Auschwitz, mass murder and today

Last weekend I visited Krakow and Auschwitz, which is about an hours drive from the city. A friend has already made a vivid blog about what we saw there along with excellent photos. Being a theorist I won't dwell so much on our observations but instead I mostly want to talk about some of the thoughts it provoked here.

The obvious questions to ask are could it happen again  and how would you react in those circumstances?  The latter of course cannot be answered, so I won't try, but the former, though natural to ask, is really rather foolish.  "It" did not only happen once, "it" has happened before, "it" has happened since and sadly I would be astonished if "it" didn't happen again.  Indeed in some sense of "it", it is happening now.  Certainly anti-semiticism existed long before Hitler, from the Roman empire through middle ages and until today. However it is not really wide spread racism which makes things so abhorrent, it the was the horrifying treatment, torture and mass murder.

At Auschwitz  (or Oświęcim to use the Polish name) we saw the concentration camp where people (most of them Jewish) were held, fed starvation diets, leading to the horrifying images like on the left, forced to endure bitter cold with minimal clothing to protect them, humiliated, tortured and eventually murdered.  We also saw the cell's where prisoners there were held for "special" punishment. Given the treatment of the typical inhabitants it's hard to imagine what this could be, but there we saw small brick boxes called standing cells, where prisoners were forced to stand for days, and cell's where some were sentenced to death by starvation.   In the same building the first experiments with gassing were also started.

Then after visiting this we moved on to the second much larger camp, Birkenau, where the same horrors were then performed on an industrial scale.

But such treatment and mass murder is not unique. "Concentration camp" is term first coined to describe camps created by the British to hold people relocated during the systematic depopulation of certain regions in South Africa during the Boer war.   Hitler cited the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the dying Ottoman empire / nascent Turkish state, as reason to believe that history would look kindly upon him despite the horrors he was ordering, thankfully he was wrong. But further back one can also consider the widespread practice of conquest and slavery in ancient civilisations, the treatment and multiple massacres of the native populations of the American continents,  and many other instances of horror one can find.  Of course details and how exact the comparison is can easily be questioned and this might be important in many circumstances, but there is no doubt that human history is filled with horrible idea and horrible acts of violence and murder.

Nor did such horrors stop with the Nazi's.  At the same time there were the horrors conducted under Stalin's regime, many deaths on both sides in partitioning of India, the huge death toll in China under Mao and more recently there is Cambodia in the 80's,  the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90's and perhaps Darfur in the last decade. And this is far from a complete summary.

However perhaps by "it" one wonders if "civilised" western nations could ever turn to such brutal mass murder again. There are of course worrying trends, such as the leader of the French Front National making it to the final run off in the French presidential elections, Joerg Haider getting into a coallition government in Austria,  and to a lesser extent the British National Party (BNP) getting council seats.     In addition there is the apparent increase in Islamaphobia post 9/11, which appears to be being exploited by the BNP.

I believe and hope that it is very unlikely in the near future that such events and attitudes will spiral into state sanctioned murder in western democracies.  I have less confidence elsewhere, but whether the next atrocity to shock people will be perpetrated on some Muslims or be by some Muslims, as terrorists or as state part of some theocratic state sanctioned violence, or involve some other group, I obviously cannot say.  But sadly I'm sure something will come. 

I have previously  drawn comparison between some aspects of the horrifying attitudes, aims and acts of Hitler and policies of western countries which maintain or do not strive to diminish the appalling disparity of wealth, living conditions and health between people born in western countries and those born in the "developing" world.  In extreme times this poverty can lead to horrifying scenes of starvation every bit as stomach churning as those shown earlier from Auschwitz.


In "better" times people living in poorer countries simply have much lower standards of living, much higher levels of infant moratlity, and much shorter life expectancy (note the latter two are not independent).  For example the life expectancy in the UK is 79.4 years, while the average expectancy world wide is only 67.2 years, more than a whole decade of life lost, and in many African Countries it can be under 60 or 50 years.  Between the lowest and highest national life expectancies there is 40 year gap, it seems people in Japan, on average, live twice as long as people in Swaziland.

