Now that Saddam Hussein has replied to the UN Security Council's demand for complete disclosure of his weapons of mass destruction programs with stonewalling and obfuscation (and not very subtly at that), it's clear the march to war against the Iraqi regime has moved a step further along the way.

Outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joseph Biden, a Democrat, and committee member Chuck Hagel, Republican, authored an opinion piece appearing last Friday in the Washington Post called “Iraq: the Decade After.”  Mostly sensibly written, I'd judge, their opinion is that we need to hang on for the long haul in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein.

As we ramp up to this war against Saddam's regime, no doubt the chorus of complaint from the antiwar left will become ever more shrill and strident, and we will hear, once again (as we did last year in the war against the Taliban), that this war is “illegal,” because “the U.S. hasn't declared war,” as stipulated by the U.S. Constitution.

Before that moment arrives, and while Joe Biden is still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — representing the liberal wing of the Congressional viewpoint as to the constitutional need for and requisite accomplishment of a declaration of war — it's worth recalling what his position and that of other members (e.g., Representative Gephardt) of the Democratic Party leadership has been. 

Consider this emphatic statement by Senator Biden with regard to the Use of Force resolution passed nearly unanimously by Congress after 2001-09-11.  In response to a question from the floor following a speech (given 2001-10-22, shown on CSPAN), the interchange went as follows:

Question:  “My question is this, do you foresee the need or the expectation of a Congressional declaration of war, which the Constitution calls for, and if so, against whom?”

Senator Biden:  “The answer is yes, and we did it.  I happen to be a professor of Constitutional law.  I'm the guy that drafted the Use of Force proposal that we passed.  It was in conflict between the President and the House.  I was the guy who finally drafted what we did pass.  Under the Constitution, there is simply no distinction …  Louis Fisher(?) and others can tell you, there is no distinction between a formal declaration of war, and an authorization of use of force.  There is none for Constitutional purposes.  None whatsoever.  And we defined in that Use of Force Act that we passed, what … against whom we were moving, and what authority was granted to the President.”

Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy, summarizes Senator Biden's constitutional position as:  “Congressional authorization of the use of force is legally tantamount to a declaration of war.”  That's how I (not a constitutional expert) interpret Biden's words too.  (Note also discussion in Volokh's piece of why a war declaration is not required by the U.S. Constitution.  As Eugene points out, however, that's a separate issue.)

Thus, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a Democrat, and author of the Use of Force resolution passed last year by Congress — roles which would appear to give him considerable credibility in this regard — categorically states that, for all practical constitutional purposes, the U.S. has declared war in this worldwide war (a real war, not a “metaphorical war” as some on the left allege) against terror round the globe.

Due to the recent resolution passed by Congress with regard to Iraq, via identical reasoning the United States has also now (legally, constitutionally) declared war against Saddam's Iraqi regime.  The antiwar left ought to be aware that the supposed lack of a declaration of war in this situation is not a valid argument for its panoply.  That will not keep many from falsely shouting it from the rooftops, but the rest of us can keep cognizant of the reality of the situation.

Whew!  The Taken series is finally over; what a relief!  Twenty hours, egad!  (Now my wife misses the program, though — and predicts a sequel.  She could be right; plus she's got all those tapes….  I predict I'll be seeing more of it.)

The biggest failing of Spielberg's Taken, as it turns out, is not a few stupid comments by the obligatory German scientist in cliched films picturing the late-40's and 50's, it's in the fundamental premise behind the entire series:  the idea that aliens from another world would want or need to conduct several generations of “selective breeding” of humans (or anything else) to produce some kind of master genetic superman.

Hello, this is the twenty-first century!  Selective breeding is how many millennia old?  Ten, fifteen thousand years?  Could there perhaps be a slightly more recent and advanced technology available (to us, much less sophisticated aliens from across the stars)?  Hm….  How about (pa-dum!) genetic engineering!

Read physicist Freeman Dyson's essay for imaginative yet entirely reasonable forecasting how such enormously powerful technology, once acquired, could be made use of.  Once we have mastered these new technologies (much less than a century away, I'd say), there will be no more need for breeding generation after generation to slowly approach some ideal phenotype.  Instead, one would simply program a “seed” or “egg” with the final genetic complement desired for the organism, then wait (pouring in energy and food to speed up the process) while it grows to adulthood.  Existing organisms can also be updated in place, rather than growing new ones.

The problem with Taken, as is typical for the entire UFO mythos in fact, is not that the science of such hypothetical galaxy-spanning denizens is so advanced (civilizations millions or billions of years older than ours — as most extraterrestrial civilizations must be — have time to develop some pretty advanced technologies; however, see my earlier Taken post for a discussion of the real difficulties in traveling between the stars).  Rather, it is that the technologies the aliens are reportedly using here and now on Earth are primitive, even by standards of what we're learning to do today, much less what we'll be able to do by the time we learn to cross the great gulfs between the stars.

Where's just one of the millions of implants, for example, supposedly distributed among the estimated one-eighth (!) of Americans who, according to the scuttlebutt, have been “abducted”?  Where indeed is any verifiable alien artifact from any of the dozens of alien races reportedly buzzing round Earth like flies over a corpse?

It's worthwhile keeping the words of writer and visionary (inventor of the modern communications satellite) Arthur C. Clarke in mind:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Any civilization capable of reaching between the stars could easily build microscopic robots capable of studying us from wazoo to zilch, zenith to nadir — from the vantage point of particles of lint hiding in our navel!  There's no need for aliens to perform “abductions,” insert implants, or indeed act in any way that we can possibly observe.  We'd simply never see them at all.

As a result, the UFO mythos — as well as the Taken storyline — simply isn't credible.  That, not some imagined great conspiracy of all the governments of the world, is why the UFO paradigm has never gotten (nor deserves) “legs.”

Eugene Volokh and Stuart Banner do back to back postings on the 2002-12-20 Volokh Conspiracy regarding the fundamental nature of federalism in the American constitutional system.

Stuart Banner's posting, entitled “The Origins of Federalism,” considers the question of “Why does the United States have a federal structure?”  Banner answers the question he poses thusly:

Not because federalism is conducive to good government, not because the Framers thought it would be wise to have a country made up of sovereign states, and not because of racism.  We have federalism today because in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when the English government began establishing colonies in North America, England set up a bunch of separate colonies rather than one big colony.  Distances were so great and technology so simple circa 1600 that North America would have been very hard to govern as a single colony.  By the time of independence it was too late to change.  Canada and Australia have a federal structure today for the same reason.  New Zealand does not, because it was small enough and colonized late enough to be run as a single colony.

Now, I have no idea whether on balance federalism is good or bad.  All I'm saying is that if it's good, we lucked into it, and if it's bad, we're stuck with a system intended for circumstances quite different from our own.

I agree with much of Stuart's reasoning, but I must note his explanation is insufficient to explain the existence much less prevalence of federalism among the British colonial successor states.  After all, the former Spanish empire is presently divided into a number of separate nations — not states or provinces of nations — for exactly the reason Banner points to above (separate colonial administrations), but without a whole lot of federalism, much less republicanism or democracy, resulting (at least until recently, and mostly under U.S. influence).

Thus, beyond a multiplicity of subject administrations created by the colonial power, there must be features in specifically British history, character, and culture that resulted not only in federalism in the subsequent development of the ex-colonial societies, but republicanism and democracy itself.

It was (Frenchman) Alexis de Tocqueville who, writing from the vantage point of a foreigner, observing America during the first half of the 19th century (he visited the U.S. during the 1830s), most perceptively saw and wrote about the kernels of the origins of the American system.

