THE
2010
REITH
LECTURES
Prof Martin Rees
MAY 31 2010
The right man at the right moment, talking on the issues at the top of
the agenda. I have no comments so far other than to recommend listening
carefully to what he has to say. It is not simple, his message,
depending as it does on the education his listeners have received in
their lifetime to date, from schools, parents, media of all sorts and
their peers, to understand what he is saying, clear and concise though
it is. This applies to the scientific community as much as others.
Professor David
Nutt, shouting from the back row, demonstrated at a stroke the converse
of the point he was no doubt trying to make. This man still thinks he
was sacked because politicians did not understand his science, and that
they were wrong to sack him. Not so. His fatuous remarks about the
relative dangers of horse-riding and drug-taking were what sealed his
fate. He might as well have insisted that a space programme should be
scrapped on grounds of danger rather than expense if he wished to prove
Martin Rees's clear and correct contention that political decisions are
not scientific decisions even when they are about what do do with the
science we have. A different overall policy on the legality of drugs
could be adopted if it was politically acceptable. As things are it is
not, and Nutt's ex-officio opinions were not acceptable. Horse-riding
is to be encouraged, drug-taking is not, but to reach that conclusion
you need to have acquired sufficient knowledge to have developed a
little wisdom..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sk5nc
JUNE 8th 2010
The second 2010 Reith Lecture, "Surviving the Century" was as
appropriate as the first. I have nothing to add at this stage. The
questions from the floor were excellent, as were the answers. I am not
wholly sure that the spin-off from the Cern Hadron Collider is worth
the electrical energy and brain power expended but will give it the
benefit of the doubt on the grounds of timing. We would not start the
project now so it is just as well it was started when it was, and quite
a lot has been learned in the process beyond the science it is
investigating which will have applications of significance. The
international and multidisciplinary aspects are also extraordinarily
important.
I also appreciated the words of Prof Rees when he gave credit, where
credit was due, to the environmental policies and effective actions of the last UK
government.
JUNE 15th 2010
The third lecture,
"What we will
never know", was not controversial. It was good to hear the
judgment that "Time
machines will remain fiction". That is not just because of the paradox
that Professor Rees
mentioned, should we be able to travel back in time as effective
agents, but because of what we have discovered about the nature of time
with respect to matter, mass and energy. I have covered this briefly in
a review on Amazon of Brian Greene's 'Fabric of the Cosmos'. Travelling
in time, other than as we do daily together when locally associated,
involves travelling in space. If we remain where we are, time-travel
faster or slower than is dictated by the local environment is
impossible. We may travel to another part of the cosmos and, if we are
able by the application of exceptional force over time, reaching speeds
near to that of the electromagnetic spectrum, that will slow our
personal time relative to the place we have left. However, should we
return home, we will not have travelled to the future in any way
substantially different from staying put and being 'frozen' for the
length of time that passed there. We will have aged less. The effects
of both Special and General relativity combine in such a way as to make
the slowing of time possible for the traveller. Such an exercise is
unlikely to be carried out, though one day in the far distant future
the slowing of time for long-distance space travellers might be
important.
Why cannot we play the same trick in reverse? We can! The very same
speed of light C allows us to experience the past remotely providing we
do NOT travel there. We can observe an environment 12 billion years ago
and be grateful we are not 'there'. We can never see the future or
travel to the past because the first has not occurred and the second
cannot be co-located with the observer. We can get to the future but no
faster than the environment allows us. We could only go back in time if
we went beyond the space-time event horizon and there is no
personal portal handy or likely to be. Nor, if you went back in
time in that way, could you be returning in reverse to the world you
had lived in unless you were to lose all memory and be the same as you
were and therefore repeat the identical actions. For this reason, even
the paradox of going back to change history is impossible with a time
machine even should one be invented. The inventor who used it would
find himself back in the past with no idea there was any time
machine in the future! On a universal or even stellar scale, that is
another matter altogether. Information or energy might recycle through
negative space-time, but we are talking 'time-machines' here and as the
good professor says, they are fiction.
He
pointed out there remain many mysteries at the extremes of the small
and large scale of universal phenomena. The known unknowns and the
unknown unknowns. "A pity Rumsfeld did not stick to philosophy" had the
audience chuckling, though I was thinking "a pity he discovered
philosophy a little late in life!". Rees spoke well about the hierarchy
of complexity and how the higher levels of organization are 'not
imperiled' by the insecure base or uncertainty of quantum mechanics.
