On different types of screwdrivers...

 

I am not what you would call a DIY aficionado, as my family can (and often do) testify. Yet even I know that there are different types of screws. Mind you, I didn’t realise there were quite so many types as I discovered when I went looking. So it turns out the world of screws is much more complicated and varied than I had thought. And this means there are a fascinatingly large number of screwdrivers required to deal with all these different screws. And of course different screws have different uses. The tiny screws (and their appropriate screwdrivers) that are used in watches, would be entirely inappropriate for holding my bookshelves together. Should we ever decide to down-size, and should I have to dismantle my rather well-made bookshelves, I will be thoroughly stuck if all I have to hand is a watchmaker’s screwdriver. If I were stupid (or distraught) enough to attempt to dismantle my bookshelves with a watchmaker’s screwdriver, all that I would succeed in doing would be to ruin the screwdriver. You need the right tools for the right job.

As with screws (and screwdrivers) so with the universe. It’s complicated and multi-layered. It is composed of different sorts of things that belong to different classes of things (and some that probably aren’t “things” at all). Asteroids, planets and stars are at the same time different and similar. While asteroids (or at least many of them) are composed of rocks of various compositions, stars (according to NASA) are “giant balls of hot gas”. Some planets are made of rock, some are mainly gases and fluids. So far, so different. But at a certain level of abstraction they are all composed of atoms organised in certain ways. Stars are composed of hydrogen and helium (at least for the most part). In the case of our own planet, which we obviously know best, it is composed of atoms of iron and nickel (in alternating solid and liquid layers) surrounded by silicate rocks (rich in iron and magnesium) topped off by a solid crust. What sort of tool could be used to study such things? Well, much of this particular type of stuff (at least of Earth) can be observed directly or indirectly. It can be measured, poked and prodded. Different bits can be collected and compared. So, at a basic level, this kind of stuff here on Earth, and what turns out to be the fairly similar stuff beyond Earth, can be studied using the tools of the physical sciences. But problems arise when we apply these tools inappropriately.

What kind of thing is a beetle or a chihuahua or an elephant? Clearly, just like a planet or a star, all of these can be thought of as material objects, and as such are composed of atoms. And yet it turns out that certain atoms, organised in a certain way, give rise to new types of things, or at least new types of properties, that don’t seen to be well suited to study by the physical sciences. So if you took the beetle, ground it up, did a chemical analysis, and worked out the proportions of different types of atoms, would you know everything there was to know about the beetle? Of course not. And arguably you will have missed all the really important things. Because the tools of the physical sciences aren’t enough. You need the tools of the life sciences. And you need a whole new array of concepts, like the concept of information to explain what that was encoded in the atoms of the beetle’s DNA, and with it concepts like replication, protein synthesis, ion transfer, let alone concepts like homeostasis, locomotion and reproduction. All of these, and whole new sets of tools, are needed to study beetles (and chihuahuas etc).

But what about persons? Think about a single individual human being. We could again simply grind them up, and work out their chemical constituents (65% oxygen, 18% carbon and so on; see here). As far as atoms go, these are exactly the same sort as those encountered in planets and beetles. And yet this is perhaps an even less satisfactory account than that of the chemical constitution of the beetle. So we could apply all those additional tools of the life sciences. And yet would we really want to claim we understood that particular person? Because we would still be missing a number of their vital aspects. Assuming the individual we have selected is just like you and me, then we know that as well as being an object (a thing made of stuff that can be prodded and poked), they are a subject. They have an interior life and a personal perspective, the have motives, desires and beliefs; we know this, because it is true of us. They (and we) will come to a time when this ceases to be the case (i.e. when they are dead). At that time our physical analysis will largely still stand (at least for a short period). But we all know that in a real sense they (and we when it happens to us) will be fundamentally different from how they were in life. Something that was present will at that time no longer be present. So it looks like we now need a further and distinct set of tools and concepts, including those of neurology and psychology. But what about all that first-person, personal perspective stuff? What is a motive, purpose, desire or belief? What kind of tools do we need to study these?

