It began for me with the advertisements for vehicle tires. There was a relatively recent one in which Aamir Khan’s character does ridiculous things on the road, like driving down the wrong side like it was the right side, setting off firecrackers and spilling recklessly into it with a group of dancers at a wedding, in every case forcing people in vehicles to depend entirely on the performance of their tires and brakes to avoid injuring/killing someone.
Ads like this caricatured what we had internalised by then – that traffic discipline in urban India was such a lost cause that we, the people pining for this change, were better off adapting to the shenanigans of these supposedly intractable people instead.
In just the first three months of 2022, however, this cynicism towards change seems to have ballooned past the thin line between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ that the tire manufacturers pretended existed, with the manufacturers claiming to help the ‘us’. Instead, in many ads today, the companies are collectively one party, the ‘us’ from their points of view, and the rest of us the ‘them’.
This perspective seems to encourage consumers to give in to their inner cynics and cowards, as the case may be, and submit to what the companies have to offer. Four examples come swiftly to mind.
There is Magicpin, in which people brawling on the street – and in a subsequent edition a suit-clad man riding in on a battle tank – politely ask a befuddled onlooker to point his camera instead at nearby stores where he can shop at a discount.
The second is Swiggy’s Instamart, a prompt delivery service for grocery-store items, à la Zomato’s promise to deliver some foods in 10 minutes and a similar offering on Dunzo’s part. In the Instamart ad, a fellow watching TV on his couch is startled when his daughter starts to scream because they’re out of chocolate-flavoured cereal. The fellow quickly orders the thing on Instamart and a “delivery executive” shows up a minute later at their doorstep. The daughter promptly stops crying.
Such children are frankly annoying, but not more than their parents, who refuse to discipline their kids in public places and who often seem to believe their kids are entitled to their tantrums, and the irritation of everyone else around. And the fact that Swiggy believes it is healthy and desirable to encourage such behaviour, by catering to such life choices as quickly as possible, is deeply disheartening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmU4U3WR6LI
Then there is Rapido – Uber with motorbikes. Bikes already exist on Indian roads, sure, but they are often driven the way Aamir Khan’s character does in the tire ad above. And Ranveer Singh, Rapido’s brand ambassador in Hindi, makes a show of how bikes can squeeze in the gaps in traffic and reach their destinations faster. This isn’t driving behaviour we need to encourage: it is in fact part of what makes driving on city roads so harrowing and unsafe.
In the Telugu version of Rapido’s ad, Tollywood star Allu Arjun – to quote from The News Minute’s article – says “state buses take too long, and that using a Rapido bike is faster and safer. The actor tells a customer that travelling by a crowded public transport bus would mince a commuter who is like a regular dosa into the stuffings of a masala dosa, suggesting that using Rapido is more convenient”. This outright promotes civic disengagement from the task of improving public transport.
Finally, there is the crowning jewel: the ad for PharmEasy, in which three clones of Aamir Khan turn up one by one at the house of a desperate middle-aged man about to rush out to a pharmacy in pouring rain late at night. But he opens a window, and there’s a clone; he opens a door and there’s a clone; he opens a hatch in the middle of the floor in the living room and there’s a clone. All bear boxes of medicines and ask the man why he feels the need to step out at all.
The poor chap, now trembling, backs down and says he won’t step out again. As the lightning storm continues to rage outside and the man browses the PharmEasy app on his phone, the three box-bearing clones break into an elated dance. If this isn’t a home invasion, what is?
Consider all four ads together and what they seem to imply for what these companies imagine their potential consumers’ lives to be like: don’t step out, get everything on your app, expect deliveries in 10 minutes, throw ear-splitting tantrums if you don’t; if you do need to get out, stick to shopping at all costs – but at discounts – and get to these shops in taxis prepared to make the experience of other commuters miserable. And for your own good, don’t try to do better.
The question of “Who found it first?” in science is deceptively straightforward. It is largely due to the rewards reserved by those who administer science – funding the ‘right’ people working in the ‘right’ areas at the ‘right’ time to ensure the field’s progress along paths deemed desirable by the state – that primacy in science has become valuable. Otherwise, and in an ideal world (in which rewards are distributed more equitably, such that the quality of research is rewarded a certain amount that is lower than the inordinate rewards that accrue to some privileged scientists today but greater than that which scholars working on ‘neglected’ topics/ideas receive, without regard for gender, race, ethnicity or caste), discovering something first wouldn’t matter to the enterprise of science, just as it doesn’t mean anything to the object of the discovery itself.
