Bibliothèque/Библиотека/Library

Ahh summer – those long lazy days on holiday by the sea…with the peace… and quiet.. and… well boredom, which can be relieved by finding a good read in the local library. Now call me weird, but when I drop into the library in those sleepy far off towns I usually pass by the physics shelf in the science section for a bit of a squiz. The shelf’s contents are almost always desultory and mercifully I’m usually forced to pass those long afternoons with some pulp fiction.

In contrast, imagine my excitement to discover how absolutely well stocked with fabulous physics books is the DESY library. And those long shelves full of (actually not) dusty old journals like Soviet Physics JETP (journal of experimental and theoretical physics). Now to come across even such a journal title, as I did when I was an undergraduate in the still cold war world of the 80’s, was exciting enough. It seemed like a little bit of a communist 5th column in our bourgeois decadent science library. And that journal is jammed pack full of very intelligent theoretical work – no doubt drummed out of proletarian scientists as they were forced to think away in some Siberian institute that was bound to be a state secret.

I based a lot of my research on papers from that journal – in the 80’s it felt like I was the only person in the West who even knew of their existence! Not true of course. They had obviously been translated into english quite sometime before and I was being naieve – but its nice to daydream sometimes. In any case during the process of my research I ran into a mathematical problem (see my previous blog entry) and I found, tucked away in a little corner of one of those JETP papers, a delicious reference to a soviet maths book – that hadn’t been translated and in fact wasn’t in our library’s catalogue. Or indeed in any library catalogue in the country. Eventually my brave inter-library loans librarian established that it could be obtained from the Leningrad library itself!

Obtained? Obtained!?? Would such a thing be possible? Even if the Apparatchiks allowed it out of the country, could it make it past the Iron Curtain? Even then, wouldn’t some US blockade (like the one around Cuba) stop my precious Leningrad maths book in its tracks? Somehow my intrepid book found its way into my eager hands some satisfyingly long 6 weeks later. And it was satisfyingly jammed pack full of mathematical identities, none of which, sadly, helped me to solve my maths problem. So I sent my brave little book back from whence it came.

To its doom. Horrifyingly, just a few months later the Leningrad National Academy of Sciences library burnt to the ground – destroying some 400,000 precious books and damaging millions of others. As this was really before the whole OCR, electronic library thing, perhaps many were lost forever – a veritable chernobyl of the soviet library world. The only thin silver lining was that it wasn’t the gorgeous Kunstkammer – built by Peter the Great to house the science collection and the original home of the Science Library – that was destroyed, but a faceless brown cubish building, which cant have been as nice to work in in any case.

These days the internet has brought us the means to better preserve our collective science knowledge. Many physics text books are now available online and the academic papers likewise – though more work needs to be done to digitize the older papers in journals like the JETP. And its still the case that this information has to be made free. I mean it not now in an iron curtain sense but a financial one. Subscription rates to academic journals are prohibitively high meaning that you have to be an employee of a large university or laboratory to get access to it. The international science community however thrives on the free exchange of information and to that end set up the freely accessible preprint server ArXiv. Here you will find academic papers in electronic form before they get locked away in the journals. There are high hopes for ArXiv

“Its existence was one of the precipitating factors that led to the current revolution in scientific publishing, known as the open access movement, with the possibility of the eventual disappearance of traditional scientific journals.”

One advantage of the journals are that the work that appears in them is peer (or if you like) quality reviewed. However mechanisms exist for the endorsement of ArXiv material – in general the quality of the work is very high, and its a great resource.

To finish with an adage then, information wants to be free and Science thrives on openness, cooperativeness and the absence of a profit motive!

Physics and Mathematics

When I was an undergraduate I enjoyed both my mathematics and physics subjects. Pure maths was an exercise in precision, when in proving a simple enough looking theorem, you should be concerned about the minutest detail. Physics I enjoyed because it was mysterious, it was about the world and it involved maths. That seemed like a compelling combination – that a whole class of physical phenomena could be encapsulated in a single mathematical expression. However, there is always the question lurking in the background, what exactly is the relationship of physics to maths?

There are of course many different attitudes and indeed deeply philosophical attitudes. A mathematician might think something like this:

In mathematics, the pure notions of numbers and other structures do not need physics to exist or explain or even justify them. But the surprising thing is that often some newly discovered abstract formulation in mathematics turns out, years later, to describe physical phenomena which we hadn’t known about earlier. The only conclusion I can bring myself to is that mathematics is not just a tool of physics; it must be much, much more.