It gets more complicated still. Because the the odd thing about people is that usually they do not exist in isolation and only function as individual specimens. All the healthy human individuals ever encountered, have existed and do exist within a dense network of relationships with other human individuals (and occasionally non-human ones). If we don’t study this aspect of being, with yet another set of appropriate tools, we will miss something vital. And emerging from and produced by these networks comes lots of stuff we haven’t classified yet. Things like football scores, paper money, political manifestos and poems. What kind of things are these? What sort of tools do we need to investigate them? It’s clear that the tool of the physical sciences that we started off with have little or no purchase on these “things”.

Which of these various levels is the most important? Which type of description and set of tools is the most useful. The real answer is that it depends. One could probably make an argument for each one of them in turn. But if the experts at any one level were to claim that only their descriptions and explanations, generated by the tools appropriate for their level of analysis, were the true ones, and all the others were somehow wrong, or illusions, or were so unimportant that they could be ignored, we would quietly smile and assume they were after a big pay rise. What we wouldn’t do is take this type of claim seriously. It would be as bizarre as insisting I can tackle any type of screw with a watchmaker's screwdriver.

And we haven’t got to arguably the most interesting and important level of all yet and its appropriate  tools. Theology will have to wait for a different post.

Death of an expert

A few days ago, a remarkable human being left this life. Professor Stephen Hawking, one of Newton’s successors as the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge (from 1979 to 2009), cosmologist, space tourist and author, died at the age of 76. His scientific output was prodigious and ground breaking, from his 1965 PhD thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes”, to his 2017 paper “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?”. His popular output has made him a familiar name to many who knew nothing of physics. His 1988 book “A Brief History of Time”, was a best seller, and in the last week has shot back up Amazon’s best seller table (I’ve just looked and it’s currently #2).  Among other places, he popped up in Star Trek and The Simpsons. He was all the more remarkable because much of what he accomplished, he accomplished from wheelchair. At the age of 21 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor neurone disease. Originally told he only had a few years to live, it turned out that he was in the small group of ALS sufferers who survive more than 10 years after diagnosis. But latterly he had lost all power of movement in his limbs and lost the ability to speak, so he communicated by means of a computer interface that allowed him to type via a cursor activated by twitching a cheek muscle. It was slow and laborious, but it allowed him to continue to make an impact on the world beyond his wheelchair, and the sound of his electronic voice was widely and instantly recognisable. He did so much more than grudgingly and grimly survive. His passing will be felt most severely by his family and close friends. Then there will be that wider circle of friends and colleagues in Physics, and science more generally, who will miss and mourn him. And beyond that a much wider circle who will feel poorer for his passing. That’s all as it should be.

He was an expert. His specific expertise was in cosmology, working on how the universe came into existence and developed, carrying out basic and elegant work on those most mysterious objects in the universe, black holes. He used the mathematics of the infinitely small, and applied it to the really big. If you get the impression I’m being a bit vague, that’s because the maths involved, as well as many of the concepts, are well beyond me. But I’m not alone. I suppose this applies to the vast bulk of humanity. This got me thinking about expertise.

Many of us can appreciate and value Stephen Hawking’s expertise. Rather than resenting it, we can accept it, respect it. Some have been inspired by it. In part, maybe this is because of his very human story of achievement in the face of the most difficult of life circumstances. Rather than give up when confronted with essentially a death sentence, he persevered. That is impressive. Maybe it’s because his expertise was of a particular non-threatening sort. After all, as important as his work on black holes is, most of us can live quite happily in ignorance of it, with it making no personal demands on us. It has no influence on how we live, or spend, or vote. It’s the sort of thing most us are very clear we have no understanding of. There’s no question of our opinion on anything to do with black holes having any weight at all compared to Stephen Hawking’s. Most of us would accept that his expertise and knowledge were unquestionable, whereas ours is miniscule or non-existent. Perhaps it gets tricky when expertise is more questionable or its implications closer to home.

