Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: world-building

  • That humans quest for cosmic dawn

    From ‘Cosmic dawn: the search for the primordial hydrogen signal’, Physics World, November 18, 2025:

    The EDGES instrument is a dipole antenna, which resembles a ping-pong table with a gap in the middle. It is mounted on a large metal groundsheet, which is about 30 × 30 m. Its ground-breaking observation was made at a remote site in western Australia, far from radio frequency interference.

    The “observation”:

    Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. As neutral hydrogen atoms change states, they can emit or absorb photons. This spectral transition, which can be stimulated by radiation, produces an emission or absorption radio wave signal with a wavelength of 21 cm. To find out what happened during that early universe, astronomers are searching for these 21 cm photons that were emitted by primordial hydrogen atoms. … In 2018 the [EDGES collaboration] hit the headlines when it claimed to have detected the global 21 cm signal (Nature 555 67).

    It will always be fascinating that a setup as deceptively simple as this one enables Earthlings to acquire information from distant reaches of the cosmos — the cosmos!— and from a time called the cosmic dawn. This is to me one of the great achievements of science, in particular scientists’ ability to link some information to specific sources in definitive ways. When you learn more, you realise where the lines between what you do and don’t know lie, at increasing resolution; about how you can and can’t interpret knowledge; and how to acquire more knowledge of increasing quality. That’s how a simple setup, one that can be transported on a small truck on a small planet in one galaxy in some part of the universe, allows us to learn about the universe as a whole.

    I’ve been awed by certain advances in materials science and quantum technologies for the same reason. A good example is nitrogen vacancy centres. Take four carbon atoms, link them together in a tetrahedral shape, make millions of copies of this ‘unit cell’, and you get diamond. If in some of the tetrahedra you replace one carbon atom with a nitrogen atom and dislodge one of the neighbouring carbon atoms, you get a nitrogen vacancy centre. And in this centre, thanks to the relative arrangement of atoms around it, the electrons have a quantum spin that’s extremely sensitive to magnetic fields. For added measure the centre responds with red light if you shine green light on it when the quantum spin is excited by a field. Et voila: you have a powerful magnetic field detector that’s already miniaturised and with a convenient optical readout. But how did physicists get here?

    They did by starting off studying why diamonds are different colours. They found that when they took a clear, transparent diamond and hit it with high-energy electrons or neutrons in a particle accelerator, the diamond would turn green or bluish. Then when they heated the irradiated diamonds to 600º C, the green colour shifted into a pinkish purple or deep red. Just as scientists could interpret data collected by the ping-pong-table-sized antenna to possibly be radio waves from the early universe, scientists understood these tests to mean the carbon atoms in the diamond lattice could be knocked off and replaced with nitrogen atoms. In 1965, a South African researcher named L. du Preez found that when his team irradiated a diamond with nitrogen in it and heated it, the material seemed to emit radiation of 637 nm wavelength. In the 1970s, Gordon Davies and M.F. Hamer in the UK found that when they squeezed this diamond, the light it emitted split and shifted, proving the defect had a specific axis. Finally, in the 1990s, Jörg Wrachtrup and others found that these ‘defects’ had a magnetic property that could be controlled with microwaves and ‘read’ using laser light.

    You learn something, you learn how to apply it to make a tool, use the tool to develop a technique, use the technique to detect something that you couldn’t before, use what you learn to hone the next tool, develop new techniques, and discover even more. Computer scientist Étienne Fortier-Dubois’s ‘Historical Tech Tree’ visualisation offers a captivating view of this knowledge loop through history. However, what it doesn’t depict, and what most histories of science and technology focused on the technic don’t depict, is crucial: the value of the knowledge loop is determined almost entirely by how it interacts with societies and vice versa.

    As technologies mature, some discoveries seem to become almost inevitable but which ones do see the light of day depends on power. In a 1922 article in Political Science Quarterly, the sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas described 148 major inventions and discoveries that two or more people had made independently, arguing that culture and technology actually co-evolve. Some famous examples from history include calculus (Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz), evolution by natural selection (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace), the discovery of oxygen (Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine Lavoisier), and the telephone (Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell). On the other hand, scientists worked out public-key cryptography inside Britain’s signals intelligence establishment in the early 1970s but remained officially unacknowledged for that until the government declassified it in 1997. Similarly and effective antiretroviral therapy for HIV existed by the mid-1990s but for years remained concentrated among richer countries and elites in practice because patent, pricing, and political pressure choked off generic competition and access.