A significant contribution to this gap are high rates of HIV/AIDS infections and the lack of drugs which could significantly increase the life expectancy of those infected.  In the west there is wider condom availability and use and better education, which help prevent the rise infections and drugs which allow people who have been infected to have a much longer and higher quality life and people in other countries could and should have access to all of this.  Some of the problems result from bad governance and it is not quite as simple as needing the will of western nations to provide, but much more could be done. And when people seek to leave for other countries where the prospects are better they are refused entry and dismissively labelled "economic migrants".

In many cases economics is life and that is one reason (there are many others) I say, with all due respect to Godwin's law , and legitimate sensitivities about comparison's which could trivialise the horror and suffering, that in some sense of the meaning "it" is still going on today.  

Poppy Burning and Racism

This is just a quick blog to express my annoyance at one of the more stupid "copy and paste" messages going round facebook. I saw it posted by someone I was at school with who is a friend on facebook, though really I barely know her, and was so irritated I had to comment.

The message which bothered me was one like the red quote below (there are a few variants it seems), which may, if you read it in a naive way, not sound so offensive, but I imagine is designed to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.

"Today we saw muslims break the 2 minute silence in central london, with banners holding "British Soldiers Burn In Hell" & the burning of a poppy... if you don't like us British people paying respect for our brave fighters, then you know where the airport is. disgusting, ... disrespectful bastards. copy and paste this if you're British and proud."

Here (slightly edited for clarity) is my response:

------ I assume you just want to show you care about people who made sacrifices to defend others in war, but that is not how this will be interpreted and it would be naive to believe that was why it was written.

First it's a tiny incident by a handful of idiots, with almost no impact until it gets reported etc, and I note no mention above of the English Defense League assaulting people at the same time. Secondly labeling them by religion is a subtle way of suggesting this behavior is a common characteristic of Muslims, it's not. We could equally label them by race or residency. How does "we saw people in Britain break the 2 minute silence" sound? Then there is the invitation to leave the country, reminiscent of a BNP rally and finally we have the "British and proud" slogan often used as euphemism for racism and xenophobia, so much so that you'll find a facebook group "British and Proud...BUT NOT RACIST".

I am fairly sure both the people who made the daft protest and whoever wrote this nonsense being copied and pasted into facebook want to stir up racial and religious divisions and people like you reposting this are helping them do this. Please stop.

I hope this doesn't makes me a facebook bully, but I was genuinely trying to change her mind and warn her about the connotations. It seems she has either defriended me or deleted her account. I feel a bit bad if it's the latter because I doubt that she realised how it might be interpreted and perhaps not everyone will read it the way I do, but I do believe that racial and religious hatred is likely the motivation behind creating such messages and hope if others pasting that post into facebook find this blog they will realise the connotations and delete it.

EDIT: Since some rage has been requested (see comments) I thought I'd add in this ~approriately themed song, by Machine Head "A nation on fire"



With the lines:
"The media it
Blinds out eyes
A people divided
And force fed lies
The black and white societies corrode
Warring, hating, blind, a rage explodes"

just put social in front of media and it works ;). sort of.

My drugs rant

It's well past time I wrote about this, given the title of my blog and the fact that support for the legalisation of drugs is probably the earliest political stance I adopted - I've held this view since I was a very young child, though it has evolved a lot since then and there have been times I doubted it. In part this is the reason I haven't written about it thus far, I've gotten bored by the arguments and having failed to find any significant flaw in the argument in many years of presenting it to people who disagree (and in some cases changing their minds) I am sceptical about what I will learn by doing this. But regardless here it is..


There is a short "cliffs notes" version of this here.

First this is not an argument to legalise all chemical substances and have no regulatory framework for anything. By "drugs" I only refer t0 well known substances which are used recreationally and by legalise I mean bring into a carefully regulated framework. Also really we should assess each drug individually but that would take too long. So be aware it is possible there are exceptions for each argument and while I'm not aware of a popular recreational drug for which the balance isn't tilted in terms of legalisation this doesn't preclude that possibility nor that such drugs couldn't in principle appear.

