Well, we had a full house. Really full. The auditorium at Annenberg has a seat capacity of 220, and all of those were in use, with people standing at the sides and sitting on the floor. In view of the fact that I was prepared to live with the fact that only ten or fifteen people might show up, this was a pleasant bonus. I think it helped that we were the first of the events of the Visions and Voices program (not counting the big gala opening last week), a fact that I did not take note of until I began to notice several of USC’s big cheeses milling around. This is a manifestation of the (relatively new) Provost’s vision, and so why would they not be there?
The audience was exactly what I’d dreamed of -or more appropriately, what the Provost had conjured up when he pitched the Arts and Humanities Initiative to all of us (see my earlier posts for extracts of his speech, here and here)- there were students and faculty from from an astonishing cross-section of the numerous schools, departments and programs that one can encounter by tracing a random 20 minute path through the campus on foot. I’m lucky enough to know a lot of these people, so it was a pleasure to look into the audience and see faculty, students and other friends from from Physics and Astronomy sitting next to faculty, students and other friends I know from the music school; and behind friends from the English department; right across from friends from political science who in turn were near students and faculty from the school of theatre, of cinema-television, etc. It was rather like happens when you invite friends from lots of different cicles to all come together to meet each other at a dinner party at your house. You’re excited since you’ve always wondered what it would be like to bring these people together, but you don’t know how it is going to turn out….but you’re sure it will be interesting. And maybe that’s enough to make it worthwhile.
It was worthwhile. We started off much closer to the appointed time than one can reasonably expect for any such large event. We had the Executive Vice Provost Barry Glassner deliver some introductory remarks, and then he handed over to Michael Parks, the Director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, who welcomed everyone to the Annenberg School and who in turn introduced KC Cole. He introduced her by recalling what he called a “typical KC Cole moment” back when he was her employer at the LA Times many years ago. She came into his office to ask for leave time in order to write a book. “What’s the book going to be about, KC?”, he asked. “Nothing”, she said. It was a book about nothing. (You can find more about that excellent book at this link, by the way.)
KC Introduced us all, and then got on with the business of talking about “Uncertainty”. She spoke of how she first heard of the idea of uncertainty in physics and how it resonated with what she was doing in journalism. This back in a time when she was not writing about science. In fact -and this is worth keeping in mind- she hated science back when she was doing her studies, and only found an open door into that wonderful world much later on. And thank goodness she did, especially given how many doors she’s opened for others with her science writing since then.
The journalistic world has several obvious (her word) but important mirrors of ideas we encounter in physics (quantum mechanics or otherwise – she began with an account of the physics for the layperson, by the way), and she spoke of some of those. These include such ideas as the sharp dependence on the observer, and the sources that a journalist uses. In fact, she said, a story is utterly meaningless if the reporter is not careful to make clear what their sources are. She recalled living for some time in several Eastern block (old Soviet Union) countries and being frustrated by the complete disconnect between the stories she’d read in Western newspapers and the reality of what was going on in the streets. The reporters were largely writing what the US state department told them about; very seldom were they on the ground themselves. (You may well recall a blog post, “Refusing to Follow The Narrative”, that I wrote about Robert Fisk’s expressing frustration about this, in the case of Iraq reporting. He came to USC last year.)
The picture of what is going on can change radically depending upon the sources, and the other filters that the journalist might be using. Focusing on a particular angle on the story may bring clarity in one aspect or other, often with resulting diffusiveness in another aspect. So this all has to be taken into account. She stressed that this does not mean that there is no objective reality (as she is often appalled to hear from some of her journalist colleagues, especially around the time of the Fry case of fabrication of stories). There is a truth to what is going on, and it is the journalist’s job to get as close to that as they can. They must not lose sight of it. The uncertainties and point-of-view dependence that is involved in journalism simply means that things are complicated. It means that it is hard to get to the truth, not that the truth does not exist.
The next part of the event was KC introducing me, and we’d simply spend ten minutes chatting about the physics aspects of the uncertainty principle. To set the mood I showed a lovely film clip from one of my favourite Coen brothers movies, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”. It is set in a small California town, where there is a murder. A man’s wife (played by the marvellous Frances McDormand) is accused of of the murder, and her husband (the excellent Billy Bob Thornton plays him) spends all his money on hiring this famous fancy lawyer from out of town, Freddie Riedenschneider, (played wonderfully by Tony Shalhoub). They’re already worried about this guy’s methods, general flashiness and considerable expense, and things are not helped by Riedenschneider all of a sudden breaking into this long monologue about the Uncertainty Principle. “There’s this guy. In Germany…. Fritz, I think he’s called. Or maybe it’s Werner…” He talks about the idea that when you observe something you disturb it, and this introduces an uncertainty in your knowledge of what is going on. He takes this further by riffing on the idea that it introduces doubt. Reasonable doubt. Something they can use to their advantage to win the murder case – get the wife acquitted. “Even Einstein says this guy is on to something….”
