9: Mister Miracle
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
(Before I start, a quick apology to any visually impaired people reading this. I posted all this before, with alt tags for the images, including one with a little extra bit about the use of the handkerchief in the minstrel show, but WordPress ate it. I’ve reposted this, but don’t have time to retag the images tonight – I am unwell with what I’m hoping isn’t stomach flu. I will do so as soon as practical. I’ve also not re-italicised titles.)
Before I start this, an admission. I am a white man. Further, I am a white man from England. I say this up front because I am going to be treading on some astonishingly touchy ground regarding race in the USA, and while I consider myself to be a passionate, committed opponent of all forms of racism, I am aware enough of my own privilege to know that it’s entirely possible I will make mistakes here, even though I am making every effort not to. Please feel free to inform me of any problematic aspects of this.
“I found that Hoyle and Narlikar had already worked out Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics in expanding universes, and had then gone on to formulate a time-symmetric new theory of gravity. Hoyle unveiled the theory at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1964. I was at the lecture, and in the question period, I said that the influence of all the matter in a steady state universe would make his masses infinite. Hoyle asked why I said that, and I replied that I had calculated it. Everyone thought I had done it in my head during the lecture, but in fact, I was sharing an office with Narlikar, and had seen a draft of the paper. Hoyle was furious. He was trying to set up his own institute, and threatening to join the brain drain to America if he didn’t get the money. He thought I had been put up to it, to sabotage his plans. However, he got his institute, and later gave me a job, so he didn’t harbor a grudge against me”
Stephen Hawking
Authenticity is a tricky subject, isn’t it?
It used to be so simple. Fats Domino doing Ain’t That A Shame was definitely authentic. Pat Boone doing the same song wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Pat Boone wanted to change the words to “Isn’t that a shame?”
But then, Chuck Berry is definitely ‘authentic’ too, isn’t he? He pretty much invented his genre. But have a look at Hail! Hail! Rock And Roll, the 1986 documentary about him. There’s a scene where he talks about how he’d admired musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as Domino, but realised that their music was ghettoised. So he changed his vocal style to sound less black, and more like Boone – “Why can’t I do what Pat Boone does and sell records to the white people, too?” [FOOTNOTE: Unfortunately I'm currently unable to check this quote for perfect accuracy, as I can no longer play my old VHS copy of this film. Should anyone be able to provide a corrected version, I will post it to http://andrewhickey.info/errata.]
This appears to have worked. Witness the scene in It by Stephen King (a novel about seven misfits who go off to fight a giant spider that’s really a far more malicious and powerful force than it at first appears), where one character wants to go and watch TV to see if Neil Sedaka is ‘a Negro’, because he’d been fooled into thinking Chuck Berry was white until seeing him on TV. [FOOTNOTE: This, as with much of King's work, is semi-autobiographical. See http://www.stephenking.pl/sk_artykuly_ew_58.html, in which King argues that white people like Bob Seger and Snow Patrol can now sound every bit as good as black people like Chuck Berry.]
Is someone ‘authentic’ when they’re copying an ‘inauthentic’ performer who is in turn copying an ‘authentic’ performer?
I still know a few people who prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles because the former are more ‘authentic’. Is an LSE economics dropout from Kent singing Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters songs more or less authentic than an art school dropout from Liverpool singing Marvelettes and Isley Brothers songs? Discuss.
Chuck Berry is, of course, known for suing artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys, who he considers stole his ideas. Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s pianist, sued him in 2000, claiming to have co-written most of Berry’s hits without credit. The lawsuit was thrown out.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman complains that Baron Bedlam, an imitator made out of plastic, is ripping off his act. Shilo Norman is the third Mister Miracle.
“You’re tokenising me! I’m not a white man, I’m a Scot, OK? My fucking country… my country has been ruled by the fucking English for five hundred years, so don’t tokenise me, okay?!”
Grant Morrison, reply to a fan’s question at a convention panel, 2006
In Final Crisis, Grant Morrison’s 2008 follow-up to Seven Soldiers (and specifically to the Mister Miracle section), Anthro, the first boy ever born and the DC Universe equivalent of Adam, is given the secret of fire by Metron of the New Gods.[ FOOTNOTE: Metron is the Greek for 'measure'. One of the quotes I considered but discarded for one of these section headers was from Antiphon the Sophist - "Time is a thought or a measure [metron], not a substance.” – but I couldn’t find a source for it other than Wikipedia] The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which knowledge is given to hominids by aliens. Unsurprisingly, Jack Kirby, the creator of the New Gods, adapted 2001 in comic form in the mid-70s – both Kubrick’s film and Kirby’s comics dealt with the idea that ultimately, what makes us human comes not from ourselves but from aliens who took the clay that was the crude form of proto-humanity and shaped it into something other and different.
Popularised by Eric von Däniken, a convicted fraudster, the ‘chariots of the Gods’ idea holds that beings from elsewhere arrived and civilised a poor bunch of ape-people who could never have achieved anything by themselves, by turning those ape-people into a poor imitation of themselves. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, this idea is a lot more popular among the nastier sections of the right-wing than among others.
Here, though, Metron is explicitly linked to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has become the modern-day symbol for knowledge and intelligence, even though his own initial reputation was based on having taken secret knowledge from others and making it public. Hawking, who uses a wheelchair because he lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was, when Seven Soldiers was written, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge – the same position Isaac Newton had held centuries earlier. The chair that allows Hawking to move about is paralleled by Metron’s Möbius chair, which allows him to travel throughout time and space.
