Space - The Final Frontier

South Africa is at present a space faring nation, having joined this exclusive club with the launch of a small satellite built in Stellenbosch in the late 1990s. We could have been there earlier, was it not for the unfortunate impact of political change on our scientific capability. We were close to having our own launch capability as well, but today not much of that expertise remains in the country.

And now, through a weird coming-together of events, we might also forfeit our capability to develop and build our own satellites. The details are messy and shrouded in controversy. My concern is with the people that dedicated their lives to this dream, those that went without sleep, without salaries sometimes, to make the deep dreams of South Africans to also be counted a reality. That dream is slipping away from us, again. This past few weeks had been some of the worst days of my life, leaving my physically ill. Helpless in the face of bureaucratic process I had to listen to people saying that maybe we do not need this capability. The message is clear; we are not top class as a nation.

I do not and will not subscribe to such nonsense. It is irresponsible to have bureaucrats decide what we may dream as a nation. The audacity is too much to handle!

Regardless of the outcome of all the debate and counting of rands and cents, I will continue to strive for the stars. I know that there are more of us out there. We must not be quiet about this. We must insist on being seen, on being counted, on contributing to the knowledge and achievements of humanity. We must never resign to just making a living, to just worry about our immediate needs, soulless and aimlessly just crawling from womb to grave, always asking for hand-outs, hoping for something to come to us for free!

Let us take what will come to us over the next few weeks and turn the adversity into a competitive edge. If we scrape through, let us decide never to get this close to disaster again. If we take a knock, let’s gather the pieces together and try again, from stone to stars, via the staircase of smart work.

Zen, the complex and xenophobia

Alan Watts, a Zen student (I guess he would forgive me for calling him a student), says: “Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so, perhaps, are the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.”

This is the distinct feeling I get when reading about and listening to the explanations of complexity and emergence. Some would have me believe that we can design for a specific emerging property, whilst others would have it that true emergence must be surprising. This duality arises, it seems, from the inability we have to untangle highly connected things. This is absolutely no good when we try to make sense of our world today. As a scientist of this age, I am perturbed by our inability to come to grips with these things. It is as if the path has arrived at too many forks all at once, as if time is howling around us, like a vicious wind, dragging us towards a catastrophic end. In mathematical terms, it seems as if we have arrived at one of those points on a logistic map where everything suddenly become chaotic, where the slightest change in the dynamics around us, ramps the whole system to another level of unpredictable behaviour. The end of certainty, for sure, Prof Prigogine!

Our divide and conquer approaches seem to fail us when we try to make sense of the xenophobia in our country, for example. Some of us quickly look for other theories, like a mysterious third force, that is driving the killing of people all over the place. Some blame it, predictably, on the past. Whatever the driving force, we cannot seem to analyze the problem down to its constituent levers, ready to be pushed and pulled into a new and better configuration. We assume (realistically) that poverty is normal in a society of free traders, but sometimes something skews the system and poverty becomes an overriding feature of a society. Worse, the gap between the poorest and the richest becomes massive. The worst case scenario is when those rich few are actually also those in charge of the society and were voted into that position by the poorest people in an attempt to escape the poverty. Again, it sounds simple, maybe too simple. One step further, and we can imagine these rulers using their positions to “direct” the society to believe certain things, to distract them from the reality of their miserable existence, or to direct them towards sinister goals to preserve their power base. This has got nothing to do with xenophobia, but it makes for a very nice cover.

Shown below is the very deterministic equation to generate a logistic map, and below it the map showing the bifurcation forks and the high density of possible states of the system to the right.

If we are somehow in such a chaotic state, what equations are driving our state, where do we go next, or will the system have to explode or implode necessarily before we can have relative stability again? Is this what revolutions are all about? Was our “managed” revolution to come from Apartheid to democracy just a fork in the road where both choices actually lead to disaster? Or was this path chosen even before Apartheid? Was it chosen maybe a couple of thousand years ago? I cannot imagine that it is possible to know the answer, but I am willing to bet that it is also not as simple as blaming it on the history of the past 1000 years or the past 50 years or just to blame it on poverty alone.

Photo from iStockPhoto.com (licensed to Jan Roodt - do not copy this image)

Arcadia

Arcadia – that place of the Golden Age, the domain of Pan, where incorruptible life emerges as if by magic, and the name of a play by Tom Stoppard. In Arcadia Stoppard toys with the idea that the concepts of chaos theory could have been discovered in the early 1800’s. He develops the ideas of chaos theory through one of the main characters and the play asks some of the eternal questions again: truth, evidence, what are these, by what qualities do we recognise these?