OK a libertarian principle which I ~ subscribe to is that you shouldn't make laws restricting consenting decisions between adults. I don't think that many people believe in this principle in it's entirety, at least not when they've thought through all of the consequences, but I suspect most think that it is a reasonable default and if you are breaking that principle then you should have some pretty powerful reasoning or evidence.

So why might people do this? One possibility is absolute moral values. If you fundamentally believe drug use is immoral (without reference to social or personal harm we can study) and think they deserve to suffer then I doubt I will persuade you otherwise. Based on those values the drug laws makes sense, though I do think your values are rather disgusting. However presumably everyone else is interested in the pragmatic results of this legislation and on that we can have a discussion. If drug prohibition leads to more deaths than under a regulated framework would you still support it? For this we will need to look at the evidence. Here I will outline the argument about how to use the the evidence and will at points give you my impression of what the evidence states. However I deliberately avoid quoting statistics and making many references to science papers because I am not an expert with the fairest overview and I want YOU to investigate yourself.

So some people are simply concerned with protecting vulnerable people from their own bad choices. Most recreational drugs have some health risks/dangers, as do many other activities people choose to do for pleasure (e.g. football, boxing, drinking, mountaineering, sex). If this the case we need to establish the extent of those risks and consider what is an acceptable reasonable choice. I am not a medical expert and will not get into details, especially since this is a general discussion but in general the health risks are far lower than is suggested by the tabloid press. It is my understand that the health risks of drugs like ecstasy, cannabis*, speed and even non infrequent use of powdered cocaine** are not usually considered to be significantly worse than those of alcohol and tobacco. Other drugs have more severe health implications associated with use, heroin users suffer high rates of overdoses and HIV infection for example. Remember each drug has different qualitative risks though (how do you compare the long term risk of cancer, with that of an allergic reaction leading to instant death or a risk of liver failure or infertility? and so on) so they cannot be compared directly, you need to examine each risk (by consulting experts or reading public communications by them) and consider how you personally weigh each of them.

Now it's possible that for you even with a realistic estimate of the health risks you still believe some or many drugs are too dangerous for their use to be a legitimate recreational activity and anyone who disagrees and wants to use them must be protected from themselves. But there are other considerations. You must also consider how much more dangerous the drugs are when sold in an illegal market under drug prohibition. Dangers associated with adulteration/contamination of the drugs, unsafe practices due to secretive use (e.g. needle sharing, makeshift pipes), increased risk of overdose due to unstable supply and unreliable purity levels are all a direct result of the drug laws. To be quantitative you need again to look at each drug and each risk individually, but I suggest that this increased risk is a very substantial, often overpowering the moderate risk of the drug itself. On top of this there is now the risk of arrest and incarceration created by the laws, which we need to also consider. Ruining someones life by throwing them in jail for several years to "protect them" from their decision to take a mild risk of getting tuberculosis does not seem very caring. Punitive responses to drug use can only be justified if the deterrent effect really works, i.e. substantially less people submit themselves to these risks you deem too great to tolerate. If we could reduce drug use to zero it wouldn't matter that they are much more dangerous when purchased in an illegal market. However that is spectacularly unrealistic.

So now we need to consider what impact if any drug laws have on usage. Let me delay that for a bit though because it will also be important in the other concern which may lead people to support drug laws.

Namely the wider social harm. So while the transaction for drugs and the use of them appears to only involve the user and his supplier, there may be others who are affected. Syringes lying in the street, "dangerous drug mad" people wandering the streets, theft to support their habit.

Is this reasonable? Well first certainly not all drugs have much wider effects. There is no wider social impact from a drug like ecstasy. It is not addictive, and therefore does not induce theft to pay for it, people who use it do not get typically get violent, it is swallowed in pill form, not injected so no needles lying around.

