Masturbation: The Typing Requirement

by Mr. Fish

When it comes to the creative arts, the only profession that seems capable of purging its weaklings is sports. Why is this? Why is there always an audience for excruciatingly mediocre artists in this country, but not for clumsy, uncoordinated ballplayers? If Ryan Howard, for instance, suddenly started trying to catch line drives with his cap or if he continuously forgot to bring a bat with him to home plate, he’d disappear from public view. And, yet, there’s Mary Higgins Clark at a tiny signing table at the head of a bug-eyed chow line made up of people starved for completely unwholesome breath mints shaped like little skulls. And there’s Stephen King in an Alfa Romeo, speeding along the Gulf of Mexico and, miraculously, not sitting alone and unshaven in a dilapidated trailer in Fort Wayne, Ind., spreading marshmallow fluff on a Pop Tart and wishing that he knowed how to work a hammer or sumthin’.

Again, why is this? I have a theory.

There are two kinds of activism. There’s the organized kind and the individual kind. The organized kind is typified by all the marching and leafleting and fundraising that come out of a group of people who wish to cure a perceived social ill that has either atrophied into the norm or, if unopposed, is threatening to atrophy into the norm. These are people who want to stop the natural gas industry from fracking up the environment, for instance, or people who think that creationism should be taught in public schools in place of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The individual kind is simply the act of not adhering mindlessly to either the demands or expectations of the dominant culture or what is verging on becoming uncontroversial public opinion. It may manifest itself merely in having a disagreement and then a conversation or a debate with somebody else, usually in an attempt to change his or her mind; specifically, it is not shutting up when faced with controversy in the name of politeness, cowardice or sheer stupidity.

Both kinds have benefits that, when unified, can affect the most positive change. Or, conversely, together they can have the most deleterious effects and inspire the most treacherous results. And that’s the point: Typically, when one decides to save the world, he or she is deciding to save only the parts of the world that he or she finds most flattering to his or her ego and sense of right, wrong and beauty. After all, what good is a savior’s concept of moral law without the implied lawlessness of contrarians who embody a contrary point of view?

When Buddha said, “There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it,” he was speaking more as a keen observer of human nature than as a moralist who sits in judgment of some intrinsic good or evil. He recognized how, by observing the symmetric physics that determine the symbiotic truisms that constitute the material balance of the universe, a human being is prone to confusing his or her interpretation of reality with reality itself, thereby investing his or her own subjective understanding of things with the irrefutable concreteness of objective matter.

Such a person will imagine the light of his own moral judgment to be precisely what determines the darkness intrinsic to all other competing moralistic visions.

Saviors, thusly, can never be trusted to be anything but mere amplifications of the dimmest wits among us, who are those who imagine that their concept of virtue is the version best suited for everyone. In fact, I always thought that the unfortunate deification of Jesus Christ and the subsequent scriptural moralizing that his biographers had him engage in for the sake of inflating their own importance were grotesquely unethical. Wasn’t the notion that we should all help the sick and poor and love our neighbors radical and mind-blowing enough? Did we really need to have a savior who could also communicate with fish like Aquaman and get a dead guy to wipe the pus out of his eyes and start turning cartwheels around the room, yipping and yahooing like a goddamn hyena? I mean, why create a fictional Jesus who is immortal, knows he’s immortal, yet still goes around pretending that his being crucified is a merit badge signifying some kind of sacrifice, as if trading in mortality for immortality wasn’t the tactical equivalent of abandoning a sinking ship or escaping a burning building. Who among us wouldn’t jump at the chance to exchange the slow, meaty disintegration of our own imperfect biology for, among other things, telepathy, the power to turn invisible, the ability to travel through time, to blow shit up with our mind, to be able to fly, to get to hang out with every celebrity who will ever live, all the while maintaining a perfect swimmer’s physique and a blood/alcohol level that hovers somewhere around the typical monster truck rallier’s 20 minutes prior to the fucking awesome arrival of Bigfoot? The only thing I felt that we should pity Jesus for was his fashion sense, which has never advanced much beyond what Roald Dahl’s Uncle Joe wore for decades prior to Charlie yanking the golden ticket from his Wonka Bar. Like Charlie, I think it might be high time that we demand that Jesus put some goddamn underpants on and humble himself by walking among the living.

Now, before I pretend that I was never ever guilty of thinking that I, myself, might make a halfway decent savior as a writer—having fooled myself into believing that I had been saved by the writings of S.J. Perelman, Albert Camus, Chuck Jones, Friedrich Nietzsche and Woody Allen—let me share with you the form letter that I used to send out to the publishers and editors of magazines and newspapers and publishing houses who rejected my work with their own form letters back when I first started out as an author:

Dear Publisher/Editor:


Thank you very much for your recent rejection note.

I would very much like to respond personally to every rejection I receive, but the volume of rejection is prohibitive. This is not an indication of the time and consideration devoted to your rejection note, but merely my desire to respond as quickly as possible. Please understand that this does not reflect on your profession but rather on my needs at present.

Fuck you and your shortsightedness. You wouldn’t know a genius if one came up and bit you on the ass, even though the simple desire to bite you anywhere should be evidence enough.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to continue rejecting exceptionally good submissions as eventually someone will kill you.


Sincerely,


The Writer

 
This was back in the ’90s, when mail was still made out of paper and submitting one’s work to an editor involved much more legwork and menial labor than it does now. (Try explaining to anybody born after 1985 the concept of licking a stamp and he’ll look at you as if you just crapped your pants and started reminiscing about how cheap sodie pop and illegal abortions used to be.) In fact, the chore of writing, itself, was much more laborious in the past and required a greater commitment to all the many stages involved in the job of being an author.
 
Think about it. Before there were word processors and email and Wikipedia, there were dictionaries (I’ll wait while you take a minute to Google the word: dic·tion·ar·ies), which one had to leaf through in order to confirm word definitions and proper spelling and usage, and there were libraries which one typically had to leave the house in order to find, and there were books which had to be opened and closely examined for the purpose of corroborating facts and theories and assumptions, and there was the collecting and the collating of research data and the handwriting of notes into notebooks, then there was the returning home and the pounding on the keys of a typewriter, which included the whiting out of mistakes with a tiny paintbrush and the blowing on the paint to make it dry, and then there was the leaving again and the xeroxing of all the pages of original type and the assemblage of copies for both storage and distribution, then there was the buying of the envelopes and the paying for the double postage, which included the self-addressed stamped envelope wherein the form rejection letter would be contained, and then, as I indicated earlier, there was the licking of the stamps and the mailing—followed, of course, by the waiting for weeks, sometimes months, for a response. It was easy then to make the sloppy deduction that all the hard work inherent in the preparation of a submission translated directly to the significance of the product.

Of course it only makes sense, given the preposterous verbosity of the human animal, that most published writing is exactly as useless and uninteresting as all the unpublished writing that comes out of nonwriters as longwinded uninterrupted speech, the only difference being that, by virtue of the printed page, a writer is less likely to shut up even when the reader puts his or her hands over his or her ears. And while such immunity to outside interference may sometimes inspire the kind of fearless intelligence necessary for the writing of such books as “Native Son” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” most of the time it simply inspires the kind of fearless stupidity that imbeciles use to publish “Going Rogue: An American Life” and “The Bell Curve” and to make like-minded publications the kind of loud and wacky bullshit that enjoy the same kind of mass circulation as herpes, hula hoops and all the different mispronunciations of Sartre and Goethe.

