Two cultures

 

Two cultures

I was reminded of this by a thought provoking article published in the Economist. This sought to modify the “two cultures” notion for 2021. The original idea proposed by C P Snow in a lecture in 1959 struck a chord and received widespread attention in following years. Essentially the notion was that intellectual life had been subdivided into two camps who did not understand each other. On one hand was the arts camp who claimed civilising influences from history, literature and fine arts while decrying scientists as narrow minded philistines. On the other camp were scientists who felt they led the areas which advanced humanity but yet were decried by the arts group. This latter feeling was shown by the much resented civil service slogan about scientists “on tap but not on top”.

C P Snow was both a scientist and a novelist and his view obtained widespread currency despite some outspoken criticism. The Economist viewed recent events at Oxford University in the light of this analysis. The role of science in generating testing and vaccines against Covid 19 was contrasted with the “woke” claims about historic colonial statues and artefacts led by some Arts intellectuals. The Economist sees the scientists as looking forward and arts looking back. This is precis of their view which was qualified in some details.

When I was younger I felt quite strongly that science was the only area worthy of study. I saw subjects such as Latin as a pure waste of time feeling it only existed to give an occupation in teaching it to those who were only fit for it. I still feel that Latin graduates are turned out only to teach Latin to some of whom go on themselves to teach; and so the cycle of intellectual waste is perpetuated.

It is notable that scientists often devote some portion of their time to study of arts subjects for their interest and amusements. I consider that my interests in literature and modern history are recreational. I could never have devoted my career to them but rather I see them as worthy pastimes. I abhor the type of pseudo intellectual who asserts that Roman History ( or many other subjects… fill in the gaps yourself) is much more important than knowing what the second law of thermodynamics is, and boasts of complete inability to change a lightbulb.

I have come to realise that society needs a cohort trained in arts subjects to provide a professional core which assists me and others in their spare time interests. I think that many new areas such as film studies while fit for recreation have no real basis for serious study. I harbour a suspicion that they provide an easy option and are seen to be so to the detriment of the wider interests of society. Those wider interests seem to me to demand a much wider cohort of scientifically  literate population. While scientists can be gullible at least this might cut down the number who believe in such daft ideas as a flat earth.

I am a supporter of the vast increase in higher education in recent years. I think that now nearly half of school leavers go on to university. I certainly agree that university education should ( hopefully) teach both how to study and some critical facility. I do worry however that far too many courses do not offer much intellectual rigour.

The careful reader will notice I have said nothing about professions such as law or accountancy. I very much agree that a civilised society needs these old professions and I do think it is the right thing that degree level study is now required rather than the type of apprenticeship which was common 60 years ago. I regret that the social cachet ( I could say snobbery ) surrounding law still exists.

Despite the protestations of a retired nurse of my acquaintance I agree that nursing justifies degree level training. She feels strongly that a vocation and “on the job” training is all that is required..

 I accept there is an argument for non vocational training. I have never been one of those who sneer at “Hamburger University” as McDonalds characterises its training facility. I very much hope that  burger slingers are trained and act in a well trained and professional manner. It is quite obvious to me that one of the defects of education in this country is that too little emphasis and pride is given to vocational training. An able and professional plumber ( or any tradesman ) is valuable to society and in return should be granted a higher standing

On the subject of English as a suitable subject for study I became notorious at my daughter’s school. At a parents evening in year 11 her English teacher complimented her work and expressed the hope she would continue at A level. My response was to say that she would be spending her time studying more valuable science subjects and that English was a recreational subject. Apparently this became a notorious view. Fortunately my daughter lived it down. My daughter went on to do Maths, Physics, English and French at A level and then to do an English degree attaining a First. I am proud but just a little wistful. Her early interest in cosmology led me to hope she would go on to work in some related area.

I am proud my elder daughter enjoyed a degree and doctorate in biochemistry. She is now employing that knowledge ( and a subsequent ecology degree ) in trying to ensure effective use of  minimum quantities of biocides in agriculture.  This type of work will hopefully lead to overall advance of civilisation. To ensure that no one goes hungry in a stable world seems to me a more worthy objective than a hundred classics scholars in their narrow niche..

Pedantic note

I, myself, largely made my career in technology. I often describe myself as a scientist for simplicity. I am proud of the association with science and my training in that discipline.

