#63: The Order of Time

There’s nothing like theoretical physics for making you feel that words are floating, untethered to any normal experience. Or to put it another way, that a self-supporting explanation for phenomena is being built without reference to anything verifiable on an everyday level.

This is at times how I felt on a first head-spinning reading of Rovelli’s The Order of Time, in which he tries to explain to ‘my dear, cultivated reader’, as he puts it, what time is in terms of physics. Why does time move from the past to the future? Does the present exist? Is time an objective ‘container’ for events which exists independently of them, or is it measurement of change, so that if nothing happens, time stops?

Well, here is my stab at a summary of the book’s answers to these questions:

Why does time move from the past to the future?

This is a tough question. Rovelli explains physicist Ludwig Boltzmann’s idea that the direction of time is due to our ‘blurred’ vision of microscopic events. If humans could ‘take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world’, the difference between past and future vanishes. What gives rise to our understanding of time passing is that the world is moving from a state of low to high entropy, meaning that disorder is increasing. One example of this is the sun, a source of low entropy when it emits photons, after which entropy increases when the earth emits 10 cold photons is in exchange for every one from the sun. This increasing disorder causes events to happen, and means traces of the past are found in the present. No? Me neither, well… maybe a little. This footnote from the book helps:

    The point is not that what happens to a cold teaspoon in a cup of hot tea depends on whether I have a blurred vision of it or not.… It just happens, regardless. The point is that the description in terms of heat, temperature and the passage of heat from tea to spoon is a blurred vision of what happens, and that it is only in this blurred vision that a startling difference between past and future appears.

Entropy itself is a result of our blurred vision, as is the ‘particularity’ of our universe which means that it is, extremely unusually, moving from a state of low to high entropy.

Does the present exist?

Rovelli thinks an ‘objective global present’ does not exist, since the most we can speak of, post-Einstein, is ‘a present relative to a moving observer’; time has been shown to be relative to qualities such as speed and proximity to an object. However, he acknowledges voices arguing for ‘a privileged time and a real present’.

Aristotle and Newton, p. 59

Is time an objective ‘container’ for events which exists without them, or is it measurement of change, so that if nothing happens, time stops?

Rovelli explains how the first view was that of Newton, the second of Aristotle. He brings in Einstein to create a synthesis of them: space-time is one field among many. (‘Fields’ are substances which ‘constitute the weave of the physical reality of the world’). Space-time is a field which exists independently of matter, but ‘stretches and jostles’ with other fields.

The 'curved' space-time field, p. 69

Connecting physics with other worldviews

Bravely, the book moves outside physics, into biology, philosophy and religion. Rovelli believes physics allows us to study time free of ‘the fog of emotion’, but he also celebrates our emotional need for time, its necessity for making us who we are through memory. Perception of time is also crucial for survival, since we have evolved neural structures that allow us to predict the future based on our understanding of the past. He also speculates that it is anxiety about time that caused Plato to imagine timeless, abstract ideas and philosophical constructs. A meditation on death comes at the end of the book. 

These departures from physics into different areas seem somewhat disconnected from the physics-based approach of the rest of the book, and less well-developed. For example, Rovelli thinks our sense of our identity comes from interaction with others, not introspection. But have not psychologists been studying this for decades? Perhaps these attempted connections with more human concerns exist to add interest to what could otherwise be a very dry book, or to clarify that physics coexists and is separate from other levels of understanding — psychological, biological, philosophical. How physics may, or may not, connect with these areas is something that, for me, awaits another book.

The Order of Time is published by Penguin.

#62: Otherlands: A World in the Making

 

Thomas Halliday’s book is a biography of the Earth, told backwards. He starts 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of the decisive thawing of the mammoth steppe, or grassland, in Beringia, now northern Alaska and the Arctic. The steppe rings the Pleistocene world and is home to creatures such as horses, bison and the now-extinct cave lion.

As the world warms over thousands of years, seas rise and the land fragments into islands, so these animals can no longer migrate widely. The decisive breaking up of the area will occur about 11,000 years before the present. Native species such as mammoth ‘will not survive for long, battered by the warming world and… versatile new predators.’ Who are these new predators able to move north because of the rising temperatures? Humans, of course. In our day only the caribou, brown bear and muskox survive of the species the steppe once hosted (the muskox as a reintroduction).