As for violence it may seem reasonable to believe that some drugs, e.g. cocaine can stimulate aggression and violent acts in the right circumstance due to their elevated mood, with the opposite effect from e.g. cannabis. However to make a case justifying drug prohibition we need evidence first that significant numbers of violent acts can be causally attributed to cocaine and an explanation of why deal with this and not alcohol which is associated with far more violence . While the first two points appear not to be satisfied, and thus sufficient to dismiss this argument for now, the latter is devastating. Alcohol leads to an enormous volume of violent incidents and health problems. Scientific drug experts have weighed up the overall harm (using subjective weightings for individual risk) of these drugs and classified them, finding alcohol to be the worst by far and this has been widely reported.

Although it is good that this has been reported in the media I find it disappointing that they have ignored the fact that there have been subjective choices made in combining qualitatively different social harms (e.g. injuries from drunken assault against used needles in parks or deaths from drunk drivers) . It should also be stated more strongly that this is the net harm from current use levels, not harm per user nor harm per single dose. Alcohol does so badly because it is used so widely, if we considered harm per user heroin, crack and crystal meth would dominate. Nonetheless the findings are still useful to consider, but it is really more important to look at the individual risk factors for yourself and in particular which might be solved by a reduction in users and which are a product of the drug laws themselves


As with health risks the wider social damage caused by the drug laws themselves is enormous. With violent gangs in charge of trafficking and supplying drugs to addicts and drug addicts committing crimes to support their habit, the relatively small number of drug addicts and criminals involved in supply have a disproportionately large impact on the rest of society. You can check the figures for yourself , the numbers are very very large and shocking.

It is indisputable that the effect per user must be greater under prohibition than under a regulated legal framework, and I am suggesting (but check for yourself) that in fact the harm per user which comes from the drug laws themselves is many times higher than any the harm from the drugs alone. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. I am aware of no evidence to support this.


One can use Portugal, Switzerland and Netherlands as well as the past history of the UK and US to get a feel for what happens when we change laws on certain drugs in liberal democracies. There is little there to give one the impression that things get worse when you liberalise. In fact to the contrary looking at countries where addictive drug use has been decriminalised (Portugal) or medical subscriptions provided for addicts (Switzerland) the uptake of these drugs has fallen. This result is anticipated by an understanding that since addicts cannot break their addiction when it is clearly in their own interest making it illegal will not stop them either. Instead their demand fuels an illegal market with high reward for the creation of new addicts as well as the supply of existing ones. The situation is not much better for soft drugs with evidence of only a small increase in uptake if any.

Of course these are real world cases and have all the problems in identifying actual factors behind any change, but given the huge and undisputed problems with contamination, criminal gangs and crime to pay the inflated prices created with drug prohibition, one has to maintain a rather strong prior belief that the number of addicts will massively shoot up to maintain a belief that harm is worse without prohibition.

I find it impossible to take seriously any politician claiming to advocate continued prohibition to save lives. This is simply not supported by the evidence, which suggests the reverse that the drug laws cost many lives and ruin far more. In my opinion there is no credible case for drug laws.

If you are a voter I suggest it is your duty to consider this issue. Consider these arguments and investigate the evidence. I am not not a medical expert and may be wrong or misinformed, but I recommend you find out what experts say on each empirical point raised here, and judge for yourself.

I really think you have to be either uniformed or hold a fairly extreme moral view to not come to the conclusion that we should legalise and regulate addictive drugs. People are dying while many voters remain ignorant of the issue, please help change this by informing yourself and possibly others.


*People may worry about cannabis because the media has put out a number of scare stories that it causes mental health issues. I am not a medical expert and therefore one should not rely on anything I say in this regard, but it is my understanding of the situation is that there is a link, known about for quite some time, between the cannabis and psychotic symptoms severe enough to lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis, and some evidence suggesting cannabis use predates onset of these symptoms (this ruled out the self medication hypothesis). This does not demonstrate a causal link as there may be a common cause, it is difficult to be sure that the people diagnosed with schizophrenia were not instead suffering from temporary drug induced psychosis and finally even if these studies are correct the incidence level is still very small and most people suffering from schizophrenia do not pose a serious risk to others. Note: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.