Much of Hawking’s work over the decades has been to do with black holes, and in particular the black hole information paradox, which we discussed back in the chapter on Zatanna. To refresh your memory very briefly, black holes suck things into themselves. They also radiate particles (Hawking radiation). But those particles should, according to the ‘no-hair theorem’, be totally random. So the information in the objects originally sucked into the black holes is destroyed. And information is supposed to be unable to be destroyed. This would violate all sorts of things, including our old friend the Second Law Of Thermodynamics.
One solution to this, which we’ve touched on earlier, is the holographic universe idea. Another is that the information gets pumped into another universe. Hawking, though, at around the time Seven Soldiers was being published, decided that Hawking radiation is just non-random enough to allow the information to escape back into the universe it came from.
“In active (feedforward and/or feedback) regulation, each disturbance D will have to be compensated by an appropriate counteraction from the regulator R. If R would react in the same way to two different disturbances, then the result would be two different values for the essential variables, and thus imperfect regulation. This means that if we wish to completely block the effect of D, the regulator must be able to produce at least as many counteractions as there are disturbances in D. Therefore, the variety of R must be at least as great as the variety of D.”
Principia Cybernetica – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/reqvar.html
It’s generally regarded that American popular song began with Stephen Foster. Foster, who died aged 37 the year before the American Civil War ended, wrote songs for blackface minstrel shows. These shows, which remained popular in the UK into the 1980s but thankfully died out in the US some decades earlier, involved light-skinned performers ‘blacking up’ as black people, and singing and dancing in a parody of what they imagined the black manner to be. Interestingly, many of the performers in these shows, who would now be regarded as white, were Jewish, Italian or Irish – ethnicities and nationalities that were regarded as inferior at the time.
Foster’s songs, and the other songs of the type, were advertised as being authentic examples of ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’ music (as well as some much more offensive terms). But they were in fact far more in the style of Irish ballads and European parlour song, and owed little or nothing in their composition to the actual songs of the enslaved black people of the period. However, they were intended for playing on the banjo, an instrument adapted from one used by slaves to perform their own music, and to be sung in ‘negro’ voices.
In fact, many of the earliest professional black entertainers in the USA performed in minstrel shows, wearing black makeup and performing in the same style as the white performers. These shows were apparently hugely popular with black audiences, who were glad to see any black performers on stage at all, even if they were reduced to playing caricatures of white people playing caricatures of black people.
The cult of ‘authenticity’ in popular music comes from much the same place, and is largely the responsibility of people like John and Alan Lomax. The Lomaxes and their ilk were well-meaning in their attempts to record a culture that was already dying, but their wish to ‘preserve’ music meant that if a black performer had a song that didn’t, to them, sound black enough it must have been contamination from white music. Likewise white folk singers were discouraged from singing blues numbers.
The person worst served by this kind of thing was probably Robert Johnson, known among his peers as a sophisticated musician in a multitude of styles, but who only ever got to record in the blues style for which he’s now known [FOOTNOTE: Johnson was recorded by commercial producers, rather than the Lomaxes, who I'm using as the most prominent example of a general trend of thinking.] Johnson, of course, died young, and to add insult to injury it became widely believed that he had sold his soul to Satan in return for musical facility – it being, of course, impossible that a young black man could have become a virtuoso guitarist through a combination of natural ability and practice.
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter did somewhat better. While the Lomaxes insisted on recording only his blues music, rather than his impassioned political songs or gorgeous ballads, and only gave him the money he earned in small amounts, supposedly to stop him spending it all on drink (until he threatened to sue them), he later managed to record pieces like Goodnight, Irene which are among his most enduring works.
But we see, time and again, the theme of the black artist being defined by what the white people think the black people should be doing, stretching from Lead Belly all the way back to the ex-slaves copying their ex-masters’ on-stage aping of them.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman is an escapologist. He puts on chains and escapes from them for his audience.
“LEAD BELLY Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”
Headline in Life magazine, 1937
The second law of thermodynamics is what both gives us our freedom and eventually dooms us. It states that as time goes on, entropy (disorder) must increase. This is quite possibly the most fundamental law in the universe, and it’s what gives us the arrow of time at all – we can define time, simply, as the increase in entropy.
But the second law is also mathematically equivalent to Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety, which states (in lay terms) that it’s impossible to control a system unless you have as many options open as there are ways the system can do things you don’t want. The more complex a system – the more disordered a system – the more options you have to have to control it. So all attempts at control are, ultimately, futile. Dark Side can find as many ways to hem Mister MIracle in as he likes, but the escape artist will always find a way out. The controller has to be lucky every time – the controlled only has to be lucky once.
Black holes are the ultimate expression of the law of gravity. Gravity pulls everything towards the centre, and get something massive enough, and this force will pull all the mass toward the centre to such an extent that even light is pulled toward it. Once you’ve crossed the ‘event horizon’ – the point at which the attraction of the singularity becomes great enough – you can’t get out.
In most black holes, movement towards the singularity (the centre of a black hole, not the geek rapture) is the same thing as the increase in entropy – this is why you can never escape. But there’s a special type of black hole – the extremal black hole (and really, what other kind could a superhero ever deign to try to escape from but an extremal one?) – where that may not be true. These are the smallest possible black holes that can exist (which also means that they’d be the perfect type to be artificially created, like the one Mister Miracle escapes from).
