zenpundit.com

“It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers”  

 – Thomas Kuhn

It used to be used as a joke, but a well established string theorist, Erik Verlinde,  is challenging the existence of gravity, calling it an “illusion” (no word as to whether he is willing to step out of a 95th floor window to test his hypothesis):

The New York Times (Dennis Overbye) – A Scientist Takes On Gravity

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

….It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton‘s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all – even if he has not yet answered them.

Dr. Verlinde goes into greater detail about his ideas on The Reference Frame, the blog of Czech string theory physicist Luboš Motl. It seems from the comment section that Dr. Motl  is not buying it at all and is politely saying that Verlinde’s hypothesis is complete nonsense ( or, conversely, if true, is so revolutionary that Verlinde upends not only everything we know about physics, but also logic). Here is another expert commentary. Here I cordially invite some of my scientist readers, Shane, Dr. Von and Cheryl to weigh in as well.

Nevertheless, what Verlinde is doing, challenging the unchallenged paradigm, is intellectually very useful.

Sir Isaac Newton who explained gravity’s action did not know what gravity was. We still don’t know what it is even though physicists today have a much wider perspective than did Newton, whose discoveries were the bedrock of not just modern science, but modernity itself. When concepts are accepted blindly we tend to stop thinking of them very deeply. Not everyone, Stephen Hawking has spent a great deal of time pondering gravity as did Albert Einstein in his later years when he groped hopelessly for a unified field theory. Richard Feynman too, was a deep thinker on gravity:

Most of us unfortunately, including most physicists, are not Einstein, Feynman or Hawking.

The difficulty with theoretical physics and questions as fundamental to the order of nature as gravity is that we may be limited in our ability to understand the universe conceptually by the physical, biological, structure of our brains and the scalar level and time frame we inhabit. It is very hard to mentally see outside that box. Our brains can only entertain so many variables or so much complexity at one time and our conceptual imagination is largely influenced by sense perceptions. Mathematics helps us get around our physical limitations as does the processing speed of supercomputers but these crutches themselves refer back to the preferred cognitive avenues of our physical brains.

In thinking about fundamental or overarching phenomena, it is useful to pause and consider that as primates, we may not have been optimized by evolution to easily discern the most significant mechanisms of the physical world when our hominid deep ancestors eluded the apex predators of the Paleolithic Age. With great probability, Verlinde is spectacularly wrong here but his paper, because he is is a credible scientist with an impressive record, is forcing a lot of very smart people to stop and reasses what they know to be true in order to defend it from his heresy – cough…excuse me – his hypothesis 🙂

In doing so, some of them may gain insights of importance that otherwise never might have occurred. Insights that may only be tangentially related to Verlinde’s original idea.

Dissent is the grain of sand that can yield a pearl.

This strikes me as an exceedingly unwise media strategy for General McChrystal:

(AP)  WASHINGTON (AP) – The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan told an interviewer he felt betrayed by the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.An article out this week in “Rolling Stone” magazine depicts Gen. Stanley McChrystal as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration and unable to convince even some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the war.A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides are quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.McChrystal himself is described by an aide as “disappointed” in his first Oval Office meeting with an unprepared President Barack Obama. The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops.“I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.”Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

The profile, titled “The Runaway General” emerged from several weeks of interviews and travel with McChrystal’s tight circle of aides this spring….

Jesus.

If this story sounds eerily familiar, it is.

The general has a reputation as a straight shooter and a workaholic commander who is 100 % committed to his mission. Anyone even casually paying attention to Afghanistan is aware of the strain between McChrystal’s HQ and the US Embassy in Kabul under Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, himself a retired lieutenant general with tours of duty in Afghanistan in charge of state and military building programs. The leaking of a confidential cable from the Ambassaador that was extremely critical of US strategy under McChrystal most likely poisoned their relationship for good ( though the leak could easily have been from State Department, White House or NSC officials eager to engage in slimy intrigue and ingratiate themselves with the MSM, rather than from the Embassy itself).

I also agree that the timetable and resources that McChrystal must labor under have been deliberately mismatched to the strategic objectives by the Obama administration to a degree best described as “asinine”.

