A Theory of Everything

When I was at school, it all seemed so simple.  The physical world, at the smallest level, was made up from atoms.  Atoms were like the solar system, with electrons whizzing around a nucleus, and this was a system just like the world we knew at the macro level, where planets whizzed around the sun.  Now, we knew there were some complications.  Electrons had their orbits, and they could jump from one orbit to another, and it appeared that those jumps were carefully scripted, so they could only go from one defined level to another, as if you were going from one level of a building up to the next.  And, yes, there was another complication, as it turned out that in the nucleus there were two things:  neutrons and protons.  The protons had a positive electromagnetic force, while the electrons travelling around them had a negative force:  the only reason the electrons didn’t hurtle down towards the protons and annihilate each other is because they were travelling in their orbits at speed: just like an aeroplane not falling to earth because it travelled fast enough to ensure it created lift?  Well, not quite like that, but it would do.  Those other items in the nucleus were neutrons, and they were called that because they didn’t have an electric charge.

There was more.  In a way I found exciting at the time, this model of the nature of the physical universe also made sense of lots of chemistry, and from there on to many other things.  Atoms could be linked together to form molecules.  Some molecules were ‘stable’, like oxygen, which in our daily lives compromises two oxygen atoms linked together to form the O₂ molecule (and later I learnt these was another stable form, O₃, ozone, which was the reason you could smell something funny by the tracks of electric trains in the London Underground).  Then we went on to compounds, like hydrochloric acid, which was a combination of hydrogen and chlorine, and this was interesting because it was really in two parts.  Part of the molecule could break away and link up with another substance, and that would lead to other combinations like sodium chloride (the sodium element combined with the chlorine bit from hydrochloride acid.  It was like the parts in a Meccano set!

Of course, it all got complicated, and eventually scientists were taking substances apart and discovering they were made up of very complex combinations of atoms, often several, sometimes even scores and even hundreds of atoms.  However, it all made sense.  However, I think all that was falling apart long before I was at school, although I didn’t know it at the time.  Although it was somewhat beyond my schoolboy science classes, at least until I reached the final years of secondary education.  Somewhat later I was to confront the science of what’s truly fundamental, and the amazing world of theoretical physics.  At that point all my schoolboy knowledge was cast aside, and I learnt that our physical reality is shaped by a bewildering and complex world of particles, fields, together with many laws and rules that nature played by.

Where was all this leading?  I was off on a different path by the time I was well into my university studies (I’d abandoned science for social anthropology), but even back then I was aware and know much more clearly today, our understanding of ‘reality’ remains limited and incomplete.  Despite this the animating hope of many scientists today and throughout history) is that we will be able to formulate a ‘Theory of Everything’, (with that marvellous acronym TOE) where one set of universal equations and one framework will describe literally every aspect of our physical reality.

When most of us think about science, we don’t often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all might be.  Clearly reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding the nature of our world rely on what we can observe, measure, and test through experiments.  When we take account of that huge body of observational and experimental knowledge, we have a record of all the phenomena that we know exist. The enterprise of science, then, seeks to make sense of the huge body of empirical data, and then seeks to explain it in as simple and conclusive way as possible, to maximize our predictive power concerning natural phenomena, doing so with as few assumptions which seem absolutely necessary.

As many writers today remind us, we have seen incredible advances in our understanding of the physical world when compared to what we understood when I was at school.  Now it appears we can analyse just about everything we can directly detect and measure, and do so precisely, even exquisitely. The ‘Standard Model’ of elementary particles lists four key influences that underpin our world, the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces along with general relativity and gravity. Then there is the inflationary Big Bang which describes our cosmic origins, when those four key forces first appeared, only to evolve and become independent. It makes for a compelling story.  Unfortunately, current mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and the baryogenesis puzzle to do with asymmetry together hint that there’s more to the Universe than we currently understand.

The elusive goal that motivates many scientists is the belief tall of these key forces can be brought together into a ‘Theory of Everything’.  However, despite its fascination, some argue that there is not a Theory of Everything out there to be found at all, that the goal is an illusion.

The modern idea of a Theory of Everything goes back more than 100 years, to the early days of general relativity. Einstein was able, starting in 1915, to successfully describe the observed phenomenon of gravitation. The presence, distribution, and motion of matter and energy through spacetime determined the curvature and evolution of that spacetime fabric, and then the curvature of that spacetime fabric determined the future trajectories and fates of every particle that exists within that spacetime. Put simply, general relativity took the idea of special relativity and unified it with the idea of gravitation, creating the powerful framework that many would argue was the most important of Einstein’s astonishing accomplishments.

When I was learning about science at school we were being taught about science prior to Einstein, with some brief references to what he had concluded.  Before his theories there had been a different approach, Maxwell’s classical theory about electromagnetism, with four central principles:

• the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit at which anything could travel,
• particles and interactions could be described in terms of fields and charges,
• electromagnetism vs relativistically invariant, and
• energy and momentum were always conserved.

Maxwell’s (classical) theory put the previously distinct notions of electricity and magnetism together into a unified footing.

Within four years from the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity scientists were working to unify this theory with Maxwell’s principles.  However, it turned out that despite some similarities the two theories also exhibited several fundamental differences.     Despite this, it was the first 20th Century attempt at a Theory of Everything.  Einstein’s general relativity was already a four dimensional theory (adding the dimension of time to our familiar three dimensional view of matter in the world), but Maxwell’s electromagnetism required four separate degrees of freedom in addition, meaning that the same four dimensions used in Einstein’s theory would be insufficient to hold general relativity and electromagnetism together in a single, unified framework.

Theoretical physicists weren’t discouraged, and attempted to solve the mismatch by taking a dramatic leap into a fifth dimension, allowing general relativity and electromagnetism to be unified.  Alas, in a way that has become familiar with integrating approaches since then, there were some new inconvenient problems.  The postulated fifth dimension couldn’t impact anything in our four-dimensional spacetime; it must somehow ‘disappear’ from all the equations that impacted the observable physical world.  Moreover, scientists knew the universe didn’t merely conform to Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism, but required more, especially it required a quantum description for electromagnetism (at least), and other limiting postulates.

However, this was merely the beginning of formulating what would turn out to be many proposals that drew on extra dimensions. In one sense this was unproblematic, as in theory there could be more than three spatial dimensions to our Universe so long as those ‘extra’ dimensions were below a certain critical size that experiments had already explored. However, as soon as scientists began to talk about the notion of a Theory of Everything, their suppositions almost always required the addition of new entities — particles, fields, interactions, etc. — whose existence was already either ruled out or highly constrained by observations, measurements, and experiments by known results.  If there is a fifth dimension, it had to be so tiny and its effects so weak that it would not affect the body of data scientists had already collected and which revealed no evidence for its existence.

The quest for a Theory of Everything was to lead to enormous advances in physics during the 20th century, in nuclear physics, quantum physics, and particle physics. The combination of novel experimental results and new theoretical developments has helped us understand what appear to be the full suite of particles that exist in the Universe, what rules they followed in interacting and binding together, and how the forces that governed them behaved.  The result today is the Standard Model of elementary particles, simultaneously simple and contradictorily, full of complexities.

As a schoolboy I learnt about atoms and their building blocks, the trio of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Rather, now the electron is just the lightest of three generations of charged leptons: along with the muon and tau lepton. Then there are their antiparticles, plus a species of neutrino (and antineutrino) that is the corresponding ‘uncharged lepton’ to each of the charged leptons.  Confused?  What’s more, protons and neutrons are no longer considered fundamental particles, but are composite particles composed of quarks and gluons. Guess what:  there are three generations of quarks, with the up-and-down quarks (making up the first generation) having charm-and-strange and then top-and-bottom quarks as their heavier-generation counterparts.  Getting even more confused?  Hang on …Meanwhile, there are eight massless gluons (mediating the strong nuclear force), one massless photon (mediating the electromagnetic force), and three very massive W-and-Z bosons (mediating the weak nuclear force), plus the Higgs boson to complete the Standard Model.  Yes, it does seem confusing, but despite this veritable zoo of particles, every particle-based experiment performed, and every detector set up to observe particles ever concocted has only found evidence of these particles and these particles alone, with the properties given to them by the Standard Model framework.

It’s not surprising to read that many have sought — and are still seeking — the elusive Grand Unified Theory, a theory of everything, one that includes gravity, string theory and additional symmetries, additional dimensions, additional extra particles, or additional unification frameworks. It seems in confronting these ideas there’s an enormous amount of trouble. All of the new ideas necessitate adding further ingredients to our reality: ingredients which can lead to new interactions or decays of the particles we already know about.   However, we already have masses of data on how the known (Standard Model) particles interact and decay (or appear forbidden from interacting or decaying), we have to take extreme care that any attempt toward a Theory of Everything doesn’t conflict with already-existing data, particularly with the data we have from particle physics experiments.

One popular approach is string theory (and positive geometry). Instead of one extra dimension, there are many: at least six and as many as 22 in addition to the four we know about. Instead of relying on such esoteric behaviours as magnetic monopoles, extra Higgs sectors, superheavy bosons admitting proton decay, and left-right symmetric features, they have even more. Instead of space, there’s superspace; there’s supergravity; there’s not just the conventional ‘for every Standard Model particle, there’s a superpartner particle’ version of supersymmetry, leading to suggestions there are four new super symmetries and hundreds of additional new particles.  It seems as though, by adding more and more and more and ingredients, ingredients that aren’t reflected in observations we grow and worsen, the puzzles we’re facing when it comes to the Universe today.

From the outside, and looking at this confusing array of developments, there’s one obvious question that haunts the scientists: do our theoretical ideas line up with reality? When we formulate attempts at a Theory of Everything, it is important to remember the goals of science are working “to maximize our predictive power of nature’s phenomena with as few assumptions, parameters, and variables as are absolutely necessary”  Our current big scientific mysteries compel us to keep seeking truths about the Universe, given many aspects of reality that we cannot yet, fully explain. But relying on loose, superficial analogies and mathematical ingenuity is more than dissatisfying; it’s an approach that loses a fundamental connection with observable, measurable reality.

Unsurprisingly, there are many critics.  Paul Davies, (in Schrödingers’s Cat Flap, The Monthly: December 2026) offers a nice if quixotic comment on this state of affairs:

“In a famous remark, Albert Einstein once asked whether the Moon continues to exist when nobody is looking.  This startling comment stemmed from Einstein’s deep distrust of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics, the mind-bending theory that brilliantly describes the atomic microworld.  Now celebrating its centenary, quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory of all time.  It accurately explains the behaviour of matter from subatomic particles to stars, and has given us the laser, the transistor, MRI machines, superconductors, AI and much more.  Although quantum mechanics underpins much of modern technology, the foundations of the theory make no sense, shredding our everyday notions of reality and defying intuition. A century on, scientists remain deeply divided over what to make of it.”