For me the key is in the next quote from Act 1, Scene 4: it sums up my experience of the world since 1981: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you knew is wrong.” Newtonian certainty finally gets the boot when Prigogine publishes The End of Certainty. Gleick publishes Chaos and Hofstadter wins me over to the concepts of holism (first coined by Jan Smuts) when I read Gödel, Escher and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid after my mathematics professor asks me to take the rest of the semester off to read it (we both gave up on me for a year while I considered what was really important). I return a year later to mathematics, applied mathematics and physics, ready to suffer through the linear and the deterministic, just to get to Schrödinger, Einstein and Planck, to name a few. I was never the same, always keen to work with uncertainty, keen to understand why we cannot predict some things so well, keen to model these complexities.

These days I bask in the Golden Age of our information age discoveries. I marvel at the work of Cilliers, Alexander, Wheatley, Strogatz, Capra, to name a few. All are trying to make sense of complexity and emergence. The only black spot in my Arcadia is the current system of learning in schools that claims to prepare children for this new reality.

It does this, it claims, by expecting of kids to re-invent the wheel, to discover pi, to discover the structure of language, and a miriad of other things that are typically part of the accumulated body of knowledge of humanity. How many of these poor souls will suddenly develop into a Derrida, an Einstein or even Michelangelo? All I know is that this leads to a lot of confused people, people not ready to absorb and question the merits of the thinkers of our time, basically shuting them out from the new age of wonderment. “When almost everything you knew is wrong” has a premsie built into it: we knew something that we took for truth and we discover a new truth to replace it through our keen analysis and synthesis of the current knowledge base. We sometimes walk away from our truth, deliberately discovering beyond ourselves. But by no means can we attain this without walking the path first.

The path of Zen is often described along the lines of the quest of searching for an animal, finding it, taming it and harnessing it towards fullfilment of our needs, only to discover that the animal “is not”. I leave you with that thought and the discovery of Tung-Shan: “The man made of wood starts to sing. The woman made of stone starts to dance. This cannot happen through logic.”

To our children: Arcadiae vias peregrinentur!

Flying

Those that know me well will know that I just love flying. It is one of the best ways to get from A to B in a hurry – or it used to be. These days getting to an airport and onto the plane might take as long as your plane journey. When flying to Durban from Johannesburg, it takes about 40 minutes to get to the airport, another 40 minutes to get airborne as a minimum and then about 20 minutes to get to the car rental. The flight time is about 60 minutes. What a pity.
But getting onto the plane for the flight has a certain magic to it for me. The seats, the food, the magazines, all of it somehow reminds me of my dream to see all sorts of far-away places. You get out of the tube with wings, walk onto another continent or island and you are suddenly part of a new culture. The air is different, the daylight casts a different shadow and even the people look different. There are different smells as well.
I remember my first visit to New York in 1992. After a long and tiring flight from Johannesburg to London and then to New York, and after a taxi ride that took forever, I finally found myself in a small room in an even tinier hotel just off Times Square. As I later walked out into the cold night air I was aware of a scent I never smelt before: I soon located the source, a Wendy’s, about a block away! My first real introduction to VERY fast food was scary to say the least.
Many years later, in Linnköping in Sweden, I had a sudden sensation of being where I belong. Walking through some snow back to my hotel after a stroll around town, I looked at the people cycling past and my soul screamed out for being part of that place. Where I have always felt that I was “home” when I walked out of the airport at Johannesburg after a long overseas flight, this time was different. I walked off the plane and felt sorrow for having to return. The smells and scents were familiar, but it was not mine anymore.
Every trip has added to my life, enriching me and convincing me that not everything about globalisation is bad. Those that fear the world and the currents of change will be washed away. Those governments that put up barriers to the free flow of people and skill will suffer for it. The people that are fanatic about preserving their cultures and languages will lose it in the hugeness of the diversity out there. We must learn to carry culture with us, in our hearts, and to enrich it with experience. What is culture today was new a century ago.
But back to airplanes: have you ever thought about those fantastic machines? Which one is or was your favourite? I always loved flying in a Boeing 727. It was such a novel design. It was fast! It was quiet inside! It was the mark of “far away” for me. I like the 747 too, and the 737 is great, but the 727 stands for me as the icon of the new age. Yes, I know about the other planes, the Comet, the McDonald Douglas machines and today the oh-so uninspiring Airbus aircraft. Anyway, I hope you will be going somewhere exotic soon and that you will think about the marvels of modern technology while you do. I’m going to Italy (Rome) soon for the first time and then I’m off to Stockholm for a couple of days. I’m so looking forward to the trip.
For the aircraft fanatics, go visit http://www.airliners.net/ . The picture at the top is from a great photographer in Australia, David Morell. Go visit him at http://www.davidmorrell.com/index.cfm.