That said, frustrated, straight shooting, honest to a fault and zealous Army commanding generals should not be encouraged to vent their grievances on the record to reporters. Especially about their civilian political superiors. Good things are not going to happen.

Still less should their intensely loyal inner circle and brain trust staff officers come across as “A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides ” mocking the Vice-President of the United States. While there’s no shortage of things to mock about Joe Biden, active-duty military officers should not be doing it in major media publications. These are the guys who should be running interference for their boss with the press, not making him look worse.

I have sympathy for General McChrystal. There are people in DC who do not have to be accountable as he does, but possess enough authority to get in his way, demand information, waste his people’s time, leak criticism, impose restrictions or whisper in ears and they do not have to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the results of their machinations. It must be intensely aggravating.

But going out and handing these folks knives ain’t smart.

ADDENDUM:

Danger Room reports McChrystal has issued an apology.

ADDENDUM II.

SWJ has a round-up.

ADDENDUM III.

Rolling Stone – The Runaway General

ADDENDUM IV.

Tom Barnett says this interview is not like what Admiral Fallon did

ADDENDUM V.

Dr. James Joyner is reporting this morning that General McChrystal is out after his meeting with President Obama.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Zen here – some background prior to Cameron’s guest post. As I mentioned previously, Charles, a while back, posted a deeply reflective essay here at ZP and at Leah Farrall’s  All Things Counterterrorism, in response to the unusual dialogue that Farrall, a former Australian counterterrorism official, was having with  Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian strategist of jihad, a sometime critic of al Qaida and an adviser to the Taliban. In other words, al-Masri is an influential voice on “the other side” of what COIN theorists like Mackinlay and Kilcullen call the “globalized insurgency” and a theorist of insurgency himself. After some delay, al-Masri responded to Charles, as Farrall described:

Abu Walid al Masri responds to Charles Cameron

Abu Walid  has responded a letter from Charles Cameron. Abu Walid’s response  to Charles can be found here.  You’ll notice when following the link, that he has a new website.It’s well worth a look. There is also an interesting comment from a reader below Abu Walid’s response to Charles; it’s from “one of the victims of Guantanamo”.

As you’ll see from his website Abu Walid is also engaging in a number of other interesting dialogues at the moment, which I am interested to read as they progress.Charles wrote his letter in response to the dialogue Abu Walid and I had a little while back. For those of you new to the site, you can find this dialogue to the right in the page links section.  The letter from Charles can be found on my blog here.

….These letters may not change anything, but they are important because  in mass media sometimes only the most controversial and polarising views tend to make it into the news.I think person to person contact, especially via mediums like this, can go some way to providing opportunities for all of us to discover or be reminded that there is more than one viewpoint and along with differences there are also similarities. Contact like this humanizes people, and in my book that’s never a bad thing.

With that context in mind, we will now let Charles take it away:

A TRANSLATION of ABU WALID al-MASRI’S REPLY

by Charles Cameron

I asked a native-speaking grad student associate of mine to give me a literal translation of Abu Walid’s response to my post, and then tweaked it to give it a reasonable combination of accuracy and fluency, and my associate has kindly given the result his thumbs up — so what follows is probably fairly close to the sense of Abu Walid’s original.

* 

Is this a return to the Age of Chivalry? — Comments on the Response of Charles Cameron

May 31, 2010

Author: Mustafa Hamed, Abu al-Walid al-Masri

MAFA: The Literature of the Outlaws

Charles Cameron’s words, in his comment on the dialog between myself and Ms. Leah Farrall, were wonderful, both for their humanitarian depth and in their high literary style, which makes it difficult for any writer to follow him. He puts me in something of a dilemma, fearing any comparison that might be made between us in terms of beauty of style or depth and originality of ideas — but in my capacity as one of those adventurous “outlaws”, I will try to contemplate, rather than compete with, his response, since this is what logic and reason call for.

Charles Cameron was deeply in touch with the roots of the problem that the world has (justly or unjustly) called the war on terror: it is a cause that relates to the sanctity of the human individual, and his rights and respect, regardless of any other considerations around which the struggle may revolve.