Primacy is a virtue imposed by the structures of modern science. There is today privilege in being cited as “Subramaniam 2021” or “Srinivasan 2022” in papers, so much so that there is reason to believe many scientific papers are published only so they may cite the work of others and keep expanding this “citation circus”. The more citations there are, the likelier the corresponding scientist is to receive a promotion, a grant, etc. at their institute.
Across history, the use of such citations has also served to obscure the work of ‘other’ scientists and to attribute a particular finding to a single individual or a group. This typically manifests in one of two forms: by flattening the evolution of a complex discovery by multiple groups of people working around the world, sometimes sharing information with each other, to a single paper authored by one of these groups; or by reinforcing the association of one or some names with particular ideas in the scientific literature, thus overlooking important contributions by less well-known scientists.
The former is a complex phenomenon that is often motivated by ‘prestigious’ awards, including the Nobel Prizes, limiting themselves to a small group of laureates at a time, as well as by the meagre availability of grants for advanced research. Scientists and, especially, the institutes at which they work engage as a result in vociferous media campaigns when an important discovery is at hand, to ensure that opportunities for profit that may arise out of the finding may rest with them alone. This said, it can also be the product of lazy citations, in which scientists cite their friends or peers they like or wish to impress, or collections of papers over the appropriate individual ones, instead of conducting a more exhaustive literature review to cite everyone involved everywhere.
The second variety of improper citations is of course one that has dogged India – and one with which anyone working with or alongside science in India must be familiar. It has also been most famously illustrated by instances of women scientists who were subsequently overlooked for Nobel Prizes that were awarded to the men who worked with them, often against them. (The Nobel Prizes are false gods and we must tearthemdown; but for their flaws, they remain good, if also absurdly selective, markers of notable scientific work: that is, no prize has thus far been awarded to work that didn’t deserve it.) The stories of Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind.
But also consider the Indian example of Meghnad Saha’s paper about selective radiation pressure (in the field of stellar astrophysics), which predated Irving Langmuir’s paper on the same topic by three years. Saha lost out on the laurels by not being able to afford having his paper published in a more popular journal and had to settle for one with “no circulation worth mentioning” (source). An equation in this theory is today known as the Saha-Langmuir equation, but even this wouldn’t be so without the conscious effort of some scholars to highlight Saha’s work and unravel the circumstances that forced him into the shadows.
I discovered recently that comparable, yet not similar, circumstances had befallen Bibhas De, when the journal Icarus rejected a paper he had submitted twice. The first time, his paper presented his calculations predicting that the planet Uranus had rings; the second time was five years later, shortly after astronomers had found that Uranus indeed had rings. Stephen Brush and Ariel Segal wrote in their 2015 book, “Although he did succeed in getting his paper published in another journal, he rarely gets any credit for this achievement.”
In both these examples, and many others like them, scientists’ attempts to formalise their successes by having their claims detailed in the literature were mediated by scientific journals – whose editors’ descisions had nothing to do with science (costs in the former case and who-knows-what in the latter).
At the same time, because of these two issues, flattening and reinforcing, attribution for primacy is paradoxically more relevant: if used right, it can help reverse these problems, these imprints of colonialism and imperialism in the scientific literature. ‘Right’ here means, to me at least, that everyone is credited or none at all, as an honest reflection of the fact that good science has never been vouchsafed to the Americans or the Europeans. But then this requires more problems to be solved, such as, say, replacing profit-based scientific publishing (and the consequent valorisation of sensational results) with a ‘global scientific record’ managed by the world’s governments through an international treaty.
Axiomatically, perhaps the biggest problem with primacy today is its entrenchment. I’m certain humanities and social science scholars have debated this thoroughly – the choice for the oppressed and the marginalised between beating their oppressors at their own game or transcending the game itself. Obviously the latter seems more englightened, but it is also more labour-intensive, labour that can’t be asked freely of them – our scientists and students who are already fighting to find or keep their places in the community of their peers. Then again, beating them at their own game may not be so easy either.
I was prompted to write this post, in fact, after I stumbled on four seemingly innocuous words in a Wikipedia article about stellarators. (I wrote about these nuclear-fusion devices yesterday in the context of a study about solving an overheating problem.) The article reads that when a solenoid – a coiled wire – is bent around to form a loop, the inner perimeter of the loop has a higher density of wire than the outer perimeter. Surely this is obvious, yet the Wikpedia article phrases it thus (emphasis added):
But, as Fermi pointed out, when the solenoid is bent into a ring, the electrical windings would be closer together on the inside than the outside.