Conversely, mathematics alone is not enough to determine a physical system. For instance in studying magnetism historically, the English physicist Michael Faraday invisioned lines of forces in an invisible medium stretching between, say, your fridge magnet and your fridge as you bring the former towards the latter. Continental physicsts like Laplace and Poisson envisaged centres of force acting over a distance across empty space. James Maxwell showed that the two different visions were identical mathematically. However physically they were completely different systems giving rise to long debates and experiments about the existence of a universal aether which may transmit Faraday’s lines of force

One concept which occurs often in physics – and which gives rise to interesting mathematical expressions is that of symmetry. For instance the image above is caused by focusing light onto a circular hole and resulting in a centrally symmetric diffraction pattern. The mathematical function which describes how the brightness of the pattern varies is called after its creator – the Airy function.

These Airy functions (written Ai(z)) occur whenever we try to describe any physical system with the same type of symmetry. And indeed I have an ulterior purpose in making such a long-winded introduction – I study a particular physical system with such a symmetry – in fact an interaction between particles embedded in a strong centrally symmetric field. So naturally in my study I obtain Airy’s functions – and not just one or two, but an awkward combination of Airy’s and other functions.

To be frank this “awkward combination” has been driving me nuts for quite sometime – with me wishing that my undergraduate maths lectures hadn’t occurred so long ago. You didn’t think I was going to spare you the gory details did you?

There are two ways of simplifying this little bit of maths. Firstly, the squiggly, almost vertical line on the left – the integration – can be done analytically. That is we can perhaps find an algebraic expression exa

ctly equivalent to the above, but without the integration. This is usually the preferred result – to be able to see a physical system described in assimple mathematics as possible is not only asthetically pleasing, but leads to deep insights about the physical system in question. For instance the formula describing the entropy S (or amount of disorder) of a gas, developed by physicist Lugwig Boltzmann, was considered so important that it is engraved on his grave.

In the second method of simplification, my problem integration could be done numerically by using a computer to plot the functions to the right of the integration sign and then calculating the area under the plot. This is the “brute force” method and not very satisfactory if you expect a physical system to be written simply in the language of mathematics. On the other hand, since all simple functions like the Airy function are themselves written in terms of integrations over other functions, then it may be the case that I’m dealing with a new type of function that deserves to be “fundamental” in some sense.

This goes to a deeper question – what is more important, the abstract formulae that describe a physical system, or a the real numbers that arise from calculating such formulae and which are compared with real experiments on the system in question? I suspect the answer is that both are equally important and it is the interplay between the numbers and the formulae – the experiment and the theory – that leads to a deeper understanding.

Murder by Maxwell's equation - or how I learnt to love the magic bullet

Science magazines have become pop savvy in recent times. They dress up fairly mundane stories in provocative titles like "Hunks get more sex" (New Scientist) or "Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?" (Scientific American). So I was only mildly piqued when I stumbled across "Radio-controlled bullets leave no place to hide" on the New Scientist site today.Far from this title being a snappy cover for say a new type of flu vaccine its rather banaly about, well, radio controlled bullets. The science content of the article is a standard application of Maxwells Laws. The said bullets, being rifled, rotate in the earth's magnetic field. A little loop inside the bullet has an AC current induced which radio receives the distance travelled in combination with the gun's 'smarts' - that's the electronic rangefinder - not the grunt who pulled the trigger. It gives the soldier "another tool in his kitbag". Now all we have to do is find someone capable of pointing it in the right direction.

From a scientific point of view it might have been a vaguely interesting article if it had gone on to discuss the effect of turbulence or whether the rotation speed, or pointing it north or south makes much difference to the range accuracy. Instead it read like a boring version of an arms fair advert

"the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken cover and can't be targeted by direct fire. "This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we've been able to develop and deploy," says Douglas Tamilio, the army's project manager for new weapons for soldiers."

The "X" stands for Xtremely smart bullet which after passing through the Afghan mudhut window (if it had one) dodges all the kiddies and takes out the wayward father sitting on the couch reading a copy of "Al Qaeda Monthly". Even if our smart bullet is unable to perform this feat of magic it can simply explode - and since the final range offset is +/- 3 metres - presumably with some force.