No one can argue about the importance of peace, or the need all humans have for it, nor can anyone argue that war is not hideous, and universally hated.  And yet wars are still happening, and their scope is even increasing.

And now the West claims: it is terrorism — as if war on the face of the earth were the invention of Bin Laden and al-Qaida — and all this, while many others are arguing ever more forcefully that the opposite is true, that al-Qaida and Bin Laden are the invention of war merchants, and that no one can definitely declare as yet — in an unbiased and transparent way — who caused the events of September 11 and the deaths of three thousand persons.

It is not only the one who pulls the trigger who is the killer, as we know —  the one who set the stage for a crime to be committed, who arranges the theatre, and opens the doors, and lures or hires the one who pulls the trigger is even more responsible. He’s the one, after all, who carries away the spoils of the crime, then chases down the trigger-man and finishes him off — not for the sake of justice, nor for love of humanity, but to hide the evidence of the crime, to erase his own fingerprints, and assassinate the witnesses who could implicate him.

For example: was the execution of Saddam Hussein really about bringing justice? Of course not. They executed him after a travesty of a trial for the most trivial of his crimes. Nobody, however, asked him about his most significant crimes — they killed him before he could admit to them, or name the major partners who brought him to the apex of his power, and provided him with a full range of lethal weaponry including weapons of mass destruction, so he could perform mass murder with confidence in his own impunity.

I personally (and here I speak only for myself, so Ms. Farrall need not get irritated) would have preferred to have Charles Cameron as President of the US and a united Europe and the leader of NATO — then there would have been no wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the problem of terrorism would have ended in minutes, along with the problems in the Middle East, and nuclear militarization, and even those of poverty and pollution. Why? Because not a single one of these problems can be solved except through the logic of humanitarianism, of justice, and love for people and peace, and hatred of oppression and discrimination between people in any form — we are all the creatures of God, and to Him we shall all return.

I am reminded of Richard the Lionheart, who came to lead a big crusade to capture Jerusalem from Muslim hands. The bloody wars he led brought fatigue to everyone and benefited neither the religious or nor the day-to-day interests of either party. Leading the Muslim campaign was Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), King Richard’s peer in courage, chivalry and wisdom.

Both parties finally agreed that Jerusalem should remain in Muslim hands — hands which would guarantee its security and that of its people, and of both the Islamic and Christian sanctuaries, preserving their interests and protecting the sanctuaries of all, in peace.

Thereafter, King Richard retreated from Muslim lands, carrying with him a most favorable impression of the Muslims and of Saladin as he returned to his own country, while leaving a continuing memory of respect and appreciation for himself and his chivalry with Saladin and the Muslims — which is preserved in our history books down to the present day.

It was Mr. Cameron’s spirit of fairness, chivalry and true spirituality that reminded me of King Richard’s character — but sadly, it is very difficult to find a ruler in the west like King Richard, and I find it even more regrettable that Muslims should have even greater difficulty finding among themselves a ruler like Saladin.

This is because things are on the wrong track, and people are not in their rightful positions. The wrong people are in power and leading us, while the best among us are weak and under siege.

No human likes or wants this state of affairs — but are the people who are in control of this planet real human beings? Can we consider those who own 50% of the earth’s wealth human, even though they comprise no more than 2% of the human population?

In my opinion, the situation is much worse than these international statistics suggest. I believe the number of those who rule the world is far fewer, and that they own much more. They are the ones who invest in all kinds of wars wherever, and under whatever name or banner, they may be found. The mention of war translates to these people as an immediate waterfall of gold tumbling into their usurious bank vaults, which hold the world — both leaders and led — by the neck.

I speak here of all wars without exception, whether they be the First and Second World Wars, or the wars in Korea and Vietnam, or the First and Second Gulf Wars, or the Third and Fourth, yet to come — whether it be a war in Afghanistan (to hunt for the “Bin Laden and al-Qaida” mirage) or in Iraq (looking for illusory “weapons of mass destruction”) or in Bosnia, Somalia or Africa — that continent of eternal wars for the sake of gold or oil fields — Africa, that colonized continent of disease, covertly modernized in the labs of the secret services and giant pharmaceutical companies.