What is this powerful theory that brings such practical benefits yet appears perplexing and paradoxical? In the mid 1920s scientist found the quantum microworld is riddled with uncertainty.  In itself, that is not so troublesome.  We are, after all, familiar with uncertainty in daily life.  Suppose you toss a coin and keep it concealed between your hands:  will it show heads or tails?  It’s fifty-fifty: you can look to find out which.  The fact that you didn’t know before looking which side of the coin faced up doesn’t affect the fact that it must have already been either heads or tails. Your observation merely uncovered a pre-existing reality.  Quantum uncertainty, however, denies that there is a pre-existing reality. Instead, atoms, molecules and subatomic particles don’t actually possess well-defined basic properties, such as position or orientation or speed, in the absence of an actual observation. You can measure, say, the location of an atom and find it to be somewhere. But that doesn’t mean the atom was already there before you looked.  Quantum mechanics says asking where the atom was an instant before inspecting is not only pointless, it’s meaningless.: “there is simply no fact of the matter of where the atom was located – a philosophically startling assertion.

In exploring the world of quantum theory and its applications, Davies ends with more philosophical problems.  “Is there a real world out there after all, even among atoms and molecules? Or is the unobserved microworld suspended in a state of existence limbo? There are a dozen or so rival attempts to make sense of quantum weirdness, ranging from invoking consciousness to adding new physical processes that collapse superpositions spontaneously into a single reality. But the most widespread attempt to make sense of the theory is to treat the alternative realities in a quantum superposition as “really real” parallel worlds. … Outlandish though the multiverse idea may seem, many distinguished physicists buy into it. … So, does the Moon exist when nobody is looking? A many-worlds advocate would answer yes, but with a vengeance: not only does the Moon exist, but there are also countless versions of the Moon, each existing in a separate branch universe amid an infinity of parallel realities. It is a conclusion that would have Einstein spinning in his grave.”

Inevitability

There is a popular strategy in looking back at past events to wonder ‘if only …’.  It’s tricky.  Any speculation about what could have been done is academic, but past events do shape the future.  Were the resulting outcomes inevitable?  Looking at alternatives may be worthwhile, as we might confront similar situations today, and thereby benefit from what we have learnt.

One example that has been on my mind is the decision to split British India in 1947, thereby creating the current nations of India and Pakistan (and a little later Bangladesh as well).  The process was described as the ‘Partition’ of India, and inthe process of allocating people to  the provinces between the two new countries many people were displaced, and two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, were actually split. As a result of the partition somewhere between 12 and 20 million people had to move, doing so based on religious lines.  The result was a refugee crisis, the inevitable consequence of the mass migration and population transfers that took place between the newly constituted countries.  Equally inevitably, there was trouble.  The process led to large-scale violence, and estimates of loss of life range from at least several hundred thousand up to possibly as many as two million people killed.

The events in 1947 had been preceded by a long history of tensions between Muslims and Hindus.  However, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 enhanced existing tensions when Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, declared war on India’s behalf, and doing so without consulting Indian leaders.  This dramatically increased some of the underlying tensions in the country.  On one side Congress provincial ministries to resigned in protest.   On the other, the Muslim League held “Deliverance Day” (deliverance from Congress dominance) and supported Britain in the war effort.   The League’s action was followed in March 1940, at its annual three-day session in Lahore, when the leader of the All-India Muslim League observed that Muslims and Hindus were ‘irreconcilably opposed monolithic religious communities’ and as such, no settlement could be imposed without outraging one side or the other.

Perhaps seeking to defuse the situation, in August 1940, Linlithgow proposed that India be granted self-governing (dominion) status after the war. To allay Muslim fears of Hindu domination, the ‘August Offer’ was accompanied by the promise that a future constitution would consider the views of minorities.  Unsurprisingly neither Congress nor the Muslim League were satisfied with the offer, and both rejected it.   However, in March 1942, after the fall of Singapore and with the Americans supporting independence for India, Prime Minister Winson Churchill offered dominion status to India at the end of the war in return for the Congress’s support for the war effort.   Not wishing to lose the support of the Muslim League the offer included a clause stating that no part of the British Indian Empire would be forced to join the post-war dominion.  Both the League and the Congress party rejected this offer too.

In August 1942, Congress launched the Quit India Resolution, asking for major constitutional changes.  The British saw this act as the most serious threat to their rule since in nearly 100 years.  Alarmed, they immediately jailed the Congress leaders where they to remain until August 1945.  This left the Muslim League free for the next three years to spread its message.  Their leader admitted, “The war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.”  The British accepted the League was the key representative of Muslim India

After the Second World War, change was in the air.  Labour won the 1945 General Election, and decided to end British rule in India.  In early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948, and issued their Cabinet Mission Plan.  This proposed preserving a united India which the British and Congress desired, while concurrently securing the League’s demand for a Pakistan.  The scheme was a federal arrangement consisting of three groups of provinces. Two of these would consist of small predominantly Muslim provinces, while the third would be made up of the large remaining Hindu region. The provinces would be autonomous, but the centre would retain control over defence, foreign affairs, and communications. Though the proposals did not include a truly independent Pakistan, the Muslim League accepted the proposals, but Congress leaders believed it would leave the centre weak, and rejected the suggested provincial groupings .

After the Cabinet Mission broke down, in July 1946 the Muslim League stated it was “preparing to launch a struggle” and that they had a plan.  If the Muslims were not granted a separate Pakistan then they would launch ‘direct action’. When asked to be specific, their leader Jinnah explained: “Go to the Congress and ask them their plans. When they take you into their confidence I will take you into mine. Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble.”.  He announced that 16 August 1946 was to be Direct Action Day, and warned Congress, “We do not want war. If you want war we accept your offer unhesitatingly. We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India.”.

On that morning, armed Muslim gangs gathered in Calcutta to hear the League’s Chief Minister of Bengal, who, in the words of historian Yasmin Khan, “if he did not explicitly incite violence certainly gave the crowd the impression that they could act with impunity, that neither the police nor the military would be called out and that the ministry would turn a blind eye to any action they unleashed in the city.” The same evening in Calcutta, Hindus were attacked by returning Muslim celebrants, an event later called the ‘Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946.’  The next day, Hindus struck back, and the violence continued for three days during which some 4,000 people died.  The violence wasn’t confined to the public sphere, but homes were entered and destroyed, women and children were attacked.  Although the Government of India and the Congress were shaken by the events, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as the ‘united’ India’s prime minister.

The communal violence spread.  UK Prime Minister Attlee appointed Mountbatten as India’s last Viceroy, giving him the task to oversee British India’s independence by 30 June 1948, with instructions to avoid partition and to preserve a united India, but with an adaptable authority to ensure a British withdrawal with minimal setbacks.  Mountbatten hoped to revive the Cabinet Mission scheme for a federal arrangement for India, but the tense situation led him to conclude that partition had become necessary for a quick transfer of power.

When Lord Mountbatten formally proposed an Indian Independence Plan on 3 June 1947, Congress’s leader Patel gave his approval and lobbied Nehru and the other Congress leaders to accept the proposal.  Knowing Gandhi’s deep concerns over partition, Patel advised him on  the perceived practical unworkability of any Congress-League coalition,  which seemed likely to lead to a further rise in violence, and even the threat of civil war. At the All-India Congress Committee meeting called to vote on the proposal, Patel said:

“I fully appreciate the fears of our brothers from [the Muslim-majority areas]. Nobody likes the division of India, and my heart is heavy. But the choice is between one division and many divisions. We must face facts. We cannot give way to emotionalism and sentimentality. The Working Committee has not acted out of fear. But I am afraid of one thing, that all our toil and hard work of these many years might go waste or prove unfruitful. My nine months in office have completely disillusioned me regarding the supposed merits of the Cabinet Mission Plan. … Freedom is coming. We have 75 to 80 percent of India, which we can make strong with our genius. The League can develop the rest of the country.” 

Menon, V. P. Transfer of Power in India. p. 385.

In June 1947, the nationalist leaders agreed to a partition of the country, despite it being in stark opposition to Gandhi’s views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan, including a division of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal into two parts.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the communal violence that followed the publication of the line of partition, the Radcliffe Line, was horrific.   At a press conference on 3 June 1947, Lord Mountbatten announced the date of independence – 14 August 1947 – and also outlined the details of the actual division of British India between the two new dominions in what became known as the ‘Mountbatten Plan’ or the ‘3 June Plan’.  This included the provision that Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab and Bengal legislative assemblies would meet and vote for partition. If a simple majority of either group wanted partition, these provinces would be divided.  The separate independence of Bengal was ruled out.

Indian political leaders accepted the Plan on 2 June.  The outcome was politically adroit.  The Muslim League’s demands for a separate country were conceded.  Congress’s position on unity was also acknowledged, while making Pakistan as small as possible.  One leader, Abul Kalam Azad, expressed concern over the likelihood of violent riots, but Mountbatten replied:

At least on this question I shall give you complete assurance. I shall see to it that there is no bloodshed and riot. I am a soldier and not a civilian. Once the partition is accepted in principle, I shall issue orders to see that there are no communal disturbances anywhere in the country. If there should be the slightest agitation, I shall adopt the sternest measures to nip the trouble in the bud.

On 18 July 1947, the British Parliament passed the India Independence Act that finalised the arrangements for partition.  The Government of India Act 1935 was adapted to provide a legal framework for the new dominions.  In the event, dividing both Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces with slim Muslim majorities caused tremendous problems, as the demographic distribution of Hindus and Muslims was complex and ‘messy’.  The new borders ran through the middle of villages, towns, fields, and more.  Further, when Pakistan was created, East and West Pakistan were separated by about 1,000 miles (some 1,600 km).  The commission also effectively sliced the large Sikh population in Punjab in half.  As a result, nearly the entirety of the Sikh community ultimately fled to areas that would become part of India.

Mountbatten administered the independence oath to Jinnah on the 14th, before leaving for India where the oath was scheduled on the midnight of the 15th.   On 14 August 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor-General in Karachi.  The following day, 15 August 1947, India, now the Dominion of India, became an independent country, with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru appointed Prime Minister. Mountbatten remained in New Delhi for 10 months, serving as the first governor-general of an independent India until June 1948.  Gandhi remained in Bengal to work with the new refugees from the partitioned subcontinent.

The borders of the new countries were not published until August 17, two days after the end of British rule. This set the stage for an immediate escalation of communal violence in areas around the new borders. Many ordinary people did not understand what partition meant until they were in the middle of it, sometimes literally. If a border village was roughly evenly divided between Hindus and Muslims, one community could argue that the village rightly belonged to India or Pakistan by driving out or killing members of the other community.