Oh did I mention that the bullet explodes? Yes, thats the idea. You cant actually see who is in the room, so better just to cause an explosion, killing or maiming everyone inside. Now the clue as to why this "tool" is any different from the current ones is given in the text:

"You could shoot a Javelin missile, and it would cost $70,000. These rounds will end up costing $25 apiece. They're relatively cheap," Tamilio says."

Now thats a word to the wise in our current economic troubles - carnage on the cheap. The best method (if a little bit of an overkill) would be just to nuke every town in Pak/Afghan/Iraq-istan, but have you seen the price of plutonium recently? That market has gone to the dogs since the North Koreans and Iranians cornered it..

As a little marketing aid, a helpful diagram of how the XM25 carries out its mission is enclosed (and reproduced here for your consideration).

Our do-gooder marine, outnumbered 2-to-1 by the dastardly foes is wisely prone behind his smart-rifle. Evil-doer number one is taking a rest in his trench after a hard morning studying the suicide bomber manual. Our smart bullet sails over the trench wall and explodes, gently showering our baddie in a black rain (thats the clue that lets you know it actually hurts). Evildoer number two after seeing the fate that has befallen number one flees - in case his uniform also gets wet from the black rain. We then quickly take out the retreater and his cowardly mates with a fuel air or DIME bomb.

As our advertising brochure picture rather gleefully informs us, "trenches arent safe anymore"... because we know how safe they were in WWI where millions of soldiers idled about on banana lounges, sipping cocktails and writing casual postcards home. And the trenches in the first Gulf War were also notably safe. There an older technology was employed - we simply drove giant tractors to the edge of the trenches and buried many tens of thousands of poor Iraqi conscripts alive. But at least they didnt get their uniforms wet from black rain.

From an earlier article in 1999, also strangely from the New Scientist (amazing what 10 years and a change of sub-editors can do) we have a more realistic description of what happens when an exploding bullet strikes flesh

"WHEN Red Cross surgeon Robin Coupland needs to demonstrate the horrific effect of outlawed weapons, he produces a slightly smudged photo of a wounded man on a stretcher. Your eyes widen as you realise what you're seeing. Like a cartoon character chomped by a shark, there's a beach-ball sized semicircle where his shoulder used to be. The man's arm is still attached to his trunk by a perilously thin strip of tissue. The grotesque injury provides ample evidence that an illegal exploding bullet has been used."

"Outlawed". Yes, thats right, by the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the Hague Declaration of 1899 and Article 35 of the Geneva protocols. But the world's remaining superpower saw fit to dispense with the Geneva convention sometime ago when it became clear that they only faced rag tag foes with nothing else much except for 50 year old kalashnikovs. That shouldnt be good enough for New Scientist though. How about some small disclaimer at the bottom of this banally amoral article saying that editors dont endorse the breaking of international law?

Perhaps I should go further...what the hell is something out of Dr Strangelove's laboratory notes doing in a science magazine?

Roentgen's Humanitarian Machine

Having the opportunity to do some travelling with my partner in Southern Germany recently, we happened upon the preserved laboratory of Whilhelm Roentgen in Wurzburg. Roentgen discoved what he called x-rays using a Crookes tube cathode to produce a stream of high energy electrons which generated characteristic frequency x-radiation via interactions with the tube anode.

Exhibiting admirable modesty, Roentgen attempted to resist the move to name the new radiation after him (an attempt which failed in at least Germany and Russia). On being awarded the first Nobel prize he declined to make a speech and donated the award money to his university. He was offered the noble appellation "von" from the Prince Regent of Bavaria but turned it down. He accepted honors from his university with a call to new students to focus on the essential joy of research.

"During the time when congratulations and honours were showered upon me [...] one thought has always remained lively and fresh, and that is the memory of the satisfaction which I felt when my work was finally developed and completed."

Noone could accuse Roentgen's attitude towards scientific research as being tainted by worldly values. He expressed astonishment at the amount of money available for research in the US (even then) and thought that essential physics could be carried out with simple apparatus and clever thinking. He refused to patent an x-ray machine and endorsed the idea of knowledge for its own sake. This was an attitude that others saw an opportunity in. For instance, Thomas Edison was quoted saying

"Professor Roentgen probably does not draw one dollar profit from his discovery. He belongs to those pure scientists who study for pleasure and love to delve into the secrets of nature. After they have discovered something wonderful someone else must come to look at it from a commercial point of view [...] One must see how to use it and how to profit from it financially"

This is either a pragmatic or cynical view depending on how you look at it. I certainly would take a hard line to such pronouncements. Not only should science be pursued for the benefit of all (not least because it is funded from the public purse), but one should prevent any individual or corporation from extracting profit from it to the disadvantage of the public generally.