Only when I first started reading what other people had written did I begin to realize that possessing the ability to write shouldn’t automatically demand that a person become a writer, just like being able to swallow a live mousetrap shouldn’t automatically demand that a person become an idiot. More often than not, being able to write about something has very little to do with having something worthwhile to say about it. My best friend all through college, for example, spent the first 15 years of his life learning how to draw with an attention to detail that made his pencil drawings appear as precise and realistic as photographs, only to piss away the 10 years after he graduated copying publicity stills out of music magazines of his favorite rock bands and implanting himself in the lineup. Not only should a person like that not be encouraged to believe that his art is anything more spectacular than a beautifully illustrated, albeit terrifically longwinded, suicide note that would guarantee no confusion among friends and family as to why, upon entering middle age, he decided to kill himself, but a person like that should probably have his air guitar confiscated and replaced with the Help Wanted section of the newspaper, which it was, thankfully. Now he’s a top-notch alcoholic with a mortgage and a shitty office job and absolutely nothing to live for. Ironically, minus the office job, he’s a more legitimate artist nowadays, being more like Jackson Pollack than he would’ve been had he continued doing what he was doing.

One thing to recognize about writing, too, is that the job of being a writer is populated by those who began as fans of the profession. In other words, wanting to be a writer is all that it takes for somebody to become a writer, especially when no one ever becomes a writer because he or she has to become one the same way that somebody has to become a dishwasher or a cashier or a house painter in order to pay the bills. As a result, the abilities of a writer are seldom what determine his or her talent, but rather it is his or her ability to simply wish to have talent that’s enough to qualify him or her as a recognized artist—which, by the way, is why art has come to have no more value to the public at large than money would if everyone were allowed to print it. Most writers, in fact, are no more able to write spectacularly than baseball fans would be able to play baseball spectacularly if all of them were suddenly put into uniforms and organized into a league of teams made to define the sport. Not only would such a scenario dumb down the game to the point where the truly gifted players would be unable to demonstrate what previously made them great because the pitches they’d be getting would either be rolling across the plate or sailing over the backstop, but the yardstick necessary for measuring the talented against the untalented would be nonexistence because everybody would be crammed onto the same diamond, their feet rubbing out all the chalked boundaries, the mass misconstruing the consensuality of the chaos with a deeply meaningful camaraderie.

I hope that clears everything up.

Am rupt-o la fugă din realitate

Aida Hancer - Povestea Cărţilor

motto: Acum serios, câte şanse sunt să prinzi o fată de împărat care se furişează de trei ori pe noapte în camera de scris şi nimeni nu-i dă de urmă?

Pe la 17 ani, întâmplător, mi-a venit ideea să-mi scriu cărţile, aşa că nu mi-a trebuit mult timp ca să neglijez puţin şcolile şi să mă întorc la lucrurile cu adevărat importante, adică la poezia altora- mai întâi, şi în cele din urmă la poezia mea. Aşa încât mi-am făcut bagajele (adică am adunat cam tot ce era util şi corect din jurul meu şi am aruncat nu în foc ci sub pat, fiindcă nu cred că „trebuie, tată, să rămâi între lucrurile utile”) şi am rupt-o la fugă din realitate.

Pe urmă, aşa cum se cuvine să facă orice copil dulce şi năzbâtios, cu aspiraţii de Herta Muller, am învăţat să-mi scriu numele pe o foaie, şi mai târziu să pun, alături de nume, şi poezii comandate de-un dictator imaginar, unelte ale sistemului meu personal şi imaginar şi care nici acum nu reuşesc să funcţioneze întocmai ca un sistem, da’ merge.

Voi toţi aţi jurat că volumele mele una-s, chiar dacă pe mine împrejurările m-au forţat să le fac două, şi mai ales cu nume de femei şi mai ales femei, fiindcă pentru o carte-bărbat nu primisem instrucţiuni precise de sus, şi nici n-avea sens să risc. Astfel că m-am gândit că am să pun fratele siamez în femeia mea preferată, în Amadiada. De aici a pornit totul, acest volum apărut la editura Princeps în 2008 înseamnă pentru mine mult mai mult pretenţioasele copilăreli din Eva nimănui, cartea bucureşteană. Prin simplul fapt că Amadiada e cartea mea bosumflată de suflet iar eva cartea de luptă, vă sugerez că n-aveţi decât să citiţi pe una din ele de la început la sfârşit tur retur şi tot nu veţi înţelege prea multe. Ceea ce vreau să spun este că n-am scris două cărţi, şi că barza se simte confortabil şi-ntr-un picior, oricât de subţire vi s-ar părea vouă că este.

Şi-apoi marfa o dată adusă din străinătăţuri trebuie vândută la suprapreţ. Dacă n-are fundă îi pui şi tot aşa, de m-am gândit să îmi sprijin volumul bucureştean de-un manifest prea puţin obraznic pentru vârsta mea de acum, dar pertinent pentru anii de-atunci. Ca să nu mă trădez definitiv să vă păcălesc cu ceva argintărie şi să vă fac să vă simţiti vinovaţi de neglijarea fratelui meu siamez, v-am scris aceste lucruri pentru ca eva nimănui să vă pară sinceră, curăţată de simboluri şi bătrâniciozităţi, pusă pe şotii şi pe jucat şah cu poeţii (şahiadele).

Pe urmă am pus cursa mea de şoareci la Gaudeamus, În vara lui 2008, ca să mă conving că pisica nu-i o invenţie inutilă. Deşi n-am aflat nici până acum, am reuşit să lansez cărţile, să prind prietenii şi să-i scot din cursă nevătămaţi şi încântaţi de cărţi, mai ales pentru că neobişnuiţii locului şi obişnuiţii textelor mele s-au adunat acolo. Venise până şi nepregătitul cu temele- Robert Şerban cu timişoara lui fistichiu agăţată la rever şi-a vorbit despre cărţile mele.

Oricum, ca la o nuntă de oameni bogaţi şi superstiţioşi, ziua de lansare s-a încheiat cu o ploaie, o straşnică şi prăfoasă ploaie bucureşteană, după care ne-am făcut şi mai curaţi şi ne-a apropiat şi mai mult. Dar ce să faci cu moldoveanul care, încântat de cărţile prospăt ieşite de sub tipar, se gândeşte să aplaude întocmai şi în Moldova lui! Am luat rapidul de Iaşi şi m-am dus acolo de unde niciun sudist nu se mai întoarce, anume la Iaşi, unde ninge cât ninge şi-n rest se-alintă prin Parcul Copou.

Acolo s-a lăsat iar cu scâncete pe seama Amadiadei, volumul despre care Bucureştiul nu zice nimic. Şi m-am lansat eu cât m-am lansat, tot într-o petrecere până-n examenul de bacalaureat, după care capul lui Harap Alb a fost lipit cu apă vie, apă moartă şi trei smicele de măr dulce şi-atât.

Acum serios, câte şanse sunt să prinzi o fată de împărat care se furişează de trei ori pe noapte în camera de scris şi nimeni nu-i dă de urmă?

Şi fetele (cărţile) mele nu-s încă de măritat. S-or duce după cine le place.

Lupii de casă

când toate lucrurile dorm în zăpadă

stai treaz pentru mine când

toate lucrurile mucegăiesc tu

pune plicuri de ceai de iarnă

în dulap printre rufe

zbiară dar să n-audă

lupii care topesc gheaţa cu boturile fierbinţi

când toate lucrurile se opresc

lasă aerul cald să se frece de pulpele tale

într-un dans

respectă ritmurile albe ale patului

de noapte

şi sângele lupilor e ca sângele din vis

alb

şi rece şi-nconjoară de trei ori orice ruină

păzită de-un foc

dar sângele lucrurilor nu se prelinge

stă încolăcit ca iedera

acum toate lucrurile dorm în zăpadă

şi tu o clipă n-ai putut să veghezi împreună cu mine

Revisiting the Horror of Nanking

Flim review

By Richard Schickel


In December 1937, Japanese troops entered the Chinese capital, Nanking (or, as it is now known, Nanjing). They were told that they could work their will on its captive citizens, and there ensued at least six weeks of what is almost certainly history’s most concentrated and brutal reign of terror. What has gone into history as “The Rape of Nanking” eventually cost between 200,000 and 300,000 lives—more than the death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—which says nothing of the nonlethal atrocities visited upon the city’s population.