That was a fun scene to start with, although once it stopped I had to make some things clear, since the scene gets carried away with the drama of the whole thing, and the character goes off with his own over-the-top interpretation of things to serve his own need…. which is one reason I love the scene so much. (Imagine you’re accused of some terrible crime, your lawyer -who you’ve spent all your money on- comes to visit you and says that he’s going to get you off because…. recent astrophysical observations of distant supernovae have suggested that the universe’s expansion is in fact accelerating.)
First, the although it seems reasonable that the uncertainty principle can be arrived at by the idea that maybe for very small things like subatomic particles, your observing them involves knocking them off course in some way -thus forbidding you from knowing both its position and momentum with arbitrary accuracy- this is not really right. It is much more profound than that. The effect of the observer is in fact a red herring, since it fools the person learning about the physics to conclude that somehow things are still very much like classical physics, that you can treat everything like billiard balls, and it is just all a consequence of difficult to handle but nonetheless deterministic underlying phenomena. The uncertainty principle is way more fundamental than that. It is Nature’s way of telling us that spacetime is a fundamentally different place from what we think it is, based upon our everyday experience. Simply put, there are quantities which are fundamentally unknowable in physics, in the right situation. It does not mean that there is a technical difficulty with learning that information, but rather it is meaningless to even consider that quantity as exsiting. The precise location of an electron in “orbit” around an atomic nucleus, for example. It is not difficult to determine its location – its location is a meaningless concept. Yes, quantum mechanics fundamentally modifies our everyday concepts of space and time. The meaninglessness of an object’s location (which can arise in the appropriate situation) can give rise to effects that we (naively) interpret as things being in more than one place at a given time. But this is really just a result of our tendency to want to reconcile the world of the small with our world of big, classically behaving objects. And so we end up concluding that it is all weird and spooky. I personally don’t agree with the use of the latter two words. It is just the way Nature is. The Newtonian mechanics we use in our world is just an approximation to what is really going on. If we’d evolved as creatures whose everyday experience was at atomic scales whree quantum mechanics was manifest, then we’d think that the big, classical world was really weird and spooky.
This “uncertainty” does not mean that there is no reality. Reality is just more intricate than we’d previously realised. Quantum mechanics has taught us that when we come to do physics, when we ask questions of Nature, we have to ask the right questions. Some questions are just meaningless. If the US President holds a press conference about the war in Iraq, and he calls on you to ask a question, you could ask, “Sir, when will the bananas on Pluto ripen?”. Now, the fact that you’ll get no good answer whatsoever about this year’s Plutonian fruit harvest from our wise leader does not -in and of itself- mean that there’s anything wrong with him. More careful probing of his Iraq advisors will not reveal more information. There are no secret files on the issue that your spies or a team of clever hackers can unlock. The question is just meaningless. At least in the context of Iraq.
The uncertainty principle -the foundation of quantum mechanics- makes a very precise statement about how this all works. Ironically, rather than make things all wishy-washy, as is often thought, it make things much more constrained: Rather than have a range of energies available to an electron in an atom (as classical physics wrongly and disasterously predicts) you have only a precise set of specific energies. Electrons can only make discrete jumps from one restricted energy to another – the famous “quantum leap” (which, ironically, is a very tiny leap, not a big one, as the increasingly common language misusage suggests). Furthermore, you can get precise answers to precise questions – if you ask the right questions, as I have already said (and probably should have emphasized more last night). You can ask what those allowed energies are, and you can calculate them precisely. You can calculate the rates at which an electron (or a collection of them in a material) will make a leap from one energy to another, perhaps releasing a burst of energy in the form of a photon (the particle of light), allowing you to see that material as red, or blue, or green, etc. Those colours are the precise manifestation of those precisely (using quantum mechanics) computable energies, as are many observable properties of materials, and behaviour of electronic devices that we take for granted in our everyday life.
KC asked me about how this all impinges upon current research, in string theory. Where might quantum behaviour show up? The answer is of course “everywhere” as the physics is inherently quantum mechanical, but that was nto really what she was hoping too hear, I suspect. So I gave the example of how string theory seems to be good at combining the two profound modifications of our view of space and time (uncertainty principle (quantum mechanics), and general relativity (gravity as warped spacetime)), to give us a view of how quantum gravity might work in terms of quantum mechanical warping of spacetime, etc. If string theory turns out to be a correct theory of nature, the sort of physics we’re learning from that description of quantum gravity would be very manifest in the context of the universe at the very earliest moments of its existence, where quantum gravity effects are probably important.
Later, in the questions, I tried to emphasize further the fact that the uncertainty principle in physics is really a misnomer, since certainty is not compromised at all. It should be better called the “indeterminacy principle” (which for example Neils Bohr preferred to call it) reminding you that some questions are just meaningless. Some quantities are just fundamentally not determinable in certain situations. My colleage Krzysztof Pilch afterwards came up and reminded me that in fact in several other languages that is precisely what it is called. I wish I’d said that while up on stage. I just clean forgot that fact.