**Cocaine is addictive in the sense that users exhibit signs of dependency and distress when they try to break habitual usage though they does not appear to be the same physical withdrawal issues associated with opiates. Patters of of addiction may be different and less severe for powdered cocaine than crack, however addiction is a risk which should be considered seriously. And again: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.

EDIT: Just to add although I didn't discuss the nature of the regulated framework for the legalised use of drugs, I personally favour providing registered addicts with maintenance doses of their drug through national health services from a non-commercial provider, to remove any incentive to encourage addiction. For further discussion on what a regulated post drug prohibition framework could look like please see this article by Steve Rolles in the British Medical Journal.

My Drugs rant: cliffs notes

This is the short version of my drug rant, without details or caveats. The full version can be found here.

Generally people tend to accept that adults can choose to make whatever lifestyle choices they wish so long as they do no non-consensual harm to anyone else.

With drugs however you may worry that health effects are so severe people must be protected from themselves. First educate yourself about the severity of these risks, they are rarely as large as the tabloid press claims, secondly be aware of how much more severe they are under drug Prohibition, with contaminants, unsafe practices and unpredictable strength.

You might also worry about the wider social harm. But be aware that much of this, such as criminal gangs distributing, addicts stealing or committing other forms of crime to pay inflated prices for the drugs is a direct result of the drug laws themselves, and would not exist if the drugs were legalised and regulated. In my opinion these wider harms substantially outweigh other social problems associated with drug use.

While how you weigh these factors may vary, it is clear that the damage caused per user both to themselves and to society is far greater under prohibition than a regulated system with legal purchase and use. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection from harm one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

In fact to the contrary looking at countries where addictive drug use has been decriminalised (Portugal) or medical subscriptions provided for addicts (Switzerland) the uptake of these drugs has fallen. This result is anticipated by an understanding that since addicts cannot break their addiction when it is clearly in their own interest making it illegal will not stop them either. Instead their demand fuels an illegal market with high reward for the creation of new addicts as well as the supply of existing ones. The situation is not much better for soft drugs with evidence of only a small increase in uptake if any.

It is almost impossible to take seriously any politician claiming to advocate continued prohibition to save lives. This is simply not supported by the evidence, which suggests the reverse that the drug laws cost many lives and ruin far more. In my opinion there is no credible case for drug laws.

If you are a voter I suggest you it is your duty to consider this issue. Consider these arguments and investigate the evidence. I am not not a medical expert and may be wrong or misinformed, but I recommend you find out what experts say on each empirical point raised here, and judge for yourself.

People are dying while many voters remain entirely uniformed on the issue, please help change this.

Waffle on determinism, free will and morality.

In a blog by a particle physicist where the words 'particle' and physics' are most often conspicuous by their absence, this is the most absurd post yet. Previously I've offered thoughts on the philosophy of science when discussing science and religion in relation to Stephen Hawking and earlier Richard Dawkins, and ranted about political issues like unfair immigration restrictions, thrown out fully deserved abuse to Melanie Phillips. As a scientist, migrant worker and voter I can at least offer a useful "hands on" perspective on those issues, but today I'm writing about the determinism and morality, which have no relation to any expert knowledge I have nor any bearing on my life and, as you will see, a subject I have done no research on.

Maybe one day I'll get around to particle physics again, but for now those of you who prefer to read blogs on topics where the author actually has some expertise, I hear jester has restarted blogging at Resonaances and has interesting comments on a very new idea. Today I just want to throw this out to the wolves because I like writing and learning by getting corrected can be fun.

My position on determinism and free will is very simply. I do not consider a persons "free will" to require that their actions cannot be predicted. Put beer in front of me and you can predict I'll drink it, hand me tasty food and I'll eat etc, but these are still free choices, there are plenty of options available to me which I could choose had I different desires. That my desires are a function of a deterministic world and can be predicted (in principle) from before I was born doesn't change this. I am as I was made and these are my desires. It is not the predictability which removes free will but restrictions on your ability to act differently, were your wishes and desires otherwise. If I were a slightly different person who had a distaste for alcohol I could choose not to drink. However if someone was controlling me like a robot, then irrespective of whether I wanted to drink or not I would do as controlled. Only in the latter do I lose free will.