The physicist Sean Carrol has shown [FOOTNOTE: for a value of 'shown' that means 'done some mathematics about objects that have never been shown to exist in nature, in a situation that would be unlikely to occur even if they do exist'] that if these are charged in a particular way, there are actually two event horizons. There’s an outer one, which is inescapable – once you’re inside it, increase in entropy becomes equivalent to movement toward the centre, so it’s impossible to get out of.
But then inside this, there’s a second event horizon. Inside this, time works normally again. Anything in it can move towards the singularity, or just hang around in the inner event horizon forever. Were you to find yourself in this inner event horizon, and somehow managed not to die instantly from the extraordinary gravitational forces, you would find you had room to move. You could never get out into the outer event horizon, but you’d have wiggle room.
And the singularity of this type of black hole, should it exist, would be something of a type unique in this universe – it would have zero entropy, according to Carrol. What Carrol suggests this means is that the entropy of anything entering the singularity would escape into another dimension, which he calls Whoville.
“Taking the extremal limit of a non-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole (by externally varying the mass or charge), the region between the inner and outer event horizons experiences an interesting fate — while this region is absent in the extremal case, it does not disappear in the extremal limit but rather approaches a patch of $AdS_2\times S^2$. In other words, the approach to extremality is not continuous, as the non-extremal Reissner-Nordström solution splits into two spacetimes at extremality: an extremal black hole and a disconnected $AdS$ space. We suggest that the unusual nature of this limit may help in understanding the entropy of extremal black holes.”
Extremal limits and black hole entropy, Sean M. Carroll, Matthew C. Johnson, Lisa Randall
So we’ve seen that a notion of authenticity is ultimately an oppressive one. Coming originally from the best of motives – to try to preserve the unique music of an oppressed racial group, and later to protect black musicians from having their music sanitised and popularised by more ‘acceptable’ white musicians – it’s ended up trapping musicians in artistic ghettos.
The songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart actually went so far as to name his band The Negro Problem, partly in reference to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1945 study into racial prejudice, but mostly because that’s how he’s regarded. Nearly 80 years after Lead Belly’s heyday, it has now become so accepted that black people make ‘black music’ that the idea of a black man playing a guitar or singing melodies, rather than using a turntable and rapping, is anathema to the music industry. In albums like Post-Minstrel Syndrome, and in his musical Passing Strange, Stew has created some of the best songs in any genre for the last thirty years.
When ‘authenticity’ means a songwriter like Stew is punished for trying to escape from a musical ghetto, is it another tool of oppression? Is it worth letting a troop of plastic clones come along, one after another, and make sanitised copies of ‘authentic’ art, if that’s the price of setting people free? Can we get rid of Pat Boone, the minstrel show and Vanilla Ice without getting rid of Fats Domino, Lead Belly and the Wu Tang Clan? And should we even want to?
Chinese guys can jump real high and Germans cook soul food
white boys rap and hippies nap up their dreads to look rude
jazz is now suburban, it’s Marsalis-ly clean
and now we’ve got Viagra everyone’s a sex machine
so black men ski
Some kids I’ll describe as friends say I am race-obsessed
the luxury of your opinion shows you that you are blessed
I have poems about sunsets, flowers and the rain
I’ve read them to policemen, but it was all in vainStew – Black Men Ski
“Barker and Taylor do that, too, but after describing the marketing manoeuvres that made country and the blues racially “pure” categories (and left much of folk a politically impotent exercise in earnestness), they shy away from the legacy of that divide: rock purists and anti-hip-hop crusades on the one hand, and, on the other, pop music that entertains but rarely provokes, and never threatens any real danger but suicide, packaged and sold as a gesture of romantic authenticity. By the time they get to punk, a genre defined by politics, they’re so committed to avoiding the authenticity trap that they celebrate punk’s overlooked showmanship, failing to recognise that their embrace of inauthenticity as the essence of popular music is itself a trap.
But, as they write of the Monkees’ utterly contrived “I’m a Believer”, so what? It’s still a great song. And Faking It is a great collection of true stories about “fake” music. It’s the essay as Möbius strip; a literary illusion that ultimately makes less of an argument than it seems to, and yet tells us more about what’s true, what’s not, and why that doesn’t always matter, than a more straightforward confrontation with the secrets and lies of pop music ever could.”
Jeff Sharlett, Keeping It Unreal, New Statesman 16 April 2007
Lead Belly is buried in Shiloh Baptist Church, Mooringsport, Louisiana. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Comic issues Mister Miracle #1-4
Artists Pasqual Ferry, Billy Patton, Freddie Williams II(pencils), Pasqual Ferry, Michael Bair, Freddie Williams II (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau, Nick J Napolitano, Phil Balsman, Travis Lanham (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Most of his DC work after this has followed on from it – 52, Final Crisis and The Return Of Bruce Wayne are all sequels to this.
Look Out For Freedom, responsibility and entropy
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The end
The Grandfather Paradox: Experimentally Resolved?
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
I am utterly astounded that I’d never seen this before today – an experiment that may have more profound implications for our worldview than… maybe any experiment since the Michelson-Morley experiment?
I’m going to assume here that everyone knows about the Grandfather Paradox. This is just the simple question “What happens if you have a time machine, and go back and kill your granddad so you can never be born?”, the staple of many TV science fiction shows.
Now the normal answer to that question is “You can’t, so don’t be daft”. But for physicists, that’s not good enough – apart from anything else, General Relativity allows for the existence of ‘closed timelike curves’. These are paths through space-time that act much like paths through space – you can go in at one end and pop out the other – except that the other end is somewhere else in time as well as space. So it’s theoretically possible that you *could* do that, and we’d quite like to know what would happen if you did before everyone’s granddad starts retroactively never-having-existed.
