin of the electron, Dirac's equation managed to reconcile Einstein's special theory of relativity with one of the few genuine revolutions in human thought, quantum mechanics. Does it matter, asks Richard Hamblyn, that Dirac's equation remains a closed book to all but a handful of initiates able to translate its compact hieroglyphics into a statement about the nature of the universe?

For Hamblyn, it does. Few of us can read ancient Aramaic or have ever finished Finnegan's Wake; nevertheless we manage to struggle along just fine. So why is Dirac's equation, and other such mathematical statements, different? Hamblyn worries that while an inability to read an ancient language or an experimental novel rarely leads to a wholesale rejection of all other languages or literature, there is a tendency among non scientists to characterise the whole of science as being as reductive, difficult and as alien as   Dirac's equation.

Introducing this anthology, Hamblyn overstates the case to reinforce his point, especially when the likes of Brian Cox and Alice Roberts make science on TV accessible to all. Intellectual engagement and entertainment are the key ingredients as scientists try to connect with audiences beyond the lab and lecture theatre. Hamblyn achieves that in this collection as he showcases not only readable translations of key scientific ideas but situates those ideas in their cultural and historical context.

The hundred-odd pieces selected either reflect the situation in which a moment of scientific understanding took place or reveal the personalities of the scientists involved. The extract from James Watson's account of the events leading up to the discovery of the structure of DNA, for example, highlights the egotism and insensitivity to be found on virtually every page of The Double Helix – yet these character traits were important factors in Watson's scientific success.

Among the classics Hamblyn has chosen is Tycho Brahe on the supernova, William Harvey on the circulation of blood, Galileo on the moons of Jupiter, Einstein on the quantum theory of light, Fahrenheit on his temperature scale and Darwin on the Origin of Species. However, the strength of the collection lies in the surprises from among the contributions made by amateurs: Seneca on whirlwinds; the schoolteacher and champion of atomism John Dalton on colour blindness; the classification of clouds into cirrus, cumulus, and stratus that remains in use today by the pharmacist Luke Howard; the account by the country doctor Gideon Mantell of how he reconstructed the Iguanodon from its fossilised teeth, and - my favourite – a piece on snowflakes by Vermont farmer Wilson Bentley.

With the ingenious aid of a bellows camera rigged up to a microscope, in 1885 Bentley became the first person successfully to photograph snowflakes. Over the next 40 years, having built up thousands of images, Bentley concluded that no two snowflakes are the same. His life's work was "one of the little romances of science". Although there are other such romances, Hamblyn has largely chosen pieces that have documentary value.

James Lind's account of his clinical trials on board HMS Salisbury affords us a surgeon's-eye view of everyday life on an 18th-century warship complete with barrels of baked biscuits and a scurvy-ridden crew. We get a glimpse of the reaction to Copernicus's new ordering of the cosmos through contemporary accounts that also shed light on the means by which his ideas began to spread.

"Art is the Tree of Life," wrote William Blake. "Science is the Tree of Death." This collection proves such accusations to be groundless as it offers ample evidence, to be dipped into at leisure, for what Hamblyn describes as the greatest invention of the human imagination, "the art of scientific thinking".

Knocking on Heaven's Door

Knocking on Heaven's Door: How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world by Lisa Randall


Independent, 16 September 2011 

Why do things weigh what they do? It seems like a simple enough question, but physicists don't know for sure why particles weigh anything at all. For the best part of 50 years they have had an answer – the Higgs boson. It plays such a fundamental role in nature that its been dubbed the "God Particle".

Attempting to answer the question of how the universe got its mass means searching for the Higgs boson. It's a nine billion-dollar enterprise involving thousands of scientists and the largest, most complex machine ever built. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) contains an enormous 26.6km circular tunnel that stretches between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva across the French-Swiss border. Electric fields inside accelerate two beams of protons as they go around 11,000 times per second.

 In this fascinating book, Lisa Randall, professor of theoretical physics at Harvard, explains the experimental research at the LHC and the theories that try to anticipate what they will find: "The goal... is to probe the structure of matter at distances never before measured and at energies higher than have ever been explored." These energies should generate an array of exotic fundamental particles and reveal interactions that occurred early in the universe's evolution, roughly a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.75 billion years ago. In the debris of colliding protons, physicists hope to find the Higgs boson and get a glimpse at the nature of dark energy and dark matter that make up 96 percent of the universe.