Although one can of course choose a different definition (my point is essentially semantic), this has always seemed much better matched to my intuitive notion of free will and I've found it difficult to understand why others consider free will to require non-deterministic behaviour. I really struggle to see why anyone would worry about deterministic behavior, since it doesn't stop you from choosing to do what you want. In fact it is non-deterministic behavior I find tricky conceptually. I am now very used to the probabilistic determinism of quantum mechanics, but true non-determinism still seems like a very strange idea.

Recently I've been wondering if the difference between my view of free will and others might come from attitudes to morality. That would explain why I missed it, as I don't believe in any morality.

My perspective is very simple, maybe too simplistic. I only think in terms of empathy and never refer to any form of morality. There are things I don't like happening and want to stop, like murder, but I never consider them to be "bad" or the people responsible "evil", terms I'm not sure I even understand. If someone is killed I fell empathy for the victim and his/her family. I also feel empathy for the murderer who has probably just screwed their life up, and the murderers family too. The only reason I want the murderer caught and jailed is to prevent further murders, by protecting the public and deterring others. Perhaps this is silly and inconsistent in some way I haven't considered, if so feel free to let me know :).

Due to this attitude I rarely consider moral implications of determinism, but lets consider the consequences for morals from god. If you have a deterministic universe controlled by god, then, while all your actions may be free choices according to my definition, since god set things up such that there would be no possibility for you to behave any differently, god also appears to be responsible. So how god can then judge your actions against His moral code. Of course religion needn't assume determinism, or that god makes moral judgements and I think there are ways round this issue even if it does, though I won't continue the theological meanderings further.

I am simply wondering if this is the real issue behind the supposed conflict between determinism and free will. Do people really mean the ability to make bad moral decisions against the will of god? Otherwise I really can't fathom why any would have conceptual difficulties with living in a deterministic universe.

If you managed to make it through this tortuously ill informed post and want to enlighten me or point me in the direction of actual philosophical literature which explodes or explores the ideas here, please do.

Hawking, Mlodinow, the media and god.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have written a new book called The Grand Design. The publication of extracts from the book in The Times has unleashed a media storm with headlines like Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe and Why God Did Not Create the Universe.

First lets be clear that they are not saying God is ruled out. While most (but not all) articles managed to avoid claiming that, the lack of clarifying details , sloppy phrases used and tedious discussions about what this might mean for religions allowed exactly such a confusion to spread.

Phrases like "God did not create the universe" do appear in many newspapers, implying that any universe creating God is ruled out by science. This is not what Hawking (or Mlodinow) actually said. In phrasing it this way the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Daily mail, CNN, and many more are misrepresenting what Hawkings and spreading misinformation. Richard Dawkins, a famous science communicator, also seemed to have an exaggerated view bof the statements religious significance in a debate. Some newspapers, like The Telegraph and The Huffington Post, report "there is no need for a creator" much closer to what Hawking appears to have actually said.

The other big confusion spread by the press is that this is a reversal of Hawking's previous position. For example the BBC state

In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe. "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God," he said.

apparently missing that Hawkings was using god in a metaphorical sense, and was not suggesting that a physical creator god made up part of his understanding of the universe.

The actual statement which does appear to originate from Hawkins and Mlodinow is:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

To me the god reference seems merely an attempt to express the grand scope of their claim. Hawking seems to think there is a now a theoretical framework which provides a satisfactory natural description of the universe coming into existence. Seeking natural models to describe physical reality is what theoretical physicists (religious, agnostic and atheist) do and from a science perspective this is a very interesting statement, and while I suspect I may not be as convinced as Hawking I nonetheless look forward to reading his view. But what about all the religious ruminations discussed in newspapers?

The first point to make, almost entirely absent in the newspaper coverage, is that Hawkins argument involves many elements not tested experimentally. Believers can still think that god created the universe without conflicting any observational evidence. They simply can't state there is no framework in science which could explain the universe existing to motivate their belief. Therefore there is still no inconsistency between science and a creator god.