Up next was religion and legal scholar Jonathan Kirsh. He gave us a marvellous -and very funny- tour of the tension between monotheism and polytheism. He was riffing mostly on the idea of a sort of “duality” between the two, and he had us keep in mind wave-particle duality from physics. The dual nature that something can have, the tension between the two, the complementarity, etc. The history is rather interesting in fact, and after telling us how starkly different the two became -especially in Western Culture, where monotheism in the form of Christianity rose to dizzying heights of power after the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine, resulting in polytheism being demoted to paganism. Another excellent contrast is the complete intolerance of Christianity in contrast to what went before. The idea that there is only one true God, and all others are illusions (or as Paul “the original Jew for Jesus” went further to say, all other Gods are actually devils sent by Satan to deceive us) is in stark contrast to the idea that previous polytheistic dominant cultures (Romans, Greeks) took the oppisite view. Worship whatever Gods you see fit. In fact, the Romans were “equal oppotunity worshippers”, in that they collected the Gods of the cultures that they conquered and often worshipped them too. In fact, they were careful to have altars to “the unknown Gods”, just in case they’d missed any out. Worshipping another God in Christianity is “heresy”, right? Jonathan reminded us at this point that the root of that word is, ironically, “choice”. Although it is a loaded phrase in this society, at this time, are we not all “pro choice”?
He then proceeded to point how things are not as clear as they might seem, or as your Sunday school lessons would have you believe, even from just a light reading of the bible. The Nature of the old testament God is remarkably variable, for example. Some chapters have him/it as an incorporeal being upon whose face we can never look without dying, and others have him/it as having a definite human form, rubbing his hands in the mud and animating clay figures into life by breathing life into them with…real lungs, presumably. And a number of your old testament fellows can have a chat with him. And then you get to the new testament, and he huge embarrassment of the Father-Son-HolySpirit thing. One God? Or three? This occupied early Christian scholars a great deal, when preparing the appropriate dogma to impose upon the masses.
Jonathan’s larger point (or at least one of them) is the uncertainty (or better, indeterminacy) of religion. Religion claims to be about the truth, and gets rather dogmatic about it, producing a number of the greatest crimes and injustices and other problems in our world today, in the past, and no doubt in the future. But that unwavering “truth” obsession quickly melts away upon closer examination.
Actress Chloe Webb was up next, and she brought with her two other performers. I will try to get their names from her. Before they came up however, Chloe did a monologue with her take on Uncertainty. She started out by talking about why she was drawn to being an actor. She said it all very wonderfully, and I am sorry to have to paraphrase so clumsily (there will be streamable video of the whole event in about a week) She instinctively did not want to take part in the business of being a human among humans. Stuff happens to us out there. It’s uncertain. There’s a great deal of comfrot to be had in the certainty of being an actor. You get the script in advance, so you know what’s going to happen in advance. You can prepare. She then talked about the process of looking into yourself as an actor to find an emotion (associated with a real event that actually happened to you) that you can use in your craft to simulate the emotion of a character. You can do this some 20 times or so in filming a scene again and again, and maybe even begin the feel that emotion for real that 21st time. But then you go home, shrug it all off and check your voicemail. Acting, she says, quoting someone who’s name i’ve forgotten, is about cupping your hand and dipping it into the water of the pool of human experience, taking that water and placing it into a lovely ornate cup which you then hand back to the audience to drink from. That’s the craft of the actor.
But what happens when real things happen to you in the real world? Experiences happen, and there’s no fancy cup. It just happens. How do you deal with the uncertainty of life? Of human experience? How do we carry on? The only people who are certain are perhaps the suicidal. They are certain that there is no hope, and so they end it all.
Hope. That’s the word that sustains it all. That is what keeps us going in the face of uncertainty. At this point she segues into a peom/monologue that she wrote especially for the event, expanding upon the idea of hope. I will not attempt to reproduce it from memory, but it was very poignant indeed.
Next, she brought up her two colleauges, one who did some light drumming in the background to set the mood, and the other who was to be her partner in a hipster-style performance (their words) of the famous “Who’s on First?” dialogue made famous by Abbot and Costello, an illustration of uncertainty in language. And just plain funny. The audience loved it, as far as I can tell.
We then all sat up on stage for a question and answer session. This was perhaps the only aspect of the evening that I think was less than successful, because it was cut short. We were running late, and the vast supply of refreshments waiting in the lobby upstairs was beginning to wilt. So we took a few questions (such as “where is the line between physics and philosophy, and on which side of the line is string theory?”, and “There is a rise of spiritualism and mysticism in hollywood and other media forms. Do you think that this is valid?”. This latter might have been sparked by my saying in my earlier remarks that the “What the Bleep…” film was a terrible misapplication of physics facts out of context which serves only to deceive people (see this post), and I briefly explained why. Planck’s constant is a very small number…. quantum states are very delicate…. effect of the environment on a quantum system… Decoherence, etc….).