Now, the main hypothesis in physics up to now has been, in effect, that it doesn’t matter. David Deutsch, a quantum computing expert at Oxford University, demonstrated that in quantum-mechanical terms you could have an outcome that makes sense so long as you accepted the many-worlds version of reality. Essentially, the probability that you were ever born, and the probability that you killed your grandfather, would both be 1/2 – or in other words the ‘you’ in a universe where you were born would travel to a universe where you were never born, kill your grandfather there, then come back to one where you’d never killed your grandfather. Nice and simple.
However, Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, never liked the many-worlds hypothesis (for reasons which, I have to say, make no sense at all to me), and he and a team of colleagues came up with another, simpler, idea, which is just that if you go back in time and try to shoot your grandfather, something will stop you. Maybe the gun will misfire, maybe you’ll be arrested, maybe your grandma was having an affair with the milkman and you’re his biological grandchild – something will just make sure that you can’t do that, because it would be cheating.
Now, there are huge, huge, MASSIVE problems with this – it gets rid of causality, it allows information to come from nowhere, and it just seems like a gigantic handwave. It makes no sense at all, and just seems like a desperate attempt to try to get out of the obvious, blatant, truth that the Many-Worlds interpretation is the only one consistent with the experiments and maths. When I first read about it, I thought it was just a neat way of avoiding the truth.
Unfortunately, it appears to be true. What I hadn’t realised was that they’d *actually done the experiment*!
Lloyd and his colleagues came up with an ingenious experiment, which I’m not entirely sure I’m capable of explaining, as it’s not really sunk in yet. This will be a GROSS oversimplification, and is just designed to get the idea across – please don’t kill me for inaccuracies. The full description is in the linked PDF. This is what Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen call lies-to-adults – the story is right, but each individual fact is wrong.
Essentially, photons (light particles) can be polarised a couple of ways, and they’ll only go through stuff that’s polarised the same way. That’s why Polaroid sun-glasses work – they block all the photons that are polarised the wrong way, so only let some light through.
Now, until something detects it, a photon isn’t in any particular polarisation – it’s in all of the possible polarisations at once. But once something has detected what kind of polarisation a photon is in, it’s always been that way – quantum causality works both ways in time. So you can set up an experiment that only detects photons of one polarisation, and that way you can send a message back to the past, to the photon emitter (light source) saying “Only send photons of this type”. If you do this the right way, you can send a photon back in time (but you can’t look at the photon that’s been sent back in time until it’s come back to the time you sent it from, or the experiment can’t work). That might sound mad, but it’s the way things are – accept it for now.
Now, by doing this, you can set up a kind of quantum ‘gun’ – set it up so that the photon going back in time tries to cancel out itself coming forward in time – all you do is put something in the middle that tries to change the polarisation of the backwards-in-time photon to the opposite of the forwards-in-time one. Changing polarisation is easy, and works about 96% of the time.
It never worked on the backwards-in-time photons.
This means that if you went back in time and tried to kill your grandfather, the gun really *would* misfire! Every time.
Now, assuming their experimental design wasn’t flawed and their maths works – and it looks OK to me, but I’m not a quantum physicist – then that means a lot of things:
Firstly, it means the universe is completely deterministic. There’s no such thing as chance.
Secondly, it’s strong evidence *against* the many-worlds hypothesis – the first such evidence I’ve ever heard of. It almost certainly means there’s a single universe.
Most interestingly, it means we can say goodbye to cause-and-effect. Effects can cause their own cause. For science-fiction fans, we’re living in the universe of Bill & Ted, the Doctor Who story Blink, and By His Bootstraps, (EDIT or of this rather nice short-short story by Simon Bucher-Jones) rather than Back To The Future or Pyramids Of Mars.
This of course means that access to a closed timelike curve (something that has never been observed in the real universe, but is theoretically possible), gives you essentially godlike powers. Got a closed timelike curve and want a million quid? Just put two pence in the bank and say “tomorrow, if my account has two milion pounds or less in it, I’ll take half of the money out and bring it back today and stick it in the account.” So if tomorrow you’ve still got 2p, you’d go back and put an extra penny in, which means that actually tomorrow you’ve got 3p in, which means… and the only stable way that can work out (other than you dying or something over the next day) is for the million pounds just to appear in your bank account.
Want to write a bestselling novel? Decide to print out five hundred pages just covered with the letter “A” and send it to a publisher. If they publish it and it becomes a bestseller, you send that back to yourself. If they don’t, you print out all the letter “A” apart from one “B” at the end and send that back to yourself to try that, and repeat – the only stable outcome is that you have a novel arrive that you never actually wrote but that will be an instant bestseller. And so on.
The possibility of time-travel in a *single, consistent universe* has never been one that’s really been taken seriously before, because it was just so absurd. I’m still 90% sure that there must be a mistake somewhere – the many-worlds hypothesis, as odd as it may sound, is far, FAR less ridiculous than this. But this is one of those things where either in a few months we’ll have a very quiet paper by Lloyd saying “Oops, I was totally wrong about everything because I forgot to carry the one” or in a hundred years’ time we’ll have a totally new understanding of physics based around this paper. I really can’t see a middle ground here…
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 3 – 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks
Don’t worry, this isn’t only the third new-to-me book I read this year – between the last of these posts and this one I also read five other books I’d not read before (as well as usual rereads, comics etc) but I’m planning on submitting some writing to the series that they are connected to (part of the reason for reading them) so don’t want to review them here. I’ve also just picked up a few more books (it’s payday) so over the next couple of days expect posts on Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles and The People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas.