Time and space travel

The book then travels the Earth, moving backwards in time to land at different times and places. So there are abundant giant penguins 41 million years ago, some taller than modern humans; a gorgon 253 million years ago with a painful mouth tumour and a leg which has never been the same since she fractured it hunting Bunostegos (a creature looking like a stumpy, tall crocodile); and rock-eating bacteria in the Devonian, 407 million years ago, which make the surface of the water in which they live, intolerably hot to every other lifeform, shimmer with bubbles. The book ends in the pre-Cambrian 550 million years ago, with no life on land, a 22-hour day before friction slows the Earth’s rotation, and a closer moon shining 15% brighter.

The climate and geological processes are given as much space as plants and animals. Heading each chapter are helpful maps showing how landmasses and seas have changed, as well as illustrations of animals now unfamiliar to us. Halliday is at pains to explain scientific terms, for example on the difference between a ‘fundamental niche’ (the possible survivable conditions for a species) and its ‘realised niche’ (the way its niche is actually limited by interactions with other organisms).

In thrall to human language

In the pre-Cambrian world are the earliest creatures we can call animals. One of these is ‘a centimetre-scale flying saucer’ with eight arms, ‘spiralling clockwise from the tip of the cone to its base… floating hypnotically’. This is Eoandromeda, ‘so called because when flattened in fossilisation, its eight arms resemble the spiral galaxy Andromeda’.

Eoandromeda’s name shows how in thrall we are to our language and ways of seeing, and also to the limited range of evidence we have. So we discover this creature flattened as a fossil and name it after a galaxy at the limits of our world (which we have also previously named), a charming link between the earthly and extinct with the unearthly and infinite. So this creature has achieved a kind of immortality, in human terms.

Drama… with no humans? How?

How does Halliday add drama and interest to processes that happen over huge timescales, mostly with no humans involved?

Firstly, he picks varied moments — differently configured landmasses and oceans, with different climates and ecosystems, for example before or after mass extinctions. Secondly he focuses on movement. Movement of wind, waves and water and therefore of land; communities of animals migrating; individual creatures on the move. Thirdly, he mixes together disparate information — so as well as watching a short-faced bear rummaging in a mammoth carcass, we learn about Korean, Russian and European bear mythologies.

Lastly, he embraces human-centred ways of description. Literary quotations head each chapter (the last has Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’, commemorating the death of a young soldier in the Boer War — ‘Yet portion of that unknown plain/Will Hodge forever be’). He chooses anthropomorphic language such as ‘cyanobacteria discovered the magic of photosynthesis’, which would not get past an academic editor.

He is also happy to translate from the academic to the literary; so the academic term ‘index fossils’ (fossils which are so abundant they can be used to date the rocks they are in) becomes ‘fossil timepieces’ later in the same paragraph. The book ends with a plea to work together to stop climate change. It tells us the world will never stop being in the making, or making.

 Otherlands: A World in the Making is published by Penguin.

#61: Academic supervision

An academic supervisor is probably the person who reads your writing more closely than anyone else, more closely than an editor, than friends and acquaintances, or even eventual readers of the finished product.

What does a supervisor do?

Good supervision is demanding. ‘Typically, the supervisor acts as a guide, mentor, source of information and facilitator to the student,’ says University College London’s advice to doctoral supervisors. Their list of things supervisors can help with is long and includes formulating the research question, evaluating the research results, making sure the work is good enough and presenting work. 

The guidance acknowledges that there are different ways of supervising: ‘Supervisory styles are often conceptualized on a spectrum from laissez-faire to more contractual or from managerial to supportive,’ it says. Hmmm… I would be a bit suspicious of that ‘laissez-faire’ — in my view good supervision is essential to the success or failure of a Masters or PhD, and a supervisor needs to take an active part in its conception and development.

PhD student Dirk Frans, looking back on successful completion, comments: ‘there must be a “click” between student and supervisor. I spent 10 years looking for a supervisor who would suit me. Not only did we “click” but he is a world expert, committed to the poor and still doing grassroots work. Only then did I apply for a place.’ Not everyone will spend 10 years looking for a supervisor, but I agree that “click” is important.

