Selected reviews of books about science, 1992-2000  
Reviews by Damien Broderick

ARE WE ALONE? Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life

by Paul Davies, Penguin, 109pp

ABOUT TIME: Einstein's Unfinished Business

by Paul Davies, Viking, 316pp

TIME MACHINES

by Paul Nahin, American Institute of Physics/OUP, 408pp

THE MONKEY WARS

by Deborah Blum, OUP, 306pp

KANZI: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind

by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, Doubleday, 299pp

The world is weird beyond belief. Consider this `quantum eraser' parable, freely adapted from recent laser-beam experiments.

            Two Hells Angels chapters barrel together down the highway. The Ladies Auxiliary ride Harleys too, none of this sexist pillion rubbish. At a crossroads, the bikers split up. Blue-helmet gang heads north in a long column. Red riders stream south. Later, each gang splits further, according to gender. Blue and Red women take northward roads, Blue and Red guys ride south.

            The women's roads dogleg, eventually intersect. Red and Blue streams merge, speeding under a traffic camera. (Meanwhile, the guys roar south, blend, are never heard from again.)  The camera snaps a single, slow shot of the mingling women. It shows only a purple blur.

            Now re-run the event, but block one of the south-bound roads. Men's Blue convoy stops dead. Instantly, hundreds of kilometres away, each female group mysteriously closes up tight, shoulder to shoulder. At the intersection, they miss each other. This time, the camera records only the bunched Blue women's pack.

            The Quantum Hells Angels women knew nothing about the men's route(s), so how could the roadblock have influenced them? Worse, if the block is now re-opened so the guys meet up after all, the women riders instantly fall back into two long, spread-out lines. If they merge, the camera will again record a purple blur--but only so long as both men's groups ride south together, indistinguishable.

            It now gets really weird. Re-run the ride again, but snap the photo of the women before before you've decided whether to throw up a roadblock. If you later choose to keep the men separated, the shot--exposed prior to your decision, but developed after it--will show only one cluster of women, Red or Blue, bunched shoulder to shoulder. As Paul Davies puts it starkly, `the record of the past' (that is, the photo of the female riders) `remains not only incomplete but undecided' until we subsequently choose to let the men merge or keep them apart.

            In the actual quantum realm of photons (particles of light) zapping through crystals and beam-splitters, it's still worse. In the reality my parable tries to simplify, the split photons only go north or south--but the phantom routes not taken persist to influence the actual journey. Several different versions of history become, as it were, entangled. Most scarily, in experiments successfully run by Raymond Chiao and colleagues at Berkeley (discussed in About Time), it turns out we can select universes after the event, thereby affecting the earlier outcome. Can we alter the past? Not quite--but actions taken now can serve to help determine the reality that was at a past moment.

            Paul Davies (winner of the $1.4 million Templeton Prize for progress in religion) charts familiar and unfamiliar popular science terrain in his latest books, one on the prospects of finding life beyond the earth (NASA is currently searching the radio skies, starting in Australia), the other a long rambling conversation about spacetime in our post-Einstein universe. Time, as he shows in his amiable way, is not the simplest thing. While its very current might possibly go into reverse, that metaphor of time `flowing' is highly dubious anyway. Provocatively, it might even become feasible to receive messages from the future--a topic also covered extensively in engineer Paul Nahin's useful volume, from the lofty American Institute of Physics--or travel into the past, given suitably exotic materials.

            What all this implies is appalling: `The commonsense idea that there is an objective reality "out there all the time" is a fallacy. When reality and knowledge are entangled, the question of when something becomes real cannot be answered in a straightforward manner.' Today's physics, like the universe, is weird beyond scepticism.

            Is there other intelligent life in the galaxy worrying about such bizarre issues? Searching for alien minds is a challenge, Davies tells us, to strict Darwinism. Recent advances in complexity theory suggest that realms `at the edge of chaos' support emergent self-organisation, a happy advance over traditional random or slam-dancing models of evolution. If these maverick accounts prove fruitful, the chances that the universe is rich with conscious life are considerably improved.

            Meanwhile, we've seen revived hopes that non-human intelligence is already here on earth. Not computers, which are still terribly stupid and will remain so for decades. I mean our evolutionary near-cousins, the apes.

            Chomskyan linguists like Steven Pinker, whose splendid The Language Instinct I recommended recently, maintain that attempts to teach sign language or computerised lexical codes to chimps and other apes are doomed, because they did not share our eccentric evolutionary history. Human brains and other cultural organs, and the species-specific genes that dictate them, are precisely what make us volubly human and them merely clever apes. Certainly the evidence put forward by primatologists such as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been deconstructed as selective, wishful at best.