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brook is one of the most interesting – and recommendable – pop-science books I’ve read in a long time (and I read a lot of pop-science books).
One of the things that worries me about the New Atheism and the Rationalist movement is its attitude to what Charles Fort referred to as Damned Data. A lot (by no means all) of the media representatives of this movement seem to regard disagreement with the current scientific consensus as being heresy – which seems to me to be a fundamentally unscientific attitude. (Richard Dawkins, for example, has condemned a creationist documentary that interviewed him under false pretences and re-edited the footage in ways he disagreed with, but he did exactly the same to Rupert Sheldrake. I happen to think that Sheldrake is wrong, but one should still use intellectually honest arguments, even against those who *are* wrong…)
(Which is not to say the majority of such disagreements aren’t cranks and quackery – they are. But some are very far from that. I *MUST* at some point get round to blogging about orthomolecular medicine, for example…)
Brooks, a consultant to New Scientist, takes the opposite – and to me, more scientific – approach here, by looking at anomalous results – the places where our theories and the data don’t quite match up.
Opening with a quote from Isaac Asimov – “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny…’” – Brooks takes us on a tour through most of the major scientific disciplines and looks at what we *don’t* know. He divides this into thirteen ‘things that don’t make sense’ as follows:
The Missing Universe – he looks at ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’, and various not-yet-accepted physical theories that do away with these concepts.
The Pioneer Anomaly – the Pioneer probes, sent out in the 1970s, are now thousands of miles away from where the theory of Relativity says they should be.
Varying Constants – the growing evidence that the ‘universal constants’ used to be different.
Cold Fusion – the growing body of evidence that suggests Pons and Fleischmann found *something* – maybe not cold fusion, but *something* – in their career-ending experiments.
Life – why have we not yet been able to synthesise life from elementary chemicals?
Viking – the Viking probe found evidence of life on Mars – one of the experiments that it ran gave *exactly* the result predicted if there were living organisms in the Martian soil. This has never been followed up on.
The WOW! Signal – a brief (sub-second) signal that looks very much like the work of intelligent life, but has never been repeated.
A Giant Virus – a virus found in Bradford that appears to be an evolutionary ‘missing link’ (sorry for the term) between bacteria and viruses.
Death – why *do* we die? Can it be stopped?
Sex – why all the current evolutionary explanations for sex fall down.
Free Will – scientific evidence that it doesn’t exist, and what this might mean for society.
The Placebo Effect – the evidence that it’s much stronger than thought when it comes to depression and pain, but has *no effect whatsoever* when it comes to physical problems, and what this means for the current medical orthodoxy of double-blind placebo-controlled trials.
And most controversially of all, Homeopathy – he shows that there is a *tiny* bit of evidence that a *small* proportion of homeopathic ‘medicines’ might actually work, and some suggested physical mechanisms for this, even while clearly showing that most of it is the nonsense we all accept it to be.
Looking through this list, some of it is probably explicable by experimental error or outright fraud (my guess is that the evidence for homeopathy falls into that category), but at least some of these things will radically rewrite parts of our understanding of the universe.
But the good thing about this book is that even when he’s talking about these things, Brooks is *NOT* doing it in a new-agey, ‘there are things that science will never understand, wisdom of the ancients’ kind of way. He is motivated by an excitement in discovery, and in the scientific method. For him, the idea that there are things we don’t know, or things we’ve got wrong, is not a threat, and it’s better to waste time on a wild goose chase occasionally in order to find something genuinely revolutionary than to dismiss out-of-hand any anomalous data or wild hypotheses.
My guess is that at least seven or eight of the things talked about in this book will turn out to be wild-goose chases of that nature, but that among the others is an account of someone who in a century will be spoken of in the way we now speak of Einstein, Darwin or Newton (or at least Crick or Watson or Curie or Pauling).
This has fired up my imagination far more than most books of its ilk, and as long as you accept (as Brooks clearly states) that the stuff talked about in it is the very opposite of ‘established fact’, I can guarantee it will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in science.
Stepping Back a bit… Yet more on Seven Soldiers
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I’ll be posting more about Final Crisis when the next issue comes out (and between following up on Batman on Thursday and then getting Superman Beyond 3D 2 next week, I’m tingling with anticipation (and incidentally, everyone, the title isn’t just Superman Beyond but Superman Beyond 3D – because he’s travelling beyond the third dimension…)). But before that I thought I’d post something briefly about Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle as that comic more than any other is the real prequel to Final Crisis.
One thing I was never entirely happy about in Seven Soldiers was the role of gravity in the story. I wrote about this on my old blog, because gravity is so important as a recurring theme throughout Seven Soldiers and the JLA: Classified story that led into it, but I couldn’t see why gravity was being used in such a similar way to entropy, which is an even bigger theme in Seven Soldiers generally. I came to the provisional conclusion that it was being used as a metaphor for the more difficult concept, as well as for the Life Trap, but I felt like I was still missing something. Given that the Mister Miracle story is about a plunge into and escape from a black hole, it was galling that the gravity and entropy themes didn’t fit together *quite* as neatly as they should.