Because of his especially perspicacious view of American society and democracy during the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville's great work Democracy in America is so highly regarded here in the United States, in fact, that it is often considered to belong among America's “Crown Jewels.”  America's “Crown Jewels,” unlike the crown jewels of monarchies as they have existed round the world, consists of a small set of documents:  the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers; that's about it — except for Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

(This three-part article consists of three postings, the present, now coming to an end; next a moderately-lengthy quotation by Alexis de Tocqueville — presenting his analysis of the origins of Amerian republicanism, democracy, and federalism — which immediately follows this post; and lastly a follow-up post with acknowledgments and links.)

Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: ¹

Democracy more perfect than any of which antiquity had dared to dream sprang full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.

The English government watched untroubled the departure of so many emigrants, glad to see the seeds of discord and of fresh revolutions dispersed afar.  Indeed it did everything to encourage it and seemed to have no anxiety about the fate of those who sought refuge from its harsh laws on American soil.  It seemed to consider New England as a land given over to the fantasy of dreamers, where innovators should be allowed to try out experiments in freedom.

The English colonies — and that was one of the main reasons for their prosperity — have always enjoyed more internal freedom and political independence than those of other nations; nowhere was this principle of liberty applied more completely than in the states of New England.

It was at that time generally recognized that the lands of the New World belonged to that nation who first discovered them.

In that way almost the whole of the North American coast became an English possession toward the end of the sixteenth century.  The means used by the British government to people these new domains were of various sorts; in some cases the king chose a governor to rule some part of the New World, administering the land in his name and under his direct orders [Footnote: This was the case in the state of New York]; that was the colonial system adopted in the rest of Europe.  In others he granted ownership of some portion of the land to an individual or to a company.  [Footnote: Maryland, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were in this category.]  In those cases all civil and political powers were concentrated in the hands of one man or a few individuals, who, subject to the supervision and regulation of the Crown, sold the land and ruled the inhabitants.  Under the third system a number of immigrants were given the right to form a political society under the patronage of the motherland and allowed to govern themselves in any way not contrary to her laws.  This mode of colonization, so favorable to liberty, was put into practice only in New England.

In 1628 a charter of that sort was granted by Charles I to the emigrants who were going to found the colony of Massachusetts.

But generally charters were only granted to the New England colonies long after their existence had become an established fact.  Plymouth, Providence, New Haven, and the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded without the help and, in a sense, without the knowledge of the motherland.  The new settlers, without denying the supremacy of the homeland, did not derive from thence the source of their powers, and it was only thirty or forty years afterward, under Charles II, that a royal charter legalized their existence.  [Footnote: In shaping their criminal and civil laws and their procedures and courts of justice, the inhabitants of Massachusetts diverged from English usages; in 1650 the king's name no longer headed judicial orders.]

For this reason it is often difficult, when studying the earliest historical and legislative records of New England, to detect the link connecting the immigrants with the land of their forefathers.  One continually finds them exercising rights of sovereignty; they appointed magistrates, made peace and war, promulgated police regulations, and enacted laws as if they were dependent on God alone.

Nothing is more peculiar or more instructive than the legislation of this time; there, if anywhere, is the key to the social enigma presented to the world by the United States now.

Among these records one may choose as particularly characteristic the code of laws enacted by the little state of Connecticut in 1650.

The Connecticut lawgivers turned their attention first to the criminal code and, in composing it, conceived the strange idea of borrowing their provisions from the text of Holy Writ:  “If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.”

There follow ten or twelve provisions of the same sort taken word for word from Deuteronomy, Exodus, or Leviticus.

Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape are punished by death; a son who outrages his parents is subject to the same penalty.  [Footnote: The laws of Massachusetts also imposed the death penalty for adultery, and Hutchinson (Vol. I, p. 441) says that several people were actually executed for that crime; in this context he quotes a strange story of something which happened in 1663.  A married woman had a love affair with a young man; her husband died and she married him; several years passed; at length the public came to suspect the intimacy which had earlier existed between the spouses, and criminal proceedings were brought against them; they were thrown into prison, and both were very near being condemned to death.]  Thus the legislation of a rough, half-civilized people was transported into the midst of an educated society with gentle mores; as a result the death penalty has never been more frequently prescribed by the laws or more seldom carried out.

The framers of these penal codes were especially concerned with the maintenance of good behavior and sound mores in society, so they constantly invaded the sphere of conscience, and there was hardly a sin not subject to the magistrate's censure.  The reader will have noticed the severity of the penalties for adultery and rape.  Simple intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise harshly repressed.  The judge had discretion to impose a fine or a whipping or to order the offenders to marry.  [Footnote: Code of 1650, p. 48.  It would seem that sometimes the judges would impose more than one of these penalties, as is seen in a judicial sentence of 1643 {…} which directs that Margaret Bedford, convicted of loose conduct, be whipped and afterward compelled to marry her accomplice, Nicholas Jemmings.]  If the records of the old courts of New Haven are to be trusted, prosecutions of this sort were not uncommon; under the date May 1, 1660, we find a sentence imposing a fine and reprimand on a girl accused of uttering some indiscreet words and letting herself be kissed.

The code of 1650 is full of preventive regulations.  Idleness and drunkenness are severely punished.  Innkeepers may give each customer only a certain quantity of wine; simply lying, if it could do harm, is subject to a fine or a whipping.  In other places the lawgivers, completely forgetting the great principle of religious liberty which they themselves claimed in Europe, enforced attendance at divine service by threat of fines and went so far as to impose severe penalties, and often the death penalty, on Christians who chose to worship God with a ritual other than their own.  [Footnote: Under the penal law of Massachusetts a Catholic priest who sets foot in the state after he has been driven out therefrom is subject to the death penalty.]

Finally, sometimes the passion for regulation which possessed them led them to interfere in matters completely unworthy of such attention.  Hence there is a clause in the same code forbidding the use of tobacco.  We must not forget that these ridiculous and tyrannical laws were not imposed from outside — they were voted by the free agreement of all the interested parties themselves — and that their mores were even more austere and puritanical than their laws.  In 1649 an association was solemnly formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair.  {…}

Such deviations undoubtedly bring shame on the spirit of man; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which, unable to hold firmly to what is true and just, is generally reduced to choosing between two excesses.

Alongside this criminal code so strongly marked by narrow sectarian spirit and all the religious passions, stimulated by persecution and still seething in the depths of men's souls, was a body of political laws, closely bound up with the penal law, which, though drafted two hundred years ago, still seems very far in advance of the spirit of freedom of our own age.

All the general principles on which modern constitutions rest, principles which most Europeans in the seventeenth century scarcely understood and whose dominance in Great Britain was then far from complete, are recognized and given authority by the laws of New England; the participation of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of government officials, individual freedom, and trial by jury — all these things were established without question and with practical effect.

These pregnant principles were there applied and developed in a way that no European nation has yet dared to attempt.

In Connecticut the electoral body consisted, from the beginning, of all the citizens, and that is readily understood.  [Footnote: Constitution of 1638 {…}.]  In that nascent community there prevailed an almost perfect equality of wealth and even greater intellectual equality.  [Footnote: In 1641 the general assembly of Rhode Island declared unanimously that the government of the state was a democracy and that power resided in the body of free men, who alone had the right to make the laws and provide for their enforcement.  Code of 1650 {…}.]

At that time in Connecticut all executive officials were elected, including the governor of the state.

Citizens over sixteen years of age were obliged to bear arms; they formed a national militia which appointed its officers and was bound to be ready to march at any time to the country's defense.

In the laws of Connecticut and of all the other states of New England we see the birth and growth of that local independence which is still the mainspring and lifeblood of American freedom.

In most European nations political existence started in the higher ranks of society and has been gradually, but always incompletely, communicated to the various members of the body social.

Contrariwise, in America one may say that the local community was organized before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the Union.