            Two new studies of simian minds, and the vile things people do to them, poignantly confront that orthodoxy. Scientists, like the rest of us, really are bastards sometimes, and the self-interest shaping their professional disciplines shields them from knowing it. In 1986, animal rights activists broke into a US AIDS-research lab where infected monkeys and chimps were caged in literally inhuman (if clean) conditions. Roger Fouts and Jane Goodall, famous chimpanzee specialists, visited the nightmarish site.

            `"They had these chimps in metal boxes. One wasn't even rocking any more" [Fouts reported to Pulitzer-winner Deborah Blum]. "It was like those children you see in Somalia, that blank look... And the vet said, `See, she's not screaming', and he told the tech to take her out. `See, she's just fine.' They were holding her like she was a typewriter and she was just lying there".'

            The official observed cheerfully `that they must be reassured by what they had seen'. Goodall simply wept. Of course, one weeps as painfully when one's beloved pet dies, and nobody believes dogs or cats have language-level consciousness. But I wept, too, reading this tale of ordinary atrocity, and of other sickening mutilations (however well intended their medical purposes) of animal minds and bodies.

            Savage-Rumbaugh and her husband Duane Rumbaugh have studied both common and bonobo chimps, notably young Kanzi, for many years. In observations and experiments, they conclude that such primates can classify lexigrams (for example, into `food' versus `tool' groups), zestfully play computer games using screen and joystick (as can rhesus macaque monkeys) and, arguably, employ grammatical constructions. These readable accounts by Blum and Savage-Rumbaugh press upon one's complacency and human chauvinism. They might well bring your blood to the boil at the heedless cruelties of--it has to be admitted in this case--stupidly reductionist science.

FROM FAUST TO STRANGELOVE: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature

by Roslynn D. Haynes, Johns Hopkins University Press, 417pp

CRACKING THE CODE: Redesigning the Living World

by David Suzuki and Joseph Levine, Allen & Unwin, 280pp

AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE

by John Archibald Wheeler, American Institute of Physics, 371pp

THE PLANETS: Portraits of New Worlds

by Nigel Henbest, Penguin, 208pp

I ran into Gareth Evans at a birthday party, which isn't really the place to discuss horrifying secrets. Still, I took the chance to pass along a report from a CSIRO genetics expert, who informed me recently that `the Russians are working on ethno-specific viruses'. Our Foreign Minister (and candidate Secretary-General of the UN) seemed taken aback by this news.

            Imagine a virus tailored to kill only those peoples of the former Soviet Union whose genetic specificity overlaps conveniently with, say, their cultural adherence to Islam. (This is precisely what the Russian genetic engineers are said to be working on.) Imagine white racist militias in the USA releasing a deadly virus that locked on to people with those genes which put extra melanin in the skin. Imagine Japanese cultists letting loose not just toxic gas but a pandemic targeting everyone without the gene for epicanthic folds to their eyelids. (Maverick scientist Sir Fred Hoyle believes AIDS is just such a military designer virus, escaped or set free as a trial run.)

            University of NSW English professor Roslynn Haynes tells us that William Blake, more than 200 years ago, wrote satirically of a chemist, Inflammable Gass, who boasts, `I have got a bottle of air that would spread a Plague!' Little wonder, then, that most people find science and scientists uncomfortable, even frightening. Yet the power and relevance of science, according to polls, are typically evicted from awareness, like a viper curled at the end of the bed one must sleep in.

            Haynes rightly notes that the `message from literature would seem to be that a society produces the scientists it deserves.' Drawing on a vast body of fiction, especially in English and German, over the last half millennium, she shows that it does more than reflect what everyone already knows. Literature--and for once that includes science fiction, although somewhat grudgingly--`allows the exploration of what is perceived only dimly... the subversive anxieties that can't be directly stated'.

            Dr Faust is an alchemist, it's true, but his hubristic over-reaching and damnation, from Marlowe and Goethe on, has held a double message. To medieval pieties, his search for all knowledge--and, beyond that, for an intuitive drenching in the universe--was merely wicked. For Renaissance artists and Romantics, he became a tragic hero. Today, the scientist is seen more often as a nerd (a `foolish virtuoso'), or as the helpless victim of unleashed power. SF, by contrast, tends to construct a heroic adventurer, even an idealist. Haynes explores these variations on a theme with rather more hope than her misleading title suggests. Actually she ranges `from Faust to Shevek', via Frankenstein and Strangelove. Shevek is Ursula K. Le Guin's great anarchist physicist in The Dispossessed, a wonderful utopia that retains its imaginative power 20 years on.

            Suzuki and Levine lead us through a scientific and technological revolution that was barely begun when Le Guin wrote her novel. Genetic engineering is precisely the discipline that might dissolve our world with the final `ethnic cleansing' solution. It could also remedy many intractable medical conditions (as it has begun to do), allowing damaged DNA to be repaired or bypassed.