At the time, the world’s attention was largely focused elsewhere—mainly on the war clouds gathering over Europe. The Nanking story was reported, of course, but the horrific events occurring there were remote, distant from Western consciousness. It has taken almost 75 years for this story to fully register on the rest of the world, with Iris Chang’s great (and almost unreadably monstrous) account of this atrocity being a crucial event in this belated awakening (she committed suicide in the aftermath of her 1997 book).

“City of Life and Death,” by the Chinese writer-director Lu Chuan, is the second film about Nanking, and it is a work that aspires to the definitive and almost achieves that status. It is shot in black and white, often with hand-held cameras, so that it has the look and feel of an epic newsreel. What is perhaps more remarkable about this film is its evenhandedness. The press notes about it stress the fact Nanking remains, to this day, central to the relationship between China and Japan—a source of suspicion, not to say hatred, on the part of the former. It therefore required courage on Lu Chuan’s part to undertake what amounts to a more or less objective and determinedly non-sensational account of this story.

There are, for example, in Iris Chang’s book still photographs of massacres and sexual crimes that one cannot bear to look at. There is nothing of the sort here. The allusions to war crimes are stated coolly, almost dispassionately. And, most remarkably, the central, apparently fictional, story Lu Chuan tells is of a young Japanese soldier who falls in love with a Chinese woman, forced to serve as a “comfort woman” (prostitute) for the conquerors. Even more remarkably, she is doing this as part of a deal between the Japanese and the citizenry. If a hundred women submit to this ordeal, the Japanese promise not to violate the “Safety Zone,” set up by a Nazi businessman, John Rabe, who, virtually alone, is able to negotiate with the Japanese.

It is perhaps needless to say that the Japanese soldier does not come to a good end. It is perhaps necessary to say that the film, potent as it is in many respects—and entirely worthy of our appalled attention—is at some level unsatisfactory. Little as I wish to say it, “City of Life and Death” needs to be more brutal than it is. It needs some imagery that forces us to look away from the screen—as the stills in the Chang book do—the pornography of violence raised to flash point. More important, the film needs to explain (as its press notes do) that the behavior of the Japanese army was not accidental, some sort of inexplicable riot. It was, rather, a promise fulfilled. The high command had, both implicitly and explicitly, told its soldiers that once inside Nanking’s gates they were free to visit any horror they could imagine on any defenseless human being they encountered. They were told that the Geneva Conventions establishing the “rules of warfare” simply did not apply to them.

The director wants to make another point. It is that the Japanese are essentially no different from anyone else, that their capacity for horrific behavior is a weakness shared by humanity everywhere. This is, in some sense, a truism—as the Holocaust proves. But the complicity of Japanese leadership in the rape of Nanking, and the willingness of its troops to partake in the exceptionalism implicit in these events, seems to me to tell a rather different story. And it does not help us much to show some nice guys among the invaders. All wars, of course, have their horrors—among which Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be numbered, along with the Allied fire bombings of Tokyo and Hamburg. But there was, I think, an up-close-and-personal malicious aforethought at Nanking that was extraordinary and not excusable by exculpatory liberal-mindedness. This was a lengthy exercise in motiveless malignity, and this movie, powerful as it is in many respects, essentially offers a sort of everybody-does-it (or might do it) rationale for the behavior it recounts. That, however, is not so. The “Rape of Nanking” remains unique in the annals of warfare—for its duration and for the extent of its crimes. To place vague blame for it on something like “human nature” and its universal capacity to do “bad things” is finally to elide morality. And that will not do.

Are Artists Liars?

Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood. Ian Leslie considers how this comes out in our art ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”

Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”

In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.

Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the second world war he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying”. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.

As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun by chronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneously—an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain to her visiting friend that she’s in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom “nothing is wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.

Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain’s frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Of course we all are sensitive to associations—hear the word “scar” and you too might think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences. But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer still would ever articulate them. We self-censor for the sake of truth, sense and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators can’t do this. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story from the confusion.

The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. He told of how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter, he found himself ‘stampeded’ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crew’s aggressive behaviour, his daughter burst into tears, he said, and Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.

The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, for the sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piled lie upon lie—apparently carried away by the improvisatory act of creativity—it’s possible that he felt similar to Brando during one of his performances. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his façade came just days before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their “stampede” encounter with Aitken outside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.

Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channelled into something socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insightful ones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not”. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

Ian Leslie is the author of "Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit", published by Quercus and out now in Britain. He can be followed on Twitter at @mrianleslie. Picture credit: procsilas and jesus_leon (both via Flickr)

"If we could prove string theory wrong, I would be thrilled!"

For the special Science issue of the New Statesman,  Helen Lewis-Hasteley interviewed Brian Greene, one of the most compelling and interesting advocates of string theory. The interview is now online, but if you'd like a more in-depth look at some of the concepts that were discussed, here's the longer Q&A. In it multiverses, extra dimensions - and the time Greene wrote dialogue for Third Rock For The Sun are discussed.

Why did you choose to write about multiverse in The Hidden Reality?

I think it's the most exciting subject at the frontier of physics research today. It is a highly speculative subject, but I don't shrink from speculative subjects. I think they're fascinating to explore, and this one in particular - the possibility that there are other universes - has really bubbled up in the past few years, and captured the attention of mainstream physicists who have been searching for the unified theory.

We don't know if these ideas are correct but they are sufficiently mathematically compelling that we're taking them seriously. I wanted to give the general public a snapshot of some exciting physics that may be the gateway to a fantastically new view of reality.


To what extent are these ideas becoming accepted now?

I wouldn't say "accepted", that would be a bit strong. What I would say is that we all recognise that these ideas could be wrong. But when our mathematical calculations bump into these ideas repeatedly from a whole variety of different angles, when it's not that we have some crazy idea about the universe that we try to impose on these theories, but rather the math leads us to this possibility.

Actually that is why we are willing to take these ideas seriously and investigate them. But until there's observational evidence or experimental proof, we won't know if this math describes reality, or is simply interesting math which may be interesting to mathematicians but not to physicists.


Which strands of physics lead you to the idea of the multiverse?

From cosmological physics, unified theories, relativity, quantum mechanics, computational physics. In the book I cover nine variations on the theme of multiverse proposals because there are these different avenues that when followed sufficiently far take you to this idea.
If you like I can give you some specific examples of how this happens. So, in cosmology, the big bang is a theory about how the universe evolved, from whatever caused the outward swelling of space to occur in the first place. We have been struggling for a long time to fill in a missing piece. What did cause the outward swelling to start?

In recent years, a proposal has been slowly developed for what may have driven an outward swelling. But here's the thing, when we study the math for that proposal, it naturally suggests that the big bang, that outward swelling, is not a one-time event. It may have been a many time event, with many big bangs in many different universes.

Our universe in that picture would be the aftermath of one big bang, but there'd be other universes which resulted from those other big bangs. I like to think about it as our universe is one expanding bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath where the other bubbles are other universes.


Different big bangs temporally or spatially?

Both. In fact it's very hard to talk about time, when applied to the whole collection. We understand time in our universe. But how does time in our universe relate to time in the other universes, and perhaps some more overarching notion of time that would embrace everything? We don't know the answer to that.

So when you say before or after, roughly speaking, I'm happy to say yes but if you press me really hard, I would have difficulty even defining before and after when discussing time beyond our little bubble universe. That's a little mind-blowing!


You talk about examples where people have read The Elegant Universe and show up at your graduate class.