In New England, local communities had taken complete and definite shape as early as 1650.  Interests, passions, duties, and rights took shape around each individual locality and were firmly attached thereto.  Inside the locality there was a real, active political life which was completely democratic and republican.  The colonies still recognized the mother country's supremacy; legally the state was a monarchy, but each locality was already a lively republic.

The towns appointed their own magistrates of all sorts, assessed themselves, and imposed their own taxes.  The New England towns adopted no representative institutions.  As at Athens, matters of common concern were dealt with in the marketplace and in the general assembly of the citizens.
 
 

¹ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 12th Edition, 1848, edited by J. P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence, Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., Inc., New York, 1969; pp. 39-44.

I decided to excerpt the above quote from the Mayer/Lawrence edition described above — fully crediting J. P. Mayer and George Lawrence's work — instead of obtaining the text from the on-line version pointed-to below, in the hope this will encourage readers to buy or check out the foregoing fine translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville's travel diary from his years-long visit to America has also been published.  See:  Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, edited by J. P. Mayer, Yale paperback series, New Haven, 1962.

An on-line version of the entirety of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is available on the Internet here. 

The U.S. public affairs television network C-SPAN has done a tremendous amount of programming on Alexis de Tocqueville.  Do a search for “Toc” on the index for the C-SPAN on-line store to review all the programming on him that is available.  C-SPAN also has a nice map showing Tocqueville's travels in America.

Then there's the web page “Tocqueville.org” containing numerous links to information about Alexis de Tocqueville and his writings.

Dominican friar Felix Faber from the German city of Ulm twice traveled as a pilgrim to the Holy Land during the latter part of the 15th century.  Faber offered up this dry advice for travelers on long Mediterranean boat voyages of his day: ¹

As the poet says, “A ripe turd is an unbearable burden” [ut dicitur metrice: maturum stercus est importabile pondus].  A few words on the manner of urinating and shitting on a boat.

Each pilgrim has near his bed a urinal — a vessel of terracotta, a small bottle — into which he urinates and vomits.  But since the quarters are cramped for the number of people, and dark besides, and since there is much coming and going, it is seldom that these vessels are not overturned before dawn.  Quite regularly in fact, driven by a pressing urge that obliges him to get up, some clumsy fellow will knock over five or six urinals in passing, giving rise to an intolerable stench.

In the morning, when the pilgrims get up and their stomachs ask for grace, they climb the bridge and head for the prow, where on either side of the spit privies have been provided.  Sometimes as many as thirteen people or more will line up for a turn at the seat, and when someone takes too long it is not embarrassment but irritation that is expressed [nec est ibi verecundia sed potius iracundia].  I would compare the wait to that which people must endure when they confess during Lent, when they are forced to stand and become irritated at the interminable confessions and await their turn in a foul mood.

At night, it is a difficult business to approach the privies owing to the huge number of people lying or sleeping on the decks from one end of the galley to the other.  Anyone who wants to go must climb over more than forty people, stepping on them as he goes; with every step he risks kicking a fellow passenger or falling on top of a sleeping body.  If he bumps into someone along the way, insults fly.  Those without fear or vertigo can climb up to the prow along the ship's gunwales, pushing themselves along from rope to rope, which I often did despite the risk and the danger.  By climbing out the hatches to the oars, one can slide along in a sitting position from oar to oar, but this is not for the faint of heart, for straddling the oars is dangerous, and even the sailors do not like it.

But the difficulties become really serious in bad weather, when the privies are constantly inundated by waves and the oars are shipped and laid across the benches.  To go to the seat in the middle of a storm is thus to risk being completely soaked, so that many passengers remove their clothing and go stark naked.  But in this, modesty [verecundia] suffers greatly, which only stirs the shameful [verecunda] parts even more.  Those who do not wish to be seen this way go squat in other places, which they soil, causing tempers to flare and fights to break out, discrediting even honorable people.  Some even fill their vessels near their beds, which is disgusting and poisons the neighbors and can be tolerated only in invalids, who cannot be blamed: a few words are not enough to recount what I was forced to endure on account of a sick bedmate.

The pilgrim must be careful not to hold back on account of false modesty and not relieve the stomach; to do so is most harmful to the traveler.  At sea it is easy to become constipated.  Here is good advice for the pilgrim: go to the privies three or four times every day, even when there is no natural urge, in order to promote evacuation by discreet efforts; and do not lose hope if nothing comes on the third or fourth try.  Go often, loosen your belt, untie all the knots of your clothes over chest and stomach, and evacuation will occur even if your intestines are filled with stones.  This advice was given me by an old sailor once when I had been terribly constipated for several days.  At sea, moreover, it is not safe to use pills or suppositories [pilulas aut suppositoria accipere], because to purge oneself too much can cause worse trouble than constipation.

Probably good advice for any time and place.

¹ Quoted from A History of Private Life: Vol. II – Revelations of the Medieval World, edited by Georges Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988; pp. 587-588.

Quote of the day, from the same volume (p. 589):

Felix conjunctio!  (“Happy coupling”)  —Carmina Burana (10th to 13th century)

Images have been added to the Roaring Camp piece.  Enjoy!

“To see the world in a grain of sand,
Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
William Blake

To paraphrase Yoda in George Lucas's Star Wars:  “Always in motion is the past.”

It might be thought that our knowledge of the ancient world (at least the better known periods and aspects of it) would have mostly shaken into a settled shape by now.  It's true that much information about the past is well and reliably known; in vast areas of concern, however (intellectual history, as an example), there remain crucial gaps, some of which are only now being partially filled in, with details sometimes importantly different from what had been presumed to be there before.

Mathematician and philosopher of science Jacob Bronowski put it like this: ¹

It is absurd to ask why the future should turn out to chime with our knowledge of the past.  This puts the question upside down and makes nonsense of it.  What we have learnt from the past is knowledge only because the future proves it to be true.

This principle is exemplified in the appreciation of one of antiquity's most brilliant minds, Archimedes (one of a handful through history whose achievements may be said to lie on a par with those of modern giants Newton and Einstein).  The story of the recovery of Archimedes' great work Method of Mechanical Theorems in 1906 after more than 2,000 years is remarkable enough, but the tale is not yet ended!  Now after nearly another 100 years further progress has recently been made, and the results are illuminating.
 

Born circa 290-280 B.C. in the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, dying in the Roman sack of that city in 212-211 B.C. during the Second Punic War, Archimedes is most famous today as the great ancient Greek inventor and mathematician.  In antiquity, Archimedes was also well known as a superb astronomer.

In a recent piece, “Proof, Amazement, and the Unexpected” in the journal Science, Stanford professor Reviel Netz characterizes Archimedes' mathematical contributions. ²

The bath anecdote does not give us the true measure of the man.  In On Floating Bodies, Archimedes made the following, astonishingly subtle deduction:  In a stable body of liquid, each column of equal volume must have equal weight; otherwise, liquid would flow from the heavier to the lighter.  The same must hold true even if some solid body is immersed in such a column of liquid.  In other words, if we have a column of liquid with a solid body immersed in it, the aggregate weight of the liquid and the body must be equal to that of a column of liquid of the same total volume.  It follows that the immersed body must lose weight: it must lose a weight equal to the weight of the volume of water it has displaced.  (This is why we feel lighter in the bath.)  This fundamental theorem was proved by Archimedes, with perfect rigor, in On Floating Bodies, Proposition 7.  Now that's something to cry “eureka” about.

Austere and technical as they are, Archimedes' treatises are just as striking as the anecdotes about him.  In the treatises three motives run together: proof, amazement, and the juxtaposition of the unexpected.  Proof and amazement are related, because Archimedes amazes us by proving that something very surprising is in fact true.  Amazement and the juxtaposition of the unexpected are related, because the amazing result is usually seen in the equality or equivalence of two seemingly separate domains.