Why does a common-sensical claim, which should strike anyone who can visualise or even see a solenoid made into a loop, be attributed to the celebrated Italian physicist Enrico Fermi? The rest of the paragraph to which this sentence belongs goes on to describe how this winding density affects nuclear fusion reactors; it is an arguably straightforward effect, far removed from the singularity and the sophistication of other claims whose origins continue to be mis- or dis-attributed. Wikipedia articles are also not scientific papers. But taken together, the attribution to Fermi contains the footprints of the fact that he, as part of the Knabenphysik of quantum mechanics, worked on many areas of physics, allowing him to attach his name to a variety of concepts at a time when studies on the same topics were only just catching on in other parts of the world – a body of work enabled, as is usual, by war, conquest and the quest for hegemony.
Maybe fighting over primacy is the tax we must pay today for allowing this to happen.
There’s an interesting new study, published on February 23, 2022, that discusses a way to make nuclear fusion devices called stellarators more efficient by applying equations used all the way away in systems biology.
The Wikipedia article about stellarators is surprisingly well-written; I’ve often found that I’ve had to bring my undergraduate engineering lessons to bear to understand the physics articles. Not here. Let me quote at length from the sections describing why physicists need stellarators, which also serves to explain how these machines work.
Heating a gas increases the energy of the particles within it, so by heating a gas into hundreds of millions of degrees, the majority of the particles within it reach the energy required to fuse. … Because the energy released by the fusion reaction is much greater than what it takes to start it, even a small number of reactions can heat surrounding fuel until it fuses as well. In 1944, Enrico Fermi calculated the deuterium-tritium reaction would be self-sustaining at about 50,000,000º C.
Materials heated beyond a few tens of thousand degrees ionize into their electrons and nuclei, producing a gas-like state of matter known as plasma. According to the ideal gas law, like any hot gas, plasma has an internal pressure and thus wants to expand. For a fusion reactor, the challenge is to keep the plasma contained. In a magnetic field, the electrons and nuclei orbit around the magnetic field lines, confining them to the area defined by the field.
A simple confinement system can be made by placing a tube inside the open core of a solenoid.
A solenoid is a wire in the shape of a spring. When an electric current is passed through the wire, it generates a magnetic field running through the centre.
The tube can be evacuated and then filled with the requisite gas and heated until it becomes a plasma. The plasma naturally wants to expand outwards to the walls of the tube, as well as move along it, towards the ends. The solenoid creates magnetic field lines running down the center of the tube, and the plasma particles orbit these lines, preventing their motion towards the sides. Unfortunately, this arrangement would not confine the plasma along the length of the tube, and the plasma would be free to flow out the ends.
The obvious solution to this problem is to bend the tube around into a torus (a ring or donut) shape.
A nuclear fusion reactor of this shape is called a tokamak.
Motion towards the sides remains constrained as before, and while the particles remain free to move along the lines, in this case, they will simply circulate around the long axis of the tube. But, as Fermi pointed out, when the solenoid is bent into a ring, the electrical windings would be closer together on the inside than the outside. This would lead to an uneven field across the tube, and the fuel will slowly drift out of the center. Since the electrons and ions would drift in opposite directions, this would lead to a charge separation and electrostatic forces that would eventually overwhelm the magnetic force. Some additional force needs to counteract this drift, providing long-term confinement.
[Lyman] Spitzer’s key concept in the stellarator design is that the drift that Fermi noted could be canceled out through the physical arrangement of the vacuum tube. In a torus, particles on the inside edge of the tube, where the field was stronger, would drift up. … However, if the particle were made to alternate between the inside and outside of the tube, the drifts would alternate between up and down and would cancel out. The cancellation is not perfect, leaving some net drift, but basic calculations suggested drift would be lowered enough to confine plasma long enough to heat it sufficiently.
These calculations are not simple because this how a stellarator can look:
The coil system (blue), plasma (yellow) and a magnetic field line (green) at the Wendelstein 7-X plasma experiment under construction at the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Greifswald, Germany. Credit: Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik
When a stellarator is operating and nuclear fusion reactions are underway, impurities accumulate in the plasma. These include ions that have formed but which can’t fuse with other particles, and atoms that have entered the plasma from the reactor lining. These pollutants are typically found at the outer layer.
An additional device called a diverter is used to remove them. The heavy ions that form in the reactor plasma are also called ‘fusion ash’, and the diverter is the ashtray.
It works like a pencil sharpener. The graphite is the plasma and the blade is the diverter. It scrapes off the wood around the graphite until the latter is fully exposed and clean. But accomplishing this inside a stellarator is easier said than done.