My experience of supervision 

I’ve just submitted a 35,000-word dissertation for my Masters by Research (MRes) in English Literature at Liverpool University. Rather than being taught through set modules, a Masters by Research consists mainly of a long dissertation, the research topic decided by the student. It is a little like one third of a PhD, although it is given a grade at the end rather than passed, failed or changes required (as happens with a PhD).

The supervision I had was excellent and I wanted to share three of the reasons here.

1. The supervisor read and engaged with my work seriously and in detail.

The high quality of the feedback comments, which were both encouraging and demanding, meant that I returned to them at later stages of research as well, beyond the particular piece of writing they referred to. These comments referred to different areas: content, organisation, expression, method, further reading, general progress and formatting. 

For example, feedback on content was: ‘I think it would be good to register the instantaneousness of the transformation which is underlined by seeing it, rather than hearing it.’ (Talking about transformation of the meaning of a word by repeating it within a line of a sonnet). A comment on expression was: ‘this opening was very difficult to make sense of and might require amendment’. A comment on method was: ‘this is good and interesting but do due diligence on analysis of the final lines first, before moving to this conceptual level’. (Meaning I had not devoted enough time to analysing the poem — I found the idea of ‘due diligence’ helpful as I continued).

2. The supervisor drew out and helped me refine and develop my own best ideas

She helped me develop my own strengths rather than expecting, either implicitly or explicitly, a particular understanding or even a set of ideas which I needed to reach, which would be more difficult and discouraging.

The above two points chime in with a reflection by Dan Long, who studied for his PhD while a secondary school teacher. According to his 'PhD diary', his supervisor Linda’s ‘enthusiasm as a reader’ was crucial. He said: 

‘As a teacher I was always sensitive to the knack of encouraging people through the right balance of praise and criticism. Linda has this knack but the most important thing about her approach to supervision is the way in which she will allow you to develop your own ideas without butting in or annexing them to her own take on a subject. With the comments on my writing she has pointed me in the right direction on certain writers or approaches without being prescriptive or didactic. Thus I find myself going back to her comments for pointers and find that I’ve taken the path suggested without really having realised it. This process is difficult to articulate and much of it hinges on the supervisor being a good or pleasant personality – it’s a mixture of being positive, supportive, questioning, sceptical, appreciative, empathic, judicious, kind etc.. Often I can see that some of my ideas might be a bit inane and Linda has the knack of hoeing these ideas over in a supervision and putting oxygen and nutriment in them.

3. The supervisor recommended not only sources to read, but how to approach my reading.

For example, she gave me guidance about how much attention it might be necessary, or not necessary, to pay to different things. She also helped me work in different ways sometimes — for example, there was a stage when I definitely needed to take a step back, let things disentangle and see which ideas ‘floated to the top’.

The supervision process meant that I’ve been able to explore the questions I had when I started the project (although it’s changed quite a bit since then). So to a large extent I’ve been able to build on the preparation I did before the course started, rather than having to put it to one side. It also means I’ve been able to progress with ideas I’m genuinely interested in. I won’t be asking for my money back.

A very useful bank of PhD students’ reflections on the supervision process can be found here (scroll down to ‘students being supervised’), with a more extensive bank here. These focus on the student-supervisor relationship, institutional attitudes and processes, and the many problems that can occur.

#60: Pet sitting

Mercer in Hythe, South Kent

Over the past five years I’ve been welcomed into the houses of people I’ve never met and trusted with some of the things dearest to them — their pets. I’ve also welcomed strangers to my flat to look after my cat mate Indi.

This is pet sitting — to find sits and sitters I use the website Trusted Housesitters, but others are Mindahome UK and MindMyHouse (there’s also HousesSitSearch, which aggregates different sites). Some sitters travel solo or in couples, some with families or even with their own pets. No money changes hands, but the sitter gets accommodation and the owner a pet-loving live-in carer, so there are no kennel or cattery fees and the pet stays in their home environment. Truly a win-win, I think.

Tiny Man in Andalucia — 'why, what else are plant pots for?'

Why petsit?