It's not a common occurrence but it does happen...more often it happens when people send me their manuscript. Not long ago I got a manuscript from somebody who'd read The Elegant Universe who for ten years was working in his basement trying to take the ideas to the next step.

He wrote how his wife almost left him because he wouldn't come out of the basement, and the painful thing to me was, I think most people realise that these books are a translation from the mathematics to the ordinary language to give a feel for the ideas. It was heartbreaking.


The actual process of doing theoretical physics, how does it work?

Usually it's a fairly communal activity. For instance I have a group of students, grad students, post-docs from the faculty, and we're constantly at the blackboard discussing ideas, throwing things back and forth, reading papers that others around the world have posted into the archive.

Every morning we go there to see what papers have been posted from the previous night. We read those papers, we think about how mathematical ideas there might be relevant to us, can we push somebody's idea further. So it's a very incremental process, with a lot of conversation and cross-talk happening really throughout the world on these ideas. So the notion of the lone individual with the solitude of their own mind at their desk trying to figure out the universe is a nice romantic image, but is usually not the way we work in practice.


And when you talk and share ideas do you talk in equations, or do you find it useful to use metaphors?

It's almost always in mathematics. Many of us do find it useful to have a mental picture of the mathematics. Personally if my understanding of a subject is solely based on the equations, I feel like I don't fully get it. Yes, I see the math, I understand the math, and that ultimately is what I'll ultimately rely on to make progress and to gain further insight, but I like in my mind to have a mental picture, a visualisation of what's going on.

And frankly when I write these books, what I do is, I revert to those very mental images that I've developed over a long period of time of thinking about this material. I strip away the mathematics, put it in the end notes or don't have it there at all. Then take the visualisation and try to develop them in a way that will be interesting, a story, a metaphor ... something that will add life to the ideas that builds a bridge from the everyday to the exotic.


How do you try and put into language things we can't even describe with maths yet?

Well, that's pretty tough. And often even if we don't have the full mathematical formulation of something, we have a mathematical trajectory. We understand certain mathematical ideas, and we can see where they're pointing, and even if we haven't developed the full rigorous math for where we believe we're headed, the trajectory is often enough to build a coherent metaphor for where we're going.

But there are some ideas, for instance, we all know that matter is made of atoms and molecules, and one of the ideas I discuss even in this book, is that we wonder whether space and time might themselves be made of molecules and atoms, of a sort, it can't be the same molecules and atoms that make up tables and chairs, but could there be a finer entity from which space and time are built? That's a hard idea to get your head around, but using the analogy with the ordinary matter, even though we don't have the mathematical version of the story - that's what we're struggling now to comprehend - I think you can get the idea that if this table is made up of finer ingredients, could the environment that we're immersed within be made up of finer ingredients?


A fabric of space-time itself?

That's the language we use. And the question is how literal should you interpret that metaphor, is it a real fabric? Or is that just the poetic language we use to describe the environment within which we're immersed? In many ways the work of Einstein that we're carrying on today suggests that it is a real fabric in some ways. It's not as tangible as an ordinary piece of fabric.

When I try to grab space it's eluding me right now, whereas this isn't eluding me, when I grab the lapel of my coat. But there are ways in which experiments have shown that space behaves very similar to fabric. For instance, if you go near a spinning black hole, you can show with experiments that space seems to be dragged around the spinning black hole, much as would happen if I had a pebble and a vat of molasses. As the pebble spins, the molasses spins with it. The experiments show that space is enough of a real thing that it begins to spin too.


Even in a vacuum?

Yeah!


I suppose that whole idea of gravity and the deformation that makes implies there is something to deform.

That is an even simpler version, absolutely. Right! The very image that you have - here's the sun, and the fabric sort of warps around it, well if there wasn't a fabric, what's doing the warping. What is that thing that's taking on a curved shape? And that is what drove Einstein to talk about the space-time fabric, the space-time continuum.

So I guess the overall lesson is, we've been fortunate that many of the ideas that have played a critical role in the advancement of understanding the universe, have analogies in the everyday world, that while imperfect to be sure - every analogy is imperfect - are at least pretty good at communicating the flavour of the idea.


So what is the point of knowing this?

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?". And I'm like "I am a doctor!" and she's all: "No, no, not that kind of doctor, I mean a real doctor". She reads my books sort of, but she basically says they give her a headache.

I think that many of us, at one level or another, are searching for meaning. Why are we here? Where do we come from? Is there a purpose to it all? And I don't think science can answer the purpose question. I don't think science is well suited to providing direct pronouncements on meaning. But I do think that if you are investigating these issues, it's critical to know where they're taking place. What is this universe? How did it come into existence?

Maybe we can't answer why it's here, but I think we can answer how it came to be. And how it will evolve. And that, to me, is a vital part of being able to even start to think about meaning. Personally, the reason I get up in the morning is these questions and the progress we're making is so exciting that that's meaning enough for me. I feel part of why I'm here is to immerse myself in the mysteries and to contribute what little I can to unravelling them.

I think that journey - that view of science as a living, breathing, evolving, exciting journey, the drama of adventure and discovery, the journey from confusion to at least partial understanding - is a thrilling one. And these books can at least give you a snapshot of that process which gives you a completely different feel from physics than what you'd get from a textbook.


My husband said The Elegant Universe is what got him through A-level physics. The idea that it wasn't just about rote learning, it was about ideas and exploration.

Exactly. I've been saying a lot lately, more back home than here, that a big problem with our educational system in the US and perhaps here too, I'm not sure, is that in the classroom, we immediately focus in on the details. To solve equations, to balance reactions, know parts of the cell, largely because that's the material that's easy to test, and that's what we do.

And I've been saying, and I feel so strongly, you've got to have a commensurate focus on the big wondrous ideas. How did the universe begin? How did light begin? How did consciousness begin? Those are the ideas that make one want to learn the details in order to perhaps make one understand those questions more fully, and we don't do enough of that by any means.

In British schools, because testing is such a large part of how we teach, it perhaps becomes "here are three things you've learned and let's find out if you remember them tomorrow" and it certainly does physics a disservice.

I've had the experience where I'm talking to kids, and I began to explain aspects of black holes, aspects of the big bang, aspects of quantum physics, and after five minutes, I find that their eyes open wide and they're like 'that's science?'

Because to them science wasn't exciting, mind-bending ideas, it was memorising certain things so that they could regurgitate them on a test. And to me, I got to tell you, it's heart breaking.

That a subject that could be the primary driver of imagination, the primary driver of interest in excelling academically, is so often viewed as the subject to stay away from. Boring, dry, dull, intimidating, who needs it? And that is a failure of the way we communicate the ideas.

There's a big problem in this country that it's very hard to get children to do what are seen as 'hard' subjects, particularly as the focus is so much on grades, and grades get you into university. If you were going to do an arts degree like I did, why would you do a hard subject like physics which is going to drag you down.


You wrote a children's book, could you tell me about that?

Well it's a reimagining of the myth of Icarus which, I don't know when, or if people encounter it here, but I came upon it at a pretty young age, and found it very distressing because in my naïveté it was simply a story about a boy who was bucking authority, not doing what his father was saying and paying the ultimate price for that which seemed wrong to me.

And as I got older and became a scientist it seemed yet more off base because in order to have great breakthroughs and insights in science, you've got to go against what the elders are saying, you've got to be courageous and go off on your own, even into uncharted territory. That might me quite dangerous, but you don't pay with your life.

The price you pay for great discovery is you and society often have to acclimate to a new reality, right? In the atomic age we learned how to split the atom, we learned how to harness nuclear power. We are obviously still struggling with that move into the nuclear age right now, obviously. The biological age - we learn how to understand DNA and the genome, and now we're struggling how to figure out what to do with that knowledge.