Brexit -an intermediate stage economic review

 

Brexit- it isn’t over    written 20 July 21

Brexit has largely dropped out of public awareness while the Covid  pandemic takes up so much attention. However it is very far from over and now seems a time to review. I must say I was, and am, opposed to Brexit largely on the economic consequences. These consequences will take some years to play out but enough is known to make an intermediate judgement. Rather than indulge in analysis of UKIPery and related nationalist nonsense I will try and look at the overall economic situation.

The manufactured goods agreement saved much of UK manufacturing industry but at a very high price. The cost of retaining some of the Japanese transplants has been high. Nissan has demanded and received a bribe of hundreds of millions of pounds to build a battery plant to service its Sunderland operations. Stellantis ( the new name for Vauxhall, as the former Fiat Chrysler Peugeot is now called ) has taken a hundred million to keep the Ellesmere Port factory open. Despite these big subsidies Honda is closing their Swindon plant.

It has become a feature of the new government to adopt a much more statist approach to the economy. While public money can be a decent investment there are limits of public finance. When Toyota come with their hands out what then? To say nothing of Indian owned Jaguar Land Rover and a number of smaller producers. One major problems is that the laudable intention to promote high technology sectors is being relatively starved of resources to pay for these handouts. One illustration is that the excellent idea to establish an English DARPA is being handed a modest initial stake.

Manufacturing is now roughly 10% of the UK economy and is dwarfed by the vast services sector at about 80%  with construction making up the remaining 10% or so. The agreement with the EU excludes services. The government has tried , and failed, to secure an agreement on “equivalence” for the financial sector. In the past the City has been a massive part of the UK economy. This is now shrinking fast. Much trading and investment management has gone overseas. The only saving grace is that this has dispersed to a number of centres, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and Paris. All had aspired to replace London as a financial hub. There are efforts to help London retain the rich environment which surround the financial industry, and thus are features of the financial business, but it remains to be seen whether these will be effective.

Outside the financial sector the services businesses largely are internal. Any exporting face big problems. There have been a steady drip of businesses in difficulty reported in the news.

There has been much talk of trade deals, supposedly to be a big bonus after Brexit. It is perhaps a bit churlish to comment on the feeble effect thus far. These deals will take time to negotiate and even longer to have any impact. Apart from carryover deals where the UK does exactly the same as the EU, the flagship deal is with Australia. Even this has been controversial in the farming community. One can also say that a deal with resolutely Anglophile Australia should have been a very easy negotiation.

The one that has got away, or rather never got started, is with the USA. Johnson toadying to Trump came too late and the Biden administration have , more or less, said not interested.

Efforts are rightly now focused on the multi country Pacific deal. Even though the USA withdrew under Trump the remaining states have ( just about ) stuck together. Tactically this would be a big win although the economic impact is probably small.

It has been a feature of Conservative governments to try to do more business with China. A trade deal is very unlikely except on China’s terms and they are likely to be very severe. Their interest is largely in technology transfer and investment. The UK should be very wary.

A feature of the 11^th hour EU agreement was to effectively put the UK/EU border in the North Sea. Although there are mutterings about reneging on this agreement this is unlikely, probably illegal. The long term implication is Irish unification which is why the so called “loyalists” are very worried.. The continual goading of the EU by the Johnson government while playing well with UKIP types isn’t making a compromise Northern Ireland solution any easier.

One can speculate why Johnson is trying a scorched earth policy with the EU. One reason , apart from playing to his gallery, may be trying to ensure there is no early reversal. Certainly he has taken care to exclude any but committed Brexiteers from government. While re-joining is inevitable in the long term there is little short term prospect. A more interesting reason clearly visible in the pro-Johnson press is whistling to keep your spirits up. The economy isn’t performing as the Brexiteers expected but I would have thought it is early days to be disheartened.

A final feature of the post Brexit economy is that it turns out European workers are important. Their numbers are higher than was expected and their roles in such as the NHS are key. A curious feature is that many low paid jobs were filled by immigrants. Recruiting English people to do arduous cleaning, fruit picking and the like is difficult particularly as they are low status and poorly rewarded. No doubt the economy is still readjusting post Covid.

Nothing I have seen changes my view that Britain will probably split and England will slowly become less prosperous as a result of the Brexit tragedy..