However this brought him to a brief consideration of chaos theory and
the famous 'butterfly' example which is one I am not happy with. There
are indeed chaotic systems, and a small event can have consequences
that multiply, but the reason weather forecasting is difficult is not
related to individual butterflies or matters on that scale but to an
excess of variables of far greater significance on a larger scale which
are still too many to analyse and compute. One cannot rule out a tiny
input being the trigger but rather like the assassination of a
well-known arch-duke, if it hadn't been one thing it would have been
another in most cases. I think Prof Rees agrees actually. It is some of
the unknown unknowns or at at least unobservables or unrecordables in
sufficient number and detail in advance that make most predictions
difficult, rather than chaos theory. The calculation of planetary
orbits cited is, I agree, not typical but that is because of the
singularly low level of variables and unknowns to take into account.
Instability with uncertain boundaries is the nightmare scenario which
only catastrophe can resolve. I get the impression that these lectures
are careful designed to encourage a greater involvement of the public
and potential scientists in rational debate and a more comfortable
communion with politics, society and ethical choices based on avoiding
confusion and prejudice. At the end of the argument there are choices
to be made and these are best made in the light of estimated outcomes
of each possibility rather than the repetition of possibly
misunderstood proverbs.
Accepting
the value of both reductionist and holistic science, Rees was fond of
using the word 'continuum' to describe the relationship of what are
sometimes seen as opposing views of reality. I like this. He used it
both when describing the relationships of the physical world, where
there are extremes but no necessary contradiction, and the world of
ideas and perceptions.
Prof
Rees
mentioned
the 'enhancement of life-span' as a goal of science.
Here I have to say I think our science is a bloody nuisance. To
lengthen the average human maximum natural life-span It is the greatest
non-priority it is possible to imagine. As for those Americans who are
freezing themselves on death in case the technology for eternal life
arrives after their conventional demise, surely they are the
incontrovertible proof that what I say is true - a world where we had
to put up with these guys any longer than we have to is not one I care
to contemplate for my children.
There were good questions form the floor as usual. A mention of the
multidimensionality of the universe which to my mind is not the same as
that of 'parallel' universes and instead of 'permitting them' could
render the case for them superfluous, but that is for future discovery.
Earlier we got onto consciousness, and whether a sufficiently complex
robot could merit 'consideration' by its owner.operator. Could it get
'bored' or be offended, even hurt. Here I expected something sensible
from Lord Rees but since it is not his speciality he merely posed the
question. The answer is clearly no, unless we mean the respect and care
that should be given by any operator to a piece of machinery. I am
quite disappointed that so few people understand what is meant by
artificial intelligence. The day we create a robot that has real
feelings that have to be respected it will be a collection of cells
with memory going back billions of years. Many of us have created such.
My parents did and the machine they produced is typing this text. It
has been updating its program assiduously for the last 70 years and
will be interested to know if you, dear reader, care if you hurt its
feelings. If you think it is talking rubbish then you will have
offended it greatly. I can tell you nobody looks after it but itself,
though it has enthusiastic support from family and friends whenever it
calls on them. It reckons it will be dead in a year but none of the
technicians it has consulted has the remotest idea what has gone wrong.
It remains of a very cheery disposition and is perfectly happy to join
the scrapheap and leave room for later models. To get back to the
question: the answer is a mouse merits respect by a human, even if we
need to kill it as it is one too many in the wrong place a the wrong
time for us, so we should kill it humanely if possible. A machine that
is assembled from manufactured parts, unless these are grown in a lab
using such parts as living cells, with neural network and emotional
autonomy on the level of said mouse for example, does not require
humane treatment.
There was a bit more discussion on the brain, with everyone appearing
to agree that conscious in humans was a mystery of which we understood
little. Personally I can't see what more there is to understand unless
we want to fiddle with it and probably damage it in the process, but
there are many who want to fix what they see as its shortcomings. Colin
Blakemore talked about understanding how atoms (inanimate) made brains
(animate and self-conscious) as being a great journey to be made in
understanding, but surely if we can understand how atoms came to make a
cell, the whole mystery is cracked and, actually, those of us who
understand geometry as well as the other stuff DO know how and why
atoms formed cells, even if we do not know the precise environment in
which this is most likely or to what extent it is happening
spontaneously these days. We know that sponges are the first form of
cell agglomeration an differentiation follows later. Face it, the brain
is inevitable.
Space exploration was intelligently discussed with the role of robots
to the fore, but also support for human space travel by pioneers.
These, it was rightly suggested, would be the risk takers in the mold
of adventurers of former days. I agree. There may be even those willing
to risk a one-way ticket if they could reach a new and important
destination and report back with information on which the future of
those at home might depend. The strange science fiction of the crew
sent to land on an asteroid headed for earth in order to destroy or
deflect it could come true. For each personal risk taker there will
have to be financial risk-takers of course, prepared to lose all in
some cases if a commercial return is expected on their investment
unless it is government, coalition or globally funded.