That's what happens, we have to acclimate to new reality. So my version of the Icarus myth, that's what happens. The boy doesn't go to the sun with wax wings, he builds a spaceship and against his father's warning he flies to a black hole. And what happens at the black hole is purely scientific, not science fiction, not fantasy. To travel to a black hole, that is fiction today, but the real physics of Einstein's general theory of relativity dictates what happens.

The boy spends an hour or two near the black hole on a joyride, going round the outskirts careful not to fall in. And what Einstein taught us is that time flows down over the edge of a black hole. So what is an hour for this futuristic Icarus, when he comes back and he wants to show his dad what he's done, he learns quickly that 10 000 years have gone by for everybody else, because while time is running slow for him, it was running at the everyday speed for everybody else, so his dad is long gone, and he has to acclimate to this new reality.

And that to me is what the process of courageous exploration leads to. So that's what the story is, and it's a way in which young kids can actually learn a real piece of science, this time slowing at a black hole is real. But do it in a way where it's emotionally compelling, because it's a story, and it's a story of exploration and loss.


And I read that you helped out with the dialogue on Third Rock from the Sun...

It's true in the most minimal sense. There was one episode in which John Lithgow was growing tired of speaking physics babble without it meaning anything in physics so one of the writers who actually I grew up with, wrote to me somewhat frantically, "can you give us 18 words of real physics that might slot into this little moment so that John Lithgow is actually saying something real". So I did, and the amazing thing is I don't watch the show, but one day, years ago I was just channel surfing mindlessly, and I look in the programme and I see the equation of quantum thermodynamics on the blackboard, so I turn up the volume and it's the words I wrote! It was one of my proudest moments!


Do you have a scientific hero?

Pretty much the one you'd think. The thing about Einstein is, almost everything that I do, and almost everything that modern physicists do, in one way or another leads back to Einstein. It's kind of astounding.

We looked at the world one way in, say, 1900, and by 1955 when Einstein left the scene, we looked at it a completely different way. The big developments, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, all are traceable back to Einstein in one form or another. And even today, as we seek a unified theory, we're trying to put together general relativity and quantum mechanics - two threads that if you trace them back they end up with Einstein, so yes Einstein is a vital figure in everything that we've done.


And in terms of scientists working today, whose work do you find most exciting?

There are a lot of great creative physicists out there. Certainly Edward Witten from the institute for Advanced Study, has for a long time been the leader in pushing the frontiers of working unification.

So many of us revere him, but it needs to be said because I've sometimes seen this reported in a slightly odd way, it's not that way we revere Einstein the way some gurus of new age cults may be revered, or some religious leaders, no, we constantly are critical of everyone's contributions, even Witten's. We look at a given paper, we examine it from all different perspectives, we bang it around, we knock it, we try to break it, we try to see what aspects of it are pointing towards the new direction.

So we're a highly critical bunch, a highly sceptical bunch. So when we have someone that we respect enormously, it doesn't mean that we take in their pronouncements in some uncritical way, not at all.


So you have standard model physics which is quite well supported, and string theory is slightly more suggestive...

I would say hugely more. Again, let me just interject one thing, for you to ask me as you may: "Do I believe in string theory?", my answer is, '"No, I don't". I don't believe anything at all until it is experimentally proven, observationally confirmed. I do find string theory the most compelling approach to the search for a unified theory, for putting gravity and quantum mechanics together and that's why I've spent time thinking about it. If you were to ask me, "Do I believe there are other universes out there?" - no, I don't. Do I think it's a compelling possibility that emerges from the mathematics and am I willing to take it very seriously and vigorously pursue it? Yes. But I won't believe it until there is that observational, experimental support.


It's an important thing to say that as a scientist you can't believe anything without evidence...or it's not a question of belief...

That's right, the better word in fact is 'confidence'. Because no matter how much experimental support a given theory may have, maybe you can confirm it on the 999th experiment, the 1000th experiment, but the 1001st might yield an anomaly! The results of that experiment might not agree with the theory, and that shows that a theory that you thought to be correct, wasn't. And that's common in physics, this is what happens.


Do you feel an emotional investment in it? What if string theory turned out to be a little cul-de-sac?

If we were able to show string theory wrong, and that is what science can do. It can't prove something right, because again the experiments way down the line might suddenly deviate. But you can prove something wrong if you have experimental evidence that simply deviates from the predictions of a given theory, you wipe it out. If we could prove string theory wrong, I would be thrilled. And I don't mean that in an offhanded way. My emotional investment is finding truth, making progress towards a deeper understanding of how the world works.

And if string theory is wrong, I would like to know that, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic! We would push it to the side and that would allow us to focus our attention on approaches that have a better chance of revealing truth. So that's where the emotional investment is. It's not in any particular theory, it's in contributing in whatever small way, to the journey that we've been on since the Ancient Greeks, and that's what it's about.


How do you balance your role between researching and communicating to a wider audience? Where do you see yourself more at the moment?

I definitely see myself more as a scientist who, every so often, steps outside of the research environment to bring a 'report from the trenches', if you will. My last book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, was seven years ago, in 2004, and my last television show, The Elegant Universe, was eight years ago. It has been a long time since I have stepped outside to do what I am doing now. It is virtually impossible, when you are in the last throes of writing a book and then out there discussing the book, to get any research done. For a good chunk of time, six months or so, you have to write the research off. But, when this periods ends, which will be relatively soon, I will go back and it will be a while before I come out in a significant making.


What area of research will you back to?

I work in String Theory which speaks to this possibility of other universes. The String theoretic version focuses upon the need for extra dimensions of space in String Theory, an idea that I have been working since I was a graduate student at Oxford in the 1980s. But the aspect that we are focusing upon now is: could it be there are many different universes, each with a different shape for the extra dimensions, and from that they will have each different physical features and properties. And we are trying to understand detailed phenomena like: 'Can the shape of the extra dimensions change over time through quantum processes?', that is one thing we are doing detailed calculus on. That is the arena in which my attention is scientifically focused.


I understand we need those extra dimensions to make sense of the maths. The maths of what?

The mathematics of String Theory falls apart if there are not these extra dimensions. It turns out that the maths requires that, left-right, back-forth and up-down [sic] - the three common dimensions - not be the only ones. The thing is, the maths does exactly not tell us what those extra dimensions look like. We believe they must be curled up and very small because we cannot see them, so this is a way to make this prediction compatible with our observation.

Our eyes only see the big dimensions, the ones that are accessible, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small. But the exact shape of the extra dimensions has a profound impact on things that can see like what the electron weighs, its mass, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force, all these features of the world that we measure in String Theory would be traced to the shape of the extra dimensions.

So a big challenge, for decades now, has been to figure out the shape of the extra dimensions and we were unable to nail that problem. We found candidate shapes, in fact a huge number of them. They are called Calabi-Yau manifolds. When I was a graduate student in Oxford, there were five known. My thesis took one of those shapes and did that mathematical analysis. The resulting physics did not agree with the observations but it was just a first test case. The problem was, when turned back to the list of shapes to look at the second, the list had grown. It was not longer five possible shapes, it was a hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand.

Ten thousand is still potentially doable, it would keep an army of graduate students busy for a while trying to work out the consequences of these shapes, but the number of shapes continued to grow. Nowadays it has reached 10 [to the power of] 500 which is an unimaginably huge number. The number of particles in the observable universe is about 10 [to the power of] 80, this dwarves even that. You would need far more graduate students than there are particles that make up the universe.

So what do you do? Some String theorists responded to this by saying: 'I am out of here, I am going to work in something else. If you have some many shapes, each gives rise to different physics and you do not know which one is the right one so you are never going to to be able to make any definitive predictions'. Others, like me, have been saying: 'Do not quit, it is early in the game, we need to develop the maths and that will hopefully give us ad equation that picks out one of those shapes as the shape. Then will study it and, if the predictions agree with what we see, great, if not, then we can discard the whole structure.