The answers to these questions (i took a very pragmatic approach to the philosophy one; “it’s fun to ponder the meaning of quantum mechanics, but then you just get on with the business of describing Nature”… String theory is an attempt to do so and we have not tested it yet so we do not know whether it is a physical “truth” about Nature yet) were just beginning to knock some interesting sparks off here and there, due to the different places the speakers were coming from – when we had to stop, unfortunately. We’d been going for an hour and 45 minutes, I think. (But I do note that the audience was not at all restless, I think we could have all happily gone on for another ten easily.)
But this is why KC and I did this program and it is also why I wrote this long blog post. We started the discussion last night, but the conversations can continue over coffee and cookies as it did last night (I did not get any as I was trapped by a hundred questions… but that’s ok), and over the water cooler today, between classes, in dorm rooms, and maybe also here on this blog. Come in and tell everyone what you thought. Of the event, but more importantly, of the issues raised. What’s your take on uncertainty? Did you disagree with things any of us said? Where do you think we went wrong on a particular point? Or perhaps you’d just like to express your agreement. Perhaps you have questions? Even if you don’t place a comment on this post, I hope that several comments and questions arise from last night’s dicsussion and/or this post in your own private conversations. If you wrote questions on the index cards that did not get answered, please consider asking it again here. Or another. I’m not going to neccessarily sit here and write careful answers to all questions, (in some cases the questions won’t be for me anyway), but all participants can interact with each other’s responses too, starting your own conversations. If there are a good number of responses from you needing attention (and also from others who did not make it to the event) I’ll also try to get KC, Jonathan, and Chloe to look in and make comments and give answers if they’re willing.
Let’s all chat, in one place or another…. and then we can all sit together again in November 16th. Same bat time, same bat place.
-cvj
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That’s the point, Doug. That’s exactly the point.
Cheers,
-cvj
Cliffford,
What a great post about a great event. One of the things I like most about blogs is the chance to “meet” new people. Some are interesting, some are stimulating, and some are just simply singular! K.C. Cole is singular, and I came to “know” her through a blog. Now, this Ioana. Who is she? She is singularly stunning! I would like to know if she is as proficient in her native language, as she is in English. If she is, it’s a demonstration of a level of intelligence that is almost incomprehensible to me. I hope she has a blog, or that she is willing to give us the titles of some of her films. I’ve got to know more about this woman!
I wanted to say something about the UP in mathematics. Your analogy of the out of context question of extraterrestial fruit is not a good one, in my opinion, because it’s simply an irrelevant question. We need a better analogy, one where the indeterminacy does not arise simply due to the irrelevancy of the question, but where the irrelevancy of the question arises due to a process that changes the context from one where the question is relevant to one where the same question is no longer relevant; that is, what would be deterministic in a given context, becomes indeterministic in a new, but related context, not an arbitrarily unrelated context. When it is understood that it is a process that changes the context, not an arbitrary choice, then it becomes clear that it’s the process that we want to understand most of all.
That is the why we like Heisenberg’s analogy better: When the observation of the position of an electron requires light and that light disturbs the very position information that we are seeking, then we have a context that is changed by a process: the interaction of light with the electron is a process changing the context in which the answer to the question, “what is the electron’s position?” that was formerly available is no longer available.
However, this analogy breaks down too, when we assume that the light has changed the position of the electron to another, unknown position, so that, if we try to define the position too accurately, we cannot do so due to the limitation that the requirement of light, in the observational process, imposes on us, and our point is that this is fundamentally different from saying that the position of the electron no longer exists, once the context is changed by the process.
Hence, the UP does not mean that the variable is changed from a known value to another, unknown value, by the change of context, but that the existence of the variable itself disappears in the changed context. This is the wierd part, “how can the position of the electron appear and disappear?” and it’s spooky too, in an absolutely delicious way.
As it turns out, there is a way to explain this magician’s trick that lies at the heart of fundamental principles known to all, and it has been discovered, by thinking about it, in spite of the infamous and stern admonition of the schoolmen to “shut up and calculate,” and it also comes as “a wonderful gift that we neither understand nor deserve.”
Indeed, its story would make for such a marvelous film script, but I can’t even tell it on this blog, let alone in a film. If only I knew Ioana!
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Hi, You can cut and paste the full url into the comment box. Dragging and dropping is not the best way.
-cvj
Hmm–the link doesn’t seem to transfer. Anyway, you can search for it on Yahoo News. Peace.
Oops— Here’s the link to the telephone telepathy article.
Cheers!
A
If something is just made up out of whole cloth, it is a fantasy. Sometimes those fantasies turn out to be -upon closer examination- backed up by verifiable and consistent experiences of others, experiments, etc. Until that time, they are fantasies. Just like when I sit down and make up a potential theory of the universe, even in a scientific context: unification of all forces, supersymmetry, violations of Lorentz invariance, whatever, in a scientific context. Until it is tested experimentally, it is a fantasy. I think that you think that I think that fantasy is a dirty word. It is not. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy -it is where a lot of wonderful things begin- but it should not be mixed up with other things that are verified.