The result was mass migration between the two newly formed states in the months immediately following the partition. There was little realisation that population transfers would be necessary because of the partitioning. Religious minorities were expected to stay put in the states there they were still residing. An exception was made for Punjab, where transfer was organized because of the communal violence affecting the province,  but this did not apply to any other provinces.  The population of undivided India in 1947 was about 390 million. Following the partition, there were perhaps 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million people in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Once the boundaries were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders into what they hoped was the relative safety of a religious majority. The 1951 Census of Pakistan identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at 7,226,600, presumably all Muslims who had entered Pakistan from India; the 1951 Census of India counted 7,295,870 displaced persons, apparently all Hindus and Sikhs who had moved to India from Pakistan after partition.

During partition, the idea of a full population exchange was a contentious issue that led to differing opinions among Indian leaders.  Some supported the idea of a complete population exchange between India and Pakistan. This meant that all the 42 million Muslims in India would move to Pakistan, while all the 19 million Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities West and East Pakistan would migrate to India. Its rationale was based on the idea of ensuring lasting communal peace by eliminating the possibility of future inter-religious conflicts and reducing the risk of large-scale violence.  It suggested that such a population exchange, though harsh, was a practical solution to the communal problems that had led to Partition:  it was believed that the lingering presence of hostile minorities could lead to future instability.

These concerns were rejected, both by Nehru and Ghandi, and a full population exchange did not occur.  When a partial migration took place, the 14.5 million people who crossed borders did so amidst horrific violence, while millions remained where they had lived.  This was to have profound and continuing repercussions.  India retained a Muslim population, which was to grow to become a significant minority, while Pakistan’s Hindu and Sikh populations dwindled drastically over the decades due to migration and persecution.  The absence of a full exchange almost certainly contributed to enduring communal tensions and periodic conflicts over the  years.  We will never know if a full exchange might have prevented these issues.

The scale of population movements was huge.  As soon as the new borders were announced, roughly 15m Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs left (fled?) from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. Some people were able to take trains or buses from one country to another, but most were forced to flee on foot, joining refugee columns that stretched for miles. These columns were the target of frequent ambushes,  as were the trains that carried refugees across the new borders. In the course of that exodus, perhaps as many as 2 million  people were slaughtered in communal massacres (though the lack of any meaningful documentation has left open a wide range of estimates). Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new division, suffered the highest proportion of casualties.  While the worst of the violence took place during the first six weeks of partition, the consequences of those weeks have played out over the decades.

Given this the obvious question is:  Was there a better way to create an indepedent India?

Brick by Brick

It must be a strange sight for a young child, to be confronted by a pile of plastic bricks, with no instructions as to what to do.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many small children find the big and brightly coloured blocks fun to play with, and pile on top of one another.  Then they begin to fit them together and eventually find there are ways to connect wheels to their creations.  Moving toys!  Around 6 or seven years of age, they find there is another, smaller set of blocks, still interlocking and still using primary colours (although some other shades are included).  Soon, they discover they are being given bigger boxes, and each contains an assembly of component blocks with which they are able to build much larger structures, ranging from houses and commercial stores through to racing cars and familiar places, a diverse range including models to build of such places as the Eiffel Tower, Neuschwanstein Castle, and the Antarctic exploration vessel Endurance.  Of course, not all children as they grew up abandon their hobby and continue to use their Lego collection to become AFOLs, Adult Fans of Lego, thereby remaining as lifetime Lego builders (LLBs?).!

Lego first appeared in 1932, and at that time it comprised wooden toys made in the workshop of a carpenter from Billund, in Denmark.  By 1934 the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, had named his company ‘Lego’, a name which was based on the Danish phrase leg godt (meaning ‘Play Well’).  Several years later Lego began producing plastic toys, and by 1949 it commenced a new product line, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, and called them “Automatic Binding Bricks”.  They were initially manufactured from cellulose acetate, offering an enhancement of traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.  The company adopted Christiansen’s motto, “only the best is good enough”, a comment still reinforced by the company today.  The motto was to serve as a way to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value in which he believed very strongly.   By 1951, plastic toys accounted for half of the company’s output, even though many had initially believed  plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys.

Lego was first sold in Denmark in 1957, and the company expanded its sales across Europe towards the end of the 1950s, before expanding outside the European continent from the 1960s.  It was Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, who saw the immense potential in Lego bricks in becoming a system for creative play.  However, the bricks still had problems:  their locking ability was rather limited, nor were they particularly versatile.  In 1958, a new modern brick design was developed; using ABS for manufacturing, which allowed the company to make use of an attractively coloured manufacturing material five years later.   ABS, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, is a durable, tough plastic which Lego has used since 1963 for most of its bricks.   Duplo, an alternative for younger children based on larger bricks was introduced in 1969 becoming a range of blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height, and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children.

Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variations in the design and the purposes of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces.  Bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made today, and sets for younger children are compatible with those made for teenagers.  As an aside, it turns out that six bricks with 2 × 4 studs can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.  This ‘simple’ system makes massive manufacturing demands:  when two pieces are engaged, they must fit firmly yet be easily disassembled.

Despite various mis-steps and challenges, overall the company grew and grew.  On 7 June 1968, Legoland Park opened in Billund, featuring elaborate miniature towns built entirely from Lego bricks. The three-acre (12,000 m²) theme park attracted 625,000 visitors in its first year alone. Over the next two decades, the theme park grew to more than eight times its original size and eventually attracted close to a million visitors annually. Sales of Lego sets also reached more than eighteen million units in 1968.  This pattern of growth was increased in the following year, 1969, when the Duplo system came into shops.

Designed to be used by younger children, Duplo bricks are much larger than Lego bricks, safer for young children (preventing them from eating them!), and the two systems are compatible: Lego bricks can be fitted neatly onto Duplo bricks.  Indeed, the name Duplo comes from the Latin word duplus, which translates literally as double, meaning that a Duplo brick is exactly twice the dimension of a Lego building brick (2× height by 2× width by 2× depth) so that a Duplo brick is eight times the volume of the Lego brick alternative.

Despite overall growth, like any business Lego has had its ups and downs over the years.  However, The Guardian reported that by August of this year Lego had recorded sales of £4bn and sales rose by 12%.   Their Chief Executive suggested this recent surge in growth could be the result of parents’ desire to keep children – and themselves – away from smartphones, helped by strong sales of its Botanicals and Formula One grand prix-themed sets.

CEO Christiansen said:

“We see ourselves as competing for children’s time. The most important thing is to provide relevant and exciting experiences” and has seen the company signing deals to produce toys linked to the Bluey and Pokémon cartoon series and launching the She Built That campaign to encourage girls to use Lego creatively. The company has seen success with its Botanicals range of plant-inspired building sets for adults, especially for Valentine’s Day and Easter.

Lego is clearly a global business.  Recently, sales have begun to grow in China, after a tough start to 2024, and the company expects worldwide sales to continue to rise by about 9% in the second half of the current year given the existence of “strong consumer demand”.  The company now has six factories in operation, in Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Mexico, China, Vietnam, with a further addition planned to open soon in Virginia, USA.  It uses an international business model, with several facilities focusing on molding and others on decoration and packaging.  The production process involves injecting molten plastic into molds to create bricks, with rigorous quality control checks to identify defects and ensure colour accuracy. The company has to aim for high precision; with the result their approach ensures bricks made today continue to fit with those made back in 1958.  The manufacturing process starts with plastic granules heated and injected under high pressure into molds to form bricks.  Today, Lego recycles almost all its plastic waste from manufacturing, with non-reusable plastic sold to other industries. 

The group has benefitted from its strategy of having manufacturing facilities as close to markets as possible, and also adopting a lean production approach whereby it seeks to produce only what is needed and simultaneously keeping stocks tight.  Lego has talked about taking steps such as making  some of its toy tyres from a material derived from recycled fishing nets, ropes and engine oil. The company is also introducing e-methanol, a material made from mixing renewable energy and CO₂ from biowaste, to create rigid Lego elements such as wheel axles and minifigure hands.

Actually, it is much more than that.    According to an article in Sustainability, it seems ‘Lego is Building Towards a More Sustainable Future’ (in a report by James Darley, 7 September 2024), as Lego expands its supply chain, smart choices and thinking are helping the Danish toy company meet its sustainability targets and achieve growth.  Surprisingly in a toy industry grappling with market downturns, Lego has not only maintained its position at the top of the tree but has also posted record-breaking results for the first half of 2024.  However, Darley reports the Danish toymaker’s success goes beyond profit margins. It is commitment to sustainability, particularly within its supply chain, which is setting new standards for the industry and providing a blueprint for responsible manufacturing.

James Darley writes that a key to this approach is using sustainable materials as the foundation for operational changes.  Recently Lego has made major increases in the proportion of sustainable materials it uses in its bricks. During the first half of 2024, the company reported that 30% of all the resin it purchased was certified under the mass balance principle, translating to an estimated 22% of material sourced from renewable and recycled sources.  This is a substantial improvement from 2023, when only 18% was certified mass balance, equating to 12% sustainable sources for the full year. Sources suggest that if it  continues to make similar year-on-year progress, it could reach the point where its products could be 100% sustainable within the next two decades.

Carsten Rasmussen, COO at the LEGO Group, says:

“We continue to invest in expanding our global supply chain network, maintain a strong focus on harvesting productivity and have made significant progress on our sustainability ambitions by increasing the amount of sustainable raw material used in our products.”

The company has set ambitious targets for the coming years, aiming to purchase more than half of its raw materials from sustainable sources, seeking to reduce its use of virgin fossil materials.  At the same time, a key initiative in this area is the launch of a Supplier Sustainability Programme, which mandates that suppliers set emission reduction targets by 2026 and further targets by 2028. Lego has even linked annual carbon emissions reductions to employee bonuses, creating strong incentives for its sustainability team.  While Lego seeks to focus on expanding its supply chain, they locate production and distribution facilities close to major markets.  Recent developments include opening factories in Vietnam and Virginia.

It’s sustainability initiatives are not just good for the planet, they’re also good for business. The company reported revenue growth of 13% and consumer sales growth of 14% in the first half of 2024, significantly outperforming the toy industry. Operating profit grew by 26% and net profit by 16% compared to the same period in 2023.  Niels B Christiansen, the current CEO, emphasises sustainability in the company’s strategy, achieving double-digit growth while significantly increasing sustainable materials in our products.”

Perhaps it is almost superfluous to say it, but the other strength of Lego is design, of course.  The company’s product development cycle is focussed on ensuring adherence to the Lego approach and  style.  Proposals go through a rigorous assessment process before they move to testing and production, ensuring the attractiveness of the kits isn’t compromised .  Their CEO notes “We used our solid financial foundation to further increase spending on strategic initiatives, which will support growth now and in the future to enable us to bring learning through play to even more children.”  He might have added ‘through offering compelling and engaging products to delight our customers’.