Secondly God didn't really have a role in science prior to Hawking's statement, because to invoke god as a solution to existence involves infinite regression and of course makes no testable predictions. You may as well just postulate the universe exists as postulate god exists then created it. The absence of satisfactory physical model of how the universe came into existence motivates scientist to investigate the question, it does not motivate god. This does not mean one cannot believe in a creator god, but the motivation should not be the lack of a fully fleshed out competing theory.

So on the religion side nothing has really changed. But this has not stopped many angry responses from religious people. And for many others correcting these misunderstandings has been a huge distraction; Jon Butterworth paused while writing a paper to clarify the situation for channel 4 news.

So who is to blame? The press have certainly been irresponsible, both in misrepresenting Hawking and treating his words in a popular science book as prouncements of "What The Science Says", without ever wondering what scientific papers are behind the comments. So far it sounds like the media are entirely responsible, but it is difficult to be sure to what extent this was fed by a publicist promoting the book or even by the authors themselves. There is also the question as to what extent they explained that much of the physics used to construict this argument, like M-Theory is not confirmed experimentally. And while their words have be taken out of context perhaps Hawking and Mlodinow should have realised this might occur when they agreed to have the extracts published in The Times. I'll leave those questions to people who are more media wise than I am though.

Finally some brief, wild speculation on the physics. Since i don't actually know what the Hawking has really talked about in the book I am simply going to discuss some of the ideas which try to explain our universe and why I am skeptical that we really have a good explanation for everything. Sean Carrol made a nice video post trying to explain the physics which may have inspired Hawking's statement. My comments here are really tangential to this, based more on the idea of a theory of everything. Please read this with the 'rant' title of my blog in mind :) and remember I am talking a little outside my area of expertise now.

String theory is probably the best candidate for describing gravity at small scales, thus allowing a theory of everything. There is however an alternative of loop quantum gravity and also the possibility that we haven't invented the right model yet. M-theory is a unification of the 5 different types of superstring theories (the 'super' stands for supersymmetry, which is needed to describe matter as well as forces but don't worry too much about this) and a nice candidate for a theory of everything.

String theory now sadly seems to make few real predictions because there are 10^500 vacua with all kinds of different physics. Many string specialists talk about exploring the string landscape, and some think this is a positive development, but I find the lack of predictivity disappointing. Of course I am not a string expert and they might say I am missing the point.

Quite a long time ago Andre Linde proposed chaotic inflation where you have lots of "bubble universes" forming a multiverse. The model was not arbitrarily invented and was motivated by problems with the standard big bang theory. Unfortunately once again there are difficulties in testing many aspects of this model since the other universes are not observable. This model and the string landscape do fit together well and give a rather nice picture of how our universe might have appeared but the difficulty of testing these ideas remains.

Now if you hypothesise lots of possible physics in different universes then you can always end up with the features we need for life etc, even if the parameters look really fine tuned. Therefore some claim this is a "natural explanation" for all observable features of our universe.

However they are essentially invoking the anthropic principle (we are here and therefore our universe must have the parameters we require or we wouldn't be around to observe it). To me this is not an explanation, since it relies on an untestable hypothesis, much like god, to evade the question. This does not make the model wrong or even a bad idea, but I do not consider it a satisfactory explanation our universe without some experimental confirmation of the different universes, which seems to be a fundamental stumbling block.

Beauty, beliefs and GUTs

When I discuss a previous blog on the controversial topic of religion and science, the issue of belief without evidence sometimes comes up. Some people take the viewpoint that you should not believe in anything without evidence (I might caricature this as militant agnosticism :P), but this strikes me as a bit over constraining and does not really match how scientists actually behave.

Although we must try and objectively assess the evidence and make clear scientific statements about it, this does not mean we have to be opinion less about everything else. Indeed my experience of scientists is they are more likely to be opinionated (I am for sure ;) ) than opinion less. But even with regard to the science, when we are doing research at the frontiers of knowledge we do not yet have scientific evidence to know what will be the right approach, how nature will have solved the problem we are interested in. What motivates us in our work can be opinion based on our expectations about nature, and this is why different people look at different possibilities to solve the same problem.