I’ve spoken at length in the above comments about keeping an open mind, and the (sometimes) validity of people’s, (for want of a better phrase) “internal beliefs” (especially if of comfort to them, and they are not using it to decieve people, etc), etc, etc. But such open-mindedness is not to be mistaken for randomly letting any old madeup stuff (by Hollywood, a charlatan who is trying to steal your money for a miracle cure or “quick fix”, or someone trying to get you to join their cult) be mistaken for reproducible facts about the world.
I heard about the Trinity College stuff. It would be nice if it were true. I hope people look at it and find out hte origin of the effect, if there really is one. Right now… it remains fantasy. Nobody has reproduced the experiments, or looked closely at the experimentor’s controls.
Thanks for the remarks about the blog. Keep coming.
Cheers,
-cvj
Hello Clifford,
In regards to your answer about the validity of psychic ability…
“But it lies outside the realm of physical science, and so in that sense is invalid. Until that changes, it remains fantasy.”
Just because something lies “outside the realm of physical science” doesn’t make it fantasy. Western science as in the scientific method and so fourth is very powerful and useful, but only one way of “proving” and “knowing.”
Repeating something in a lab is not the gold standard for truth or validity. Besides that, it’s just plain rude to call what tons of people experience every day “fantasy.” The arrogance of male dominated, western science only shoots itself in the foot.
Anyway– I came across this article about an experiment out of Trinity College, Cambridge. It deals with telephone telepathy and may be of interest.
Love the blog and your pix are first rate.
Aretha
Thanks for a wonderfully thought-provoking evening! The GPS illustration of relativity is so obvious and important, but, pilot though I am, I’d not thought about before! (Naturally Kev had.) Structurally it did seem a bit like Kirsh’s monotheism/polytheism min-lecture was kind of plunked down on top of the existing dialogue structure, and ’twas not a perfect fit.
My apologies for mis-communication as my purpose was not to rank religions, a sure way to engage in polemics when what we need now is tolerance and inter-faith understanding.
Three nights ago ABC carried a night documentary entitled “Last days on Earth” (I think) that expounded on ways the Earth, or rather Homo Sapiens, can perish/vanish such as asteroid impact, HN51 virus, supervolcanoes, climate change, etc.
If you watched the documentary, what’s your take?
Also, I read from a chinese blog that scientists are speculating that particle accelerators can cause a micro black hole on Earth (my literal translation). Again, what’s your professional take on the matter?
Sorry to have been seen fixated on doomsday scenarios on this great Labor weekend.
Say Lee:- I spoke of those issues and mentioned -as promised- some of the words of the president of the union of concerned scientists in my post entitled “California Steps Froward, Again.” I may may more remakrs about his remarks as things go along. I’ve also spoken of climate change in a number of other posts. I will mention it again and again.
As to you interesting remarks about Buddhism, I don’t think that the intent of the talk was to rank religions accrding to accountability, or any other measure…. Or at least that is not what I took away from the discussion.
Cheers,
-cvj
Go shopping if you must, Cliff, but I must say that I’m still waiting for your piece on climate change where uncertainty seems to be the only constant, which you promised, or rather enumerated, as one of the issues you would address in your preamble to this blog.
On monotheism and polytheism, are these two the opposite ends of our spectrum of religious belief? Where is Buddhism in which the “belief” is that everyone has the potential to ascend to buddhahood contingent upon one’s deeds in both past and present, on this scale? Isn’t this accountability at its highest?
No, I don’t beleive there is anything like the “bright line” that you refer to as dividing the two worlds. It is blurry in so many ways. So you see we agree on rather a lot…. (Although it is a bright line if we wish to talk about what is established and reproducible fact, vs anecdotals stuff which may or may not one day become reproducible fact…. maybe this tighter definition is what Jonathan appealed to…)
This illustrates a larger point. It is assumed quite a lot by the general populace that scientists are some sort of robot that dismisses anything that is outside the established scientific realm as nonsense. Actually, I know very few scientists like that, and in fact count very few people who hold such views as my friends since they are just not very interesting people, in most instances I’ve met. I wish people would stop portraying scientists like that, in fact. in film, and other media. It is an all-too-common gross distortion of what is actually the case.