Oh, and one more comment.  My partner is a long term AFOL, and I’m a recent convert.  It offers a great range of buildings and vehicles to construct, using an astonishing range of building components.  Our local Lego store is a place we visit frequently, trying to decide which model we ‘ll build next.  Surprised  to learn we’re fans?

St Martin’s Cathedral Utrecht

Major cities across Europe become packed in the summer months.  It’s not just Paris, Rome and Berlin:  a day in Vienna, Bucharest or Prague is going to be equally overwhelming, and today the tide of tourists is sweeping through Split, Dubrovnik and Valletta.  Packed cities have to respond to the needs of their visitors, and so the roads in the centre of these cities are lined with shops selling souvenirs, food (tea rooms and cafes offering snacks), and cheap summer clothing alongside the usual range of international fashion stores.  Municipalities are trying to work out how to manage the influx, which often runs for six, eight or even ten months.  Cars may be banned, tourist buses have to go to special areas, and public transport is limited in most inner city areas.  In the centre holidaymakers can be found sitting at a streetside coffee shop while another member of the family braves the flood to go shopping.

So it was in Utrecht in the summer of 2025, as this formerly quiet city in the Netherlands now receives hundreds, no thousands, of enthusiastic visitors.  After a coffee and pastry at the Winkel van Sinkel and continuing to battle through the streets, they can see a church tower behind some of the shops.  It is the 112-metre-high (367 ft) Dom Tower, the hallmark of the city.  Navigating the narrow streets, you eventually arrive at the Domplein, where you realise the church tower is quite separate from the Domkerk, the gothic cathedral!

Well, perhaps we’ll leave that a sight for a moment ‘over there’ and return to the Winkel van Sinkel.  Anton Sinkel was born in 1785, and in 1806 he established a store selling fabrics and textiles.  He was a pioneer in  retail business with his haberdashery store which dealt in clothing fabrics, stockings, hats, and more .  His ambition is described in the popular song “In de Winkel van Sinkel is van alles te koop” (In the Winkel van Sinkel, everything is for sale)”. However, the store became famous because of four caryatids that supported the building’s façade colloquially known as the ‘British harlots’, as “Due to their visible décolleté, these figures were believed to be a potential threat to the moral values of the citizenry.” Today they are seen as less offensive, but according to legend, “only at midnight, the caryatids swiftly and inconspicuously fly across the canal to the opposite side and back again.”

Returning to the cathedral, the best way to see it is from the air, a balloon flight out of the reach of most of us.  However, the proportions become clear, a massive spire towering above much of the city, separated by a small park area, and the other side of the open space the remains of the rest of the church, a major building in its own right, but its height diminished by that spire:

So much for what you see.  The story of St Martin’s is fascinating in its own right.  Wikipedia reveals the first chapel was founded around 630 AD by Frankish clergy, but it was destroyed during an attack shortly after, and its site remains unknown.  It was the beginning of a cycle of rebuilding and destruction.  A second chapel devoted to Saint Martin was built close to the site of the current building soon after, but was destroyed by the Normans during a raid on Utrecht in the 9th century .  It was rebuilt by Bishop Bladeric in the 10th century, by which time St Martin’s had become the principal church of Utrecht, the site of the see of a bishop.

The life of the cathedral remained challenging.  The church was repeatedly destroyed by fires and then rebuilt.  Then Bishop Adalbold built a Romanesque style church, which was  consecrated in 1023, only to be  partially destroyed in the fire of 1253 which ravaged much of Utrecht.  Undaunted, another bishop, Henry van Vianen, began building the next cathedral in 1254. but the  construction of the Gothic style cathedral was to continue into the 16th century.  The work was in stages: the Dom Tower was started in 1321 and finished in 1382.  By 1515 financial difficulties prevented completion of the building, and in 1566, the Iconoclast Fury swept across the region, a movement based on the Calvinist doctrine, which asserted statues in a house of God were idolatrous images which must be destroyed. As a result, many of the ornaments on both the exterior and interior of Utrecht’s cathedral were destroyed.

In 1580 the Utrecht city government decided to delegate some of its controls over the Diocese of Utrecht to local Calvinists, and now it became a centre for Protestant services.  However, the building’s saga continued, and in  1672-3, during the upheavals of the Franco-Dutch War, Catholic Masses recommenced – for two years!  After the French retreat, the unfinished nave collapsed on 1 August 1674 during a massive tornado. From that time on, much of the building fell into further neglect.  Despite significant renovations in the early twentieth century, much was left incomplete and the nave was never rebuilt.

Images and history are important, but both can only offer a partial insight to a place.  However, as the saying goes, ‘you have to be there’.  Visually, there are two very different perspectives on St Martin’s today.  For the visitor to Utrecht standing outside the cathedral area , the only visible perspective from a short distance away is of the tower as it rises above the surrounding buildings.  It soars above the shops and other buildings in the town centre, but you are well aware you are only seeing the upper part of the construction.

Moreover, although you can see it from a distance away, it is hard to reach.  As you get closer, passing the Winkel van Sinkel, it seems to be one of those illusions where the tower retreats behind buildings and never appears to become any closer.  There are some streets that take a straighter line, but for the visitor walking alongside the Oudergracht, which takes a couple of 90° around the area, any direct line of sight at ground level is impossible.

The second perspective is from the Domplein itself.  Once you are there, there are buildings close by to the West and North.  The best perspective is from the South, but even then the tower seems to reach up so high you can’t really encompass what it is like.  It’s an impressive sight, as is the cathedral building and other offices and meeting rooms across the way, but close by the tower rises above any normal sight line.  It is a little frustrating.  In many other cities the authorities, or possibly the church itself, would be able to keep quite a large area clear.  In Utrecht, the height of the tower combined with closeness of the retail area, and some offices, means that a real appreciation of the height is impossible. That balloon flight mentioned earlier would be ideal.

A completely different way of seeing the cathedral is from the inside.  On entering you’re shocked as it appears almost empty.  Just two stained glass windows to grab your attention, and the internal decoration is simple to the point of being austere.  There’s an altar in the Choir, with a beautiful screen and carving behind.  Overall the church has a simple beauty, but it is found in its simplicity, the very opposite of so many cathedrals in other places.

However, then you turn around and see the organ.  The case and pipes are set on one of the side walls, with the keyboards and pedal board below.  Built by Jonothan Batz, the instrument dates from 1831, although it incorporates parts of an earlier organ, built by Pieter Janszoon de Swart between 1569-1571.  It is said to precisely conform to the type of instrument that was being built in the Netherlands throughout the 19th century.  Some research revealed that a “church architect, Tieleman Franciscus Suys, from Brussels, designed the case and ornaments, as well as constructing a small building at the back of the church to house the nine wedge-shaped bellows. The case is in a kind of neo-classical style, although in size and proportion  (the length of many of the front pipes are far longer than what is required for the pitch needed ), not strictly functional.”

Wikipedia advises that the organ had  been superbly designed internally “so that every pipe and each division, with all of its parts can be easily accessed for maintenance and tuning, which was very favourably commented on by probably the greatest organ builder of the 19th century, Aristide Cavaille’-Coll (1811-1899), about the spacious internal layout during a visit he made here in November 1844.”  There were many changes over the years.  Eventually the organ finally “underwent an extensive restoration between 1972-73 by the Van Vulpen company, which replaced all the stops that had been removed over the last 107 years, and a new modern wind supply with internal regulators was built within the main case, because there was nowhere outside to house a bellows chamber based on the space as originally constructed.”

The organ today is said to be widely acclaimed for its “mild tone and expressive tremulants which makes the instrument far more suitable for the late romantic or modern periods of composition, rather than for the strict Baroque counterpoint or fugal music of Buxtehude and Bach.“  It was wonderful to see.  Alas, I don’t know if it was wonderful to hear, as there was no-one playing on the organ, or even practicing when we were there.  Despite this it was a gem in a rather surprising building.

Barges

When I was at school, I discovered and loved Cargoes, a poem by John Masefield:

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

(Salt-Water Poems, © 1902).

How could you not love the images.  A cargo for distant Ophir with ivory, peacocks, sandalwood, sweet white wine.  A galleon returning with diamonds, gold and other jewels – probably plundered for another ship, out there on main.  And then that lovely British coaster, dirty, carrying dirty industrial materials – and fighting its way up the English Channel.  Nostalgic, vivid, and somehow pulling off the trick of making that British coaster just as noteworthy as a quinquereme or a galleon.

The sailing ships of old were romantic and exciting., especially when they appeared in films packed with swashbuckling sailors.  There’s the Black Pearl,  the pirate ship from the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, captained by Jack Sparrow.   The Black Pearl was originally a merchant vessel named the Wicked Wench, sunk and  resurrected by Davy Jones, renamed, and with its new name became infamous for its black sails and hull.  It was a symbol of freedom for Jack Sparrow, known for being “nigh uncatchable, and a symbol for freedom on the high seas.

The Black Pearl was far more exciting than the captain of that legendary ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, who once found himself struggling to round the Cape of Good Hope during a ferocious storm.  He swore that he would succeed even if he had to sail until Judgment Day. The Devil heard his oath and took him up on it; the Flying Dutchman was condemned to stay at sea forever.  Even the Hispaniola, the ship on which Jim Hawkins sailed to Treasure Island, plays a minor part in that adventure.  In contrast to these, the Black Pearl was rather more exciting as it kept sinking and reappearing!

Against such alternatives, Masefield’s short poem provides us with a brief but vivid commentary on the history of ships, shipping, consumption, and empire.  Much had changed. If Masefield is to be believed, once ships had exotic names and sailed through idyllic climes to and from faraway destinations with strange and marvellous cargoes. However,  by the turn of the 20^th Century, dirty, polluting ships made their way through bad weather in the English Channel, with a cargo not only produced in the same country it was shipped to, but was cheap and plentiful—a cargo for the masses instead of the kings and queens of yesterday. These three snapshots offer us both the lushness of poetry, and an insight into change.

I suspect that even that British coaster is just about lost to change.  Today, if you travel by sea, one of the more familiar sights among the huge cruise liners are container ships.  Massive, slow-moving, they always seem top-heavy.  Cargo ships provide the essential underpinning for trade, and these ships can be separated into two broad categories by the goods they transport:  bulk cargo and break bulk cargo.  Bulk cargo refers to material in either liquid or granular form, and includes such goods are crude oil, grain, coal, and gravel.  Bulk cargo is usually dropped or poured into a ship’s hold.  Break-bulk cargoes, in contrast, are transported in packages, and are generally manufactured goods.