It was 1964 when Peter Higgs conceived of an invisible field that filled the cosmos immediately after the Big Bang. As the newborn universe expanded and cooled, the field switched on. At that moment massless particles that had been travelling at the speed of light were caught in the field and became massive. The more strongly they felt the effects of the field, the more massive they became. Without this field atoms, molecules, galaxies, stars and the planets would not exist.

 The Higgs field is like a field of snow that stretches forever in all directions. Beams of light move as though they have skis on: they zip through the field as if it weren't there. Some particles have snowshoes while others go barefoot and trudge around. A particle's mass is simply a measure of how much it gets bogged down in the field.

The ripples in the Higgs field appear as particles called Higgs bosons – the snowflakes that make up the cosmic snowfield, and the thing that physicists need in order to explain why stuff weighs anything. The Higgs mechanism tells how elementary particles go from having zero mass in the absence of the Higgs field to having the masses measured in experiments. The Higgs boson is a crucial part of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics. It's a construction made out of 24 fundamental building-blocks of matter: 18 of these particles are six types of quarks that come in three varieties. The remaining six are called "leptons", a family that includes electrons.

There are also other particles known as "bosons", responsible for transmitting forces of nature. The electromagnetic force is carried by photons – the particles of light. Inside atomic nuclei, quarks are stuck together by the strong force carried by "gluons". The W and Z bosons carry the weak force that is responsible for radioactive decay. "With these ingredients," explains Randall, "physicists have been able to successfully predict the results of all particle physics experiments to date."

 On 10 September 2008, the world's media gathered near Geneva at CERN, home of the European Centre for Particle Physics, to watch the LHC being switched on. "People followed the trajectory of two spots of light on a computer screen with unbelievable excitement," recalls Randall. In the months to follow, the LHC was to be cranked up to energies that would replicate those of the early universe, but nine days later euphoria transformed into despair as a malfunction triggered an emergency shutdown. After a year-long delay and repairs costing $40m, the LHC came back online in November 2009.

Yet there are other, even bigger, problems in particle physics that the LHC should help to solve. One is the hierarchy problem. The Higgs mechanism addresses the question of why fundamental particles have mass. The hierarchy problem asks the question, why those masses are what they are.

Another concerns hints about the "holy grail of physics", the so-called "theory of everything". The best candidate for such a theory is superstrings, in which particles are really little oscillating bits of "string". The different levels of "vibration" of these strings correspond to the different particles. Alas, it was later found that there were at least five different string theories. Physicists were relieved when it was discovered they were all just different approximations to a more fundamental theory called M-theory. However, the theory poses enormous conceptual and mathematical challenges.

The "super" in superstrings refers to something called supersymmetry. The LHC will be used to look for "supersymmetric particles". If found, they would provide the first tangible evidence in support of superstrings and M-theory. The proponents of superstrings and M-theory justify their creation by pointing to its elegance and beauty.

And there's the problem. The "quest for beauty", which elevates aesthetics over empirical evidence in the formulation of a theory, took centre stage in the more esoteric areas of theoretical physics and cosmology, in the absence of experimental data. An appreciation of beauty certainly has a role to play when faced with a blank piece of paper; an appeal to aesthetic criteria is part of the physicists' unshakeable belief in the underlying simplicity and beauty of nature.

It is one of their most powerful guiding principles. Nature should not be more complicated than it has to be, they tell themselves. It is this belief that motivates the search for a "theory of everything". Randall quotes Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". It can't be denied that "the search for beauty - or at least simplicity - had also led to truth". Yet she finds the assumption "a little slippery" and readily admits that "although everyone would love to believe that beauty is at the heart of great scientific theories, and that the truth will always be aesthetically satisfying, beauty is at least in part a subjective criterion".

There is nothing wrong with speculation; it is a necessary and vital part of any science, as a first step. The danger of "truth through beauty" in physics, as Randall describes it, is that it makes a virtue of necessity. Wherever experimental evidence can be coaxed out of nature, it suffices to corroborate or refute a theory and serves as the sole arbiter of validity. As Darwin's champion Thomas Huxley once said, "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact". Despite the delay in the LHC, it will be a source of invaluable new data that will provide stringent constraints on what phenomena or theories beyond the Standard Model can exist. We maybe on the edge of discovery, but for the moment the Higgs boson remains a hypothetical particle on which rests the weight of the universe.