For me, one of the benefits of sitting is an opportunity to discover places I never would normally. I’m currently in Market Rasen, a pleasant Lincolnshire town, but hardly on the beaten tourist track. But if I hadn’t come here, I would never have visited the wonderful Lincoln Museum or seen the only statue I know incorporating an algebraic calculation (the statue is to George Boole, whose development of algebraic logic laid the foundations for modern computer design, and who grew up and taught in Lincoln. Photo at the end).

Cats are lovely companions and need less attention than dogs, but they can be characters — a rather hyper pair near Bath had to be kept apart, and one of them was not above running into the kitchen and nipping my ankle to remind me to feed her. But such forward behaviour is unusual.

Kipper, an aged Oxfordshire gent

Memorable pet sitting experiences 

Some other memorable moments and experiences I’ve had pet sitting are:

•           walking between the beautiful Oxfordshire villages of Adderbury and Deddington as abundant Red Admiral butterflies flew up around my feet

•           making firm friends with the first people I sat for in 2018, in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge

•           seeing a deer raise its head from the grass in the twilight on Farnham Park in Surrey (I never expected deer so close to the town)

•           sitting in a top floor flat above the bustling streets of Brixton reading Keeping their marbles: How the treasures of the past ended up in museums… and why they should stay there by Tiffany Jenkins — the most detailed case in favour of retaining ‘contested’ objects in museums I’ve read (raiding new bookshelves — with permission of course — is one of the pleasures of sitting)

Arnold in Sheffield changes the settings on my laptop

Are sitters or sits in more demand?

Supply and demand? Sits seem to be taken very fast in London, as do longer-term sits anywhere. Those in remoter places may take more time, but my impression from the Trusted Housesitters site is that sits and sitters are fairly evenly balanced. And like me, many people have both sitters in their home and sit for others. So if you are either looking for care for your furry one(s), or a chance to travel with free accommodation and four-legged companionship, it is well worth considering.

Tony the little lion in Suffolk

statue of George Boole with two students…

… and the equation

#59: Teapot

 

Teapots in life

Time to say goodbye to a beloved teapot, due to a broken lid and chipped spout. This morning saw me in a charity shop examining another, but I reluctantly decided the lack of draining holes to the spout meant it was impractical. Plus it didn’t have that friendly chubby shape.

I wonder what is so appealing about teapots? Two things I think – first, they are a sign of company – ‘tea for two’, even if you are making tea for one (a teapot for one which holds exactly two cups is ideal, to my mind). Secondly, using a teapot is more of an event, a longer break, than bunging a teabag into a cup.

Tea for one

Teapots in literature

What about teapots in literature? There’s Intelligence Service landlady Millie McCaig’s ‘ministrations with the teapot’ in le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the climactic night when the mole is unmasked. Then there is Fanny visiting Lady Polly in Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. Fanny discovers Polly ‘amid the usual five o’clock paraphernalia of silver kettle on flame, silver teapot, Crown Derby cups and plates and enough sugary food to stock a pastrycook’s shop’.

But my favourite is Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy losing patience with the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesiser which always produces ‘a plastic cup filled with a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea’. Arthur sits and tells the machine how to make a proper cup:

He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished.

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘that is what I want.’

‘You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?’

‘Er, yes. With milk.’

‘Squirted out of the cow?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose…’

‘I’m going to need some help with this one,’ said the machine tersely. All the cheerful burbling had dropped out of its voice and it now meant business.

The machine joins forces with the ship’s computer to try to solve this problem, with potentially disastrous results (although the tea they produce is wonderful).

Back to Earth. I would nominate the White Horse Inn in Westleton, Suffolk, for ‘the most generous teapot award’ for this year – tea for one turned out to have about 6 cups. There are much worse ways to spend a sunny afternoon then sipping it away in an East Anglian pub garden. Now, time for another cup.

Tea at the White Horse Inn, Westleton

#58: Prejudice warning

Love in a Cold Climate, published by Penguin Random House

I was dismayed to open a newly bought copy of one of my favourite novels, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, to find this on an introductory page:

In this book are some expressions and depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written. These prejudices were wrong then and are wrong today. We are printing the novel as it was originally published because to make changes would be the same as pretending these prejudices never existed.