Much has changed since Masefield’s day.  Up until the 1950s, break-bulk items required manual loading, lashing, unlashing and unloading from the ship one piece at a time.  The only interesting variations prior to this time came through the development of standardized load units, which I learnt were first used in the late 18th century for shipping in England. In 1766, James Brindley, an engineer, was asked to assist in the transportation of coal, and designed the box boat “Starvationer” with 10 wooden containers, which operated between Alford and  Manchester via the Bridgewater Canal.

The idea was slow to catch on, but by the 1930s ships were used to carry the baggage of luxury passenger train customers in containers from London to Paris on flat rail cars.  In February 1931, the first container ship in the world was launched; the Autocarrier, owned by the Southern Railway, with 21 slots for containers.  Slowly the idea progressed, and the earliest recognised container ships appeared after the Second World War.  They were  converted oil tankers.  In 1951, the first purpose-built container vessels began operating in Denmark and in the USA between Seattle and Alaska.  Wikipedia records the first commercially successful container ship was the Ideal X, developed by Malcolm McLean, which on its first voyage on April 26, 1956, carried 58 metal containers between Newark, New Jersey and Houston, Texas.

It marked the beginning of a revolution in modern shipping, and from then on, progress accelerated.  By 1964, Adelaide Steamships had launched the world’s first fully cellular, purpose-built container ship.  This was the critical step in eliminating requirements for the individual hatches, holds and other storage dividers. The hull of a typical container ship is similar to an airport hangar, or a huge warehouse, which is divided into individual holding cells, using vertical guide rails. These cells are designed to hold cargo containers, typically constructed of steel, though some are made from aluminium, fiberglass or plywood.

Today, about 90% of non-bulk non-worldwide goods are transported by container, with around 50,000 container ships. Containers vary in size, carrying anything from, 1,000 to 3,000 cubic feet (28 to 85 m³) of cargo, with the result each can move up to about 64,000 pounds, (29,000 kg), at a time.  Global maritime container traffic is now around 160 Million TEUs (estimated to be more than 3 bn tons of goods).  TEU, the Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, is the standard unit of measurement used for cargo capacity in shipping, particularly for container ships and ports.  It is based on the volume of a standard 20-foot long container.

All very interesting, but my fascination isn’t with ships of old, pirate ships, British working ships or with container ships.  No, it’s with barges.

Just recently, I saw some Rhine barges.  Many of these are flat-bottomed, non-self-propelling vessels that are pulled (and can be pushed) by tugboats.  The ones I saw  were the powered versions, the flat bottomed design allowing them to deal with falling river levels.  Many of these barges are very large, far from easy to manoeuvre, and often rather slow moving.  They don’t share the immediately attractive features of many other varieties of shipping, but they are curiously hypnotic.

However, my enjoyment in looking at barges is really an exercise in nostalgia.  My childhood home was close to the Grand Union Canal.  Barges, known in those days as ‘narrowboats’ were the vehicles for  commerce on the canal from the late 1700s until the 1970s.  Initially horse-drawn, they were one of the most important ways to transport raw materials and finished goods .  It was competition from railways and the growth of  road traffic in logistics that led to the decline of traditional commercial barges in the mid-20th century, but when I was young I was just in time to see the horses disappear, and the transition to motorized and steam-powered vessels take place

That transition had begun in 1934 on the Grand Union Canal, when a company was formed to modernize the waterway, allowing the introduction of new, larger boats and modernizing locks to accommodate these wider barges, an initiative supported by the government in the hope of making the canal more competitive with railways.  There was some respite from the. decline in usage when the canal and its barges played a vital role in transporting war supplies during WWII.  Women even took on the work of operating the barges, as many men were in the armed forces.  Despite this, traffic continued to decline after the war ended.  The last regular long-distance cargo service ended in 1970. While some traffic continued into the 1980s, mainly sustained by the transport of aggregates, the rise of containerization and growth in road transport led to the commercial decline of the Grand Union Canal.

Today Britain’s canals are no longer the functional working canals of former centuries.  Instead, these water highways provide visitors and holidaymakers an opportunity to enjoy the tranquillity of the countryside, taking a barge holiday.   A few professional boatmen still live in communities on canal boats throughout Britain – gliding easily through the locks, keeping their self-decorated boats in good nick and going about their daily lives.  This is documented in Life on Britain’s Canals and Waterways  : a history of the canals of Britain and their people, (denhamhistory.online).

A part of my childhood, I wasn’t aware back then that waterways and canals had been a lifeline for British industry and agriculture for a very long time.  Indeed, canals can be traced as far back as Roman times when the Romans used canals for irrigation purposes and to connect existing waterways with one another.  Indeed, Romans built the Foss Dyke in Lincolnshire for drainage and navigation and the Caer Dyke around AD 50, shortly after the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD by the armies of Emperor Claudius.

What did I see?  I was watching the so-called “slow” boats on the canals, which often worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, and only in some cases tied up on Sundays. On the narrow canals these boats were operated by one man and a boy, occasionally two men, and later one man and his family. Slow boats were slow in another sense, as they didn’t operate on a strict timetable and would often wait until they had a full load before starting out.  They were distinguished from from the faster, lighter so-called “fly” boats which were first introduced in Scotland in 1830 to provide and “express” service for some commodities. No, I liked the slow boats!

The narrowboat was less than 7 feet in width and could be pulled by a single horse. They were designed for the waterways,  traditionally 21 m (70ft) long, just short enough to fit in the locks, which were usually 22 m (72 ft) long.  Most carried a load of approximately 25 tons.  They were usually horse drawn up until around World War I, and the steam engines which some boats used were considered to take up too much space.  However, diesel engines began to take over boats in the 1920s, and after the Second world war, horses were hardly ever seen.  The fly boat trade tended to be concentrated in the hands of big public carriers such as Pickfords who operated large fleets of boats and employed many men and horses.  After 1840 much of this trade was lost to the railway companies, and the last company, Fellows, Morton & Clayton failed  in 1948 – though its name and livery can still to be found, rather nostalgically, on boats on the canals today.

To protect and deliver the cargo safely and as quickly as possible, the boatman captain needed to steer a barge and keep a horse moving on the towpath.   The faster he got the cargo to its destination, the quicker he got paid.  The boat captain could earn extra money if he (and/or his family) could unload the cargo as well.  A woman who lived on board the barge would be expected to steer the boat occasionally and sometimes lead the horse on the towpath.  Reformers sought to remove female and child labour from the boats,  concerned with sanitation, morality and education rather than working conditions.  The number of women working on canal boats increased during the First World War to make up the gaps in the labour force which were created by men leaving to join the armed forces.  The number of men working independently on their own account appeared to double after the first World War.  At the same time the female labour force increased by 50 percent, and the proportion of women remained high until after WWII.

For a boy, the barge and life travelling along the English canals seemed attractive (and perhaps I thought it would have meant I could avoid going to school.  Did I think about the downside – no Meccano, no Eagle comic, little free time, and cramped living quarters?  I think what attracted me was the idea of freedom, always travelling.  I never whent on a barge, not even when barge holidays began to become available, but I suspect that sense of wandering that appealed to me was part of the source of the desire to move often in my adult life.

The Company

There are two usages that dominate the word ‘Company’, one very familiar, and the  other somewhat more limited.  That second usage is American, where The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is often called ‘the Company’ due to its role as the coordinator of intelligence activities and its origins in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  Indeed, it was first referred to as the Company during World War II.  The wartime OSS was the precursor to the CIA, and as a result the nickname carried over to the newly formed agency.  While The Company is an informal nickname, it reflects the CIA’s central position in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its historical roots in the OSS.

However, the choice of the nickname influenced by the history of Ivy League universities, especially Yale.  The very first American spies against the British in the War of Independence were educated at Yale.  Further, Russell & Company, the most successful American Company in the opium smuggling business, was very influential in all of the Ivy League universities and the Russell Family played a key role in Yale’s Skull and Bones, from which many went into intelligence.  Gaddis Smith, a History Professor at Yale, said, “Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” And “Bonesmen” have been foremost among the ‘spooks’ in the building known as the CIA’s ‘haunted house’.  Professor Antony Cyril Sutton of Stanford University wrote a book about how the Skull & Bones club focused on the Hegelian Dialectic: ‘Thesis Vs Antithesis which will create Synthesis’.  “The power elite applied this to Politics & Geopolitics with a few changes, rather than waiting for the Antithesis to evolve naturally, create the Antithesis in the first place and make gains & profits out of the evolving Synthesis. In other words, create a Problem against the established system, learn what type of Reaction will occur, find the Solution, and while achieving that collect the benefits.”

Then there is the more familiar usage, a company being “an organization that produces or sells goods or services in order to make a profit” (from the Cambridge Dictionary).  The word ‘the’ before ‘company‘ is key, of course:  by itself company refers to “the fact or condition of being with others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment’.  When 22 years ago, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige combined to write a ‘short history of a revolutionary idea’, The Company they were referring to the organisation (and not the CIA).

At the time, Micklethwait oversaw US issues for The Economist, and Wooldridge was the magazine’s Washington correspondent.  Micklethwait was appointed as editor-in-chief of The Economist in 2006, and in 2015, he was appointed as a Trustee of  the British Museum.  Currently he is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a position he has held since 2015.   Wooldridge worked at The Economist for more than 20 years.  In September 2021, he joined Bloomberg Opinionas the Global Business Columnist.

The Company is a fascinating book.  It was reviewed in 2012 in The Ratchet of Technology, by Michael Magoon.  He rated its scope 3.5 stars (out of 5); readability was 4 stars, while his personal rating was 5 stars.  He summarised its ideas in six key points.  First, he suggested it could be regarded as the most important organization in the world, concluding the modern company brought together three big ideas: “it could be an ‘artificial person’  with the same ability to do business as a real person; it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and investors could have limited liability.”

He went on to add some other factors.  He suggested that the modern corporation, invented in 19^th-Century Britain, has slowly spread throughout the world.  Americans added on some key attributes, that it employed professional salaried managers; that many had wide networks of suppliers; and it was organised into various operating units.  Later developments in Germany and Japan in particular enhanced the corporate model by utilising bank financing, largely through investment banks, and by focussing on developments based on connections with technical universities, combined with their own research and development labs.  In more recent decades the model has been complicated by developments such as the increasing use of lean manufacturing techniques, and by acquisition and selling by corporate raiders.  Today, especially in the West, it is often seen as the most important form of organization in the world.  Regulation has grown, and Companies Acts rapidly emerging in many countries, allowing entrepreneurs to raise money, safe in the knowledge that investors had protections.