            The book supplements a TV series. Certainly it contains far more detail than one could absorb from the box, but uses media devices to convey its difficult ideas. We meet specific patients (who, irritatingly, tend to be `vibrant, raven-haired', to `erupt with laughter', to `battle' cancers which `claim lives'), and individual researchers in their natural lab settings. All of this, despite the pap, eases the reader into a realm of oncogenes, suppressor cells, T-helper and T-killer cells, CFTR protein, amyloid precursors, alpha-1-antitrypsin genes, and so on. It is enthralling and important, because from this mix of discourse and practice will emerge the altered bodies (human and otherwise) and minds of the twenty-first century.

            Among other useful tips, you will learn what cancer actually is, and why (paradoxically) it afflicts those tissues that constantly repair themselves--colon, uterus, milk ducts, the skin on both the outside and inside of our bodies. Cancer, one might say, is the downside of immortality. Which means that mastery of the cellular repair system that goes haywire in carcinoma might be only a few short steps from drugs for longevity. I hope the process can be retro-fitted when it comes on line--I want my hair back, and my back back, for that matter.

            If understanding mortality and corruption seems a bigger bite than we poor humans are likely to chew and swallow, John Archibald Wheeler's life quest is even more astonishing. Wheeler is 84, and with Niels Bohr figured out how quantum physics explains nuclear fission. He taught Richard Feynman and helped elucidate quantum electrodynamics, the theory of light and matter. Decades later he helped coin the term `black hole', and today he speaks to the Sante Fe Institute about complexity and the need to derive `it from bit'.

            This curiously gnomic task places Wheeler, one of the century's greatest physicists, in an opposite camp from the better known Stephen Hawking and Murray Gell-Mann. He wishes to derive existence itself from the quantum, that smallest of all `its', or things, which is simultaneously the most elementary `bit', or item of information. Despite his detestation of mysticism and what he calls `pathological science' (for example, parapsychology), Wheeler claims that the entire universe is brought into reality and sustained by `participatory observation'--not by consciousness, but by `registration and amplification' of pivotal quantum-scale events.

            Since there are clearly not enough observers to do this trick just now (even if we add in all the mice), the universe today is being crystallised by observers in the future, in the 50 billion years awaiting the cosmos before the Big Crunch melts everything down again. Unlike Paul Davies, who thinks that the laws of physics precede spacetime and hence point to some kind of deity, Wheeler thinks the laws themselves are just a statistical assembly of quantum effects at the smallest scale. We know that heat is like this--it's just the swarming of atoms. So, too, Wheeler tells us, `There were no gears and pinions, no Swiss watchmakers to put things together, not even a pre-existing plan'. The world is not a machine built on law, but `self-synthesised'. It is an extraordinary and dazing vision.

            Whatever its source, however its sinews are strung, the universe that emerged from the Big Bang and built itself into difference and endless variety is a joy fit for the delectation of a Faust (or a Shevek). Nigel Henbest's striking `portraits of new worlds' brings together a batch of recent images of our solar system, artistic fruit of science's hunger for knowledge, and they are very beautiful. His text adds the hard facts behind the lovely images.

GALEN'S PROPHECY: Temperament in Human Nature

by Jerome Kagan, Basic Books/HarperCollins, 376pp

DESCARTES' ERROR: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

by Antonio R. Damasio, Picador, 312pp

SCHRÖDINGER'S KITTENS: And the Search for Reality

by John Gribbin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 261pp

DARK WHITE: Aliens, Abductions, and the UFO Obsession

by Jim Schnabel, Penguin, 304pp

Although the Greek physician Galen got much of it wrong, his theories of physiology and anatomy ruled Western medicine for more than a thousand years. He's best known for his notion of the four humours--black and yellow bile, phlegm and blood--whose inherited dominance determined the patient's temperament: melancholic or choleric, phlegmatic or sanguine, or one of five mixed types.

            The last living adherents of this quaintly old-fashioned doctrine were surely the teaching Brothers at my dismal school in the early 1960s, but it's having an unexpected comeback. For decades, psychology taught that temperament, along with ability, was not innate but created by our experience of the world. What's more, mind and personality were akin to the telegraph or the computer. Sloshy, mucky humoral fluids were rather... de trop.

            A few years ago, neurotransmitters made the big time. Brains and bodies are filled with chemical messengers, peptides, GABA, corticotropin releasing hormone and a hundred other tiny droplets that go gloop in the night. While logic circuits do crunch away, they run as much on chemistry as on electric currents. And while our cortical and limbic circuits get tuned in an individual fashion, they tend to bunch into a few reliable categories, surprisingly close to Galen's humours. Kagan, a notable Harvard psychology professor, maps recent research into temperament and its strong heritability. His team's results, for all their nuance and circumspection, will stir political passions.