This article has changed that. I always knew, of course, that black holes do strange things to entropy and information (once you’re in an event horizon, you can *only* move towards the singularity. That means that moving forward in time is equivalent to moving towards the singularity. As the ‘arrow of time’ is a thermodynamic one, that means that moving towards the singularity is equivalent to increasing in entropy. That’s a hopeless oversimplification, but it’s sort-of right).
Now, the whole of Seven Soldiers, and Morrison’s work generally, is a meditation on entropy, information and life. Life has been defined by some as localised patches of negative entropy – using energy to create order from disorder. If there’s a real ‘anti-life equation’ then the second law of thermodynamics has a strong claim to the title, because all life is essentially a battle against entropy, and a battle that will always be won by entropy.
But having said that, entropy is the only thing that allows us any freedom at all – entropy is the reason that all iron hands must eventually succumb to rust, the reason none of us can ever be controlled at all. Which is why Darkseid’s search for complete control must go along with his search for immortality – change is both freedom and death.
So I was absolutely delighted to read in the Discover Magazine article linked above that there’s a type of black hole that does even more interesting things with entropy, and that this was known about long enough ago that Morrison may have used it in Mister Miracle. In fact, given that this type of black hole is called an ‘extremal’ black hole, it seems obvious that this must have been the type that Shilo plunged into in his escape act. After all, what superhero comic is going to feature a normal black hole when it can feature an EXTREMal!! black hole?
Now the interesting thing about black holes is that if they’re charged, matter can enter them and *not* hit the singularity (which would again make it the perfect type for Shilo Norman to try to escape from. Admittedly, he’d still be trapped within the event horizon and crushed to death by unimaginable forces, but he’d have room to manoeuvre… ). But even more interestingly (at least if Stephen Hawking is correct in his mathematics, and I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one… ) , if you have a charged *extremal* black hole… it has *ZERO* entropy.
All of a sudden the gravity and entropy subtexts of Mister Miracle come together – Mister Miracle is the story of someone entering a realm with no entropy at all and coming out again. Keep this in mind and reread Mister Miracle and see how much more sense it makes.
Even more interesting is the result that caused the Discover Magazine article to be published – that there’s a range of spacetime in the centre of those black holes that pops out of existence at the same point the entropy becomes zero – effectively taking the entropy out of this universe altogether and into what the authors of the article call ‘whoville’.
Or, as they put it, the entropy…
escapes.
Linkblogging for 02/01/09
I had to leave work early today with an ear infection that’s left me (temporarily, I sincerely hope) almost deaf, so whether there’s a Big Finish A Week today depends on my hearing….
Tom Spurgeon’s been doing a great series of interviews with comics people, whether creators like Eddie Campbell or bloggers like Tucker Stone. All are worth reading, but the best one so far is the interview with Abhay, who shows again why the rest of us regard him with slack-jawed awe. I kept changing my mind about which paragraph was worth quoting here, because they *all* are, but this gives a flavour:
I don’t know, though. The biggest comic company in the country’s highest profile series of the year was about religious fanatics blowing themselves up because their religion tells them they’re entitled to a specific parcel of occupied property, where the heroes tell the religious people that the heroes’ white-skinned God will lead them to victory, where the happy ending was that the Marvel heroes kill all of the religious people and that a religious woman has her head blown off mid-prayer. What were they even trying to do?? What did I even read, Comics Reporter? How was that the ending? It’s such a weird comic book. And comic fans make it stranger because most of them seem to think a one-panel Obama cameo is the only politically charged material in the book. People don’t think mainstream comics might mean things! People think mainstream comic creators are brainless fanboys just because mainstream comic fans are brainless fanboys. It’s a bizarre culture.
This post on crossover events is pretty interesting, but worth reading more because every Big Clever Comics Name Blogger shows up in the comments, which get very interesting…
James Graham has a good post on the need for a ‘new new atheism‘ – something more than just Richard Dawkins’ “If you believe in god, you’re a bastard”. I don’t agree with all of this, but there’s a lot of sense in there.
Cosmic Variance, inspired by the new film Benjamin Button, explains why you can’t have part of the universe where time goes backwards.
And there’s a petition here to decriminalise prostitution. I think that prostitution is undoubtedly a bad thing, both for the individuals involved and society as a whole, in the vast majority of cases. But I also think that criminalisation causes far more problems than it cures, and as long as people are going to turn to prostitution as a source of income, the priority should not be punishing them but ensuring they are safe and healthy.
Quantum Physics and the DCU
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Sorry there’ve not been many comics-related posts recently, but with the exception of the last issue of Batman, which I’m waiting to review until the end of the RIP storyline, there’s not actually been a comic worth writing about since All-Star Superman ended. There’ve been plenty of decent comics, in a sort of “this is quite fun, I suppose” way, but nothing that I’ve had anything to say about. I miss 52 and Seven Soldiers…
Of course if/when the Final Crisis related things get back on schedule, I’ll have a lot to say…
So I thought I’d talk about the different interpretations of quantum physics, the extent to which each of them appears to apply in the DCU, and why that leaves Hypertime as the only *actually consistent* interpretation of DCU physics.
Incidentally, when I talk about the DCU here and in other posts, I’m not talking about what’s officially ‘canonical’ as much as I’m talking about what comics I personally bother remembering. In ‘my’ DCU, no Batman story told between Alan Grant leaving and Grant Morrison coming on happened, 52 happened but Infinite Crisis didn’t, Morrison’s Doom Patrol happened but Byrne’s didn’t, and so on…
There are three major interpretations of quantum physics, which I shall now grotesquely oversimplify. All these interpretations come from a single fact, which is that the results of some experiments change depending on the results people look for. Richard Feynman once said that all quantum physics can essentially be explained by saying “Remember the double-slit experiment? It’s like that”, so I’ll talk in terms of that experiment (or, more precisely, a variant called the quantum eraser experiment ).