Time has seen other gradual changes appear.  A company’s past is often more dramatic than its present, despite alarmist accounts in books like Barbarians at the Gate and Only the Paranoid Survive.  Many would also argue that, in general, companies have become more ethical, more honest, more humane, more socially responsible. The early history of companies was often one of imperialism and speculation, of frequent disasters, even the use of slavery and opium.  Generally free from these and other historical hangovers, the company today has given the West great competitive advantage. Finally, in more recent years we have seen a cluster of competing companies creating an innovative economy, like Silicon Valley.

As Micklethwait and Wooldridge make clear, today’s modern company has a long, varied and sometimes fascinating history.   In the early Middle Ages, the law began to recognize the existence of “corporate persons”: loose associations of people who wished to be treated as collective entities. These corporate persons included towns, universities, and religious communities, as well as guilds of merchants and tradesmen.  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of some remarkable business organisations: ‘chartered companies’ that bore the names of almost every part of the known world (“East India,” “Muscovy,” “Hudson’s Bay,” “Africa,” “Levant,” “Virginia,” “Massachusetts”).  Many were the lucky recipients of royal charters giving them exclusive rights to trade in specific areas.

These chartered companies also drew on two other ideas . The first was offering investment shares that could be sold on the open market. The other was limited liability. Colonization was so risky that the only way to raise large sums of money from investors was to protect them.  Approaches varied.  The Dutch East India Company obtained a monopoly from the state in 1602 and became a model for many chartered firms.  Investors were the first to trade their shares at a stock exchange:  the first was founded in 1611. Using a slightly different approach the English East India Company initially treated each voyage as a separate venture.

In the journal Medium, Rohan Murdeshwar, (on May 9, 2020) reviewed The Company, and noted: “One theme that flows through the book is the relationship between companies and the state. Between 1500 and 1750, the British and Dutch East India Companies grew to behemoths on the back of state-sanctioned monopoly power. Unlike their counterparts in the south of the continent, Northern European nations ‘subcontracted imperialism’ to privately owned companies resulting in a symbiotic relationship between company and state. The company was given monopoly rights and the state obtained a steady stream of revenue from the trade that followed.  Politicians in governments also received lucrative shares in the monopolies they’d delivered to the world, the world‘s first taste of crony capitalism.”

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the state began to step back, at first in the United States of America. There were three prompts for change. The most important was railroads, which by 1840 needed funds to build thousand miles of track to establish the bare bones of a national network.  This could only be financed by chartered joint-stock companies. The second was legal. In an 1819 ruling about the status of Dartmouth College, the Supreme Court found that corporations of all sorts possessed private rights, so states could not rewrite their charters capriciously. The last prompt was political. Concerns over losing potential business led legislatures to loosen control over companies.

However, these development were still a long way from modern shareholder capitalism. British law provided remarkably little protection for shareholders.   It was not until 1897, when the House of Lords ruled in favour of a leather merchant who had transferred his assets into a limited company, that the separate legal identity of the company, and the “corporate veil” of protection that it offered to its directors, was firmly established in UK law.

Why did these extraordinary organisations take off when they did? Alfred Chandler provided the classic answer: “Modern business enterprise” became viable “only when the visible hand of management proved to be more efficient than the invisible hand of market forces.” First, a new system of transport and communication was necessary.  The railroads were not just great enablers for modern business; they were also the first modern businesses.  The first American companies to take advantage of the railway infrastructure were in distribution and retailing.  In 1840, most goods were distributed around the country through a system of wheeling and dealing. Within a generation, distribution was dominated by giant companies. The 1850s and 1860s saw huge wholesalers emerge buying directly from producers and selling to retailers. Next modern mass retailers emerged, chain stores, department stores, and mail-order companies.  Integrated companies dominated most vital industries by the turn of the century.

From the middle of the 19th century to the early years of the twentieth, different approaches to capitalism across the world gave birth to different types of companies.  American and capitalism enthusiastically embraced each other, with a combination of light regulation, a scientific approach to management and a growing acceptance of business seeing the rise of large vertically integrated multidivisional firms. Across the Atlantic, a preference for small family firms meant British companies failed to develop the managerial expertise needed in in a globalising world. This was exacerbated by a “fatal snobbish distaste for business”.

In Germany and Japan, where companies were meant to serve the nation, stakeholder capitalism triumphed over shareholder capitalism. For example, capitalism in Germany “emphasised cooperation rather than competition”. The state took a leading role by legalising collusion and encouraging cartels as the resulting agreements on prices and output “benefited the country as a whole”.  Company boards included representatives from lenders, unions and government. Japan’s family-owned conglomerates, the zaibatsu, adopted western methods and hired managers from outside the family to run their business that “operated in a bewildering number of industries”. They were helped by the government which showered them with subsidies and put money into infrastructure, universities, helping business and offered credit.

America’s analytical approach to business takes us to the third theme in the book and the reason why American companies superseded their British counterparts in the early 20th century. The authors argue that the multidivisional firm, pioneered in the 1920s at General Motors, put American companies on the fast track to global domination. A centralised corporate strategy together with the latest “management science”, worked together like a well-oiled machine. Markets were segmented so that there was a car for “every purse and purpose” (General Motors), delivery trucks were painted with a strict shade of red (Coke) and “brand management” identified everyday items in people’s homes (Procter & Gamble).  Britain was reluctant to establish companies. Germany and Japan embraced the idea, but tried to twist it to rather different ends, such as workers’ welfare and the quest for national greatness.  British entrepreneurs clung to the personal approach long after American businesses had embraced professionalism. As late as 1939, a remarkable number of British firms were still managed by founding family members.  Germany’s companies were focussed on the new economy, especially metals, chemicals, and machinery. Both countries emphasised cooperation rather.

A second difference was the influence of the big banks. Germany’s capital markets were too localized and inefficient to power its industrialization. Germany’s bankers stepped into the breach by forming joint-stock and limited-partnership banks that duly channelled money from savers of all sorts, first into the railways and then, after the railways were nationalized in 1879, into young industrial companies like Siemens.   Germany’s success might owe less to stakeholder capitalism than to other practical issues. The first was emphasising scientific and vocational education, and technical universities acted as both research agencies and recruiting grounds.  German firms also developed internal laboratories investing in research and development.  Second was the relatively high respect accorded to managers.  Japan’s approach  had many similarities to Germany’s.  It embraced a conception of the company that combined up-to-date professionalism with a pronounced nationalism.  Mitsubishi was the model for the zaibatsu, Japanese conglomerates (“financial cliques”) that dominated business in the country until the Second World War (and were subsequently reborn as keiretsu.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual separation of ownership from control.  By 1920, the ‘Company Man’ combined professional standards and corporate loyalty:  he was defined by credentials rather than by lineage or collective muscle.   The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of Company Man, or Organization Man, as he became known.  Then came change.  The rate at which large American companies left the Fortune 500 increased fourfold between 1970 and 1990.  Big became a code for inflexibility. In 1974, America’s one hundred biggest industrial companies accounted for 35.8 percent of the country’s GDP; by 1998, that figure had fallen to 17.3 percent. Companies were gradually forced to focus on their “core competencies.”

Next came Silicon Valley which changed companies in two ways. The first was through the products it made. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the cost of computing processing tumbled by 99.99%, 35% a year. Computers offered increasing power, while the growing Internet reduced transaction costs.  It also changed the company with an alternative form of corporate life. The Valley epitomized the idea of “creative destruction” with much of the Valley’s growth coming from gazelle companies, firms whose sales had grown by at least 20% in each of the previous four years.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea is just that, too brief a book to answer pressing questions that businesses and society are asking today: Who are companies meant to serve? How should governments regulate monopolies? And what do companies need to do to make profits without destroying the planet? Rather than provide original insight, the authors summarise research by previous business historians.  However, the book’s well worth re-reading now, as the study of the past offers insights into organisations that have become increasingly important to understand in solving the problems of the present.

DD82 – Gods and Robots

It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human.  Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics.  Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.

Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities.  They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size.  It is also the case that  recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.

It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development.  However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the  mythical statue of Pygmalion.  In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton.  Not just the Greeks.  In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou.  To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.

All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press).  She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.”  In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.

To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”

The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”.  However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China.  If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you:  she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.

Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of  Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!).  However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks.  Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.

An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer.  Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors.  It is an excellent example of her cautious approach.  Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning.  She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.”  Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.

Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour.  That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book .  For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.

In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation.  Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.

Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures.  She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.

In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.

But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?

Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives.  Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.

It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’.  However, to do so is to miss the point.  As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago.  What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes.  Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China.  Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality.  He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible.  Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.

In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom.  In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus.   His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun.  It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.

If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations.  We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth.  However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us.  We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us.  It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.

Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?”  Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?

After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds.  The idea won’t go away.

DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test

Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’.  It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market.  Back in  1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953.  However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.

Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others.  I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible.  An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.

Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field.  She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.  Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that!  Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual.  Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology.  Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.

Her approach is refreshing.  She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:

“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.

What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”

Interesting?  She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour.  I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’   Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics.  She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.

That’s not all this busy academic does.  In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’.  The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities.  By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”

Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked.  Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas.  In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:

1. The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.

“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”

“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.  The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.”  …

2. Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.

“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”

“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”

3. Dogs are not exceptional.

“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t.  The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated.  “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.”  The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”

“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …

4. 4. Animals can treat their diseases.

“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”

“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …

5. Animals get mentally ill too.

“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”

“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”

“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.  This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”

OK!  Have I convinced you her books are worth reading?  Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point:  often her writing is funny as well as informative.  On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”.  Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation:  “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich?  Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls.  Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”

She also has a mischievous side.  :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden.  Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world.  Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability:  they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone.  The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?!   Weird?  No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least.  Zuk is like Pennant:  the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.

Is she coming out of left field?  Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected.  I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist.  However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising.  The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is  reassuringly sensible.  By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”.  If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.

Histories of Time

There are two ways we tend to think about time.  One has to do with the way we cut up time, so that we can refer to moments of importance, or of interest, or of necessity.  This is the topic Leofranc Holford-Strevens explores in his book, A Short History of Time (published by OUP in 2005).  The other is the nature of time itself, and the way this has been re-examined in order to see it as a key in helping us understand the nature of the universe.  This is the topic of Stephen Hawking’s brief (and exceedingly difficult to understand) book, A Brief History of time.  Two approaches to the history of time, and yet they couldn’t be more different.  If Holford-Strevens uncovers the various forms of the calendar, the ways in which we slice up the year into weeks and seasons, and other ways of ‘marking the year’, Hawking happily tosses all that aside, and suggests the real issue is the nature of time.

Holford-Strevens is disarmingly honest.  In the Preface to his short book includes a quote from St Augustine “So what is time?  If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not.”  He continues to make it clear that he is not going to address whether time has a beginning for an end, if it proceeds in a straight line or in cycles, nor is he going to delve into the idea that time is the fourth dimension of the universe.  He explains that he will “concentrate on the methods by which its passage is and has been measured”, the way the ‘man-in-the-street’ might consider it (pages ix-x).  It is for that reason that Chapter 1 focusses on ‘the day’, the period of time determined by the rotation of the earth.