Addendum

I have long regarded the referendum as very dubious and now Cummings, the Vote Leave strategist has admitted to the lies told ( he prefers the term “deliberately misleading” )  The notorious 350m weekly payment to the EU was untrue  as were the imaginary Turkish immigrants.

New Orleans

 

 

I was asked to attend the American Standards meeting on Aerospace at New Orleans. I hadn’t long joined Castrol ( it was 1982 ) and the timing was incredibly inconvenient. We hadn’t long moved to Wilmslow and our house was being reroofed. I had to leave my wife with tarpaulins covering part of the roof. However the trip was seen as necessary to join up with the consultant who would be handing the aerospace products over to me. I had never met him before but he was held in very high regard by the company

I made a very bad start at the New Orleans airport by asking a policeman where I could find a bus to the hotel. He looked at me pityingly and said I shouldn’t use the bus but the hotel limo. I learned that the limo was actually a shuttle minibus and that buses were seen as only for the poor. My first lesson that American English is different; my first thought ( and fear) was the limo would be a very upmarket and expensive taxi.

I can pass over the meeting except to say that it was held in two parts and I had to request an extra days stay because there was a free day between. The consultant was a disappointment. I felt obliged to spend a lot of free time with him and he only seemed to want to go a restaurant and then on to a bar where he drank quite heavily. He also seemed to know a lot of the attendees but barely bothered to introduce me.

On our free day we went on a Mississippi stern wheeler  on a cruise up the river. The cruise was on a rather fake ship, the Natchez. Although with the look of a traditional Mississippi river boat the Natchez was actually newly built only a few years previously.

New Orleans is the home of jazz. The first restaurant we chose had a jazz combo and I was able to request a classic , “muskrat ramble”. Our consultant was a relatively elderly man who didn’t want to walk. I did go as far as the nearest park where there was  a statue of famous jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. The tourism peak was however  a visit to Preservation Hall in my final evening. This is a living museum where you queue to hear a group play in the most traditional style in surroundings supposedly similar to early days of 1917 or so.

Entrance is cheap but the price is that you “stand in line” as the Americans say for the evening concert. I recall I was next to a couple who in exchange for keeping their place bought mint julip drinks from a nearby vendor. On a warm evening this ice cold drink was most wonderfully refreshing. Preservation Hall itself was stark with just wooden benches for the audience. Such was the crowd that many sat on the floor or stood around the walls. The group was a mixture of old timers ( all coloured ) and a couple of young whites.

New Orleans has still a French ambience. The centre French Quarter is notable for Creole building around courtyards with first floor balconies. These are fronted by intricate ironwork. In Jackson Square they sell “beignets” which are sugar coated  batter rings like doughnuts.. These are really unremarkable except for the location and name.

It happened that during my stay there was St Patricks Day. I soon found that the throng of people by the hotel were celebrants with a profusion of green, fabric shamrocks. I had the strong impression that the day was really an excuse for a street party. Apparently this gets quite rowdy as the evening wears on but I was back in my room by then. Many Americans seem to think, on often slender evidence, that they are linked to Irish immigrants.

One feature which was new at the time was the Louisiana Superdome. This later became famous as a shelter during hurricane Katrina. The Superdome was also notorious for the crimes among the refugees. Mercedes Benz now have the naming rights. This is a sports stadium with a sliding roof which is also used for all sorts of events and exhibitions. It is the largest permanent dome structure in the world. The Millennium Dome is larger but regarded as a temporary structure. The Superdome has a seating capacity of about 75,000. I took a guided tour. I was impressed to by the immense gradually sloping access ramps along the outside. Fully covered not only do they handle large crowds leaving all at once but they allow emergency vehicles to go to all levels- they are easily wide enough for two vehicles to pass.. During my visit there was a Camping and Caravanning show.

My visit was before Hurricane Katrina  destroyed much of the city with massive flooding as the levees burst. I expect it is now much changed.

As it turned out I had virtually nothing to do with aero products for many years. The qualification testing  makes them expensive and laborious. This testing was something I avoided as we didn’t have the facilities or structure to cope. Probably rightly aviation standards are very precise and detailed. Late in my time with Castrol we became involved in compressor cleaning of ground based gas turbines used in power stations. Even then I was in a secondary role helping to support a product bought in from a specialist firm. I did get to visit Heathrow and walk round a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. It really is immense.