 

My objections

These are my objections to this warning of prejudice:

1. It is preachy, lecturing the reader on how they should read and think.

2. It denigrates British society as a whole, by saying these prejudices were common.

3. It implies a central purpose of publishing is to moralise — it says the prejudices are only allowed to remain in order to show us they existed. It does not consider that they were part of a complex culture and way of thinking which forms the society portrayed in the book which, just like ours, was not uniformly bad or good.

4. It is inimical to the spirit of literature. Such ideologically-based statements tend to kill literature since their broadbrush, political, often fundamentalist approach does not sit well with individual experiences, the food of the novel. (I have explored this more deeply in another post on Jane Eyre.)

5. It is especially inimical to Nancy Mitford’s funny, wry, gently ironic tone.

What are we being warned of?

So what are the editors warning us about? The story of Boy Dougdale, the ‘lecherous lecturer’, molesting his young relatives and fascinating them with it? ‘And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing. Do admit, Fanny,’ says Jassy Radlett after one visit. Boy’s behaviour makes his beautiful niece Polly Hampton fall in love with him, and eventually they marry. Friend of the family Davey reports back on their wedded state when he returns from Sicily, where the couple have gone to live: ‘Well, all I can say is I know it is wrong, not right, to arouse the sexual instincts of little girls so that they fall madly in love with you, but the fact is, poor old Boy is taking a fearful punishment. You see, he has literally nothing to do from morning to night, except water his geraniums, and you know how bad it is for them to have too much water; of course, they are all leaf as a result.’ The last sentence is Davey’s wonderfully true-to-life gay humour and Mitford’s delicious comedy. Not exactly a prejudice, but a different take on sexual behaviour with minors.

Or perhaps we are being warned about this early description of the Hampton family’s aristocratic ancestry: ‘… in 1770, the Lord Hampton of the day brought back, from a visit to Versailles, a French bride, a Mademoiselle de Montdore. Their son had brown eyes, dark skin and presumably, for it is powdered in all the pictures of him, black hair. This practice did not persist in the family; he married a golden-haired heiress from Derbyshire and the Hamptons reverted to their blue and gold looks, for which they are famous to this day.’ Oh dear — implied negativity about a dark complexion. Well, since the book informs us this dark-featured man had ‘a great and life-long friendship with the Regent’ perhaps we should not take it as the plain evidence of British prejudice which the editors encourage us to.

Escaping the ideological filter

How boring it is to read literature in spot-the-prejudice mode. Mitford’s wry comedy is, like Boy’s geraniums, a sensitive growth, one which is spoiled by top-down moralising directives. But ideologies have overwhelming voices. Despite my determination to the contrary, to my dismay when I started to read the book alarm bells started ringing at examples of wrong thinking, to the detriment of the story. But I recovered in time to enjoy the story of this extended family: Polly and her exuberant young relatives Jassy and Victoria; Cedric the heir from the colonies (Canada) who, as Polly is cut off from our inheritance by her marriage, gains everything material that she might have had. Does he feel guilty about this? Not a bit. ‘No cruel looks at One,’ he says, referring to himself. ‘Fair’s fair, you know’. He changes the appearance, and the life, of Polly’s mother by giving her the full-time occupation of becoming beautiful with ‘creaming and splashing and putting on a mask and taking it off again and having her nails done and her feet and then all the exercises, as well as having her teeth completely rearranged and the hair zipped off her arms and legs’. And lastly, there is the counterfoil, Fanny the plain narrator with her unruly heather-like hair and unworldly academic husband.

So what motivates such prejudice warnings?

I assume such warnings are inserted because the publishers do not want to be seen as endorsing everything in the work they publish. But surely we don’t believe they do endorse everything — freedom of imagination, and the often conflicting views this produces, is one of the things which keeps literature alive, and publishers can’t agree with everything. And in that case we should have warnings on the Bible, Silence of the Lambs, On the Road, The Naked Lunch… and countless others. There is certainly a place for warning people about upsetting content, but Love in a Cold Climate is no candidate for that. Publishers, please trust the reader a little more to make their own judgements, and to realise that societies of past times had different values to ours.