A day:  so simple and clear a concept.  However, like most things, it isn’t quite as clear as you might think.  After all, when does a day ‘begin’?  Is it determined by daylight (which, inconveniently gradually appears at different times in many parts of the world, especially the further we are away from the Equator).  In most senses, of course, a day is determined by agreement not a physical sign, a day which Holford-Strevens describes as a ‘civil day’.  Given the changing time at which the sun rises and sinks, it isn’t surprising to discover that for many societies and at many times, the day would begin when the sun was at its highest point, at noon.  That has the incidental benefit that nightly observations by sailors and astronomers are all doing so during ‘the one day’, given our rather inconvenient separation of the hours before and after midnight as belonging to two separate but consecutive days.  However, we seem to be happy with the convention that the day extends through the daylight hours, and the change from one day to another occurs during the night.  With advantages in either direction, the determination of when a day begins is clearly a matter of convention.

If convention has shaped our views of days, what about hours?  Holford-Strevens reveals that the idea there were 12 daytime and twelve night hours can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians.  However, the length of each days varied through the seasons, but they had defined there were twelve hours of daylight in the summer and in the winter – in other worlds, daylight hours were long in the summer.  He reveals that was common practice in Europe up until the later part of the Middle Ages, and hence various references to twelve hours in the day.  Incidentally, a mid-day rest is often referred to as a ‘siesta’, which happens to be the old Spanish word for sixth …. Once the day was defined as beginning in the middle of the night, that led to another convention to be established, which is whether the hour after noon is the 13^th hour, or if you start again, and distinguish it as 1 pm!

It goes without saying, once we get past hours, things get far more complicated.  In Byzantine Greek times, the hour was divided in 5 leptá, each leptá into 4 stigmaí, and each stigmé into either 2 rhopaí (or 1½ minutes), 3 endeixeis (1 minute), or 12 rhipaí (15 sedond interbals), and each rhipé was 10 átomata.  In the Medieval Latin period each hour was divided into 4 puncta, and each punctum was 2 ½ minuta:  a minuta was 6 minutes in our time scale.  However, there was an alternative where there were 5 puncta per hour, 2 minuta per punctum, and each minutum could be broken down into 4 momenta (1 ½ mutes) or 6 ostenta (1 minute), each momentum into 12 unciae (7 ½ seconds), and each uncia was 47 or 54 atoimi.  Then there was the Hebrew calendar, where each hour had 1080 hâlãqîm (parts), and each heleq had 76 rega’îm (moments).  Confused?  So were the users, and variations were common.

Then came clocks, and now there was a need to displace apparent solar time with mean solar time (the time shown on a clock).  The two can vary by as much as 10 minutes over the course of the years (with the greatest variations late February and late November in the UK.   By the Eighteenth Century time, standardisation was becoming a key issue, and when solar time became the legal definition of time, as it did in the UK in 1792, variations still occurred as a function of the local meridian.  Eventually, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in the UK, and in 1880 enshrined in a statute.  However, Holford-Strevens adds “So completely has local time been forgotten so that the practice still observed at Christ Church, Oxford, that one is not late until five minutes past the appointed time, that is to say till one is late by local mean solar time (longitude 1° 15′ W of Greenwich), is a tradition regarded even in other Oxford colleges as no more than an amiable eccentricity.”

Almost there, but not quite.  Thinking about time in the Nineteenth Century, countries were busy standardising their time across their regions.  However, that left unresolved one other question, which was how to standardise time between countries, and, in particular, around the globe.  In 1884, an International Median Conference in Washington, DC, adopted a US proposal that the prime meridian ((0°) should pass through the “centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich”.  This has remained the case since then, although the French persisted for some years in showing 0° as passing through Paris.  In the end, they agreed, but with the concession that another French proposal be adopted, that researchers use decimal measurements of angles and times.  Almost finished, but for one final twist which was that time zones should be along the lines of meridians – but with some exceptions.  Iceland wanted to use Greenwich mean time, with France and Spain one hour ahead of it (but not Portugal!);  China and India imposed a single time zone of their huge territories, but Russia accepted having time zones spread over 11 zones.

If all of that was resolved, one puzzle remained.  This was when a date changed.  The convention was established that “an eastbound traveller crossing the meridian 180° east of Greenwich needs to give back the gained day, a westward-bound traveller to regain a lost day: ships therefore repeat the day when eastward bound, and suppress a day when westward bound” (and the same for air travellers – a real issue for those with watches that show dates!).  He goes on to discuss the tricky issue of the year being slight longer than 365 days, with conventions of leap years, atomic clocks and the like.  However, despite all the tiny adjustments, the 20^th Century seemed to have sorted out most time matters for travellers.

Ah, but only ‘most’ time matters!  That takes us to Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time.  Published in 1988, it takes us into hitherto unimaginable twists and turns in the story of time.  In just 13 pages, Hawking takes us through Holford-Strevens history.  In that first chapter, having arrived at the generally agreed theories of time up to the 1930s, he ends by suggesting that it is very difficult to draw together all the threads of science to offer a single theory that describes ‘the whole universe’.  Instead, he takes us past Holford Strevens summary, and into the strange world of time as it is being examined in the 21^st Century.  He suggests there are two basic but partial theories that confront us.  “The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million, million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.  Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch.  Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct”.  He might have added they also push to one side the nice story about time that Holford Strevens had written.

Hawking did start with familiar ground, reminding the reader about Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, before moving on to the 19^th Century.  This was when great discoveries about the nature of light and the speed of light were made.  There was a snag, which was that, however you measured it, and in whatever direction, light travelled at a fixed speed, irrespective of whether the observer was at rest or moving.  It was the Mitchelson-Morley experiment that presented us with this puzzle, and which remained unsolved for 28 years.  Then in 1905 Einstein presented his theory of relativity, of which the fundamental point was that the laws of science should be the same for all ‘freely moving observers, no matter what their speed’.

As with so many other revolutionary theories, the implications of Eistein’s theory were, to put it simply, astonishing.  In particular, it dispensed with the idea of absolute time.  This was illustrated by some challenging observations (even though the proof was to come many years later).  For example, two observers, one on top of a mountain and one at the bottom, might compare the performance of the clock each possesses (they are assumed to be very accurate).  The clock nearer the centre of the earth would run more slowly than the one at the top of the mountain.  Sounds slightly crazy, but it is true, and in the age of satellites it is very important:  given that time runs faster above the earth as compared to on the surface.  Calculating the position of the satellite would be inaccurate if you assumed time runs at the same rate for both, and such predictions of the satellite’s position would be wrong by several miles.

At the same time as the implications of Einstein’s theory were being considered, another challenge to our view of the universe emerged.  This was the result of the work of Edwin Hubble.  The starting point for this was consideration of the well-known Doppler effect.  If you are driving along the road, with an emergency vehicle coming towards you, the siren  is at a higher frequency than when it has passed and is travelling away.  Realising this was true for light waves as well as sound waves, Hubble found, by measuring the shift in the spectra of galaxies, that most appeared to be moving away from us, and the further away the galaxy, the faster it was moving away.  This revealed that the universe is expanding!

However, that has led to yet another extraordinary observation.  If the universe is expanding, then there must be a point in the past when everything was closer together.  Indeed, there must be a point, some 13.8 billion when the universe began, supposedly from a very small, hot, and dense state, one from which it has been expanding and cooling ever since.  This theory agrees with several pieces of evidence, including the abundance of light elements in the universe, and the existence of what is known as cosmic microwave background radiation.  But if we accept this, we’re left with yet another puzzle: what, if anything, existed before the “Big Bang” which is considered the beginning of space and time?

Hawking goes on to describe some other findings from the physical sciences.  These include the ‘uncertainty principle’, the continuing arguments about the nature and number of elementary particles, and the almost inconceivable topic of ‘black holes’.  However, having covered these, A Brief History of Time ends on two even more challenging topics:  the fate of the universe and the ‘arrow of time’.

In his chapter on the ‘Origin and Fate of the Universe’., Hawking quickly explains views known as the ‘standard model’, which are that the universe started as a very small, hot and immensely dense object, nearly 14 billion years ago, and started to expand very rapidly – the so called Big Bang.   As it expanded, it began to cool, and from that point on many observations at distant (and hence very early) objects have been the basis of a relatively robust model of what happened all the way from those first few thousand years after the Big Bang and change began.  However, Hawking points out there are some challenges:

1. Why was the early universe so hot?
2. Why is the universe so uniform on a large scale, as appears to be the case when you are looking at points of space in every possible direction?
3. How did the universe expand at the rate it did – if the rate of expansion had been smaller (by even one part in one hundred thousand million million), it would have collapsed?
4. Although the universe is so uniform at the large scale, there are many local irregularities (stars, galaxies), and so we need to explain how these emerged.
5. Finally and not on Hawking’s list, we might add a fifth puzzle: what was there before this time?  That’s a question for lay readers, even if it doesn’t bother astrophysicists.

Hawking asks that we think of the anthropic principle: “we see the universe the way it is because we exist’.  He distinguishes two versions of this.  The weak anthropic principle is that the conditions for intelligent life will only be met in some regions of the universe, the inhabitants of these regions should not be surprised if they observe their locality meets these conditions.  You might say we exist because we were in the right place at the right time.  If that isn’t odd enough, the ‘strong’ anthropic principle proposes there are many different universes, or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own configuration, and possibly its own set of laws of science.  We happen to be in one of those places.  If we weren’t, we wouldn’t exist.

How can all this make sense?  One dominant idea is that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion.  Very rapid?  In an early iteration of this model it was suggested that the radius of the universe might have increased one million, million million million times in a fraction of a second.  More to the point, it has been hypothesised that there was a point of singularity at the beginning of the universe, where all the laws of science as we know them were not in place.  If that isn’t enough to give a non-scientist a headache, a further element is Einstein’s idea that “the gravitational field is represented by curved space time:  particles try to follow the nearest thing to a straight path in curved space, but because space-time is not flat their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field.”  Indeed, Hawking goes on, “time is imaginary and indistinguishable from directions in space”.  As if that wasn’t enough, Hawking goes on to postulate that “space and time may form a closed surface without boundary … but if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.”

As Hawking remarks in the last chapter of his Brief History “We find ourselves in a bewildering world.  We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe?  What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?  Why is it the way it is?”  This is the desire to find a ‘unified theory’.  So far, that eluded us.