Archimedes very rarely makes arguments that merely appear intuitive — and, crucially, when he does, he says so explicitly.  He sets out as postulates some very subtle assumptions.  For instance, in the introduction to the First Book on Sphere and Cylinder, Archimedes asserts that if two lines are concave to the same direction, and one encloses the other, the enclosing line is greater than the enclosed and so, for instance, the line is the shortest distance between two points.  He took enormous care to distinguish what can be proved from what cannot.  By turning seemingly obvious observations into explicit postulates, Archimedes was able to set out truly incontrovertible proofs.

Books such as Euclid's Elements have come down to us by way of numerous Greek and Arabic manuscripts, but, as Carl Boyer points out in his excellent History of Mathematics, the connecting link to Archimedes' works is thin.  Boyer writes: ³

Almost all copies are from a single Greek original which was in existence in the early sixteenth century and itself was copied from an original of about the ninth or tenth century. … There have been times when few or even none of Archimedes' works were known.  In the days of Eutocius, a first-rate scholar and skillful commentator of the sixth century, only three of the many Archimedean works were generally known….
 

The dearth in availability of Archimedes' works over much of the past two millennia has, as one might expect, led to errors in the appreciation of the body of his work.  Boyer writes:

His other treatises are gems of logical precision, with little hint of the preliminary analysis that may have led to the definitive formulations.  So thoroughly without motivation did his proofs appear to some writers of the seventeenth century that they suspected Archimedes of having concealed his method of approach in order that his work might be admired the more.

How unwarranted such an ungenerous estimate of the great Syracusan was became clear in 1906 with the discovery of the manuscript containing The Method.  Here Archimedes had published, for all the world to read, a description of the preliminary “mechanical” investigations that had led to many of his chief mathematical discoveries.  He thought that his “method” in these cases lacked rigor, since it assumed an area, for example, to be a sum of line segments.

The Method, as we have it, contains most of the text of some fifteen propositions sent in the form of a letter of Eratosthenes, mathematician and librarian at the university of Alexandria.  The author opened by saying that it is easier to supply a proof of a theorem if we first have some knowledge of what is involved; as an example he cites the proofs of Eudoxus of the cone and pyramid, which had been facilitated by the preliminary assertions, without proof, made by Democritus.  Then, Archimedes announced that he himself had a “mechanical” approach that paved the way for some of his proofs.  The very first theorem that he discovered by this approach was the one on the area of a parabolic segment; in Proposition 1 of The Method the author describes how he arrived at this theorem by balancing lines as one balances weights in mechanics.

Gerald Toomer of Brown University assesses Archimedes' Method, as it was known during the twentieth century. ⁴

Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems describes the process of discovery in mathematics.  It is the sole surviving work from antiquity and one of the few from any period that deals with this topic.  In it Archimedes recounts how he used a “mechanical” method to arrive at some of his key discoveries, including the area of a parabolic segment and the surface area and volume of a sphere.  The technique consists of dividing each of two figures, one bounded by straight lines and the other by a curve, into an infinite but equal number of infinitesimally thin strips, then “weighing” each corresponding pair of these strips against each other on a notional balance, and summing them to find the ratio of the two whole figures.  Archimedes emphasizes that, though useful as a heuristic method, this procedure does not constitute a rigorous proof.
 

The story of the recovery of Archimedes' Method of Mechanical Theorems is a terrific example, in my view, of how our comprehension of the past can even at this late date be dramatically changed by new discoveries, which may hinge on the merest chance.  Quoting Boyer again:

The work containing such marvelous results of more than 2000 years ago was recovered almost by accident in 1906.  The indefatigable Danish scholar J. L. Heiberg had read that at Constantinople there was a palimpsest of mathematical content.  (A palimpsest is a parchment the original writing on which as been only imperfectly washed off and replaced with a new and different text.)  Close inspection showed him that the original manuscript had contained something by Archimedes, and through photographs he was able to read most of the Archimedean text.  The manuscript consisted of 185 leaves, mostly of parchment but a few of paper, with the Archimedean text copied in a tenth-century hand.  An attempt — fortunately, none too successful — had been made to expunge this text in order to use the parchment for a Euchologion (a collection of prayers and liturgies used in the Eastern Orthodox Church) written in about the thirteenth century.  The mathematical text contained On the Sphere and Cylinder, most of the work On Spirals, part of the Measurement of a Circle and of On the Equilibrium of Planes, and On Floating Bodies, all of which have been preserved in other manuscripts; most important of all, the palimpsest gives us the only surviving copy of The Method.

In a sense, the palimpsest is symbolic of the contribution of the Medieval Age.  Intense preoccupation with religious concerns very nearly wiped out one of the most important works of the greatest mathematician of antiquity; yet in the end it was medieval scholarship that inadvertently preserved this, and much besides, which might otherwise have been lost.

No sooner had Archimedes' Method been almost miraculously recovered in 1906, but it was lost again (or stolen), disappearing for most of the rest of the century.  Fortunately for Archimedean scholarship of the twentieth century, the palimpsest had been photographed before being lost, allowing Heiberg to perform his remarkable feat. 

In 1998 (!) the nearly priceless document reappeared at a New York auction house.  Netz chronicles the manuscript's recent history:

Archimedes' treatise on the Method of Mechanical Theorems, which itself tends to turn up in unexpected places, was his most remarkable work.  It was lost until the great philologist Heiberg discovered it in a palimpsest (a scraped and overwritten parchment) in Istanbul in 1906.  Heiberg had discovered a 10th-century copy of the treatise, which had been used as the fabric for a 13th-century prayer-book.  Heiberg was able to read much, but not all of the faint traces.  Shortly after this astonishing discovery, the manuscript was lost or stolen, but in 1998 it resurfaced at a Christie's auction sale at New York.  It sold for two million dollars.  The anonymous owner generously supports the conservation and imaging now taking place at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. ⁵
 

Netz proceeds to the heart of the matter: the remarkable results recently obtaining from the re-recovery of the original manuscript in 1998.

As we should expect of Archimedes, the results of our recent research on the palimpsest are indeed unexpected.

Since 1906, it has been known that in the Method of Mechanical Theorems, Archimedes combined concepts of straight, curved, physical, and geometrical.  Above all, anticipating the calculus, he combined finite and infinite….

So much we have known for a century.  In a visit to Baltimore in 2001, Ken Saito from Osaka Prefecture University and I examined a hitherto unread piece of the Method of Mechanical Theorems.  We could hardly believe our eyes:  It turned out that Archimedes was looking for rigorous ways of establishing the calculus.

Modern scholarship always assumed that mathematics has undergone a fundamental conceptual shift during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century.  It has always been thought that modern mathematicians were the first to be able to handle infinitely large sets, and that this was something the Greek mathematicians never attempted to do.  But in the palimpsest we found Archimedes doing just that.  He compared two infinitely large sets and stated that they have an equal number of members.  No other extant source for Greek mathematics has that.
 

¹ J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963; pp. 117-118.

² Reviel Netz (Assistant Professor of Classics, Stanford University), “Proof, Amazement, and the Unexpected” (link requires subscription or pay per view), Science (1 Nov 2002), Vol. 298, No. 5595, pp. 967-968.

³ Carl B. Boyer (Professor of Mathematics, Brooklyn College), A History of Mathematics, Second Edition, revised by Uta C. Merzbach, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1991, ISBN 0-471-09763-2 or 0-471-54397-7 (pbk); pp. 136-137, 139.

⁴ Gerald J. Toomer (Professor of the History of Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island), “Archimedes,” Encyclopædia Britannica, CD 1997, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

⁵ See “Eureka! Archimedes Palimpsest at the Walters Art Gallery.”