Expertise that has implications for how we think or how we live seems to be under attack (see Tom Nichol’s essay “The death of expertise”). In the blogosphere, in the media (social and otherwise), even in the street, we no longer defer to experts even when the issues are relatively technical. And of course some seem happy to keep us away from actual knowledge and to glory in ignorance (something discussed here). We have the spread of fake news (or at least the constant claim that a particular piece of news is fake) and fake facts. It emerged this week that a certain prominent politician made up a “fact” stated as a truth.

But this approach strikes me of having at its heart a strange double standard. In cosmology, medicine and aviation (to mention a few) we are happy to recognise, trust and rely on experts. Black holes may be remote objects with little direct impact on us, but knowing your surgeon can tell your tonsils from your toes, or that your pilot can successfully lower the undercarriage before landing, is clearly important. We accept that true facts matter in these domains, and that fake facts (your tonsils are on the end of your foot) have potentially serious consequences. Why then the unwillingness to accept expertise in other matters? Maybe it’s because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; it leads to the kind of hubris that claims that we can all be experts. And of course a little knowledge is only mouse click away. All opinions can then become expert opinions that must be taken equally seriously.

The answer to this is not so much a new deference but old fashioned humility; humility to recognise skill and expertise in others, and therefore give their opinions more weight than my own within their areas of expertise. This doesn’t mean experts should be regarded as infallible, even within their areas of expertise. They are human, and therefore always capable of making mistakes. So transparency and dialogue, critical engagement and debate have a role in providing corrections.  But experts are still much more likely to be right that I am. And maybe experts need a degree of humility too. Perhaps it’s tempting in the current climate to be a little too dogmatic and emphatic, even where uncertainties abound.

True expertise will always be valuable and should be valued. I wouldn’t take my views on the fate of particle pairs at the edge of black holes too seriously if I were you. We had Stephen Hawking for that.

On understanding pencils…..

Consider the humble pencil. For those poor souls born in the internet age who may not be familiar with them, the pencil is a wooden cylinder, usually about 12cm long, with a graphite core. They can be used for things like writing or drawing, making dark marks on paper (a bit like what happens on your laptop screen when you press keys on the keyboard). They don’t require an electrical supply and are pretty hardy objects, continuing to work in both hot and cold weather. They even work outdoors when it’s raining. But when all is said and done, they are fairly simple objects. Now here are some questions. What does it mean to understand a pencil? What range of disciplines are required? Is anything required beyond some fairly straightforward science? Could a pencil be any more than a sum of its parts?

Well talking of parts, I suppose a scientific approach to pencils would begin by understanding what it was actually made from. A simple pencil (let’s not complicate things too much by discussing pencils with erasers on the end or highly engineered propelling pencils) seems to consist of just two kinds of stuff. Its core is clearly different from the material surrounding it. In fact the core is probably a far from simple mixture of graphite, a substance which was originally mined but these days is manufactured. The graphite is mixed with clay or wax. The surround is of course wood. But what kind of wood? It turns out that almost all pencils are made of cedar, which doesn’t warp or crack, and can be repeatedly sharpened.  Actually the pencil I have in front of me is also painted (it’s red), and on the side there’s lettering.

The lettering spells out a brand name, but there are also some code letters. It turns out all pencils are not the same. In some the “filling” is hard and makes a thick black line, while in others it’s relatively soft making fainter, finer marks. So you don’t have to try out a pencil each time you go to buy one to find out what kind it is, the different types are coded. Apparently “medium soft” pencils (#2’s) are best for writing. But hang on. Now we’re not really thinking about the constituent parts of a pencil and their properties, the sort of thing that science can help with. A botanist could perhaps have identified the wood and speculated as to why it had been chosen. A chemist would have quickly identified that the core was a mixture of something that occurs naturally (graphite) mixed with other chemicals that it doesn’t naturally occur with. She could perhaps speculate on the processes used to combine these different substances. But now it turns out that there’s a whole other level of understanding required in order to understand pencils. They are “for something”, they have an intended purpose. And this is beyond the purview of chemistry and botany.