In the image above, let’s isolate just the plasma (yellow stuff), slice a small section of it and look at it from the side. Depending on the shape of the stellarator, it will probably look like a vertical ellipse, an elongated egg – a blob, basically. By adjusting the magnetic field near the bottom of the stellarator, operators can change the shape of the plasma there to pinch off its bottom, making the overall shape more like an inverted droplet.
The shapes of an egg and an inverted droplet. Note that the shapes are illustrative and aren’t exact representations of the shape of the plasma. Credit: Good Ware/Flaticon
At the bottom-most point, called the X-point, the magnetic field lines shaping the plasma intersect with each other. At least, some magnetic field lines intersect with each other while others move towards each other without fully criss-crossing, but which are in contact with the surface of the reactor. (In the image below, the boundary between these two layers of the plasma is called the separatrix.)
Diverter plates are installed near this crossover point to ‘drain’ the plasma moving along the non-intersecting fields.
An illustration showing the effect of the diverter coils on the plasma, the X-point, the layer of plasma that will be ‘scraped off’, and the diverter plates at the bottom – in the Joint European Torus, a plasma physics experiment at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxfordshire. Credit: EUROfusion 2016/United Kingdom Atomic Energy AuthorityNote the placement and shape of the diverter coils and their effect on the shape of the plasma, at the Joint European Torus. Credit: Focus On: JET/Matthew Banks, EFDA JET
In the new study, physicists addressed the problem of diverter overheating. The heat removed at the diverter is considered to be ‘waste’ and not a part of the fusion reactor’s output. The primary purpose here is to take away the impure plasma, so the cooler it is, the longer the diverter will be able to operate without replacement.
The researchers used the Large Helical Device in Gifu, Japan, to conduct their tests. It is the world’s second largest stellarator (the first is the Wendelstein 7-X). Their solution was to stop heating the plasma just before it hit the diverter plates, in order to allow the ions and electrons to recombine into atoms. The energy of the combined atom is lower than that of the free ions and electrons, so less heat reaches the diverter plates.
How to achieve this cooling? There were different options, but the physicists resorted to arranging additional magnetic coils around the stellarator such that, just before the plasma hit the diverter, its periphery would detach into a smaller blob that, being separated from the overall plasma, could cool. These smaller blobs are called magnetic islands.
When they ran tests with the Large Helical Device, they found that the diverter removed heat from the plasma chamber in short bursts, instead of continuously. They interpreted this to mean the magnetic islands didn’t exist in a steady state but attached and detached from the plasma at a regular frequency. The physicists also found that they could model the rate of attachment using the so-called predator-prey equations.
These are the famous Lotka-Volterra equations. They describe how the populations of two species – one predator and one prey – vary over time. Say we have a small ecosystem in which crows feed on worms. As they do, the crow population increases, but due to overfeeding, the population of worms dwindles. This forces the crow population to shrink as well. But once there are fewer crows around, the number of worms increases again, which then allows more crows to feed on worms and become more populous. And so the cycle goes.
A plot showing the varying populations of predator and prey, as predicted by the Lotka-Volterra equations. Plot: Ian Alexander and Krishnavedala/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Similarly, the researchers found that the Lotka-Volterra equations (with some adjustments) could model the attachment frequency if they assumed the magnetic islands to be the predators and an electric current in the plasma to be the prey. This current is the product of electrons moving around in the plasma, which the authors call a “bootstrap current”.
When the strength of the bootstrap current increases, the magnetic island expands. At the same time, the confining magnetic field resists the expansion, forcing the current to dwindle. This allows the island to shrink as well, receding from the field. But then this allows the bootstrap current to increase once more to expand the island. And so the cycle goes.
Competitive relation between magnetic island and localised plasma current derived with the predator-prey model. Increased current (bottom left) enhances the magnetic island. In turn, electric resistivity increases, which reduces the current (bottom right). Eventually, the magnetic island shrinks, which leads to reduction of the electric receptivity and increase of the current. Caption and credit: National Institute for Fusion Science, Japan
The researchers reported in their paper that while they observed a frequency of 40 Hz (i.e. 40 times per second) in the Large Helical Device, the equations on paper predicted a frequency of around 20 Hz. However, they have interpreted to mean there is “qualitative agreement” between their idea and their observation. They also wrote that they expect the numbers to align once they fine-tune their math to account for various other specifics of the stellarator’s operation.
They eventually aim to find a way to control the attachment rate so that the diverters can operate for as long as possible – and at the same time take away as much ‘useless’ energy from the plasma as possible.