The Book of Universes

The Book of Universes by John D Barrow

Independent, 25 March 2011

"Einstein explained his theory to me every day and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it," reported Chaim Weizmann. He would become the first president of Israel, but in 1921 was accompanying Einstein on a transatlantic voyage to New York. The theory in question was general relativity, in which gravity is due to the warping of space caused by the presence of mass. The Earth moves around the Sun not because some mysterious invisible force pulls it, but because of the warping of space due to the Sun's enormous mass.

"The theory is beautiful beyond comparison," Einstein wrote. When, in November 1919, British astronomers announced that they had discovered that gravity bends light – as predicted by general relativity – it made headlines around the world. Yet buried within his greatest achievement was what Einstein called "my greatest blunder".

He knew that his equations could be solved in a number of different ways, with each solution representing a model of a possible universe. Like everyone else at the time, Einstein believed that the actual universe was eternal and unchanging. So he introduced a term (his "greatest blunder") into the equations that ensured exactly that. It was left to others, a Russian mathematician and then a Belgian Jesuit priest, to find and take seriously the solutions that pointed to an expanding universe. Soon this non-static model attracted some experimental support.

In the 1920s, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered two remarkable facts. First, what we had long assumed to be the universe was actually our host galaxy and there were many other such "island universes". Second, he found that light from these distant galaxies was stretched towards the red end of the visible spectrum. This so-called redshift is evidence that these galaxies are moving away from our own Milky Way and that the universe is expanding.

Eventually, this led theorists to a universe that was exploded into being in a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago from a single point, called a singularity, which was infinitely hot and dense. Add a surge of accelerated expansion only a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of a second after the Big Bang that lasted for only a trillion trillion trillionth of a second, and the discovery that 96 per cent of it is made up of dark matter and dark energy, then we arrive at the most popular model of our universe.

In the 20th century, cosmology became a bonafide scientific discipline, but there remains plenty of room for some metaphysical speculation. What exactly do we mean by "universe"? Is the universe everything that has existed, does exist and will ever exist? asks Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow. What about including all that cannot exist? After all, as he points out, some medieval philosophers "were drawn to this sort of completeness, adding everything that has existed, does exist and will not exist to the catalogue of what was, is and will be".

Barrow and his colleagues are not only interested in the structure and history of our universe. There are other universes that live inside black holes, or are chaotically unpredictable or allow time travel into the past. However, the most mind-numbing concept of all only emerged in the 1990s: the never-ending "multiverse" – the universe of all possible universes. There can be few better guides to the bewildering array of potential universes, and none so readable or entertaining.

The man who went nuclear

The Man Who Went Nuclear: How Ernest Rutherford Ushered in the Atomic Age


Independent, 3 March 2011

Did the nuclear age begin in 1942, when Chicago Pile-1, a reactor built in a squash court, went "critical" by achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction? Or was it on 16 July 1945 in the Jemez mountains in New Mexico, when "The Gadget", the first atomic bomb, was successfully tested and Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita? Maybe it was June 1954, when the Russian Obninsk nuclear station first generated electricity for the grid.

In reality, it was during a meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society that the nuclear age was announced, on Tuesday, 7 March 1911, by Professor Ernest Rutherford, the 39-year-old head of physics at Manchester University. Rutherford was born in 1871, in Spring Grove, New Zealand. Descended from Scottish emigrants, it was from this scattered rural community on the north coast of the South Island that Rutherford's aptitude for science and maths led in 1895 to a coveted place at Cambridge. There, under the direction of JJ Thomson, Rutherford established a reputation as a fine experimentalist with a study of X-rays.

Though surrounded at Cambridge by all the excitement generated by Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897, Rutherford opted to investigate radioactivity and soon found that there were two distinct types of radiation emitted from uranium, which he called alpha and beta, before a third was discovered, called gamma rays.

Aged just 27, in 1898, he was appointed professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Among his successes over the next nine years the most important was the discovery, with his collaborator Frederick Soddy, that radioactivity was the transformation of one element into another due to the emission of an alpha or beta particle. Rutherford regarded "all science as either physics or stamp collecting" but saw the funny side when he received the 1908 Nobel prize for chemistry for this seminal work. By then he was in Manchester.

"Youthful, energetic, boisterous, he suggested anything but the scientist," was how Chaim Weizmann, then a chemist but later the first president of Israel, remembered Rutherford in Manchester. "He talked readily and vigorously on any subject under the sun, often without knowing anything about it. Going down to the refectory for lunch, I would hear the loud, friendly voice rolling up the corridor."