The possibility of alien life was intelligently discussed and what
difference its existence would make to science on earth. The point was
made that due to distance no meaningful exchange or conversation would
be possible, we could only hope to learn that life or intelligent life
was possible and had once existed elsewhere. What difference would that
make? Not as much as you might suppose to our behaviour because whether
we are unique or one of many intelligent civilizations we should be
extremely humble and extremely careful as well as adventurous. We must
seek to find, and we must find to survive in a dynamic environment.
Lord Rees has not decide whether life is a fluke or not. Here I have to
say we have enough information to know it is an inevitability. On
universal terms, Earth is replaceable just as the
fertilized ovum in a mothers womb is replaceable on a species scale.
Yet
also in another way, and for the mother, irreplaceable. Chandra Wickramasinghe
was in the hall
to add some serious celebrity to this debate. My own view is the whole
of nature is quite evidently an evolving whole in the course of
self-realization on logical and geometrical principles that we discover
reproduced in our brains, which it inevitably forms. We are bound to
understand it as we are fragments of the whole which reproduces itself,
just as the DNA in a single human cell can give rise, in the right
conditions, to a whole human being.
Rees makes the point that humans are not the end of evolution, and that
the dominant life forms of the future will be as different from us as
we are from a bug. I disagree profoundly. Many principles come into
play in the evolution of evolution. Many are well known in mathematics
and geometry. Humanity is reaching at a rapid speed the form in which
it can function as part of a process which must by default serve the
overarching requirement of the self observing, self-sustaining
universal existence. The evolution of life will continue, but with many
possible human/machine achievements and processes, Humans have a size
and shape and attributes appropriate and adapted to planetary life, and
advanced life will grow and survive in a specific range of
gravitational conditions. A homo-spatiens could evolve adapted to lower
or zero gravity over time with double-jointed attributes but generally
speaking, because of our ability to
make machinery and devices, major design changes of the human
body will now cease. You read it here first.
Can machines take over the world? The question was raised. Certainly
not other than in the way they already have. Some worship the
automobile, some planes, some trains, some computers and the Internet.
Machines can destroy the world, but not run it imaginatively other than
at times, in places, briefly. A machine to cope with Murphy's law takes
billions of years to build. We are part of it.
Richard Dawkins was given a passing reference which was appropriate.
Dawkins is not 'wrong', just small-minded, and his war with
fundamentalist nutters is not even helpful. We can in time explain
complex systems in terms of reductionist elements, a list of their
parts, but so what? Why would a human body not have parts? It grew them
for goodness sake, to enable the whole to take in energy and 'boot up'
for a lifetime.
David Willets, the minister for science was there to avoid saying he
was going to cut science funding. The Cern Hadron Collider was defended
on much the same grounds as I tolerated it further up the page.
Finally. on the issue of what can know and what we can never know, the
first entry I saw on the online discussion this lecture was this:
At 10am on 15 Jun 2010 General Jack Ripper wrote:
While that is not
necessarily true, as information can be compressed rather than expanded
to show the graphical truth in 3 dimensions and time, General Jack
Ripper has unwittingly revealed the reason for the existence of the
material universe. Even if we restrict our definition of knowledge to
knowing the typical outcome of of all significantly distinguishable
events, all knowledge has to come from experience, and
this
is
it! On our humble,
personal scale, each one of us can only share an abstracted impression
of the whole, and contribute our tiny lifetime experience to that
whole. That little bit, to the extent that we have lived and understood
at some stage the experience, plus that of others we can rationally
relate to, is our own knowledge. Then we have to consider what we call
emotion. But not here and not now!
JUNE 22nd 2010
The 4th and final lecture was at the Open University, Milton Keynes. A
doctor's appointment prevented me from going but these days there is no
need to attend anything when the broadcast and written transcript is
available and, particularly in this case, the questions from the floor
afterwards are so perfectly posed and perfectly answered. I have
nothing at all to add. These lectures were addressed to the British
public, in clear concise language. They should be required listening
and reading for every single person in these islands. It is clear that
a lot of thought has gone into them. If there was one point on which I
am ruefully cautious it was on knocking a career in 'the city' as
opposed to science. Not all trading is in derivatives, though
unfortunately such trading is used in some cases out of necessity, and
the investment Martin Rees needs for science education, research,
development and application comes from many sources, not least
government tax revenues from the banks and bankers, who also manage the
resources required by start-ups of all sizes. However the point was
well made, we have to recover our national status as a pioneering
society in engineering and technology and manufacturing where
appropriate of all sorts so that it covers more of the range. Leading
in computer game software from time to time is not enough. The question
from Lord Haskins was particularly trenchant and amusing, referring to
the global need for cooperation while at the same time basing
commercial viability on competition. Food for thought and some planning
here.
nnnn