What scientists do is make a distinction between what is known to science and what is not. They use the scientific method as a tool for sniffing out the high volume of deception (intended or otherwise, externally or internally generated) that undeniably lies out there. They are open minded about the possibility of phenomena -that may yet lie in the murky side of things- eventually making the transition from fantasy to actual physical reproducible facts. Their existing knowledge of science and the scientific method -combined with a an open mind- helps them sort through a lot of the junk, and recognise simply wrong implications or plain fantasy bordering on lies (such as in What the Bleep….)……
But there will always be things that are very “valid” and important to the human condition that will always lie outside the realm of science. That’s ok. It is what we do with those things that we have to be careful of. And this is where most scientists feel they have to draw the line…. but it gets misinterpreted as saying those things are invalid…..Do we stand by and let them be used use to deceive people into giving their hard earned money – or hard won state of health – to someone in exchange for a miracle cure? How about letting smart mediums and fortune tellers use the science of psychology and other human behavioural cues that they can read from people to let them believe that they can predict the future, or talk to their dead loved ones? It is a fun parlour trick -most (and probably all) of it- but what happens when it gets to the point where it stops the deceived person from taking control of their own life? Taking responsibility for their own actions, etc? If that person was better equipped with a “bullshit monitor” (some basic understanding of what is known about the physical world, and what isn’t, and some basic scientific knowledge of what human signals they are giving out that are being read by the fortune teller and then told back to them…a basic understanding of the rules of deduction and inference, etc) they might be better able to protect themselves from the charlatans. Then if there really is something of value to be gained from the session, they would be better able to sort it out from the deception…….
I could go on, but I must go shopping.
-cvj
oh, no, you personally haven’t said anything about knowledge being the monopoly of science, but I am pretty sure Jonathan did say something that might be interpreted as such – he used the expression “bright line” and put knowledge on one side and belief on the other. However, I am also pretty sure that what he meant was “scientific knowledge”.
“To declare something as lying outside the realm of science is not the same as saying that it does not constitute knowledge. Science is not the only perspective from which to view the world, in my opinion. Nevertheless, perspectives that do not take into account what is already understood by science are highly deficient. On that I am 100% sure.” -you say.
yes I couldn’t agree with you more. This is one of the reasons why I am working on the relationship/interface between science, theory and filmmaking. Because I think that as film/culture theorists it’s necessary to go back and check what science has already settled as acceptable truth, and take that into account.
didn’t mean to put words or meanings in Jonathan’s mouth. I am sure his knowledge of these issues is much more extensive and profound than mine, but his presentation just spawned all these feelings and questions in my mind. I think Thursday’s event was actually an excellent example of a continuum (another word I love and am happy to have found it used by you on the blog) of modalities of communication. What you said was probably most clearly conveyed and understood, which says something about the chracteristics of scientific knowledge and the accuracy with which it can be communicated (which is not to say that it’s necessarily easy to understand). Then there’s Jonathan’s presentation, which contained a lot of facts (historical- thus scientific – knowledge) but also come choices of interpretation, of presentation, a proposal for an imaginative leap, that create a different dynamic and reaction from the audience, depending on their personal background, assumptions, cultural differences, and yes beliefs (which is why my reaction to his talk was different than yours). Finally, Chloe’s performance is at the other end of the continuum, where I am sure the experience of spectatorship was a lot more diverse among the audience than when you or Jonathan were talking. I see a dispersion of precision – or an increase in indeterminacy? – in the communication of meaning from your talk to Chloe’s performance; which is not a judgment value but an acknowledgment of the complicated ways in which the transfer of meaning is being effected in different modalities, when different tools are being used. And as KC has said in the beginning, the truth (or reality, or objectiveness) is not necessarily in the “fair balance” of all these possibilities.
ioana
Ioana, you said:
In fact I agree with you. Pleae note that I did not say or imply the above. You seem to have found an interpretation that was not implied. I don’t think that anyone of my colleagues from Thursday night said it either.
To declare something as lying outside the realm of science is not the same as saying that it does not constitute knowledge. Science is not the only perspective from which to view the world, in my opinion. Nevertheless, perspectives that do not take into account what is already understood by science are highly deficient. On that I am 100% sure.
As to the practice of looking at other cultures and times from the perspective of our culture and time. I completely agree that we should be aware that we are doing that. We cannot help but do that, for we are in our own culture and our own time. We must therefore be aware of the limitations of our perspective (see the Point of View series next semester), but to refrain from making any inferecens at all because they might be coloured by our perspective is a mistake. I don’t think that there was as much value judgement in Jonathan’s piece as you imply. Or, at least, there was only as much as needed to get us to step out of the Monotheistic-centric culture we find ourselves in. I should also remind you that Jonathan was not actually painting the Polytheism approach as superior to Monotheism. He went out of his way to stress that the cultures that nurture(d) them were both full of problems (e.g. extremely brutal in their own respects). His main thesis I think was that monotheism (and the extremely rigid line it takes on the matter) has several interesting (and sometimes amusing) internal inconsitencies.
Email me if you want to set up a time to meet in my office to talk about, for example, your definition of “phenomenology”… and/or talkk more about it here. Others may find it interesting enough to join the conversation.
Cheers….