            He reports good evidence that our feelings are organised in standard ways from earliest infancy, although styles of upbringing may skew the way we act out those feelings. Some 15 percent of Caucasian babies studied were shy, timid or fearful, and these Kagan dubs inhibited. They tended to have quite specific physical characteristics: narrow faces, pale eyes, tall, thin, allergic bodies. Brown-eyed, smiling, fearless, robust uninhibited children made up 30 percent. The rest fell somewhere between. (Chinese-American babies tended to be more inhibited.) Subtle new instruments and careful experiments endorse this pattern, and help explain the many acquired and hard-wired factors that build the profiles of temperament. Dominant activity in the left frontal brain relates to calm happiness, in the right with fear and sadness; the right rear lobes govern emotional intensity, whether distressed or joyful.

            Essentially, temperament seems to be `a family of states' organised around the level of reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn is under the control of the amygdala, a part of the deep brain. High reactives are jumpy and reserved: worriers. Low reactives are extroverted, cheerful, fearless: warriors (or thugs). Kagan's study is vastly more supple than any outline can convey, enlivened with eye-opening case studies.

            But are mere feelings all that important? In the age of economic and other rationalisms, isn't it rather soppy and snaggish to care about emotions? (Discourse analysts note that such objections are coded sneers at traits historically regarded as `feminine' or `queer'.) Actually, as neurologist Antonio Damasio makes clear, feelings are not only important to the quality of life but crucial to the human exercise of reason. Feelings are `a window that opens directly onto a continuous updated image of the structure and state of our body'.

            René Descartes blew it by supposing that we comprise a mechanical body yoked by divine contrivance to an impalpable and altogether finer self or soul, an immaterial essence designed to survive the corruption of the flesh. Since anyone could see that pure minds can't get angry or randy or sooky, bodily feelings had to be downgraded.

            Now we know differently. `The organism,' declares Damasio, playing on Pascal's famous phrase, `has reasons that reason must utilise.' Thoughts or ideas are `qualified' by feelings, which are markers within the body of how the world has affected us in the past. They are short-cuts to value: powerful devices that help us nip through the waffle of unchecked logic. Victims of pre-frontal leucotomy, whose links between the reasoning frontal lobes and the emotional amygdala are cut, lapse into a feckless inability to plan or decide. They can know but not feel. And so their knowledge is short-changed, their reasoning not merely `cold' but unhinged from reality. Like Kagan's study, Damasio's is full of formidable detail but anchored for non-specialists in the details of poignant case histories.

            If mind and heart alike stand in the middle ground of science, particle physics and cosmology reach from the infinitesimal to the immense. They are linked by theories (quantum and relativity) that work beautifully but don't fit together--yet. John Gribbin provides his latest estimate of `the best all-round picture of how the world works at the quantum level', one that explains how the quantum state of a kitten (say) could be instantaneously registered by its twin on the other side of the galaxy.

            Physicist John G. Cramer has proposed that quantum measurements combine two real phenomena which are usually treated as useful fictions. Quantum wave functions employ complex numbers: values that contain i, the square root of minus one. To estimate a quantum probability, we must multiply a complex number (the wave function) with its complex conjugate, in which i is replaced by minus-i. The product avoids those pesky square roots of minus numbers, and is always positive and real.

            This mathematical shenanigans, according to Cramer, has a literal meaning. The original wave is an `offer wave', which flows out into the universe like a ripple from a stone dropped into a pond. Its complex conjugate is an `echo wave' or `confirmation wave', a pulse that travels backwards in time (from the edge of the pond) to meet the particle's offer wave and actualise it. Such time-bending encounters create those `real' quantities observed in the laboratory. So much for common sense.

            Far less likely to be true is the X-Files belief, surprisingly popular, that thousands of hapless humans are being routinely abducted by UFO aliens and subjected to tacky sexual experiments. Hybrid human-alien babies, humiliating anal probes, that sort of thing. To fit the pattern of the three books above, Schnabel's charming account might be re-named Adamski's Prank or Whitley's White Lie. George Adamski started it all nearly 50 years back with faked photos of a flying saucer that took him, and his readers, for a ride. Whitley Strieber cashed in decades later with scary `true' tales about small grey aliens with huge dark eyes and dubious sexual plans for the human race.

            In his sympathetic investigation of this strange epidemic (which has entrapped psychiatrist John Mack, one of Kagan's fellow Harvard professors, now an abduction believer hounded by his peers) Schnabel is as funny as P. J. O'Rourke, but in a kinder, gentler way. His tale escalates in jumps of lunacy that have you laughing and groaning and staring wildly by turns. And his explanation for it all sounds good to me, and would appeal to Kagan and Damasio, tracking these powerful delusions back to `promiscuous neuronal intercourse'--intense dissociative states where the temporal lobe gets cross-wired. There are aliens, says Jim, but not as we know them.