U.S. government black project's captive German scientist, in Steven Spielberg's Taken episode 2:

These are beings of unimaginable power of mind.  The ability to reach inside a man's mind and give him the images that are lurking there, surely that requires more energy than what is needed to guide a ship among the stars.

Anyone who's glanced at a few of the books entertaining the possibility of interstellar travel (covering such topics as the amount of fuel vs. payload needed to get a vessel to the stars) can see what a terrific boner is being pulled here.  In brief, if you have to carry your fuel along with you (as in ordinary rockets), even using nuclear or antimatter powered spaceships, the payload achievable is an extremely tiny fraction of the size of the entire ship, with required fuel occupying almost all of it.  Needless to say, a vast ship full of antimatter (and normal matter) fuel equals a stupendous amount of energy. 

Ramscoops or ground-laser illuminated lightsails offer significant escape from these limitations, because you don't have to carry (most of) the fuel along with you.  Even using these approaches, however, the amount of portable energy that must be carried on an interstellar ship is immense.

Beyond straightforward acceleration-deceleration means of getting to the stars, even if suggested approaches for bypassing the great distances between the stars turn out to be feasible (hypotheticals such as wormholes or “hyperspace”), who says the amount of energy needed to make use of such methods would be small?  If opening up a wormhole requires, say, artificial creation of a black hole massive enough not to crush “passengers” passing through its event horizon (i.e., much-much larger than a stellar-mass black hole), then the physical energy requirements for interstellar travel via wormholes would be truly gigantic!

Coming at it from the other direction, one must consider the question of how much “energy,” if that's the right term, is needed in principle to “reach inside a man's mind and give him the images that are lurking there.”  The “scientist” providing the Taken quote tosses it off as if of course! the energy required would be huge.  How much energy, though, did it take for the Voyager spacecraft to send images into the minds of Earthlings across billions of miles of space from the planet Neptune?  A few watts of power in Voyager's transmitter?

In the scene in Taken to which the above quote refers, the alien stood only a few feet from a human into whose brain he fed “the images that are lurking there.”  How much “energy” would that take?  How much energy under optimum conditions would it take to send a TV signal across a few feet?  Microwatts, at a guess?

Whether any signal transmitted could be received is another matter.  If a reception mechanism is already present in the human brain (which if telepathy exists — a big if — there must be; or if “synchronicity” is the way that telepathy works, that too will do for an explanation), in either case, once again, watts or microwatts (or even less, in the case of synchronicity) should suffice.  If there is no reception mechanism already present in the brain, however (or no synchronicity), then even an infinitude of power might not do.

In the situation where humans do not already come equipped with a “transmission image receptor” mechanism, the easiest way to get such a reception system implanted, in my view, would simply be to waft a “designer virus” across the intervening space (once again, a few feet, given the premise of the story), which infecting the intended individual, would cause a suitable receptor system to be grown, perhaps in his or her brain.  How much “energy” does it take to waft a tiny virus (far smaller than anthrax spores) across a few feet of space?

Once a suitable reception mechanism is present in the intended recipient, images should, once again, be transmittable using minimal energy.  Of course, if a continuing transmission link isn't needed, the viruses themselves could carry all the images or other data desired without any subsequent energy requirements.

However, the words Spielberg later in that same episode of Taken also places in the mouth of that “German scientist,” are if anything even stupider than the above quote!

We lost the war [WWII] because the Russians betrayed our trust.  There was never a question of our attitude.

I don't know about Spielberg.
 

UPDATE:  2002-12-22 01:30 UT:  More fundamental Taken stupidity.

The inimitable Sgt. Stryker has pulled off another of his hilarious yet pointed voyages into another world, in this case the surreal world of CONUS — the “Continental U.S.” to the American military.

The (retroactive) humor in the situation is obviously terrific, but seriously, this kind of thing can't help being tremendously inefficient as well as terribly frustrating when it occurs.  This attitude and manner of “working” is obviously costing the taxpayers loads of money and damaging the effectiveness of the U.S. armed forces.  Can't something be done to improve the situation?

Don't miss other gems in this Sgt. Stryker (scroll up and down).  There are the cartoons, as well as the Sarge's results from the test for which character in I, Claudius he is!

I tagged along as still cameraman on Tamara's latest filming expedition, this time to a local Felton attraction, Roaring Camp & Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad, an old-time narrow gauge steam train that winds its way through the Santa Cruz Mountains nearby.  Our train was drawn by Engine No. 7, built in 1902 (just 100 years old this year, made the same year my grandparents got married!).

The massive mechanism lumbers along, snorting out giant chuffs of steam along with multitudinous chugging, clanking and groaning noises, its drive train (which on first sight resembles a worm gear, but isn't) spinning along above track level, carrying power to the wheels via an intricate seemingly spiraling maneuver, while the train labors its way up a 10% grade through misty cathedral groves of monumental 300 ft. tall redwood trees!  It's a magical experience, a whiff of another age.

(I must admit, one of the things I love about Felton, Calif., is the wail of the steam locomotive, and other accoutrement sounds of the Age of Steam, exceedingly rare elsewhere these days in America, is still to be heard in its environs.)

So thoroughly has the world entered the machine age, it's necessary sometimes to remind ourselves that the first contrivance in history (beyond speculations in antiquity) capable of converting a generalized source of (perhaps fuel generated) heat into useful motion was invented less than three hundred years ago.  Before that time, the only power sources available to humanity were (1) human and animal muscle-power, (2) the happenstance of moving wind and water, and (3) — for the previous few hundred years — gunpowder (which could impart motion only to things like bullets, cannonballs, and things blown up).

The new thing under the sun was Thomas Newcomen's “steam” (actually atmosphere powered) engine, first built in 1712.  The progression from Newcomen's eerily-quiet behemoths, through James Watt's major improvements a half century on (the first true “steam engine”), to the groaning, clanking, self-propelled automatons of steam-engines-on-the-hoof took about a century.  On Christmas Eve, 1801 (just short of 201 years ago), Richard Trevithick rolled out the world's first “steam carriage” and drove it up an adjacent slope.  As the 19th century wore on, the at-first gradual progress of these puffing, snorting Pied-Pipers across the land became inexorable.

It's easy to forget how impressive to denizens of that earlier era (people as various as North American Plains Indians and European Romantics), and how symbolic for the dawning of a new age, these roaring, steaming mechanical monsters must have been.  The feeling of antiquity and modernity standing vis-a-vis is well captured in a quote from William Makepeace Thackeray (of Vanity Fair fame), born 1811 in Calcutta, India:

We, who lived before the railways and survived out of the ancient world, are like Noah and his family out of the Ark.

UPDATE:  2005-07-20 05:15 UT:  Updated photographs to use less compressed images.

(SiteMeter has finally gotten propagated to all the leaves of the Impearls archives, so information is available about where people are coming from and what they're visiting.  What a difference throwing a little light on the situation makes!)

Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, for his initial link to Impearls' publication of Freeman Dyson's essay The World, The Flesh, and The Devil.  Transhumanism also deserves a plug for providing a link.

Thanks moreover to Metanexus for linking to the Dyson essay.  Metanexus, however, needs to fix its link (see here), which currently is ephemeral.  Here's the correct permalink to Dyson's essay in the Impearls archive.  (Metanexus has been e-mailed about this.)

And thanks to Dave Trowbridge at Redwood Dragon for his link and comment, “a sterling example of intelligent prognostication — and excellent science fiction,” with which I heartily agree.  Redwood Dragon also has a discussion going about Dyson's essay.

UPDATE:  2002-11-26 08:00 UT:  Thanks to DickT on the String Theory Discussion Forum for posting a link to the Dyson essay.  A voluminous discussion has ensued there, but unfortunately most of it appears not connected with the substance of Dyson's paper.