-cvj
back to monotheism and polytheism for a second: I see what your point is, but shouldn’t we be careful when we assume that things in the past or in a different culture are “the same” as ours? let me explain: we look back at the civilizations before monotheism with the eyes of a civilization (ours) who has experienced religious monotheism for well more than 2000 years. Therefore, our perspective is filtered through our experience and we automatically assume that politheism (“paganism”) had all the values associated with a culture imbued and conditioned by monotheism (e.g. transcendence, redemption, personal connection with a unique omnipotent deity etc). PLUS the advantage of choosing-your-own-Gods and not being persecuted for your option. I am not sure this is the case, historically speaking. History and religion are not my specialty, but I would venture to guess that the entire worldview in “paganism” was quite different from ours, us post-enlightenment, post-modernization, post-colonialism people. So I’m not that certain that we can just understand what politheism “felt like” by looking at it from today’s western cultural perspective. Hey, we can’t even understand how some other things that go on in the world right now “feel like” – what seems like common sense and basic no-brainer to us is definitely not so for say a guy who decides to fly a plane into a building (to go back to M. Kirsch’s point). Talking about the past solely from today’s perspective would be a little bit like talking about the quantum world as if it were our regular large-scale (newtonian?) world.
and just another small thing that I was very curious to know your opinion about: the assertion that there is a “bright line” that separates unequivocally the world of science (and implicitly, the world of objective, incontestable truth) from the world of beliefs, desires and dreams. Yes, there’s a big difference between them – and I was so happy to see that you took the time to emphasize the notion of ANALOGY on this blog. I am all for scientific rigor and accuracy. But I am not convinced that only the “science” part of this great divide can claim the notion of knowledge for itself. What happens with that 5% of knowledge that is not scientific knowledge? And I am not talking ghosts and spirits here, I am talking about things like theories that are still awaiting experimental validation, of the possibility that every responsible scientist entertains, which is that even the most well-established theories can be contradicted, re-interpreted or completely overturned; of the beliefs and intuitions that have no support in relaity but that could however be proved right, potentially, in the future; and about the beliefs that are strong enough to change reality. Granted, this is not scientific knowledge. Not at all. However, there’s something going on there. There’s something about beliefs and desires that makes us lay down our lives for them, we are so desperate to validate them. We can’t discard the reality of this, can we?
I’ve gone on for too long. Yes, I would very much love to talk to you about these issues. I am adamant about making scientifically valid assertions about science 🙂 so I would love to hear more from the physicist’s mouth. In exchange, I can tell you a lot about film and filmmaking! And I’m really dying to hear what is your take on – the magic word – phenomenology. I have been reading about the biological sciences’ view of it, but I want to hear yours. Is the phenomenological view somehow “softer” than the hard-science of physics?
can I come see you in your office hours or do you prefer email :-)?
thank you for this great conversation
ioana
Clifford,
Wish I had been able to make it, sincerely. With the fam back from Italy it’s a bit tougher to live my “single guy” lifestyle — I’m not sure the baby would have been as enthralled with your Uncertainty Principle explanations as I would have.
Nice point to emphasize that the U.P. isn’t about not being able to do a measurement fine enough, it’s a fundamental definition of how things can be known or not known. That’s often a missed point when it’s explained.
Hopefully make the next one…
Hi,
I’m guessing that you’re referring to the question about whether it is valid that there’s a lot of drama, etc, written about psychic matters, telepathy, spirits, ghosts and ghouls, etc.
I did not answer very well, since I did not know what the word “Valid” meant in the context used. If the question was asking whether it is valid to write dramas, etc, about the fantasy that such things are real, then I don’t see why not. it is fantasy. If the question is about whether those things are real, then the answer is simple. No one has consistently demonstrated that such things have any basis in anything more than stories, anecdotes, coincindences, etc. Until that changes, they remain fantasy. Dramas can be written about them, but people must remember that it is fantasy. Beliefs in such things can be comforting to some people, and that’s fine, as far as it goes. In some sense, that might make them real enough. But it lies outside the realm of physical science, and so in that sense is invalid. Until that changes, it remains fantasy. Maybe one day somebody will do some careful experiments and find that there i something we missed. But that has not happened, and unfortunately the task is made much more difficult by the fact that there are an awful lot of people out there who deceive and manipulate people who want to beleive in it.
So all I’m saying is that it has nothign to do with science. It is fantasy. Nothing invalid about writing dramas about fantasy.
Final point….. from science, we have learned that the world is such a wonderful and beautiful place, with truly mind-boggling things happening for real. I wish people would write more dramas using some of those things. Why do we need to make up the same tired old ghost stories when we’re learning about so many marvellous things about the way the world works from a real examination of our world? Some of those things are even more wild than any of us can make up in a fairy story…..
Thanks for the question!
Cheers,
-cvj
Hello,
Thaks for the event last night. Just a question–Why did you choose not to answer the question about the validity of physic ability?
Thanks!
A
Hi Henry. Thanks. As I said in the Q&A at the end, I think that there are lessons to be learned by finding reflections of certain ideas in other fields. And the arrow can run both ways. Science principles can give interesting lessons for the arts and humanities, and the arts and humanities can give interesting lessons for science.