At the time Rutherford was busy using the alpha particle to probe and unlock the secrets of the atom. But what exactly is an alpha particle? It was a question that Rutherford and his German colleague Hans Geiger answered. It was a helium ion; that is, a helium atom that had been stripped of its two electrons. Rutherford had noticed, while still in Montreal, that some alpha particles passing through thin sheets of metal were slightly deflected, causing fuzziness on a photographic plate. It was something he asked Geiger to investigate.

As instructed by Rutherford he fired beams of alpha particles at some gold foil and by the tiny flashes of light when they struck a zinc sulphide screen discovered that a few "were deflected through quite an appreciable angle". Soon afterwards Rutherford assigned a research project to a promising undergraduate called Ernest Marsden: "Why not let him see if any alpha particles can be scattered through a large angle?" Marsden found some alpha particles bouncing straight back after hitting the gold foil and Rutherford was shocked: "It was almost as incredible as if you had fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you."

Marsden and Geiger made comparative measurements using different metals and they discovered exactly they same large angle scattering. In June 1909 they published their extraordinary results, but with Rutherford unable to offer any kind of explanation they attracted little interest.

After decades of intense arguments, by 1910 the reality of atoms was established beyond reasonable doubt. The most widely-accepted atomic model was Thomson's so-called "plum pudding". Its ingredients consisted of a ball of diffuse "positive electricity" in which negatively charged electrons were embedded like plums in a pudding. But Rutherford knew that the atom of his old mentor couldn't explain alpha particle scattering. The probability that the accumulated effect of a number of tiny ricochets off electrons in Thomson's atom resulted in even one alpha particle being scattered backwards was almost zero. By December 1910, Rutherford believed that given the mass and energy of an alpha particle the large deflections must be the result of a single collision with an atom. It led him "to devise an atom superior to J.J's" he said at time.

Rutherford's atom consisted of a tiny central core containing virtually all the atomic mass, which he later called the nucleus, but it occupied only a minute volume "like a fly in a cathedral".Most alpha particles would pass straight through Rutherford's atom in any "collision", since they were too far from the tiny nucleus at its heart to suffer any deflection. But if an alpha particle approached the nucleus head-on, the repulsive force between the two would cause it to recoil straight back like a ball bouncing off a brick wall. Rutherford said that such direct hits were "like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night". Rutherford's model allowed him to make definite predictions using a simple formula he had derived about the fraction of scattered alpha particles to be found at any angle of deflection.

Experimental checks performed by Geiger and Marsden confirmed the predictions, but few physicists beyond Manchester gave any serious attention to the nuclear atom. Although Rutherford did not explicitly suggest a planetary model of the atom, there were those who knew that's exactly what it was. For most that settled the matter, Rutherford's atom was fatally flawed. A model of the atom with electrons moving around the nucleus, like planets orbiting the sun, would collapse. Any object moving in a circle undergoes acceleration, if it happens to be a charged particle, like an electron, as it accelerates it continuously losses energy in the form of radiation. An electron in orbit around the nucleus would spiral into it. Rutherford's atom was unstable and the existence of the material world was compelling evidence against it. Enter Niels Bohr.

Arriving in Manchester in March 1912 to learn about radioactivity, it wasn't before long the 27-year-old Dane began thinking about how to prevent Rutherford's nuclear atom from collapsing. His solution employed the quantum – the idea that energy comes in packets. Bohr argued that electrons inside an atom could only move in certain orbits in which they did not radiate energy and therefore couldn't spiral into the nucleus. Bohr said that each orbit had a certain energy associated with it, so all the allowed orbits were in effect a series of energy levels, like the rungs of a ladder. For an electron to move between levels, the famous quantum leap, required it to absorb or emit a quantum of energy that was equivalent to the difference in energy between the two levels.

"It is difficult to overestimate the scientific importance of the discovery of the nucleus," says Sean Freeman, professor of nuclear physics at Manchester University. "Rutherford's insight, imagination and attention to detail enabled him to make revolutionary discoveries using rather rudimentary technology by modern standards. He was a true pioneer."

One of his most important achievements was made in his spare time while Rutherford was developing methods for detecting submarines during the First World War – he split the atom. Arriving late for a committee meeting one day, Rutherford didn't apologise, but announced: "I have been engaged in experiments which suggest that the atom can be artificially disintegrated. If it is true, it is of far greater importance than a war!" It was 1919 before he published the results that showed the nucleus contained positively charged particles he called protons by knocking them out of nitrogen nuclei using alpha particles – thereby effectively splitting the nucleus and hence the atom. It was the last work he did at Manchester before moving to Cambridge to take over from Thomson as head of the Cavendish Laboratory.