    Some of the most consequential technical systems were also incubated in secrecy and under pressure, showing that states and firms can concentrate talent and money in ways that a ‘republic of letters’ can’t — exemplified by the military-industrial complex in the post-war US — and still have the same outcomes. These settings have the same knowledge loop but the state has fenced it off from society at large, whether by classifying it or, as is often the case in India, by structurally weakening the means to access it. To use a different example: the American writer Charles Fort famously said, “A steam engine comes when it is steam engine time”. The more important question however is how “steam engine time” itself arises: when the corresponding supply chains, capital, geopolitical competition, profit, surveillance, and labour regulations, among other things, are in place.

    (Aside: Fort’s comment also reveals a well-known problem with world-building in the sci-fi and fantasy genres of literature. The British writer M. John Harrison called it the “great clomping foot of nerdism”, an expression with which I’ve taken offence more than once, but over time I’ve come to discern a particular problem — one that this post allows me to articulate clearerly: if you world-build a world in which steam engines appear without the requisite social and cultural conditions, you’re not doing it right. That, for all its focus on the technic, would indeed be a great clomping foot.)

    In order to facilitate such scientific and technological progress, then, a human society needs to get itself on and then stay on the path of learning, investing, researching, and maturing knowledge and technologies. It needs to facilitate that combination of availing scientists the freedom to ask questions and the resources to answer them, over and over — and it needs to develop the social, economic, and political conditions to apply the outcomes of that loop efficiently for the better of society, without entrenching existing inequities or creating new ones. The latter is very important because societies generally don’t stay on that path by consensus but by so using coercive instruments like budgets, patents, labour policing, and bargaining with other countries.

    In the end a potent technique can be born in a cramped corner of human society — whether a lab or a monopoly — but culture matters most for whether it spreads, who controls it, who gets to benefit from it, and, eventually, what kind of change it leads to in turn. It’s difficult not to return to what now seems like the absurdity of the ping-pong-table-sized antenna bolted to a groundsheet in a quiet patch of Earth, a modest platform from which humans are trying piece back together a time when there were no planets, no eyes, no archives, just hydrogen and the universe’s first pinpricks of light. The achievement isn’t only that we can sense something so ancient but that we can justify that we’re hearing it, step by step, against noise as much as self-deception.

  • The mad world

    Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

    What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

    One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

    But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

    … [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

    He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

    Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

    But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?1

    1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

  • The calculus of creative discipline

    Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.

    Once I’m awake and have had my mug of tea, and once I’m done checking Twitter, I can quote these words of M. John Harrison from memory: not because they’re true – I don’t believe they are – but because they rankle. I haven’t read any writing of Harrison’s, I can’t remember the names of any of his books. Sometimes I don’t remember his name even, only that there was this man who uttered these words. Perhaps it is to Harrison’s credit that he’s clearly touched a nerve but I’m reluctant to concede anymore than this.

    His (partial) quote reflects a narrow view of a wider world, and it bothers me because I remain unable to extend the conviction that he’s seeing only a part of the picture to the conclusion that he lacks imagination; as a writer of not inconsiderable repute, at least according to Wikipedia, I doubt he has any trouble imagining things.

    I’ve written about the virtues of world-building before (notably here), and I intend to make another attempt in this post; I should mention what both attempts, both defences, have in common is that they’re not prescriptive. They’re not recommendations to others, they’re non-generalisable. They’re my personal reasons to champion the act, even art, of world-building; my specific loci of resistance to Harrison’s contention. But at the same time, I don’t view them – and neither should you – as inviolable or as immune to criticism, although I suspect this display of a willingness to reason may not go far in terms of eliminating subjective positions from this exercise, so make of it what you will.