Eugene Volokh links to a hilarious pseudo-movie poster advertising the forthcoming new Gulf Wars extravaganza.

I actually think this artifice ought to be be funny no matter what side of the debate over war with Iraq you're on, though I'm sure some (perhaps humorless) people will feel no one should make jokes where death and destruction are concerned.

But how could one not make fun of some of the characters involved in this global morality play — e.g., Saddam Hussein, Knight of the Arab World, with his “100% elections,” etc. etc. — so long as one doesn't forget the seriousness that lurks behind Saddam's murderousness on every scale from his individual tortures and killings to the very real threat of mushroom clouds suddenly blossoming above major cities in the land, perhaps not now but someday not extremely far distant?

Interesting news item (link requires subscription or pay per view) by Charles Seife in the journal Science (organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) on the race to be first to make significant quantities of antihydrogen — enough to study and hopefully find the spectrum of that most volatile of substances.  (Antihydrogen is the negative subatomic mirror of normal hydrogen, consisting of duos of antiprotons and antielectrons [positrons] electronically united as antiatoms, though apparently not, at least for the moment, as antihydrogen molecules.)

Achieving the holy grail of the spectrum of antihydrogen, “could rattle the foundations of physics and will likely net a Nobel Prize for whichever team gets there first,” Seife writes.  “Scientists think that antihydrogen's spectrum should be identical to hydrogen's.  If it's not, a key principle in physics known as CPT symmetry will have to be discarded, forcing a drastic revision of physicists' understanding of subatomic particles.”

Neither of the two teams now closing in on the prize of the spectrum has yet achieved this goal, but that “shouldn't detract from the real story: the production of significant amounts of cold, slow antihydrogen.  ‘The fact that both groups have gotten antihydrogen is a major accomplishment,’” Seife quotes MIT physicist Daniel Kleppner.

The two teams, known as ATRAP and ATHENA, which are in the running are both using “similar techniques, nearly identical equipment, and the same particle beam, an antiproton factory at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.”  Both groups, Seife reports:

… had access to the same beamline, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN, which takes protons created at near the speed of light down to about 10% of that speed.  Drawing on years of experiments with AD's predecessor, LEAR, both groups settled on electromagnetic bottles known as Penning traps to cool antiprotons down to about 4 kelvin, confine them with antielectrons, and induce the two to combine.

ATHENA and ATRAP follow the same basic recipe for antimatter.  Each gets its antiprotons from AD and its antielectrons from a radioactive sodium isotope that emits the particles as it decays.  Each captures the antiprotons, cools them to a few kelvin, and shoots them and the antielectrons into opposite ends of a trap where they can mix.

The traps — meter-long cylinders that corral the particles with electromagnetic fields — face a daunting challenge:  Because antiprotons and antielectrons have opposite charges, a potential that captures antielectrons repels antiprotons and vice versa.  That makes it difficult to build a single trap that can hold both of them, because a trap that appears like a valley to an antielectron looks like a hill to the antiprotons.  To bring the particles together, both teams use a trap within a trap — in effect, two hills framing a valley (from the antielectrons' point of view) or two valleys flanking a hill (from the antiprotons' point of view)….  When an antielectron binds to an antiproton (something that occurs with only a handful of the thousands of cold antiprotons in each shot), the resulting neutral antiatom can no longer be easily controlled by electric or magnetic fields.  It escapes the trap and floats away.

That's where the big differences start.  To tell that they've created antihydrogen, the ATHENA physicists look for gamma rays that are produced when an antihydrogen atom is annihilated by collisions with ordinary matter.  By subtracting the background gamma rays from their total count, they can estimate the number of antiatoms.  Gabrielse's ATRAP team, by contrast, lets the untrapped neutral antihydrogens float into an additional trap, which tears apart the antihydrogen atom.  The team then counts the liberated antiprotons as they annihilate on contact with ordinary matter.  As a bonus, the ionization trap also yields information about how tightly the antielectron is bound to the antiproton.

Unfortunately, the two teams are now “frozen neck and neck,” as Seife put it, in their race.  He writes:  “… the teams' source of antiprotons has just dried up.  The current run of CERN's beamline just ended, so both teams will have to wait until next year to resume the race.  And the budget problems at CERN … will interfere with their scramble to collect antihydrogen.  ‘[AD] will be shut down for 1 year, which is a huge disappointment,’” Seife quotes ATRAP leader Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse.  “‘Without antiprotons, it's hard to make progress.’”

George Huang, economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), responded to Impearls' earlier article with an e-mail dated 2002-11-12 18:02 UT.

Dear Mr. McNeil,

Our GDP data and statement is available at: http://www.e-edge.org/special/GDP.htm

When we did the 2000 comparison back in 2001, OECD data for France was much lower, which allowed California to move up.  This year OECD revised the French GDP data and France, instead of California, was no. 5 back in 2000.  This is where the 5th/6th controversy originated.  The truth is (and we mention this explicitly in the comparison table) that the changes in rankings came from the drastic depreciation of the value of euro.  It seems that no one ever reads that sentence and instead take our comparison and use it in an opportunistic fashion which we detest.

We use OECD and IMF data because we believe it is the best available set from a single source (actually, two sources because OECD doesn't cover everyone we needed to know).  Our California estimate is proprietary and based on published personal income data from the California Dept. of Finance and GSP data from the BEA.

We did the comparison to show how large California's economy is, and it was never intended for the GDP race that Davis loves to show off.  In fact, after we published the GDP data, we came under pressure from the State.  (And this is as much as I can tell you, please don't ask more about this.  You can sense in the published statement that we were defending our estimates against someone.  Now you know.)

As for China & India, I do not know why CIA's estimates are higher.  Perhaps OECD and IMF rely solely on the nations' official estimates, while CIA add in the underground economy.  As I said before, we had to find one or two sources that provide data for all we needed and based on a common set of methodology, and OCED and IMF were the sources chosen.  No one in the economic analysis field uses CIA's estimates for such analyses.

Sincerely,
George Huang
Associate Economist

Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
 

Introduction  by Michael McNeil
I.  Bernal's Book
II.  The Double Helix
III.  Biological Engineering
IV.  Big Trees
V.  Self-Reproducing Machinery
VI.  Devils and Pilgrims
 

Introduction   by Michael McNeil

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, recently published in his web log several plugs for nanotechnology (not to speak of entire articles appearing elsewhere), such as this entitled “WHY WE NEED NANOTECHNOLOGY.”  In his piece, Reynolds quotes a recent article from The Independent, “Only technology revolution can save the Earth.”

Diplomacy has failed — meaning that only a revolutionary advanced technology will save the Earth from relentless global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warned yesterday.

Avoiding a catastrophic effect on climate from the burning of fossil fuels would require political will, international cooperation and huge resources, said the team from a group of American universities.  But “no amount of regulation” could solve the problem, they said.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds as to the great potential of nanotechnology, but I'd point out that there are several forthcoming technologies other specifically than nanotechnology which can greatly assist in ameliorating the (literally) vast problems, to which the quoted article alludes, facing us on this planet.

The best exposition of these new technologies of which I'm aware is a too-long-neglected essay by physicist-visionary Freeman Dyson, since 1953 of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, originator of such concepts as the “Dyson sphere,” and the author of moving books such as Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), and Infinite in All Directions (1988).

Thirty years ago this year, on May 16, 1972, Freeman Dyson presented the Third J. D. Bernal Lecture, at Birkbeck College, London.  The talk was printed for private circulation in 1972 by Birkbeck College, and reprinted the following year as Appendix D of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), edited by Carl Sagan and published by MIT Press.  Now three decades on the author has kindly allowed me to republish his essay here, slightly corrected from preceding versions.