It was there that in 1932 his colleagues James Cockcroft and Ernest Walton "split the atom" using the world's first particle accelerator. Also at the Cavendish, James Chadwick used Rutherford's suggestion that there was probably another constituent to heavier nuclei to discover the neutron. The particle plays the central role in establishing a nuclear chain reaction. The three men were among the 11 former students and colleagues of Rutherford who would win the Nobel prize.

Another of those 11 was Niels Bohr, who said that Rutherford never spoke more angrily to him than he did one evening at a Royal Society dinner. He had overheard Bohr refer to him by his title (Rutherford was awarded a peerage in 1931) and angrily asked the Dane loudly: "Do you Lord me?" Rutherford never cared for the honours and was indifferent to academic or social standing. What mattered most to him were the results of experiments. "I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in colour, according to taste," he once said. It was a model he replaced with an atom that began the nuclear age.

Culture Under The Microscope

Culture Under The Microscope
The Visceral Exhibition @ The Science Gallery, Dublin.

Independent, 10 February 2011



What is Life? It's a question that the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger tackled in three famous lectures given at Trinity College, Dublin. The first, on 5 February 1943, was heard by an audience that included the entire Irish cabinet led by Éamon de Valera.

Schrödinger is remembered today for making vivid the weirdness of the quantum world with his famous cat-in-the-box thought experiment. Schrödinger's cat is neither dead nor alive but exists in a superposition of states until we open it and look. Yet when his Trinity College lectures were published they became influential in persuading many young physicists that Schrödinger's methods might solve some of the problems in the developing field of molecular biology. James Watson and Francis Crick cited the book as a key inspiration for the research that led them to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

"Schrödinger with his mythical 'semi-living' cat, could be described as a pioneer of BioArt," says Dr Michael John Gorman, the director of Dublin's Science Gallery, which is also located in Trinity College. His tongue is firmly in his cheek as he accompanies 40 people on the short walk from his gallery to the Schrödinger Theatre, to discuss what life is. This is one of the many activities surrounding the gallery's latest exhibition, Visceral: The Living Art Experiment.

"BioArt" was a term coined in 1997 as a number of artists abandoned paints and brush in favour of cells, fragments of DNA, proteins and living tissue. Visceral, a month-long exhibition uses new technologies, tissue and neural engineering to explore the question "what is life?" People may be put off by some of the 15 works, some of which use human tissue as book covers or retinal cells to project film. Gorman admits there is something a little queasy about creating artworks from living tissue. "The very idea of tissue-engineering becoming an art form makes us squirm," he says. However, Visceral is all about provoking the sort of instinctive gut reaction that Gorman hopes will gets visitors asking questions about the ethical implications of manipulating living material and what we mean by "living".

The exhibition's curator, Oron Catts, believes that the "logic that drives things like nanotechnology, synthetic biology and even things like neuroengineering needs to be scrutinised and explored by people other than just scientists and engineers". It was one of the reason that Catts helped to set up SymbioticA, an artistic lab dedicated to a hands-on engagement with the life sciences based at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

"Our interest is in life," says Catts, "not only art or science." Yet the exhibition demonstrates the depth of the potential of interactions between art and science. For Gorman, nothing illustrates this better than Silent Barrage, the largest work on show. The product of a collaboration between Neurotica, a group of five artists, and Dr Steve Potter of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, its a cutting edge piece of neural engineering. It consists of an array of robotic poles hooked up to neurons from the brains of rats in Potter's lab.

The array responds to the way visitors move through it and sends signals back to the neurons. These neurons then fire, making the robotic poles shudder up and down. Depending on the amount of audience activity, the neurons can undergo what is called a "barrage" – when they start firing in a chaotic fashion. This is exactly what happens during an epileptic seizure. With epilepsy affecting over 450000 people in the UK alone, it is hoped by the scientists involved that the data collected might lead to a better understanding of the process by which cells are calmed and seizures mitigated. And its not the only exhibit that promises something scientifically tangible.

The battlefield of Kathy High's Blood Wars is a Petri dish with the combatants being the white blood cells drawn from two different people. After a few hours slugging it out, one set of platelets will have destroyed the other. The "winner" of each cellular battle goes on to fight another participant. The concept may sound sinister to some with concerns about eugenics, but it is in an ingenious attempt to engage in the age-old debates surrounding traits inherited through blood.