This is particularly an easy case to make for applications related to medical health (as x-rays are). Profits are derived in proportion to the direct cost of medical machines. Without an enlightened public health policy this can only lead to restricted access based on the financial ability of patients. This is a societal disease which we are yet to eradicate.

Apart from his attitude to financial gain, Roentgen does not appear to have particularly left-wing though, expressing a horror of Bolshevism and cheering on the German war effort in WWI. To be fair, one had to have hard left politics to see the 'Great' War for what it was, an imperialist adventure in which workers were sent to kill each other.

One wonders what Roentgen thought of the use of poison gas in the trenches (introduced by the Germans but in the end used mostly by the British). Though Roentgen signed the pro-war proclamation of the 93 intellectuals (which Einstein refused to sign) he later expressed embarrassment and claimed he was persuaded to sign without reading it.

On his death, Roentgen ordered his scientific and personal correspondence destroyed. This act of self effacement underlined an earlier speech he gave sayng that scientists must expect their work to be surpassed and forgotten. Roentgen does us a disservice here in my opinion - there is much to be learned from the history of science and the thought processes (and mistakes) of scientists. It is not in the interest of science to obscure the background to significant work.

Stand Up Obama - who's laughing?

Bush was a dull witted beast - a burger munching, pretzel choking, torture monkey who couldnt even tell a good joke. How refreshing then to see the current POTUS kick back with a few of his high society buddies and reel off the one-liners. I dont think I would add anything by parodying the actual jokes. I will try to categorise them though.

Lets see... there was the joke about Obama's kids hijacking Air Force 1 and taking it for a spin around Manhattan at low altitude (causing several buildings to be evacuated and presumably scaring some New Yorkers shitless) - thats a new 21st century branch of comedy called unintentional terrorism. And there was the jolly torture joke - "Cheney is busy writing a book; how to shoot friends and interrogate people". Out with the faux moral outrage about torture, the real agenda is scoring political points against the Republicans.

This all took place at the annual White House Correspondent's dinner, a distasteful nexus of film stars, mass-stream media and politicians. For this cabal, the real world of torture, terrorism and bombing raids is far away; a media image to be manipulated. There is for instance Clinton and Obama's crocodile tears over bombed Afghan villagers. The real pain for the administration is not that it happened but that it became visible.

We now have a 'rethink' going on in which "'tactical actions' should not undermine strategic goals". The focus apparently should be counter insurgency rather than conventional war. However the murder of villagers - that is the destruction of the resistance's base - is classical counter insurgency. If you cant coopt or corrupt then exterminate, is their motto. This has the same dynamic as the Israeli barbarity in Gaza at the beginning of the year.

Obama as head of the world's most irresponsibly powerful Imperium has nothing new to offer. He heads an historic relic which knows only how to wreak hideous amounts of casual destruction against whoever it designates 'failed peoples'. But Obama is not there to change the direction of the juggernaut, only to polish its exterior.

Scientific Socialism for the dull

Roy Hattersley, former UK Labour Party minister, recently reviewed a new biography of Engels, "The Frock-Coated Communist" in The Guardian newspaper. Hattersley freely admits he finds Engels Anti-Duhring/Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, unintelligible, and then quotes from it

"Engels wrote that when the means of production become state property, "the proletariat abolishes itself as a proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonism, abolishes also the State as a State". I am still not sure how the thought-process that concludes with this fantasy can be called scientific rather than utopian"

Now as former Labour Party minister he should know all about how control of state property can still leave the working class fucked over. And its probably no accident that he leaves out a key part of the Engels quote, that it is the proletariat that turns the means of production into state property after seizing political power. That is to say that the proletariat itself should control the means of production and that the act of revolution should be the act of the working class itself.

The only fantasy at work here is possibly the idea that the Labour Party in government means that the proletariat runs the country. The Tories stopped trumpeting that obvious fallacy quite sometime ago, and I'm positive that the Labour Party itself no longer believes it, if it ever did. What I wanted to take task with however is the idea of scientific socialism that Hattersley feels free to parody without understanding.

For Engels, actually, scientific socialism was based on two principles. Firstly that history changes, and is explained by, material forces and political/economic contradictions rather than ideologies. Secondly that Capitalism was based on exploitation of workers on one hand, and reliance on them as consumers on the other, a contradiction bound to lead periodically into crisis. I would have thought the current economic crisis would be enough to suggest there was something fundamentally correct about Marx and Engel's analysis.