Dyson's essay The World, The Flesh, and the Devil is a retro- and prospective look at the great physicist (and developer of X-ray crystallography) J. D. Bernal's first book, of similar name, composed in 1929.  In his talk dedicated to Bernal, Dyson said he decided the best way he can “do honor to Bernal … is to use his book as a point of departure for my own speculations about the future of mankind,” which Dyson certainly accomplishes in this essay.

How well do Dyson's (and Bernal's) predictions hold up over a span of 30 more years?  My view, just as Dyson said in his turn of Bernal, speaking then 43 years after Bernal had set down his book, is that the bright promise of the technologies championed is just as beckoning, and as yet as unrealized, as almost in Bernal's day.  (Of course, nanotechnology is another unrealized dream as yet, except for tentative beginnings.)

Someday, however, the technologies Dyson so eloquently lays out will be achieved.  They certainly appear possible, and I believe they are very likely both attainable and feasible, every one of them.  Look at the advances in biotechnology and computer systems over the past 30 years for slight guidance as to what can perhaps be achieved in derivative fields given a few more decades.

The conclusions of another great figure, physiologist and geneticist J. B. S. Haldane (writing in nearly the same period as when J. D. Bernal composed his own slim little book) are still pertinent in this regard, I believe, even today.

We are at present almost completely ignorant of biology, a fact which often escapes the notice of biologists, and renders them too presumptuous in their estimates of the present position of their science, too modest in their claims for the future….  The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.  These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides….  I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any detail the future applications of their science.  They do not see themselves as sinister or revolutionary figures.  They have no time to dream.  But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to confess it…. 
(J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future, 1924)

Given the travails and wrenching transitions that no doubt lie ahead, the virtues of the pilgrim fathers that Dyson recommends to us in chapter VI. Devils and Pilgrims will stand us in very good stead, in the future as they have in the past.

Without further ado, here's Freeman Dyson's The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1972).  (Chapters are posted in inverse chronological order so scrolling down reads normally.)
 

UPDATE:  2002-11-24 19:34 UT:  Backlinks to linkers.

Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
 

I.  Bernal's Book  

The World, The Flesh and the Devil; An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, is the full title of Bernal's first book which he wrote at the age of 28.  Forty years later he said in a foreword to the second edition, “This short book was the first I ever wrote.  I have a great attachment to it because it contains many of the seeds of ideas which I have been elaborating throughout my scientific life.  It still seems to me to have validity in its own right.”  It must have been a consolation to Bernal, crippled and incapacitated in the last years of his life, to know that this work of his spring-time was again being bought and read by a new generation of young readers.

Bernal's book begins with these words:  “There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.”  I do not know of any finer opening sentence of a work of literature in English.  Bernal's modest claim that his book “still seems to have validity in its own right” holds good in 1972 as it did in 1968.  Enormous changes have occurred since he wrote the book in 1929, both in science and in human affairs.  It would be miraculous if nothing in it had become dated or superseded by the events of the last forty years.  But astonishingly little of it has proved to be wrong or irrelevant to our present concerns.

I decided that the best way I can do honor to Bernal in this lecture is to use his book as a point of departure for my own speculations about the future of mankind.  I shall not expound or criticize the book in detail.  I hope that much of what I shall say will be fresh and will go in some directions beyond Bernal's horizons.  But it will be obvious to those of my audience who have read Bernal that my ideas are deeply influenced by him.  To those of you who have not read Bernal I hope that I may provide a stimulus to do so.

Bernal saw the future as a struggle of the rational side of man's nature against three enemies.  The first enemy he called the World, meaning scarcity of material goods, inadequate land, harsh climate, desert, swamp, and other physical obstacles which condemn the majority of mankind to lives of poverty.  The second enemy he called the Flesh, meaning the defects in man's physiology that expose him to disease, cloud the clarity of his mind, and finally destroy him by senile deterioration.  The third enemy he called the Devil, meaning the irrational forces in man's psychological nature that distort his perceptions and lead him astray with crazy hopes and fears, overriding the feeble voice of reason.  Bernal had faith that the rational soul of man would ultimately prevail over these enemies.  But he did not foresee cheap or easy victories.  In each of these struggles, he saw hope of defeating the enemy only if mankind is prepared to adopt extremely radical measures.

Briefly summarized, the radical measures which Bernal prescribed were the following.  To defeat the World, the greater part of the human species will leave this planet and go to live in innumerable freely floating colonies scattered through outer space.  To defeat the Flesh, humans will learn to replace failing organs with artificial substitutes until we become an intimate symbiosis of brain and machine.  To defeat the Devil, we shall first reorganize society along scientific lines, and later learn to exercise conscious intellectual control over our moods and emotional drives, intervening directly in the affective functions of our brains with technical means yet to be discovered.  This summary is a crude oversimplification of Bernal's discussion.  He did not imagine that these remedies would provide a final solution to the problems of humanity.  He well knew that every change in the human situation will create new problems and new enemies of the rational soul.  He stopped where he stopped because he could not see any farther.  His chapter on “The Flesh” ends with the words:  “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”

How much that was out of sight to Bernal in 1929 can we see from the vantage point of 1972?  The first and most obvious difference between 1929 and 1972 is that we have now a highly vocal and well-organized opposition to the further growth of the part that technology plays in human affairs.  The social prophets of today look upon technology as a destructive rather than a liberating force.  In 1972 it is highly unfashionable to believe as Bernal did that the colonization of space, the perfection of artificial organs and the mastery of brain physiology are the keys to man's future.  Young people in tune with the mood of the times regard space as irrelevant, and they consider ecology to be the only branch of science that is ethically respectable.  However, it would be wrong to imagine that Bernal's ideas were more in line with popular views in 1929 than they are in 1972.  Bernal was never a man to swim with the tide.  Technology was unpopular in 1929 because it was associated in people's minds with the gas warfare of the first World War, just as now it is unpopular by association with Hiroshima and the defoliation of Vietnam.  In 1929 the dislike of technology was less noisy than today but no less real.  Bernal understood that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts.  He did not on that account weaken or compromise his statement.  He believed that a rational soul would ultimately come to accept his vision of the future as reasonable, and that for him was enough.  He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living.  And he recognized that the dispersion of mankind into the vastness of space is precisely what is required for such a split of the species to occur without intolerable strife and social disruption.  The wider perspective which we have gained between 1929 and 1972 concerning the harmful effects of technology affects only the details and not the core of Bernal's argument.

Another conspicuous difference between 1929 and 1972 is that men have now visited the moon.  Surprisingly, this fact makes little difference to the plausibility of Bernal's vision of the future.  Bernal in 1929 foresaw cheap and massive emigration of human beings from the earth.  He did not know in detail how it should be done.  We still do not know how it should be done.  Certainly it will not be done by using the techniques that took men to the moon in 1969.  We know that in principle the cost in energy or fuel of transporting people from Earth into space need be no greater than the cost of transporting them from New York to London.  To translate this “in principle” into reality will require two things: first a great advance in the engineering of hypersonic aircraft, and second the growth of a traffic massive enough to permit large economies of scale.  It is likely that the Apollo vehicle bears the same relation to the cheap mass-transportation space-vehicle of the future as the majestic airship of the 1930s bears to the Boeing 747 of today.  The airship R101 was absurdly large, beautiful, expensive, and fragile, just like the Apollo Saturn 5.  If this analogy is sound, and I believe it is, we shall have transportation into space at a reasonable price within about fifty years from now.  But my grounds for believing this are not essentially firmer than Bernal's were for believing it in 1929.
 

Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
 

II.  The Double Helix  

The decisive change that has enabled us to see farther in 1972 than we could in 1929 is the advent of molecular biology.  Bernal recognized this in the 1968 foreword to his book, where he speaks of the double helix as “the greatest and most comprehensive idea in all science.”  We now understand the basic principles by which living cells organize and reproduce themselves.  Many mysteries remain, but it is inevitable that we shall understand the chemical processes of life in full detail, including the processes of development and differentiation of higher organisms, within the next century.  I consider it also inevitable and desirable that we shall learn to exploit these processes for our own purposes.  The next century will see a completely new technology growing out of the mastery of the principles of biology in the same way as our existing technology grew out of a mastery of the principles of physics.

The new biological technology may grow in three distinct directions.  Probably all three will be followed and will prove fruitful for particular purposes.  The first direction is the one that has been chiefly discussed by biologists who feel responsibility for the human consequences of their work; they call it “genetic surgery.”  The idea is that we shall be able to read the base-sequence of the DNA in a human sperm or egg-cell, run the sequence through a computer which will identify deleterious genes or mutations, and then by micromanipulation patch harmless genes into the sequence to replace the bad ones.  It might also be possible to add to the DNA genes conferring various characteristics to the resulting individual.  This technology will be difficult and dangerous, and its use will raise severe ethical problems.  Jacques Monod in his recent book Chance and Necessity sweeps all thought of it aside with his customary dogmatic certitude.  “There are,” he says, “occasional promises of remedies expected from the current advances in molecular genetics.  This illusion, spread by a few superficial minds, had better be disposed of.”  Although I have a great respect for Jacques Monod, I still dare to brave his scorn by stating my belief that genetic surgery has an important part to play in man's future.  But I share the prevailing view of biologists that we must be exceedingly careful in interfering with the human genetic material.  The interactions between the thousands of genes in a human cell are so exquisitely complicated that a computer program labeling genes “good” or “bad” will be adequate to deal only with the grossest sort of defect.  There are strong arguments for declaring a moratorium on genetic surgery for the next hundred years, or until we understand human genetics vastly better than we do now.

Leaving aside genetic surgery applied to humans, I foresee that the coming century will place in our hands two other forms of biological technology which are less dangerous but still revolutionary enough to transform the conditions of our existence.  I count these new technologies as powerful allies in the attack on Bernal's three enemies.  I give them the names “biological engineering” and “self-reproducing machinery.”  Biological engineering means the artificial synthesis of living organisms designed to fulfill human purposes.  Self-reproducing machinery means the imitation of the function and reproduction of a living organism with nonliving materials, a computer program imitating the function of DNA and a miniature factory imitating the functions of protein molecules.  After we have attained a complete understanding of the principles of organization and development of a simple multicellular organism, both of these avenues of technological exploitation should be open to us.
 

Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
 

III.  Biological Engineering  

I would expect the earliest and least controversial triumphs of biological engineering to be extensions of the art of industrial fermentation.  When we are able to produce microorganisms equipped with enzyme systems tailored to our own design, we can use such organisms to perform chemical operations with far greater delicacy and economy than present industrial practices allow.  For example, oil refineries would contain a variety of bugs designed to metabolize crude petroleum into the precise hydrocarbon stereo-isomers which are needed for various purposes.  One tank would contain the n-octane bug, another the benzene bug, and so on.  All the bugs would contain enzymes metabolizing sulphur into elemental form, so that pollution of the atmosphere by sulphurous gases would be completely controlled.  The management and operation of such fermentation tanks on a vast scale would not be easy, but the economic and social rewards are so great that I am confident we shall learn how to do it.  After we have mastered the biological oil refinery, more important applications of the same principles will follow.  We shall have factories producing specific foodstuffs biologically from cheap raw materials, and sewage-treatment plants converting our wastes efficiently into usable solids and pure water.  To perform these operations we shall need an armamentarium of many species of microorganisms trained to ingest and excrete the appropriate chemicals.  And we shall design into the metabolism of these organisms the essential property of self-liquidation, so that when deprived of food they disappear by cannibalizing one another.  They will not, like the bacteria that feed on our sewage in today's technology, leave their rotting carcasses behind to make a sludge only slightly less noxious than the mess they have eaten.

If these expectations are fulfilled, the advent of biological technology will help enormously in the establishment of patterns of industrial development with which human beings can live in health and comfort.  Oil refineries need not stink.  Rivers need not be sewers.  However, there are many environmental problems which the use of artificial organisms in enclosed tanks will not touch.  For example, the fouling of the environment by mining and by abandoned automobiles will not be reduced by building cleaner factories.  The second step in biological engineering, after the enclosed biological factory, is to let artificial organisms loose into the environment.  This is admittedly a more dangerous and problematical step than the first.  The second step should be taken only when we have a deep understanding of its ecological consequences.  Nevertheless the advantages which artificial organisms offer in the environmental domain are so great that we are unlikely to forego their use forever.

The two great functions which artificial organisms promise to perform for us when let loose upon the earth are mining and scavenging.  The beauty of a natural landscape undisturbed by man is largely due to the fact that the natural organisms in a balanced ecology are excellent miners and scavengers.  Mining is mostly done by plants and microorganisms extracting minerals from water, air, and soil.  For example, it has been recently discovered that organisms in the ground mine ammonia and carbon monoxide from air with high efficiency.  To the scavengers we owe the fact that a natural forest is not piled as high with dead birds as one of our junk yards with dead cars.  Many of the worst offenses of human beings against natural beauty are due to our incompetence in mining and scavenging.  Natural organisms know how to mine and scavenge effectively in a natural environment.  In a man-made environment, neither they nor we know how to do it.  But there is no reason why we should not be able to design artificial organisms that are adaptable enough to collect our raw materials and dispose of our refuse in an environment that is a careful mixture of natural and artificial.

A simple example of a problem that an artificial organism could solve is the eutrophication of lakes.  At present many lakes are being ruined by excessive growth of algae feeding on high levels of nitrogen or phosphorus in the water.  The damage could be stopped by an organism that would convert nitrogen to molecular form or phosphorus to an insoluble solid.  Alternatively and preferably, an organism could be designed to divert the nitrogen and phosphorus into a food chain culminating in some species of palatable fish.  To control and harvest the mineral resources of the lake in this way will in the long run be more feasible than to maintain artificially a state of “natural” barrenness.

The artificial mining organisms would not operate in the style of human miners.  Many of them would be designed to mine the ocean.  For example, oysters might extract gold from seawater and secrete golden pearls.  A less poetic but more practical possibility is the artificial coral that build a reef rich in copper or magnesium.  Other mining organisms would burrow like earthworms into mud and clay, concentrating in their bodies the ores of aluminum or tin or iron, and excreting the ores in some manner convenient for human harvesting.  Almost every raw material necessary for our existence can be mined from ocean, air or clay, without digging deep into the earth.  Where conventional mining is necessary, artificial organisms can still be useful for digesting and purifying the ore.

Not much imagination is needed to foresee the effectiveness of artificial organisms as scavengers.  A suitable microorganism could convert the dangerous organic mercury in our rivers and lakes to a harmless insoluble solid.  We could make good use of an organism with a consuming appetite for polyvinyl chloride and similar plastic materials which now litter beaches all over the earth.  Conceivably we may produce an animal specifically designed for chewing up dead automobiles.  But one may hope that the automobile in its present form will become extinct before it needs to be incorporated into an artificial foodchain.  A more serious and permanent role for scavenging organisms is the removal of trace quantities of radioactivity from the environment.  The three most hazardous radioactive elements produced in fission reactors are strontium, cesium, and plutonium.  These elements have long half-lives and will inevitably be released in small quantities so long as mankind uses nuclear fission as an energy source.  The long-term hazard of nuclear energy would be notably reduced if we had organisms designed to gobble up these three elements from water or soil and convert them into indigestible form.  Fortunately, none of these three elements is essential to our body chemistry, and it therefore does us no harm if they are made indigestible.