Catts says that cell lines create a form of immortality since they can live beyond the life of the donor. I'm reminded of the story told by Rebecca Skloot in her bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Known to scientists as HeLa, Lacks died in 1951 but her cancer cells were taken without her knowledge and became one of the most important tools in medicine. The Vision Splendid, a work by Alicia King consists of two sealed glass jars, connected by tubes that contain nutrients and cultured human tissue. The cells were those of an unknown African-American girl aged 13. You're left wondering who owns the stuff our bodies are made of. If that worries you, then Catts offers a way to ease your troubles.

The Semi-Living Worry Dolls by Catts and Ionat Zurr are a modern version of the famous Guatemalan worry dolls constructed out of degradable polymer on which cells are grown in micro-gravity conditions. You can whisper your troubles to them through a microphone as they eventually replace the polymer completely, transforming the piece from fabric to tissue.

With the Irish general election rescheduled for the closing date of Visceral on 25 February, there's a rumour going around that the Silent Barrage installation may be able to predict the outcome – if political candidates are willing to present themselves to the cultured rat neurons in person.

Chasing The Sun

The sun shines on a solar quest

Chasing The Sun: The epic story of the star that gave us life by Richard Cohen

Independent, 3 December 2010

A Chinese-made portable solar-powered lamp and charger was the final object chosen by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, in his A History of the World in 100 Objects. It was a choice that few would have predicted, but once its solar panel captures and stores the energy of eight hours of sunshine, this 21st-century lamp converts it into 100 hours of light to be used whenever and wherever needed. "The power of the Sun seems a good place to end this global history," said MacGregor, "because solar energy is a dream of the future that echoes the oldest and most universal of human myths, that of the life-giving Sun."

Richard Cohen has produced an encyclopaedia of a book that could almost serve as a companion to MacGregor's landmark series – an alternative history of the world told through humanity's relationship with a single object.

He begins with the myth of the Sun as the god Inti, of the tribes of Peru and northern Chile, who descended into the ocean every evening, swam back to the east, then reappeared, refreshed by his bath. The Hopi of Arizona claim that they made the Sun by throwing up a buckskin shield along with a fox's coat and a parrot's tail, to make the colours of sunrise and sunset.

"The Sun is 32,000 light years from the centre of its galaxy of a hundred billion stars, which it orbits at about 155 miles a second, taking about 200 million years to complete a revolution," reports Cohen. The Sun has been active for 4.6 billion years and a single particle of light, a photon, from its core takes 150,000 years to reach space. Every second, about five million metric tonnes of mass are converted into nuclear energy: equivalent to the detonation of 90,000 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. The numbers are mind-boggling, but this constant blast of nuclear reactions pushes energy to the surface, releasing it as light and heat.

The Earth receives more of this energy in just 45 minutes than its inhabitants consume in a year. About 35 per cent is reflected back into space by clouds and the atmosphere absorbs another 19 per cent. This still leaves 12,000 times as much energy as used by all man-made devices.

Effectively harnessing the Sun is not just a modern ambition. The Greeks in the third century BC used "burning mirrors" to focus sunlight on enemy warships. Archimedes, so legend has it, deployed such mirrors in 212BC to defend Syracuse from a blockading Roman fleet by burning the enemy's sails.The Romans were the first to build greenhouses. In the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian passed a law protecting public and domestic sunrooms from the erection of buildings that obstructed light; a 1,000 years later, Leonardo da Vinci proposed using a giant mirror as a commercial source of heat.

Like some latter-day Victorian species hunter who travels the globe collecting new specimens, Cohen spent eight years chasing the Sun across 18 countries and six continents. He began with a climb to the top of Mount Fuji to watch the sunrise on the summer solstice and ended in a sunset viewed from a boat on the Ganges at Varanasi.

Among other trips, Cohen recounts seeing an eclipse on the Antarctic ice. He visits the Arctic city of Tromso in Norway, which for ten weeks each year receives virtually no sunlight (a period the locals call "the dark times"), to investigate how we react to the loss of light.

Among Cohen's treasure-trove of solar miscellanea is the "sunspot cycle" in modern economics, the story of sundials and calendars from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory VII, the introduction of daylight saving time in 1916 as a wartime economic measure, and a brief history of navigation and cartography. He shows how the Babylonians were the first to record the Sun's movements in detail, while the Greeks went further, inquiring into its size, shape, and distance from the Earth.