    There’s an idea in mathematical analysis called smoothness. Let’s say you’ve got a curve drawn on a graph, between the x- and y-axes, shaped like the letter ‘S’. Let’s say you’ve got another curve drawn on a second graph, shaped like the letter ‘Z’. According to one definition, the S-curve is smoother than the Z-curve because it has fewer sharp edges. A diligent high-schooler might take recourse through differential calculus to explain the idea. Say the Z-curve on the graph is the result of a function Z(x) = y. If you differentiate Z(x) where ‘x’ is the point on the x-axis where the Z-curve makes a sharp turn, the derivative Z'(x) has a value of zero. Such points are called critical points. The S-curve doesn’t have any critical points (except at the ends, but let’s ignore them); L-, and T-curves have one critical point each; P- and D-curves have two critical points each; and an E-curve has three critical points.

    With the help of a loose analogy, you could say a well-written story is smooth à la an S-curve (excluding the terminal points): it it has an unambiguous beginning and an ending, and it flows smoothly in between the two. While I admire Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series for many reasons, its first instalment is like a T-curve, where three broad plot-lines abruptly end at a point in the climax that the reader has been given no reason to expect. The curves of the first three books of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series resemble the tangent function (from trigonometry: tan(x) = sin(x)/cosine(x)): they’re individually somewhat self-consistent but the reader is resigned to the hope that their beginnings and endings must be connected at infinity.

    You could even say Donald Trump’s presidency hasn’t been smooth at all because there have been so many critical points.

    Where world-building “literalises the urge to invent” to Harrison, it spatialises the narrative to me, and automatically spotlights the importance of the narrative smoothness it harbours. World-building can be just as susceptible to non-sequiturs and deus ex machinae as writing itself, all the way to the hubris Harrison noticed, of assuming it gives the reader anything to do, even enjoy themselves. Where he sees the “clomping foot of nerdism”, I see critical points in a curve some clumsy world-builder invented as they went along. World-building can be “dull” – or it can choose to reveal the hand-prints of a cave-dwelling people preserved for thousands of years, and the now-dry channels of once-heaving rivers that nurtured an ancient civilisation.

    My principal objection to Harrison’s view is directed at the false dichotomy of writing and world-building, and which he seems to want to impose instead of the more fundamental and more consequential need for creative discipline. Let me borrow here from philosophy of science 101, specifically of the particular importance of contending with contradictory experimental results. You’ve probably heard of the replication crisis: when researchers tried to reproduce the results of older psychology studies, their efforts came a cropper. Many – if not most – studies didn’t replicate, and scientists are currently grappling with the consequences of overturning decades’ worth of research and research practices.

    This is on the face of it an important reality check but to a philosopher with a deeper view of the history of science, the replication crisis also recalls the different ways in which the practitioners of science have responded to evidence their theories aren’t prepared to accommodate. The stories of Niels Bohr v. classical mechanics, Dan Shechtman v. Linus Pauling and the EPR paradox come first to mind. Heck, the philosophers Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend are known for their criticisms of each other’s ideas on different ways to rationalise the transition from one moment containing multiple answers to the moment where one emerges as the favourite.

    In much the same way, the disciplined writer should challenge themself instead of presuming the liberty to totter over the landscape of possibilities, zig-zagging between one critical point and the next until they topple over the edge. And if they can’t, they should – like the practitioners of good science – ask for help from others, pressing the conflict between competing results into the service of scouring the rust away to expose the metal.

    For example, since June this year, I’ve been participating on my friend Thomas Manuel’s initiative in his effort to compose an underwater ‘monsters’ manual’. It’s effectively a collaborative world-building exercise where we take turns to populate different parts of a large planet with sizeable oceans, seas, lakes and numerous rivers with creatures, habitats and ecosystems. We broadly follow the same laws of physics and harbour substantially overlapping views of magic, but we enjoy the things we invent because they’re forced through the grinding wheels of each other’s doubts and curiosities, and the implicit expectation of one creator to make adequate room for the creations of the other.

    I see it as the intersection of two functions: at first, their curves will criss-cross at a point, and the writers must then fashion a blending curve so a particle moving along one can switch to the other without any abruptness, without any of the tired melodrama often used to mask criticality. So the Kularu people are reminded by their oral traditions to fight for their rivers, so the archaeologists see through the invading Gezmin’s benevolence and into the heart of their imperialist ambitions.