Instead of regurgitating the high ideology of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union proves that socialism will never work, Hattersley ought to look at whether it really was a test of the principles. In fact the idea that socialism can exist in one relatively backward country in the face of aggression from the rest of the world runs diametrically opposed to what Marx and Engels argued would be necessary - that it must be an international system with no military and economic competition and that it must be based on 'advanced' capitalism. It is no surprise that the USSR after being blockaded and invaded on all sides became a place where communism was not possible.

It is welcome however to see the revival of interest in Marx and Engels, a tendency not unrelated to the present round of capitalist war and crisis.

Manufacturing Mayday violence

Happy Mayday all. I joined a May Day protest/dance party in Hamburg, which was really a bit of a blast. Named "Krisenfest" we (looked to be a couple of thousand) danced our way to Hafencity and back along the waterfront to the Fischmarkt. Hafencity is a massive yuppie accommodation and business project which makes Canary Wharf in London look small. Specially commissioned apartment blocks, a philharmonic hall and many, many other buildings are built on former container and warehouse land. One would think with the crisis in full swing building would have slowed to a halt, as has the port traffic in Hamburg Port. But no, its full steam ahead on projects for the rich whereas workers elsewhere are being thrown out of work and social cuts loom. The krisenfest highlighted the disparity - plenty of money for banks and architecture firms and none for the rest of us. The philharmonic hall was 'shoed', banks water pistolled and generally a good time was had by all.

The cops were mostly hands off, except for one incident where the protest trucks/sound systems had to separate from the protestors for a short while( they went down a street and most of us over a footbridge). The cops took the opportunity to stop the trucks and harass the occupants. A potentially ugly scene was avoided when the cops backed down under the hard stares of the rest of the crowd.

There were a number of other (smaller) Hamburg Mayday demos which had a much heavier police 'footprint'. About 700 anticap/anarchists marched through St Pauli to Rote Flora, and there were a smaller number of antifa protestors in Barmbek later on. It was a pity that our forces were so divided, but I guess that reflects real differences in how to go about protesting

Elsewhere, Berlin cops who had whipped themselves into a frenzy about potential violence, managed to provoke it themselves when they raided a peaceful dance party. There is a rather good report on the Berlin activities here. In Istanbul the violence was again caused by the cops who wouldnt even allow free assembly. The mantra from media was predictable: 'violent protestors around the world' - blah!

Here's a report from Reuters trying to figure out the violence in Berlin,

Rioting on the May 1 Labor Day holiday, which since it started in 1987 has caused extensive damage to parts of the city, had been on the wane in the last three years after police shifted tactics from battling rioters to de-escalation. [...] Police in Berlin expect further violence when members of far-right parties, labor unions and leftists march. The trouble in Berlin on Friday began at the end of an otherwise peaceful gathering of about 2,000 people, police said. Demonstrators threw bottles and stones at trams and cars. Glass windows at bus stops were also destroyed by rioters.

Now I'm not a specialist in cop logic, but I would have thought that if you had less riots with a policy of 'de-escalation' - then its probably anti-logical to convince yourself that there was going to be violence and then act in such a way as to ensure that it was going to happen. Unless of course your role as cop is not keeping the peace but bringing to bear the means of violence against anyone with ideas of changing the status quo.

There is of course a pressing social concern for the powers that be. In the context of a German economy forecast to contract by 6 percent in 2009, with unemployment likely to rise to nearly five million,

Michael Sommer, president of the German Unions' Federation, has warned that 'if business corporations react to the crisis with mass layoff of workers, it is very likely that social revolt take place.' Sommer said this was not a threat, but a comment on the prevailing atmosphere.

Instead of formulating policies to defuse the social crisis, the ruling class prefers to set loose its attack dogs

"Whoever throws a stone or wears a mask must be immediately taken out of play," [Rainer Wendt, chairman of one of Germany's national police unions] told the Neuen Osnabruecker Zeitung newspaper.

And of course the cops/ruling class know there is a potential revolutionary in every disgruntled worker. So they raid peaceful events, kill a protestor in London, provoke more anger and all the time calling for an expansion of police numbers. So there you have a vicious circle of cop logic: more police=more violence=still more police.

But this is an old fight and an old enemy and in the best spirit of the day, there is always 1000s on the street willing to resist.