I wish we could return to the age of chivalry– of courageous and rightly religious knights — for then wisdom would prevail and peace would spread, and we could leave this age of the brokers and merchants of war behind us.

Muslims always call on God to bless them with a leader such as Saladin , and I think they should also pray for God to bless the West with a ruler such as Richard the Lionheart — because without a Saladin here and a Richard there, the fires of war will continue to blaze. That’s the reason the brokers of wars will not allow the appearance of a Saladdin here, nor a Richard there.

By means of the laws to fight terrorism, the emergency laws, NATO, the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, the various counter-terrorism forces around the world, the CIA and FBI, and the Army and National Guard, the Patriot Act in the US, the jails at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Bagram — and the secret “black sites” and “floating prison ships”– by all these means and many others, they kill and jail and start wars, so that humans (and terrorists) are not threatened by the likes of the two great kings, Saladin and Richard.

Therefore in the situation we find ourselves in now — despite our noble dreams of an age of knighthood and chivalry as an alternative to this age of broker kings — the destiny of all humanity, and even planet earth itself, remains in question. Of course there will be an end to all this someday… but how??… and when?? I do not think any one of us has the answer.

Finally I would like to thank Charles Cameron for his care in writing and commenting, and to express again my thanks to Ms. Leah Farrall, who deserves all the credit for initiating these dialogues.

Signed: Mustafa Hamed, Abu al-Walid al-Masri

H-Diplo, the H-Net listserv for Diplomatic History, has an outstanding set of essays by prominent historians and political scientists on the subject of “Politics and Scholarship” (hat tip to Bruce Kesler and the Warlord Loop):

NOTE TO READERS: I am having some difficulty fixing the links, notably to Jervis and Cumings, due to site problems at H-Diplo so I am going with Phil’s suggestion in the comments and posting a link to the PDF VERSION here.

Commissioned for H-Diplo/ISSF by Robert Jervis, Columbia University

• Introduction by Robert Jervis, Columbia University ( Currently the link is coming up File 404 – I will add an excerpt when it is working)
• Essay by Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins SAIS

….This is a slippery slope, and as academics we should worry about it.  Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to remind ourselves that our policy judgment is likely to be considerably more fallible than our scholarly expertise. Most intelligent people know this, which is why mass letters to the editor by professors protesting or advocating some policy carry so little weight.  By and large, the policy world does not think of professors as being any wiser than any other class, and they are correct to do so.  The ancient distinction between theoretical and prudential wisdom holds as strongly as ever. Humility is not, alas, a common academic virtue, and someone involved in the hurly burly of political discourse should try to make a clear distinction, at least in his or her own mind, about what he knows as a professor, and what he thinks as a citizen or policymaker.  The most troubling area of pseudo-scholarship is likely to be that kind which nominally deals with policy in a scholarly way, but is, in fact, nothing more than a polemic masquerading as something else.

• Essay by Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

….We are told by many people – for example by Nobel scientist E. O. Wilson in his best-selling book Consilience – that the hard sciences and the social sciences are coalescing in the use of mathematical modeling, computers, game theory, and various other methods to finally get to the bottom of what makes human beings tick. I would argue the exact opposite: both the hard and soft sciences are in crisis. From my point of view the social sciences should have seen this crisis coming long ago (in fact many did – long ago, but they did not redefine the disciplines), but much more significant is the turn toward uncertainty in the hard sciences, as Newtonian mechanics, empiricism, and the scientific method show themselves incapable of comprehending the complexities of the physical world.