To oversimplify this a lot (the details are all wrong but the ideas are right – look it up if you want precision) – if you shine a light through a piece of card with two very thin slits in it, onto a screen, you get an interference pattern which can only be caused by light acting like a wave. However, if you put equipment in the slits to detect individual particles, then you get a *different pattern* which can only be explained if light is made up of particles, not waves. If you leave the equipment there, but turned off, it acts like waves again. Weirdest of all, though, if you turn the equipment on, *but don’t record the results*, or delete the results before you can look at them, it still acts like waves. In other words, behaviour of the light *in the past* is dependent on the information you know *now*.
This has been interpreted in a number of ways, but there are three interpretations that have received most publicity . The ‘orthodox’ interpretation is called the Copenhagen interpretation, and essentially says that everything exists in a fuzzy state until something observes it, which makes the universe ‘choose’ what has happened. The reason that, say, the Moon is there, according to this interpretation, is because people keep looking at it (or looking at effects it causes, like the tides). If everyone ignored the moon long enough, by this interpretation, it would go away.
More accurately, it says it makes no sense to talk about anything unless we can actually measure it. The advantages of this interpretation are that it’s parsimonious – it doesn’t require any new entities being created – and that it just takes the equations and experimental results absolutely literally. The disadvantages are that it means we can never talk about an objectively existing universe – that it denies even the existence of such a thing – and some argue that it gives an undeserved primacy to consciousness, making the universe depend on the existence of minds (though some, such as Heisenberg, would argue with this). Its detractors have characterised it as nothing more than solipsism, and it is most popular among those who think of themselves as pragmatists, who care more about the results than about what the results mean.
The best-known interpretation among the general public is the many-worlds interpretation of Everett, Wheeler and Graham, which posits that any time anything could happen in two different ways, the universe itself splits into two, with each universe being identical except for the position of one photon (or whatever). The advantages of this interpretation are that it fits all the known facts, that it does not get rid of an objectively-existing universe, that it’s easily comprehensible, and that it doesn’t make the fact of observation especially important. The disadvantage – and it is a substantial disadvantage – is that it means that in the time it took me to write this sentence, a trillion to the power of a trillion new universes were created, all absolutely indistinguishable from each other except that somewhere three galaxies away a photon hit a helium nucleus which in this universe it missed. To say the least, this seems to go against Occam’s razor. This interpretation is most popular among science-fiction fans and those who want the universe to be a more exciting and interesting place.
The third main interpretation is the hidden variable hypothesis, specifically the version advanced by David Bohm. This states that all the quantum results that look like they’re probabilistic are in fact deterministic, but controlled by some factor we don’t yet know. For various reasons that factor would have to be something ‘nonlocal’, which means in effect it would be outside of normal space-time, and it would quite possibly be impossible to measure. The advantage of this hypothesis is that it preserves a single, objectively-existing universe which isn’t dependent on our measurement, and that it suggests there’s an underlying order to the universe (the implicit assumption of most people). The main disadvantage is that it involves invoking something outside the normal universe which we can’t measure yet. It also has the disadvantage, as I’ve linked to a couple of times recently, that John Conway and another mathematician whose name I can’t remember have recently proved that the only way this can be true is if we give up the concept of free will altogether.
This interpretation is most favoured by both ultra-fundamentalist materialists who are very convinced that a totally deterministic, objectively existing measurable universe must exist, and by religious/mystical people who see the implicit order or hidden variable as being a manifestation of the will of God (although the God being talked about is not usually the god of the Abrahamic religions but some more Eastern concept like the Tao, or the Deist Nature’s God). In fact this description is rather like the description in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters of the universe as seen by God.
All of these interpretations (plus others such as the transactional and relational interpretations, which are very close to one or more of the above) seem equally valid in our world (I just typoed that as equally valis…) and make the same predictions for every experiment we’ve thought of. So which of these hypotheses appears to be correct within the DCU?
Firstly, we appear to be able to dismiss the Copenhagen interpretation out of hand – there’s never been any mention of it in any DCU story I’ve read. However, there is an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing going on in the DCU, where if a character stops appearing in comics, after a while they just stop existing (like all the recent Supergirls). But that’s stretching a metaphor. We’ve never seen any evidence of the DCU behaving in a Copenhagenist manner.
[EDIT - RAB in the comments (and read the comment in question, it's a good'un) has pointed out that Limbo from Animal Man could be interpreted in a Copenhagenist way. He’s also linked to this post, which is a rather good reaction to the reintroduction of the multiverse in 52 and ties in with a lot of this stuff).
So we now turn to the many-worlds interpretation. This *has* been brought up before, in things like Peter Milligan’s rather wonderful ‘Schrodinger’s Pizza’ storyline in Animal Man (which really needs reprinting at some point). But while the DCU does currently have multiple universes, these seem to be strictly limited, and the differences between them are macroscopic rather than microscopic in nature. And also, apart from the Hypertime stories (which I’m removing from consideration here because that would be to presuppose the conclusion) most stories involving alternate realities, such as the recent Booster Gold stories or Rock Of Ages have involved an ‘incorrect’ timeline being created which is then fixed. So there is more evidence of this than there is of the Copenhagen interpretation, but it still seems fundamentally wrong in the DCU, where timelines can be altered.