Occasionally Cohen's passion for all things solar gets the better of him, as when he suggests that the lingams of Hindu temple domes are "purposely imitated in the design of nuclear-reactor cones, the latest tribute to the Sun's potency". Yet he can be forgiven, as we learn how artists from the Renaissance to Hockney have depicted the Sun, or of Shakespeare's enthusiasm for suntans. We see why Galileo recorded his discovery of sunspots in code, why Matisse rushed out of his dying wife's bedroom, why Wagner hated the Sun and Mozart loved it.

All things come to an end, and Cohen devotes a chapter to the death of the Sun. As I read it I remembered the first part of a poem by Francis William Bourdillon:

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

Merchants of Doubt

A lot of hot air from the sceptics

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway

Independent, 18 October 2010

Public scepticism about climate change is on the rise. The shift is due in part to the publication of the hacked emails of the University of East Anglia's "climategate" scientists. Now climatologists have to live with the fact that most people simply don't trust them. Merchants of Doubt, by two historians of science, may help restore some trust by showing that science is rarely black and white, and how its shades of grey have sometimes been distorted by a few willing hands.

Writing before "climategate", Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway believe that "We all need a better understanding of what science really is...and how to separate it from the garbage." They tell the story of how for half a century, a small group of scientists in America collaborated with think-tanks and corporations in campaigns to discredit scientific research by creating doubt and manipulating debate.

Manufacturing doubt as an effective corporate strategy was first developed by the American tobacco industry. Determined to stop any government regulation in the face of scientific evidence linking tobacco to lung cancer, the cigarette-makers created the Council for Tobacco Research to discredit the scientists and dispute their findings. "Doubt is our product," boasted a now infamous 1969 industry memo. Doubt would shield the tobacco industry from litigation and regulation for decades to come.

The so-called "Tobacco Strategy" was used to "maintain the controversy" by promoting claims contrary to research. The peddlers of doubt insisted that scientists were wrong about the risks of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, and that acid rain was caused by volcanoes. They would dismiss global warming by claiming, in turn, that there was none; if there was, it was just natural variation; finally, it didn't matter because humans would adapt. Aided by a complicit media, these claims generated the illusion of genuine scientific debate when there was none at all.

No scientific conclusion can ever be proven with certainty, but it is no more a "belief" to say that the Earth is heating up than to say that continents move or that germs cause disease. Oreskes and Conway warn that, "without some degree of trust in our designated experts we are paralyzed".

The Grand Design

Theories of everything: Has cosmic science written its last word?

Independent, 10 September 2010

God is dead," declared Friedrich Nietzsche, but few listened or cared. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," announced Stephen Hawking last week, and it was picked up by the world's media. For over 20 years earlier, the world's most famous scientist had ended his phenomenal bestseller A Brief History of Time with the arresting conclusion that "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God."

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? It is these "ultimate questions of life" that Hawking's now sets out to answer, with the help of the American physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow, in his fascinating new book The Grand Design (Bantam, £18.99). Philosophers have traditionally tackled such questions, while most physicists have stayed well clear from addressing the "why" of things and concentrated instead on the "how".

Not any more. "To understand the universe at the deepest level," says Hawking, "we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why." He believes that "philosophy is dead" because it failed to keep up with the latest developments, especially in physics.

For it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science and without resorting to God. And the answers hinge on a candidate for a theory of everything called M-theory, "if it indeed exists", the authors admit. Unfortunately, no one seems to know what "M" stands for; it could be "master", "miracle" or "mystery".

The story of M-theory could be said to begin with the desire of physicists to unify and simplify. Just as ice, water and steam are different manifestations of water, in 1864 James Clerk Maxwell showed that electricity and magnetism were likewise different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon - electromagnetism. He managed to encapsulate the disparate the behaviour of electricity and magnetism into a set of four elegant mathematical equations. Using these equations, Maxwell was able to make the startling prediction that electromagnetic waves travelled at the speed of light, approximately 670 million miles per hour. Light was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's unification of electricity, magnetism and light was the crowning achievement of 19th-century physics.

In the 20th century, to go with gravity and electromagnetism, physicists discovered two new forces - the weak, which is responsible for radioactivity, and the strong that binds together, for example, the nucleus of an atom. They believed that these four forces, which appeared so different, would be reunited a single all-encompassing theory of everything.With exception of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, it's possible to "quantize" the other three forces, since quantum mechanics deals with the atomic and sub-atomic domain. In effect, we have three trains running on the same-sized track.