A third group - which is what I focus on in the book - have suggested a more radical proposal. Those physicists have said: 'Take seriously the failure to pick out one shape from the many, maybe that is telling there is no unique shape. Maybe the maths is really telling us that there are many universes where each of those shapes is in the limelight, where each of them gets its due'.

So the reason we have not been able to pick one out is that there is no unique special one. The only thing special about the shape in our domain is that the physics such that it allows our form of life to exist, stars, planets and galaxies, here. In those universes with different shapes, the physics is so vastly different that there are not any stars, planets or people. But that is the only thing that is special about this one: we can be here to think about these questions.


Does the idea that something happens in every possible universe have any implications on the concept of free will?

I think it does, but I do not know that the philosophical ideas are actually that different from the ones which would emerge from Newtonian physics. Even in the Newtonian world, it is hard to see where there is free will.

When we look at the equations that have come down to us from the last few hundred years, those equations tell how they are now and how they will be in five minutes. Where does free will affect where they will be in five minutes? We do not see free will in the equations. I think that you and I are just particles governed by particular laws.

In Newtonian terms, it is very clear, there is no free will. The Quantum mechanics comes along and people think that maybe that is where there is free will because, now, there is a fuzziness, there are many possible outcomes. Maybe free will enters there, but it does not, because, in the Quantum equation, there is still absolute determinism of what will happen in a probabilistic sense: the equations say, with absolute certainty, there is a 30 per cent of this, a 20 per cent chance of that, 50 per cent chance of that... Nowhere does free will come in into those equations either.

The only place where free will may still have a last fighting chance to emerge, is in something which we do not yet understand: how, in Quantum physics, do we go from this many possible outcomes to the one definite outcome that we observe. In that so-called Quantum measurement problem, which is still a puzzle, you could imagine that, maybe, free will emerge. I doubt it, but the standard free-willer could say that is where it will happen. In the many worlds approach to this world which I describe in this book, certainly there is no free will happening, as I can see it.

Every individual, when faced with five different choices, if each are allowed by the laws of physics, in quantum physics, each of those outcomes would happen. The individual would make all five choices, one per universe. And it would not be that the individual has had the choice to make one choice more real than the other, all of the choices would be as real as the others, they would take place in the different universes. There would not be any volitional choice involved in what happens.


Could you not at least say that "I" in "this" universe am tacking my own way through?
Not really, because you are following one trajectory of choices. It is not as though there was a place in the mathematics where your free will dictated that particular set of choices. You are knocked around by the laws of physics just like all your copies in the other universes.


Is there a moment you can pin-point from which you were interested in this kind of subjects?

When I was really young, I was five, my dad taught the basic operations multiplications which I found really exciting because it meant you could do calculations that no one had ever really done before. They had not been done before because they were not interesting to do, but to me to create a new sequence of numbers on a page from multiplying - my dad would set 30-digit by 30-digit multiplication tables and I would buy huge pieces of construction paper, tape them together and spend the weekend doing these calculations. To me it was so exciting to have an answer that no one had looked at before.

That is where my interest in maths took off. When I learned, later on, that maths were no just a game - I remember at some point sooner after, when I learned multiplications, my dad asked me to calculate the number of inches between here and the Andromeda galaxy. That is a very straightforward calculation because people know how far away it is in light-years, then you just need to convert light-years into miles, miles into feet and feet into inches, so it is just a sequence of multiplications. But, to get that number at the and look at it, I was like: "Wow, that is relevant to what is out there". It hooked me for good, when that link to the real world was made.


Was your father interested in maths?

He was definitely interested. He dropped out of high school to be a musician. He was a singer, performer, composer, vocal coach... he liked to say that he had an 'SPHD': Seward Park High school Dropout, which is where he dropped out. But he was self-taught and because of that, his interest came from a very self-motivated place. Because of that, he was constantly telling me about atoms and the universe, and in retrospect, some of that stuff was right, some was not, but it did not matter. It got me interested in the wider universe


What was your experience of learning maths and physics at school?

I had some pretty good teachers, not all of them, but I can pin point a couple that recognised I had some ability and would give me work to do outside of the class: go home and work my way through various texts that the gave me to allow to keep this enthusiasm and interest going. They were vital to me, in fact - as a sidebar - when I was in seventh grade, I went to a public [as in state] school, I did not go to a specialised private school and I had exhausted what that public school could offer.

The teacher said: "Why don't you go to Columbia University?". He wrote me a little note. I was this tall, my sister was three heads taller, she went with me. We just knocked on doors randomly and we would hand them this note. The note basically said: "Take this kid on, he is hungry to learn". And most people we gave this would say "oh that's nice" and give it back.

They were busy obviously, but one guy in the maths department - he was a graduate student - said "sure, come". All summer I met him every day and then I carried on during the academic year subsequently once a week. For no money - we did not have any money - but he just did this for the love of learning, the love of teaching. He took me to mathematical places that I would not have visited, for five to ten years if I had just followed the traditional education. So it was a wonderful thing for me.


That is wonderful because without it, presumably, you might just run into a dead end...

And joined some gang and just been a street thug, it is possible.


You present nine versions of the multiverse. Is there one that intuitively seems to you more attractive than the others? Is intuition a useful concept or should you struggle against it?

I think one of the big lessons of modern physics and certainly the idea of this book is that perception of the everyday world can be a very misleading guide the true nature of what is out there. And there is a way in which that is startling, because we all think we know the world! We look around!

On the other hand, if you think about it, when we were back there in the Savannah, trying to get our next meal, understanding the true nature of reality would not really have helped us. Would it have helped to know electrons can be sort of be at two places at once in a quantum world? Would it have helped us to know about the nature of time near a black hole? No! We just needed where that antelope was going to be in five seconds so we can capture it and eat it.

Having said that, we need to inform ourselves by mathematic s and observation and experimentation. That goes beyond our senses and that is what we are doing. So I do no consider these other parallel particularly universes. So the yardstick that I would use is not really intuition, but rather which of these proposals has the best chance of being tested in the shortest timescale. And for that I would place my focus on the brane multiverse - the idea which comes from string theory that we may be living in a giant three-dimensional membrane.

The easier way of thinking about it is to suppress one dimension and thinking about it to make it more intuitive and imagining our universes taking place in a big slice of bread. The idea according to string theory is there could be other slices of bread, other universes out there, maybe even real nearby, all part of the big cosmic loaf. But we are not aware of these other slices of bread because it turns out that light cannot travel between them, so we a re blind to their existence.

However this is a testable idea - at least in principle - at the Large Hadron Collider, the big accelerator in Geneva, because when protons slam against each other at high speed, the maths shows that debris can be created that would be ejected off of our universe, off of our brane, off of our slice of bread. If that happened, how would we know? The debris would take some energy with it which means our detectors, which are on our slice of bread, would miss that energy and measure less energy than before. A missing energy signature, that physicists are now looking for.


Presumably, the big problem with that, is that something else could have taken the energy away.

That is the challenge and that is why the experiments get paid the big bucks. They have to be able to close all those loopholes.


The Higgs Boson has been described as a 'god particle' that would suddenly make everything clear. Is that not a bit simplistic?

No, I think it is a vital and important idea. It is not directly a force-carrying particle, that is not its real claim to fame. The 'God particle' concept comes from Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman. I do not like that language, it is unnecessary to inject that perspective, that is my personal view on it.

The Higgs boson would be the smallest chunk of what we call the Higgs field. If these ideas are right, the Higgs field would be like an ocean that fills all of space, and invisible ocean. Right now, this room is filled with the electromagnetic field. The reason why I can turn on my cell phone, get my messages or log on to the internet, is because these fields are right here.