But one has to be careful to remember that they are analogies. Analogies can be misleading if the user forgets that they are analogies. But they can be valuable too, and sometimes bring out aspects or qualities that had been hitherto overlooked.
-cvj
[Moved comment from another post to here, where I think it was intended to be. -cvj]
(Original time stamp: August 31st, 2006 at 22:57)
That was an intriguing seminar, and I applaud all your efforts in putting together the wonderful evening. However, I would like to remark that it didn’t seem like the division between the solid, concrete Uncertainty Principle of Physics and the more vague, liberally-applied uncertainty of the humanities was reconciled. What I noticed was a brief application of the concept of “uncertainty” in the humanities’ speakers’ presentations, whereas Dr. Clifford Johnson kept on refining and clarifying the definition of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, to delineate it from popular (mis)conception. I suppose my point is that I perceived the moral of the symposium (as it arose) was that one cannot arbitrarily apply the same principles from one vastly different world to another. The thing was that I was looking for an underlying connection between physics and the humanities. Perhaps I’m limited in my abilities to find such connections – what do you guys think?
What a marvelous post. I wish I was there so please dont forget to post the url of the webcast.
Currently Bertold Brecht’s ‘Life of Galileo’ is playing in London. This is fascinating drama at many levels, but in particular through the clash of Certainty against Certainty. As the play unfolds we see that nobody really wins. It seems true therefore that life is enriched by the recognition of uncertainty, and through the exploration of its consequences. Physics simply underlines this with an authorative hand.
ioana:- thanks! You mention being interested in arts-humanities-science from the perspective of a filmmaker. This is great. We should talk more. I have been involved in a number of projects in this area, and am always interested in hearing about more. Get in touch if interested in telling me more about your work. And see several blog posts of mine from the past (look over on Cosmic Variance) and in the future on the subject.
With regards Jonathan’s presentation. I think that he also stressed the fact that the polytheists were acting out of fear, at least in part, and not neccessarily enlightenment. But there’s a lot more to say on the subject, and I’ll stop here for now. Your point about accountability and individual empowerment is interesting though. It is not entiely clear to me why you think that monotheism encourages those more than polytheism. You pick some Gods, and you’re still contrained to act within the accountability framework of that chosen subset of Gods, no?
-cvj
first of all, thank you Clifford for taking the time to give this summary of last night’s event. I was in the audience and had more than a few reactions to what has been said. First time I leaped (or leapt? sorry, English is not my native language) was when KC mentioned her living behind the Iron Curtain. Her example of dsconnect between the journalistic reports and the on-the-ground reality was just one of the examples of uncertainty that haunted Eastern European life under communism. I grew up in one of those countries, and I still display symptoms :-). There was also a huge disconnect between each person’s “real life” and “public life”. My parents would ask me what I have learned in school every day and then tried to gently break it to me that while I was supposed to respect school, the professors and the idea of education, I should nevertheless understand that I’m not supposed to believe everything I am being taught at school and I have to develop a flair for filtering the true stuff from the obligatory lies. Try explaining that to a 10-year old.
Then I was really happy to hear you dotting some i’s and crossing the t in “scientific”. I am a filmmaker and film scholar with an advanced science degree (long story) and it makes me crazy to see how science language and scientific concepts get imported into (other kinds of) theory without any rigorous explanation, and are basically being abused. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s beautiful when we find trans-disciplinary metaphors that make us open up our minds and look at the world differently. But let’s not confuse what science actually says and does with the poetic or intellectually speculative discourses that it might inspire. The interdisciplinary arts-science-humanities initiative is laudable (I am actually writing my doctoral dissertation in a related topic) but I think one of the measures of its success will be the ability to “keep it real” and not turn it into a crowd-pleasing, ear-tickling, vulgarized science conversation.
which brings me to my third point, the conversation about religion. I must confess that I was a little disappointed by M. Kirsch’s expose. There are so many fascinating ways in which the idea of indeterminacy is approached (and tentatively resolved) by religion, especially the monotheistic ones. I would have been very interested to hear his take on the idea of personal responsibility and free will and how Judaism, Christianity and Islam propose paradigms for dealing with choice, in their doctrine if not in their practice. I can’t help but feel that M.Kirsch’s take on the politheist vs. monotheist dynamic was a bit simplistic. I don’t want to go into a great amount of detail here, but I have a feeling that politheistic religions were not really an early incarnation of democracy – one of their charateristics was that the humans saw themselves completely powerless and at the mercy of a multitude of whimsical, moody deities, and in the concrete everyday life, often at the mercy of a master, tyrant, emperor or king. Hence, we could say that the move to a monotheistic worldview based on accountability and yes, contract with a clearly defined, stable entity represented a progress in terms of humanism and individual empowerment.
I have much more I would like to say but I would love to hear what other people have to say about all this !
thank you
ioana