• Essay by Peter D. Feaver, Duke University

Q: Does being in the minority ever annoy you?A: Yes, some aspects of this minority status are annoying.  For instance, it is annoying that my peers presume that I “have an ideology” whereas they do not.  It is very reminiscent of African-Americans in the academy several decades ago; they were presumed to have “race” and “racially tinged views” whereas Caucasians did not.  For that matter, the racial analogy suggests another curious burden: being assigned the role of token on panels.  Some of my peers believe that a balanced panel on foreign policy is one that has a critique of Democrats from the left along with two shades of Democratic perspective, say center-left and center.  However, most recognize that it would be better if they could find just one person, me, to offer the “whacky conservative view” – here they hope I will represent not just my own actual views but also cover, or be held responsible for, everything to the right.  And this leads to my biggest gripe: feeling obligated to defend, or at least explain, the position of anyone to the right of Joe Biden, because if I don’t then no one will.  Because liberals do not have a monopoly on nonsense, there is plenty of bone-headedness from conservatives and Republicans for my colleagues to highlight and go after.  Often the attacks are legitimate and fair, but when they cross over into caricature and canard I am left with a tough choice: do I inject a clarification or do I let it pass?

• Essay by Charles L. Glaser, The George Washington University

….Instead of this kind of variation, however, what we typically see is stability both across time and across issues that are at most loosely connected.   For example, during the Cold War, hawks and doves rarely changed their assessment of Soviet motives, which had decisive impacts on their policy prescriptions, with hawks favoring many variations of competitive military and political policies and doves favoring none.  Proponents and opponents of ballistic missile defense have rarely changed their assessments of the feasibility of effective defense: proponents have consistently found significantly greater prospects for technically feasible defenses, which they believe would provide substantial strategic advantages; in contrast, opponents have as regularly found that the prospects for  effective defenses have been poor, and worried that these missile defenses would generate strategic dangers whether or not they were effective.  And Cold War hawks were more likely than doves to believe the effective missile defense were feasible, even though their hawkishness stemmed primarily from assessments of Soviet motives, not technology.  Scholars’ overall assessments of the danger posed by nuclear proliferation appear to be stubbornly constant in the face of evolving circumstances and possibilities, reinforcing their established preferences for adopting more or less costly policies in response. 

• Essay by Douglas J. Macdonald, Colgate University

….The scholarly critics’ stance is predicated on a crucial, often unacknowledged, assumption (shared by my American students and their parents): that they themselves are non-ideological, personally and in their analysis of events, though they may hold personal ideological beliefs.   This is even true of many self-identified orthodox Marxists, liberals, socialists, political religionists, realists, and other believers with universalist truth claims or political goals: they personally are not ideologists because what they believe is true, not some metaphysical scheme that only the foolish or the dangerous could believe. 

It is my contention that this assumption of non-ideological pragmatism, or presumed normative detachment, in the critics’ point of view is not sustainable upon examination.  Scholars have found that even in the natural sciences certain beliefs can be held or supported largely because they are congruent with ideological norms, e.g., in liberal societies the assumed symmetrical, random distribution of human intelligence.

• Essay by Tony Smith, Tufts University

Presumably Niebuhr would have seen what so many fail to see still today, that by becoming a “science,” DPT-in conjunction with democratic transition theory and liberal international jurisprudence-blinded American policy makers to many dangers they might otherwise have perceived.  In this respect we might recall how the “Washington Consensus,” the package of ideas behind economic globalization that included deregulation, privatization, and openness, contributed to the blindness that allowed the economic crash of 2008 to occur. In each case, the wounds have been self-inflicted; American hubris has been our own worst enemy. How united the American economics profession seemed at the time and indeed for the most part still today, just as political science seems unwilling to recognize the damage its theorizing underwrote. Democratic Peace Theory, like the Washington Consensus, reminds us of the famous words of John Maynard Keynes:The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

WAR by Sebastian Junger

Received a courtesy review copy of WAR yesterday from the publisher, due entirely to the kind offices of Kanani.

Read the first 50 pages this afternoon and found it it interesting because as a book, it exists on the opposite end of the spectrum from Mackinlay and Kilcullen. Where the former are giving a panoramic or telescopic view of COIN as strategic-operational-grand tactics, the author of WAR, journalist Sebastian Junger, is using a microscope to show COIN in the Korengal valley, Afghanistan as seen by an Army platoon, squad and individual soldier. Maybe an electron microscope would be a better analogy. Gritty.

Will write a full review when I am finished. If any active duty or veteran readers were in Korengal or Afghanistan or have read WAR and care to sound off in the comment section, you are cordially encouraged to do so.

Junger is also part of the documentary film project, RESTREPO, which he personally financed.