The idea of a field-filling space, much like steam fills a sauna, is not an exotic idea. It is true. The exotic idea for the Higgs field is that it is a new field that we have not yet seen. What would it do? If it is correct, if this field is filling space, the idea is that as matter tries to move through space, the Higgs field exerts a friction-like drag on particles, so as I am pushing an object I feel it resisting my attempt to speed it up.

Normally we say that is the mass of the object - the bigger it is, the harder it is to push it. But where does the mass come from? According to Higgs, it comes from this object, its particles, being dragged back by this molasses-like Higgs field within which we are all immersed. So the Higgs field is meant to be the fundamental explanation for why particles have the mass that they do. And that is a drawl in the standard model of particle physics.


Has this research led you to reject the idea of 'God'?

My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'God of the gaps': if you are trying to understand the world around you and science has not yet given an explanation for some phenomenon, you could step back and say "oh, that is God". Then, when science does explain that phenomena - as it eventually does - God gets squeezed out because he is no longer needed to explain that phenomena.

But that is a very particular and simplistic notion of God. No matter what physics does, you can always say there is god behind it: God set up the rules the physics, God set the environment within which those rules play themselves out. Do I feel that we need that? No. Do I personally subscribe to it? I do not. But does physics rule that picture out? No it does not.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist to is to say: "I do not find the concept of God very interesting because I cannot test it, I cannot rule it out in the traditional ways and what excites me and makes me want to go to my office is to work on things that I can test". For me God is not that interesting but I do not think God is ruled out, that is a statement that is actually unjustifiable.

“A land without people for a people without land?”

Larry Gross tackles here the issues surrounding the occupier's narratives, Zionist idealism and the harsh realities of ethnic cleansing in the apartheid state of Israel...

Reflections on Israel: From Idealism to Ethnic Cleansing


In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting. I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants. An offer to my father to join a group of economic advisers to the prime minister of the then 5-year-old state of Israel was another matter. To my mother, the daughter of longtime Labor Zionists, this was an appealing option, and we left the States for what was to be a two-year stint. After the two years were over, my father moved to the Hebrew University, where he taught for the next five years before we returned to the United States and I started college.

I’ve long thought that it wasn’t a bad bargain, missing out on the 1950s in the United States, by all accounts a very missable decade, and instead experiencing life in the young and then exciting and idealistic state of Israel. From the sixth grade through high school I went to Jerusalem schools, using Hebrew and absorbing a blend of nationalism and Jewish-slanted perspectives on history, within a context of widely proclaimed external threats and internal nation-building. This was a period in which education—history, geography and even Bible studies—was clearly in the service of the national enterprise. Even in the secular schools Bible study was required, but the subject largely was taught as an extension of the story of the Jews, reinforcing the connections of the Chosen People to the land, with the names of biblical places still present all around us, cementing the historical continuity we were now experiencing after 2,000 years of exile. As the familiar song went, we have come to the Land, to build and to be rebuilt in it.

Even then there were tangles in the stories that were woven through the nationalist tapestry: The barely disguised racism to which Sephardic Jews from the Arab countries were subjected, in comparison with the preferential treatment of Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe and the United States—to my parents’ amusement, British and American Jews were routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”—and the even less disguised racism directed at Arabs. Traveling with my father, whose advisory brief included public housing, to visit settlements for Sephardic immigrants—Maabarot—it was easy to see the contrast between the government’s views of various categories of olim (immigrants), and the vast difference in social services and opportunities extended. It was also easy to see that Israeli Arabs occupied a distinctly lower status.

At the same time, to be blunt, it was also clear to me that the beauty of the landscape and the indigenous architecture that seemed to grow organically on the rocky hills, a landscape and architecture that has etched itself on my soul, was the creation of the Palestinian people who had lived in these hills for generations. In contrast, the new settlements built by the Israeli government spread across the hilltops like an ugly ribbon of concrete.

The big city of the time, Tel Aviv, despite some neighborhoods with low-rise apartment buildings echoing the Bauhaus style, felt ugly and cramped and already was falling apart. Now, I know that Tel Aviv has been transformed, with skyscrapers and freeways, bright lights and nightlife, but it also looks like nearly every other modern metropolis. The adjacent Arab port of Jaffa, absorbed into a unified Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality, has been gentrified and touristed up.

The Jerusalem of my childhood was a divided city, in which the new part, the Israeli portion, was a small town I could traverse on my bicycle, avoiding the scar of barbed-wired “no man’s land” that divided it from the Jordanian-controlled Old City. Since 1967 the unified city, along with the extensive territories annexed into “Greater Jerusalem,” has grown and expanded and build up and out. High-rises have desecrated the timeless skyline of the city, as new housing settlements have covered the surrounding hills.
 
Even more striking than the sheer growth of the city is its domination by the ultra-orthodox. I recall the first riot I ever saw, in the mid-1950s, when thousands of black-suited men thronged the center of the city to protest the building of the first public swimming pool in Jerusalem. The pool was expected to permit men and women to swim at the same time, a provocation and blasphemy that roused the orthodox communities to outrage. Previously, the orthodox communities had limited themselves to barricading their streets during the Sabbath and throwing stones at cars that wandered too close to their neighborhoods. They also greeted other violations in similar fashion: I recall my mother being pelted with pebbles by small boys when she wore a sleeveless dress as we walked on a street that was the border between orthodox and secular neighborhoods. But the tensions of that time were nothing compared to the rise of religious nationalism after the 1967 Six Day War, when many ultra-orthodox groups previously hostile to Zionism—God will decide when we return to Zion, not men, they argued, and thus Zionism is presumptuous—took the Israeli victory as a sign that God now favored the Zionist enterprise, and therefore Jews had the right and indeed the obligation to settle the entire Land of Israel.

Which brings me to the crux of the issue, the Palestinian Problem. When I was a youngster learning Jewish history in Jerusalem’s schools, the story was clear and even simple. In many ways, it could be encapsulated in a saying one heard occasionally, attributed to early Zionists: “A land without people for a people without land.” Well, there are several striking problems with this aphorism, the most obvious being that there were people already living in the Holy Land, the Palestinians. This phrase originated in writings of British clergy and statesmen who viewed with favor what later became the Zionist cause, decades before Theodor Herzl wrote “The Jewish State” (see the fascinating and important article by Diana Muir on the history of the phrase).
 
Not surprising for the people who retell the ancient story of liberation from slavery in Egypt every year at Passover, the official Zionist story was frequently retold. The story I was taught in school was repeated in the nearly obligatory youth movements that organized much of our out-of-school lives (the choice was between youth movements, each aligned with a political party; not belonging to any movement carried a sentence of total social isolation). This story was also repeated on the frequent occasions for public expression of nationalistic fervor (the Zionist leaders of the day were reminiscent of Fidel Castro in their love of delivering long speeches). It was the story of the return to The Land, the Rebuilding of the Land and the People, and the continuity of Jewish identification with the Land, from biblical times to the present. The Arab residents of the land—Palestinian was not a term used at that time, either by the Jews or, as far as I can recall, by the Arabs—were generally viewed as peasants, shopkeepers or craftsmen, living in the Levantine past, neither part of the romantic Hebrew past nor the modern new state being built around them.

Then there were the “infiltrators”—Arab peasants, taken from their refugee camps in Gaza or the West Bank, armed by the cynical Egyptians or Jordanians, and sent over the border to kill Israelis, unless, as usually happened, the Israelis killed them first. I well recall spending time with my high school class doing “national service” on a kibbutz near Gaza—helping out in the fields as replacement for kibbutzniks off on military service—when the army killed several infiltrators not far from where we were working. It was a familiar story that fit with the national narrative that blamed the neighboring Arab states for the plight of the Palestinian refugees kept confined in camps reminiscent of the Maabarot, in which the Israeli government settled immigrants from Arab countries. True, of course, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese governments were callous and calculating in their realpolitik treatment of the refugees. But the larger story, and a key foundation of the mythology of Israeli nationalism, is that the refugees had not been deliberately driven out by the Israeli army in an act of what we now call ethnic cleansing.