In particle physics, for example, I have a (fairly dilute) belief in both Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) and Supersymmetry (SUSY). Others have a stronger belief, while some seem sure they are not realised in nature. Nonetheless everyone in the field knows that ultimately these are scientific theories which need to be tested. But where does our prior belief or theoretical prejudice spring from?

I have already talked briefly about motivations for supersymmetry so I will focus on GUTs here. As I previously discussed the Standard Model of particle physics describes three fundamental forces (strong, electromagnetic and weak) through gauge symmetries. The different forces have different 'strengths' by which the fundamental particles interact, and the fundamental particles are sensitive to different forces. Quarks, the particles which form hadrons like the proton and neutron, are sensitive the all three forces, while leptons, like the electron, to only the electromagnetic and weak forces. The fact that the strong force is much, well... stronger than other two explains why quarks are confined into hadrons and cannot be observed as free states.

So we have three (not counting gravity which is so weak we don't notice it) different forces with different strengths and fundamental particles which interact with different forces. This description matches the data incredibly well giving some of the most precisely tested predictions in all of science. But why do we have these different forces? Perhaps nature is simply like this, some scientists may well believe that is all there is to it. But for me this seems to leave nature looking rather arbitrary and messy.

Grand Unified Theories are a possible explanation for where these different forces come from. In these GUTs the different symmetries are embedded into a larger symmetry group which unifies all forces into a single unified one. All fields describing matter particles then transform together under this larger symmetry and interact via this single force. The different forces can then arise as a consequence of the breaking of this GUT symmetry. Additionally the larger symmetry of this gauge group means it has fixed charges, allowing for the possibility that the different values of electric charge we observe at low energies (unexplained in the SM) are fixed by the breaking of this GUT.

The simple elegance and beauty of Grand Unified Theories fits well into my expectations about nature. There is no proof that nature can be described in increasingly simple ways (the idea that it can is often called reductionism) but the aesthetic beauty of it appeals to me. As does my hope that I can explain or understand the forces and the electric charges we observe in nature.

This hope may seem in stark contradiction with the observation of three separate forces with different interaction strengths. However the vacuum is not empty but filled with 'virtual' particle and anti-particle pairs which are being created and annihilated and when particles interact across the vacuum such virtual particles are affected. For the case Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) the positively charged particles in the vacuum are drawn closer towards a negative charge and vice versa, and this effectively screens the interaction strength from the charges between two particles separated across the vacuum. The further apart the particles are the weaker the interaction strength. Since how close together particles can get in collisions depends on how energetic they are, interaction strengths depend on the energy at which the interactions take place.

For more complicated symmetries describing the weak and strong force there is a similar effect, but one also gets anti-screening from the gauge bosons so that interactions interactions can either increase or decrease with distance depending on the particle content of the model. This is the basis for having quarks which are confined into colorless hadrons at low energies while behaving like free particles at high energies, known as asymptotic freedom, for which the 2004 nobel prize for physics was awarded.

This also allows for the possibility that the separate three forces we observe at low energies have a common interaction strength at higher energies. This possibility is precisely realised in models with Supersymmetry at the TeV energy scale (the scale we are probing at the LHC), as is shown by the red lines in the figure to the left.

To motivate Supersymmetry I previously described the hierarchy problem and pointed out that this motivates new physics at the TeV scale based on our lack of understanding as to how two unrelated masses could be tuned to be incredibly close, but not equal. While this is not a fundamental proof of new low energy physics it is at least a physical question which we want to understand and the Supersymmetric solution is very elegant and therefore in my mind compelling.

I am personally very attracted to this picture of a simple Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory at high energies which as we move down to lower energies has some of it's elegant symmetry spontaneously broken, leaving us with the complicated set of massive particles with different interactions which we have already observed. I find this idea beautiful, fascinating and compelling.

Others do not find it so convincing, but that is fine. This does not make either them nor me poor scientists who misunderstand the evidence, we simply have different theoretical prejudices based on our expectations of nature. Ultimately questions like this will be resolved by data and this is what we excitedly await from the LHC.