New Physics

 

New Physics?

Physics is the fundamental branch of science. All other branches rely on physics to some greater or lesser degree. Broadly physics deals with all properties of matter and energy. There is however a fundamental problem, in fact several problems. Basically relativity, so brilliantly developed by Einstein, explains the property of matter on a large scale. In particular it describes gravity, a basic force, as deriving from the curvature of space-time. Relativity has been proven correct in very many tests. On very small scales typically of atomic size a separate description called quantum theory holds true, again as has been shown in very many tests.

There have been many efforts  to reconcile the two models both of which seem strong and well supported. The efforts even gained their own title which was much used a decade ago. The title is the theory of everything.

Within the province of the very small particularly atoms a structure of both evidence and theory has built up which is called the standard model. Effectively the standard model describes all the sub atomic particles which make up an atom. It is believed these particles are truly fundamental and cannot be split up. It has been shown that particles in the Bohr atom such as the neutron can be broken up into constituent particles in the standard model. Part of the background to the model is the belief there are four fundamental forces called the weak, the strong, electromagnetic and gravity.

The weak and strong forces are very, very short range and only effective within an atom. The electromagnetic force is ubiquitous and fairly strong. All electric and electronic technology relies on its manipulation. The oddity is gravity. It is much weaker than the other forces, less than a billion, billionth as strong as the others. However gravity has a very long range with its effects reducing by an inverse square law as first set out by Newton. Although the standard model fits the evidence very well it must be incomplete because it doesn’t take account of gravity.

I glibly talk of evidence for the standard model. This has been carefully worked out over decades using atom smashers and studying the particles produced under such as different electrical and magnetic fields. It culminated in the discovery of the precisely predicted Higgs boson at the massive atom smasher at CERN..

It might be useful to reflect on the history of physics. Over the century 1850 to 1950 particularly the latter half century most particles and force fields were discovered. Not only were there a bonanza of experimental discoveries but a strong theoretical basis was established with Maxwell on electromagnetic fields in the 1860’s and the whole theory of quantum mechanics developed over 1910-1930 by Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and others. In contrast since about 1950 physics while advancing has presented many frustrations. Some major phenomena such as dark energy and matter is at present inexplicable. One of the frustrations of the past half century has been that measurements have either confirmed existing theory or have come as a completely unexplained surprise.  The most recent example was that the prediction of the standard model let to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.

Quantum theory is based on the simple observation that energy changes in the atom don’t happen continuously but rather in jumps. These jumps are predictable and consistent. From this the towering edifice of quantum mechanics has been built. In quantum mechanics  it is possible to describe say the position of an electron as the probability that it will be in that place. However some seemingly improbable positions have a definite albeit very small probability. These probabilities are mathematically precise but lead to an imprecise position. This is a wholly imperfect description of quantum mechanics. I think it was Schrodinger who said “quantum theory is not just strange but stranger than we can possibly imagine” As an example quantum theory says two particles joined in particular way ( entangled in the jargon ) always behave exactly the same even if many miles apart. What’s more the reflected change happens instantaneously which defies the prediction of relativity which holds that nothing travels faster than light. This led Einstein to call it “spooky action at a distance” and to reject its reality. However insofar as it can be observed it appears to be true.

Relativity theory has been massively supported by recent evidence that gravitation does indeed result from distortions of space time. The very slight distortions in gravity by changes in mass has been observed directly when huge masses such as black holes merge. These distortions are very small indeed and are of sub atomic dimensions. As well as a direct confirmation of relativity these instruments ( laser interferometer gravity observations ) open up a potential new way of observing the universe.

Recently there have been intriguing hints that the standard model may not fit perfectly with the evidence. Part of the frustration of physicists is that they know it must be incomplete but so far it has fitted perfectly with the evidence. This suspicion is related to the properties of the muon, a particle in the standard model. This is related to how muons spin in a magnetic field and how they decay. The problem is that the experiments are not precise enough to give evidence with the statistical rigour required. Atomic physicists like to be sure and at present they can’t be certain. If the required statistical tests can be passed it may be the first dim signs of a fifth force to add to the four known . If confirmed it could open up ways of resolving all the present contradictions and will send physicists haring down a new track..