In the Jerusalem of my youth the nicest houses by far were the Arab mansions of certain West Jerusalem neighborhoods, many of them truly beautiful examples of Eastern Mediterranean architecture, with thick stone walls, cool courtyards and tiled floors. These “abandoned” homes, technically controlled by the government as trustee for “enemy property,” were given out to politically favored or wealthy Israelis, without any visible irony or candor. I recall visiting Golda Meir’s apartment in the mid-1950s with my parents—Golda, then minister of labor, was an old friend of my Labor Zionist grandparents, and my father was consulting for her as well—which occupied the top floor of one of these mansions, its large stone-tiled balcony overlooking lush gardens. The floor below was the home of a Supreme Court justice whose son was my youth movement group leader.

Somewhat later my family became close to a young Yemenite woman who worked for us as a housekeeper (most middle-class Ashkenazi families employed Sephardic housekeepers—I heard Tel Aviv housewives refer to them as the “Schwartzeh”). We came to know her family, headed by an elderly patriarch who succeeded in marrying her off to someone she neither knew nor wanted. The family lived in Liftah, a run-down “abandoned” Arab village just below the main road at the entry to Jerusalem; a common pattern in which Jews from Arab countries were settled in former Arab villages.
 
The Israel of my youth was not only hostile to its Arab citizens and neighbors, it was also frequently contemptuous of European Jews, especially the Shtetl Jews who had been massacred in the Holocaust. I recall my grandfather’s dismay and anger at the Israeli rejection of Yiddish, truly my grandparents’ mother tongue, which was treated as a badge of the old Jewry, deformed by exile and now to be replaced by the New Jews building a new country. Long before Hannah Arendt was attacked for seeming to blame the victims for their fate under the Nazis (this was the grounds for the firestorm of criticism leveled at her “Eichmann in Jerusalem”), it was common to hear the charge that Ghetto Jews had gone like sheep to the slaughter, not fighting back as Sabras would as a matter of course. In this context, understandably, the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto were among the most celebrated of the Holocaust victims.

While I am not sure how much of the national story I was questioning at the time I left Israel and returned to the United States, I do know I was clearly aware of the pervasive racism directed at both Arabs and Sephardic Jews. But then, I was returning to a country itself in the midst of a struggle over civil rights and still mostly unwilling to acknowledge its racist past and present. I also know that I was aware of the shallowness of the commitment to social democracy that the Israeli Labor-dominated establishment proclaimed. I had learned from my father’s experience that much of the familiar story was bogus. For example, that the kibbutz system, the crown jewel of Israel’s new society and the birthplace of much of its military-governmental elite, was artificially maintained by a system of public subsidies. And that the political deal that continued through every coalition government yielded authority over domestic life to the religious parties that joined the government, thus giving them total control over such “minor” matters as marriage, divorce and the rights of women and children. I recall accompanying my mother when she went to court to support another one of our housekeepers, who was entangled in a dispute with her abusive husband. He was refusing to give her a divorce. In the religious courts that control such matters, only a husband can grant a divorce.
 
What became even clearer in subsequent years was that single-party rule by the Labor coalition over decades had created the sort of complacent and often corrupt political system familiar from Eastern Europe, in which bureaucratic sludge infiltrates most corners of public institutions, and in which knowing the right person—what Israelis, in a term imported from Poland, call Protectzia—is the only key that will open the door you’ve been banging on. The systematic oppression of Sephardic communities led to an eruption in the 1970s, when young people organized their version of the Black Panthers, and then finally to the political upheaval in which the Labor government’s rule was finally ended. As it turned out, the new governing bloc, Menachem Begin’s right-wing coalition, was only slightly more accommodating to the “Eastern communities” that voted them in, but that’s another, also familiar story.

The dividing line in the history of Israel, and the region, of course, is the 1967 war in which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria, capturing the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. By this time, I was living in New York, attending graduate school, and I recall following the news of the war and, as it drew to a close, thinking that most subsequent challenges could be resolved, except for the future of Jerusalem. As it turns out, I was overly optimistic, as almost everything has been mishandled, either by the Israelis or, in many cases, the Arab neighbors and the various Palestinian factions that have emerged. In a famous line Israeli diplomat Abba Eban used to characterize the Palestinians, but that could more accurately be applied to all parties to the dispute, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

As has often been noted, it was Israel that largely created the sense of Palestinian national identity as a political force. In a famous Israeli short story I read in high school, a kibbutznik argues that there is no Jewish history, because Jews have always been reacting to what the Goyim have done to them—chased them from country to country, limited the occupations permitted to them, attacked their communities and confiscated their wealth. This account can be applied as well to the relationship between the Palestinians and Israel.

AP / Muhammed Muheisen

Backdropped by a section of Israel’s separation barrier, Israeli troops fire rubber bullets at Palestinian stone throwers, not seen, during clashes in the West Bank in 2007.

We have also learned uncomfortable truths from “revisionist” histories of the War of Independence, as it is called by Israel, as well as more recent accounts of the 1967 war and its aftermath. It turns out that the Six Day War was not forced on Israel by an overreaching Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, although his posturing, like Saddam Hussein’s decades later, played into the hands of those happy for the excuse to attack. Israeli leaders saw an opportunity and took it, under the guise of defending their nation from annihilation (see this recent account of the events of this period), as well as Miko Peled’s riveting account of the involvement of his father, Israeli Gen. Matti Peled, in these events.
 
In the aftermath of the stunning success, many Israeli leaders, including the old lion David Ben-Gurion, warned of the dangers of holding on to and occupying the conquered lands, especially the West Bank, and their warnings have proved prescient.

What I don’t believe was foreseen among the secular but nationalistic governmental/military leaders—such farm-community-raised generals as Dayan, Alon and Rabin—was the explosion of religious fundamentalism that transformed their vision of a security-based string of semi-military settlements along the Jordan River into the rash of Gush Emunim settlements that spread across the West Bank and Gaza, as well as into the Old City of Jerusalem and the center of Hebron. So was the scene set for the most intractable of human conflicts, when mutually antagonistic faith communities claim sole ownership of the same territory. Whether it’s Hindus and Muslims in India, Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, the plot is all too familiar, and the chances for a peaceful outcome equally remote.

This, however, is not enough, as it leaves us with a false equivalence of competing claims and culpability. Israel is the occupying power, in clear contravention of international law and United Nations resolutions, and the moral consequences are as clear as they were predictable in 1967. Israel has squandered its moral integrity and corrupted the lives of generations of young folk drafted into an army of occupation.

I recall hearing stories from Holocaust survivors of the treatment of Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Not stories of concentration camps and gas chambers, although those, too, of course. But stories of legally enacted restrictions and humiliations, put in place by the government and carried out by its agents, police and soldiers, often young and often callous. Stories that are uncomfortably recalled when seeing the oppression and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints; of soldiers mistreating civilians protesting the confiscation of their land and the destruction of their homes and orchards; of roads cutting through Palestinian lands that are open only to Israeli settlers; of Palestinians cut off from their own communities by a wall that cuts across the landscape like an ugly scar.

I recall visiting Germany for the first time in the late 1950s and thinking, as I looked at folks in their 30s and older, “What were you doing during that period?” I can’t help thinking that civilized folks will be asking the same question of Israelis, now and in the future.

Larry Gross is the director of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, one of the founders of queer studies and a scholar of art, media, and the portrayal of minorities.