There are lots of uses to which pencils could be put. I assume that they burn, wood usually does. So I suppose you could put them in a fire to keep your house warm. They are relatively long and thin.  So I suppose you could poke them into holes in a bid to winkle out anything that might be hiding there. A quick experiment will show that graphite is an excellent conductor. But if you try to build circuits with pencils you’ll discover that they quickly generate so much heat that they burst into flames. So a line of pencils is never going to perform well as a mains electricity distribution system. Pencils have an intended purpose, for which they are designed, and for which they are really good. They are designed for writing and drawing, and when used in this way they perform admirably. But what kind of thing is an intended purpose? And what discipline has the correct tools for studying intended purposes? Not physics, or chemistry, or even most of biology.

It turns out pencils have a history, so it’s not just about the particular pencil sitting in front of me now. But they did not start out as the finely manufactured objects they are today. Some trace the history of the pencil back to Roman stylus. Others argue that pencils, properly understood, began with the discovery of naturally occurring graphite in Borrowdale in 1564. Leonardo frequently sketched his ideas in pencil. Without the humble pencil who knows what he might have forgotten all about,a what we would never have known he thought about. The pencil no doubt played a role in, and benefitted from, the industrial revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. To understand the pencil clearly the humanities have a role to play.

Understanding pencils is turning out to be a bit tricky. To fully capture their constitution, their use and purposes, and their impact on society is getting complicated. Just imagine how complicated it would be to substantiate the claim that we understand things like table lamps, or cars or houses. Mind you, these are all artefacts. They are all things that people make and use. But what about understanding people? Is a person simpler or more complicated that a pencil? Now I think that the answer to this is fairly simply. But for the absence of doubt I think that people are more complicated than pencils. So if we need multiple methods to understand pencils, it’s fairly certain we’ll need multiple methods to understand people. To be able to claim we understand just one individual will take effort, multiple disciplines and many layers of explanation. Some higher levels of explanation will probably be closely related to lower layers, and it may be able to explain one thing at a higher level with things at a lower level. So in principle the biological processes of digestion, beginning with what goes on in the stomach, might well be reducible to chemical explanations (eg the action of hydrochloric acid on certain foodstuffs). While the detail might be a bit tricky and technical, you can see how this kind of thing might work. But there might be other levels of explanation that can’t be decomposed into lower level types of explanation. So I might well be able to explain chemically the effect of HCl on chocolate, but why do I so enjoy Cadbury’s Dairy Milk?

And this is just about explaining one individual. People tend to clump together. And in that clumping whole new concepts emerge and need different types of explanations. So what do we make of football scores? They are a thing. You know what I mean by “football score” even if in the UK it’s about some you do with a round ball, and in the US it concerns an oval ball. On one level a football score might be just two numbers on a board at one end of a football ground. But then it seems to have strange properties than can induce effects on human beings even over great distances. So there might be a vast crowd of 50 000 people in a football ground, variable distances from the board displaying the score. A score of 1-0 is somehow capable of inducing depression in one group of 25 000 and euphoria in the remaining 25 000 (and this is the simplified version). Suppose the same score is liberated from the football ground itself and transmitted by the wonders of modern communications across the world. Across the world a similar pattern of depression and eupohoria is induced in different individuals. So what kind of thing is a football score, and with what tools should it be studied?

Given all of the above consider the following famous quotation: “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”  This comes from Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick. If you’re nothing but a pack of neurons, then all we need to understand all the complexity of humanity are the tools furnished by a particular branch of biology called neuroscience, with perhaps a dash of physics and chemistry thrown in. It smacks of a kind of reductionism often encountered in the popular writings of scientists, very often towards the end of otherwise really interesting books. reductionism doesn't work for pencils. It’s unlikely to be a plausible approach to understanding people.