Descartes’ Error

I can’t remember why, back in 1995, I bought a copy of Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error.  Was it the cover, with a Renaissance-style portrait overlain with symbols, geometric constructions, and a strange dark block obscuring the eyes?  Was it the subtitle – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain – that caught my attention?  While I would like to think that it was the content, which addresses how the social mind affects and shapes rational analysis and behaviour, I suspect it was because it opened with a discussion of Phineas gage.  Gage was a blue-collar worker man, employed in the building of a railroad,  who had an iron tamping bar explode into his skull, entering from below his cheek and exiting through the top of his head.  Remarkably, he survived the accident, with the result that he was to become one of the most famous cases in the history of brains and behaviour.

The story of Phineas Gage is quite extraordinary.  He was working as the foreman of a railway gang in the summer of 1848, employed to construct a new railway line in Vermont.  His key responsibility was to insert an ‘ex[plosive powder’ into each hole drilled by the team, so that the rock along the intended line could be destroyed.  Momentarily distracted when tamping down the powder, he knocks his iron tool against the rock, and the resulting spark immediately creates an explosion, shooting the tamping iron into the air.  Gage wasn’t killed but is thrown backwards as the iron bar leaves through the top of his head.  After a few ‘convulsive motions’, he sits up, speaks to the people around him and then sits upright in the cart that took him to be seen by a doctor.

The top of Gage’s skull has been blown off, and his brain can be seen pulsing within his skull.  That tamping iron was three feet seven inches long (a little over a metre) and weighed thirteen and a quarter pounds.  That he survived is almost impossible to believe.  He was to experience a fever from the infection of the site, but within two months he is fully recovered, physically recovered, that is.  He regained his strength, and could use his senses, with the exception of his left eye, which was damaged in the accident.

However, the psychological changes were profound.  Prior to the accident, Gage had been considered ‘”temperate of character”, shrewd, smart and very diligent.  After, he was transformed, and the physician’s report noted he was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice … at times pertinaciously obstinate , yet capricious and vacillating … a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man”.

Sadly, the rest of his life was a spiral downwards.  He worked for a while on farms, and then became an attraction in a circus.  He left that life to work with horses in South America, and eventually returned to California in 1960 to live with his mother.  He began to experience seizures, and died in 1861, just 38 years old.  While physically it seems he largely recovered from his accident, Phineas Gage was no longer the individual he had been before his accident:  we would say he was a ‘different person’.  Indeed it is the relationship between his recovery from the bodily consequences of the accident and the change in his personality that was to make him such an important figure in conjectures about the role of the mind, and the reciprocal impact of the brain on the body.  Important in the sense that the aftermath of his accident was to lead to changes that were hard to understand at the time, and which remain a puzzle today.

Such an extraordinary case could not be taken much further at the time, as Gage was buried in 1861, without an autopsy.  However, it was Damasio’s sister, Hanna, who was to undertake a brilliant reconstruction of the accident, using Gage’s skull.  By painstaking reconstruction of the remains, working with a number of collaborators, she was able to show that it was almost certain that it was selective damage in the prefrontal cortices of Gage’s brain that had compromised “his ability to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the rules he had previously learnt, and to decide on the courses of action that ultimately would be the most advantageous to his survival” (page 33 of Descartes’ Error).

Damasio was then to have a second case to examine, but now a contemporary one.  This was the case of Elliot, a man in his thirties, who had been referred for study as the result of a ‘radical change of personality’.  Elliot had been an intelligent, skilled and able bodied man, and when Damasio saw him had an excellent memory about the world, and had kept his considerable business skills.  However, he had begun to lose concentration at work, and also his sense of responsibility.  This was diagnosed as the result of a rapidly growing frontal lobe tumour.  Surgery was required, and as a result he had the tumour removed, as well as frontal lobe tissue.

After surgery his skills and use of language was unchanged.  However, his personality was completely different.  He needed continuing prompting, to get up, to go to work, to keep working. He could no longer follow a schedule, and he would easily slip from one  activity to another without completing either.  He could understand the material and tasks he was given, but would change to something else almost on a whim.  He lost his job, and tried various foolish and unsuccessful ventures.  He commenced a series of marriages and divorces.  Damasio describes him as a new Phineas Gage “fallen from social grace, unable to reason and decide in ways conducive to the maintenance and betterment of himself and his family, no longer capable of succeeding as an independent human being.”  As had been likely with Gage, it was clear that in Elliot’s case parts of his frontal lobe were removed, but no other part of is brain.  It was as if he had “a new mind”.  In time, Damasio concluded that his intellectual abilities were undamaged, but his responses had changed, and he was experiencing reduced emotions and feelings.  He was ‘another Phineas Gage’.

Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese neuroscientist.   His interests are n neurobiology, especially the neural systems which underlie emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness.  He has developed what he calls the ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ a theory about how emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously).  Central to his approach is the view that emotions provide the basic scaffolding for social cognition and the self-processes which underpin consciousness.  His approach offers a scientific basis for the linkage between feelings and the body, offering evidence showing the connection between mind and nerve cells … what he calls the “personalized embodiment of mind.”.

It has been groundbreaking work.  Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics and social communication have drawn on his work.  He has proposed that our emotions and feelings as a read-out of body states.  In a later book, The Feeling of What Happens, he laid the foundations of what he describes as the “enchainment of precedences”: “the nonconscious neural signalling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness.  At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience (271-271, The Feeling of What Happens).

His work is complex and challenging, but the implications of his approach are clear.  It’s a reflection on Descartes (and hence the title of the book).  Descartes based his philosophy using a single first principle: he thinks., best known as the statement ‘Cogito, ergo sum”  (I think, therefore I am).  Central to this perspective was the notion of doubt:  Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting; therefore, the very fact that he doubted proved his existence.  “The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist.” (Principles of Philosophy, Part IX).  Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, he comments that evidence suggests that the senses are unreliable.  Given this, the only knowledge on which we can rely is through thinking.  Thinking is seen as every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious

Damasio’s approach upsets that apple cart.  We are a long way past Descartes’ musings (well, perhaps I should say his philosophical explorations).  Today many want to argue that we are simply data processing machines, AI systems, with our bodies the equivalent of electrical power generators.  In that perspective, ‘mind’ is something to be explained away, a peripheral and rather uninteresting phenomenon.  It’s a dull and dehumanising view.  Indeed, it reflects an even broader understanding, the depressing expectation that soon we will be able to explain humanity, life on earth, and even the secrets of the cosmos at both the level of elementary particles and the cosmos as a whole.  Once the view of the world was it was turtles all the way down; now it’s AI all the way up!

If Damasio’s views are subtle and complex, they make a reassuring contrast to those of some scientists who claim that new discoveries have proved free will is an illusion.  In large part, this is an argument about genetics.  If Damasio offers and nuanced and complex view, there are others who take a far simpler approach, suggesting that many of our traits are more than 50% inherited, including obedience to authority, vulnerability to stress, and risk-seeking. Researchers have even suggested that when it comes to issues such as religion and politics, our choices are much more determined by our genes than we think.

Many find this disturbing. The idea that unconscious biological forces drive our beliefs and actions would seem to pose a real threat to our free will. We like to think that we make choices on the basis of our own conscious deliberations. But isn’t all that thinking things over irrelevant if our final decision was already written in our genetic code? And doesn’t the whole edifice of personal responsibility collapse if we accept that “my genes made me do it”? One source of insight on this comes from the experiences of identical twins.

When Professor Tim Spector started his research on identical twins in the early 1990s, he soon was able to confirm that identical twins were always more similar than brothers or sisters or non-identical twins.  As he collected the evidence, his research was undertaken around the time of an emerging  consensus was that genes were an important determinant of who we were, a view promoted by advocates like Richard Dawkins.   His research was also being built up at around the time of  the launch in 1990 of Human Genome Project, setting out to map the complete sequence of human DNA.  This was a decade of optimism, when Daniel Koshland, then editor of the prestigious journal Science, captured the mood when he wrote: “The benefits to science of the genome project are clear. Illnesses such as manic depression, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and heart disease are probably all multigenic and even more difficult to unravel than cystic fibrosis. Yet these diseases are at the root of many current societal problems.” Genes would help us uncover the secrets of all kinds of ills, from the psychological to the physical.

By 2000, genes were no longer regarded as the key to understanding health, but they had become the key to unlock almost all the puzzles of human development and illnesses. For just about every aspect of life – criminality, fidelity, political persuasion, religious belief – scientists were writing papers to claim to how genes were the cause of what was being observed.  Perhaps the ‘high spot’ in this came in 2005 in Hall County, Georgia, when Stephen Mobley sought to avoid execution on the grounds his murder of a Domino’s pizza store manager was the result of a mutation in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene.  While the judge Refused his appeal, the idea that the low-MAOA gene is a major cause of violence has become widely accepted, and it is now commonly called the “warrior gene”.

In recent years, belief that genes are basis for explaining almost everything about human development and behaviour  has waned.  In part this is because continuing research has revealed almost all inherited features or traits are the products of complex interactions of numerous genes. However, the fact that there is no one genetic trigger has not by itself undermined the claim that many of our deepest character traits, dispositions and even opinions are genetically determined. (This worry is only slightly tempered by what we are learning about epigenetics, which shows how many inherited traits only get “switched on” in certain environments. The reason this doesn’t remove all fears is that most of this switching on and off occurs very early in life – either in utero or in early childhood.)

In more recent years, Spector’s work has focussed on  heritability. We are often told that many traits are highly heritable: happiness, for instance, is around 50% heritable.  What does that mean?  It  is easy to assume that if, for example, autism is 90% heritable, then 90% of autistic people got the condition from their parents. But heritability is not about “chance or risk of passing it on”, says Spector. “It simply means how much of the variation within a given population is down to genes. Crucially, this will be different according to the environment of that population.

Spector spells out what this means with something such as IQ, which has a heritability of 70% on average. “If you go to the US, around Harvard, it’s above 90%.” Why? Because people selected to go there tend to come from middle-class families who have offered their children excellent educational opportunities. Having all been given very similar upbringings, almost all the remaining variation is down to genes. In contrast, if you go to the Detroit suburbs, where deprivation and drug addiction are common, the IQ heritability is “close to 0%”, because the environment is having such a strong effect. In general, Spector believes, “Any change in environment has a much greater effect on IQ than genes,” as it does on almost every human characteristic.

Discounting a simplistic belief in causation by genes has been one significant development in recent years.  However, most researchers are still far from catching up with Damasio’s work.  If we are now coming to a much better understanding of what complex factors affect the developments and disorders of the body as a physiological system, Damasio’s work on consciousness takes a further step.  In suggesting that the roots of conscious are feelings, we are on the edge of confronting some critical puzzles.  Damasio suggest three in particular.   What are feelings made of?  What are feelings the perception of? Finally, and perhaps most important for future research, ‘how far behind feelings can we get’. For me, Damasio is one of the most exciting scientists working on the cutting edge of understanding consciousness.