Unfortunately, Einstein's gravity train was running on a completely incompatible track. Yet the impulse for unity and simplicity is so strong that theorists have pursued a quantum theory of gravity, without success, for decades. Then in the 1980s there appeared a new theory that looked promising - superstrings.

The theory assumes that all observed particles are different manifestations of the same fundamental entity. According to the superstring idea, all particles previously thought off as little points are in fact not points at all but basically little oscillating bits of "string" which move through space. The different levels of "vibration" of these strings correspond to the different particles.

Superstrings vibrate in 10 dimensions. But we don't notice these extra dimensions because they are curled up into a space that's infinitesimally small. Alas, it was discovered that there were at least five different string theories and millions of ways the extra dimensions could be curled up - an embarrassment of riches for those who hoped that string theory was the longed for theory of everything.

As others despaired, the American physicist Ed Witten led the way, beginning in the mid-1990s, in showing that the different string theories and a theory called "supergravity" were all just different approximations to a more fundamental theory: M-theory.

"M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense," admits Hawking. "It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations. It is a bit like a map." Faithfully to map the entire earth, one has to use a collection of maps, each of which covers a limited region. The maps overlap each other, and where they do, they show the same landscape.

M-theory needs 11 space-time dimensions and contains not just vibrating strings but other objects that are impossible to visualize. The extra space dimensions can be curled up in a mind-blowing 10 to the 500th different ways, each leading to a universe with its own laws. To get an idea how many that is, Hawking and Mlodinow ask the reader to imagine a being capable of scanning each of those universes in just one millisecond and who started working on it at the Big Bang. Today that being would have only have scanned just 10 to the 20th of them.

This plethora of universes, the multiverse, explains what appears to be the mystery behind the remarkable coincidences that have fine-tuned natural laws to make our universe habitable for us. With so many universes, it's a lot less remarkable that there is at least one in which conditions are Goldilocks-like: just right to have given rise to us, since we exist it has to be this one. This is the anthrophic principle that effectively says that things are the way they are because they were the way they were. From here, Hawking goes on to argue "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

"'Think of an expanding universe as a surface of a bubble," writes Hawking. "Our picture of the spontaneous quantum creation of the universe is then a bit like the formation of bubbles of steam in boiling water. Many tiny bubbles appear, and then disappear again. These represent mini-universes that expand but collapse again while still of microscopic size. They represent possible alternative universes, but they are not of much interest since they do not last long enough to develop galaxies and stars, let alone intelligent life. A few of the little bubbles will grow long enough so that they will be safe from recollapse. They will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate and will form the bubbles of steam we are able to see. These correspond to universes that start off expanding at an ever-increasing rate."

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing; why the universe exists, why we exist. God is surplus to Hawking's requirements.

Why are the fundamental laws as they are? The ultimate theory must be consistent and must predict finite results for quantities that we can measure. There must be a law like gravity and, for a theory of gravity to predict finite quantities, the theory must have what is called "supersymmetry" between the forces of nature and the matter on which they act. "If the theory is confirmed by observation," says Hawking, "it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3000 years."

"Yet in the history of science," he admits, "we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories or models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?"

Though Hawking is probably being rhetorical, Russell Stannard, a former professor of physics at the Open University, looks at the unanswered questions of modern physics in his book The End of Discovery (Oxford, £14.99). Stannard believes that eventually, but he doesn't know when, fundamental science will reach the limit of what it can explain. On that day, the Scientific Age, like the Stone Age and the Iron Age before it, will come to an end. He believes that not only technological limits, but maybe humanity will have reached the limits if its mental capacities to unravel the nature and workings of reality.

Stannard takes readers on a tour of some of the deepest questions facing science: questions to do with consciousness, free will, the nature of space, time, and matter. He covers much of the same territory as Hawking and Mlodinow, and points out that to understand the subatomic world, scientists depend of particle accelerators; but to understand the very smallest units of nature, it has been calculated that we would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy.

In A Brief History of Time, Hawking said that a scientific theory "may originally be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observations". As they have waited for the next generation of particle accelerators and experiments, the research of physicists from superstrings to quantum cosmology has had a tendency to take on a metaphysical character in recent decades.

So maybe philosophy isn't as dead as Stephen Hawking thinks. For those having a difficult time wrapping their head around "spontaneous creation", he has this tip: "If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God'."