Finally, there’s the Hidden Variable hypothesis. This is the one used by Grant Morrison in Animal Man, and Matt Sturges has recently used it (very much in passing) in Blue Beetle. It also fits the facts in that there *is* something outside the DC Universe affecting it – namely the various writers, artists and editors who work on the stories (unless you consider the infant universe of Qwewq to be part of the DCU of course). It seems the best-fitting of the various interpretations in many ways, and is also the one (of those three) that would allow the intelligent universe that Grant Morrison seems to be pushing for (with the hidden variable here being the DCU’s own sentience). However, as I’ve explained before, in the context of the DCU this would ultimately mean that Darkseid wins, and we all know that Darkseid doesn’t win.
So that leaves a combination of elements from the different interpretations – especially the last two – as the only way forward. It is my contention that Hypertime fits the bill, and is thus the only way to actually make sense of the various different, conflicting stories that have taken place in the DCU. More of this later, including how this ties into information theory…
The Kingdom Of Hypertime Is Within You
I’m planning a series of posts on what a few of us are calling ‘the Prismatic Age’ of comics, and specifically about the idea of Hypertime, a Grant Morrison concept that to my mind is one of the most innovative ever to be brought into mainstream comics.
Hypertime was introduced in a miniseries called The Kingdom, by Mark Waid and various artists. The Kingdom has a horrible reputation among comic fans, and it doesn’t really deserve it. The main reason for this terrible reputation is that it was promoted as a sequel to Kingdom Come. Kingdom Come was a graphic novel by Waid and Alex Ross that was regarded at the time of its publication in the mid-90s as being something new and exciting and good, but it hasn’t aged at all well. It’s overblown, stodgy, and full of self-importance – it cries out “Look, superheroes are Serious Important Business! Look, I can quote from the Book Of Revelation! Doesn’t Superman look dignified with sideburns?” The best thing about it is that it managed to get in a reference to a Dukes Of Stratosphear song (Brainiac’s Daughter)
The Kingdom, on the other hand, is unabashed fun. In fact, it looks in retrospect very much like a proto-Seven Soldiers – or at least a halfway house between DC’s ‘annual events’ and Morrison’s mega-event – there’s a pair of bookends (plus a #0 story) and five one-shots, each focusing on a different new character (including a ‘son of the Bat’ who bears more than a passing resemblance to Damien Wayne) which don’t really connect up in any way but are all needed in the end. It’s far more about introducing new ideas than it is about rehashing the old. The one-shots are set in the world of Kingdom Come, and so are fairly downbeat in tone, as is the framing story (about someone going back in time and killing Superman over and over again, every day), but the story’s told with a lightness of touch that was missing from the original story. It’s aged a hell of a lot better, but anyone who wanted a second Kingdom Come definitely didn’t get it, while anyone who didn’t want that probably wasn’t reading it in the first place.
But some of the criticism of The Kingdom is fairer, at least in retrospect, because it was not primarily a story as much as it was a way of introducing a single concept into the DC Universe, but that concept has gone almost completely unused ever since.
At the time, DC was very proud for some reason of having a fixed, immutable, timeline with no multiple realities, in which the continuity was invariant – as if this was in some way a good idea for a supposedly fantastical universe. There was even a team of superheroes called the Linear Men (and can you imagine a duller name than that? They were created by Dan Jurgens, as I’m sure no-one is shocked to know) who were dedicated to preserving the timeline and preventing interesting stories from happening by ensuring there was no deviation.
The Kingdom introduced Hypertime, which was an attempt to do away with all that nonsense and also to explain away any inconvenient continuity errors. But it was much more than that. An idea from Grant Morrison, named by Mark Waid, Rip Hunter explains Hypertime in The Kingdom as follows:
Hypertime. The vast, interconnected web of parallel time-lines which comprise all reality… The possibilities of hypertime are infinite and humble the power of any man… The problem with the linear men is that they’re too linear. They’re vested in enforcing an inflexible view of reality… they think orderly, catalogued continuity is preferable to a kingdom of wonder.
Events of importance often cause divergent ‘tributaries’ to branch off the main timestream… on occasion, those tributaries return — sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course
Now one thing I dislike about this description is that it still refers to one central timeline – it still gives one view of reality primacy – which is not something I’ve got from the Morrison interviews where he talks about this. In fact, without the idea of a central timeline Hypertime can be quite a neat way of reconciling two of the different interpretations of quantum physics – the Copenhagen interpretation (which suggests that there is no objective reality, just the reality that we measure) and the Everett-Wheeler-Graham many-worlds interpretation (in which there are an infinite, infinitely-replicating, number of nearly-identical parallel universes). If you assume that each individual’s perception is a separate hypertimeline, which is in turn a parallel universe in the EWG model, you get a universe where measuring reality becomes the act of splitting or merging hypertimelines. This actually is as consistent with the data as either of those two – Wigner’s Friend exists in a separate hypertimeline from Wigner, but the two timelines overlap whenever the two are in contact.
(Of course we know now that in the DCU the hidden variable interpretation is true, but that could probably be brought in too with a bit of fudging…)
I’m not explaining this very well, but I’m planning to do several more posts on this, and how this idea has fed into 52, Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis. I think Hypertime has been misunderstood to a great extent by most comic fans, who see it as ‘confusing’ or an excuse for continuity errors. I think though it is the most perfect representation of a set of ideas Grant Morrison has been working with at least since Animal Man I’ve got a lot more to say about this, and shall probably continue tomorrow…
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