I also think that, ultimately, it’s a lovely union of physics, mathematics, biology and engineering. This is thanks in part to the Lotka-Volterra equations, which are a specific form of the Kolmogorov model. This is a framework of equations and principles that describes the evolution of a stochastic process in time. A stochastic process is simply one that depends on variables whose values change randomly.
In 1931, the Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov described two kinds of stochastic processes. In 1949, the Croatian-American mathematician William Feller described them thus:
… the “purely discontinuous” type of … process: in a small time interval there is an overwhelming probability that the state will remain unchanged; however, if it changes, the change may be radical.
… a “purely continuous” process … there it is certain that some change will occur in any time interval, however small; only, here it is certain that the changes during small time intervals will be also small.
Kolmogorov derived a pair of ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ equations for each type of stochastic process, depending on the direction of evolution we need to understand. Together, these four equations have been adapted to a diverse array of fields and applications – including quantum mechanics, financial options and biochemical dynamics.
Featured image: Inside the Large Helical Device stellarator. Credit: Justin Ruckman, Infinite Machine/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
I wrote this piece for a friend who wanted to understand what NFTs were. I have considerably simplified many points and omitted many others to keep the explanation below (relatively) short. If you’re interested, you can read the following articles/sites as well as find links to more discussion on this topic from there.
To understand NFTs, we need to understand the ‘T’ first: tokens.
And to understand the Ts, we need to understand the reason they exist: the blockchain.
The blockchain is widely touted to be a ledger of transactions. But I – a person who has struggled to understand banking and finance terminologies – have found it more useful to understand this technology in terms of the fundamentally new thing it facilitates.
In ‘conventional’ banking, banks – state-owned and otherwise – validate financial transactions. If I transfer money from my wallet to yours online, the bank knows a) whether money has been deducted from my wallet, b) whether money has been credited to your wallet, and c) whether I, the wallet’s owner, performed the transaction in question.
The blockchain is a database that, together with a bunch of algorithms, offers a way to perform these tasks without requiring a centralised authority. Instead, it helps the people who are transacting with each other to ensure the security and integrity of their transactions.
Say 10 people have already been using a blockchain to validate their transactions. Each row in this database is called a block. When one of the 10 performs a new transaction, it is added as a new block in the database along with some data pertaining to the previous block. This bit of data is called a cryptographic hash. Using the hash, all the blocks in the database are linked together: every new block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, all the way back to the very first block. This chain of blocks is called the blockchain.
Every time a new transaction is performed, and a new block has to be added to the blockchain, some algorithms kick in to validate the transaction. Once it has been validated, the block is added, a timestamp is affixed to the operation, and a copy of the blockchain in that instance is shared with all the 10 people using it.
This validation process doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need computing power to perform it, drawn from the machines owned and operated by some or all of the 10 people. To incentivise these people to donate their computing power, the blockchain releases some files at periodic intervals. These files denote value on the blockchain, and the people who get them can use them gainfully. These files are called tokens.
Different blockchains have different validation incentives. For example, the bitcoin blockchain releases its tokens, the bitcoins, as rewards to those who have provided computing power to validate new transactions.
The bitcoin protocol states that the number of bitcoins released drops by half for every 210,000 blocks added. In May 2020, this reward stood at 6.25 bitcoins per block. The blockchain will also stop releasing new bitcoins once it has released 21 million of them.
Technically speaking, both centralised and decentralised validation systems use blockchains. The one that uses a central authority is called a permissioned blockchain. The one without a centralised authority is called a permissionless blockchain.
This is useful to know if only to understand two things:
The concept of blockchains has existed since the early 1980s in the form of permissioned systems, and
Permissionless blockchains need tokens to incentivise users to share computing power whereas permissioned blockchains don’t need tokens
The demand for bitcoins has caused the price of each such token to rise to $43,925, or Rs 33.47 lakh, today (March 25, 2022, 9:06 am).
The tokens on a blockchain can be fungible or non-fungible. An example of a fungible token is bona fide currency: one one-rupee note can be replaced by another (equally legitimate) one-rupee note and not make any difference to a transaction. Bitcoins are also fungible tokens for the same reason. On the other hand, NFTs are tokens that can’t be interchanged. Each NFT is unique – it has to be because this characteristic defines NFTs. They are non-fungible tokens.
Bitcoins are basically files. You write an article and store it as a docx file. This file contains text. A bitcoin is a file that contains alphanumeric data and is stored in a certain way. You can save a docx file on your laptop’s hard-disk or on Google Drive, and you can only open it with software that can read docx files. Similarly, you can store bitcoins in wallets on the internet, and they can be ‘read’ only by special software that work with blockchains.
Similarly, NFTs are also files. The alphanumeric code they contain are linked in a unique way to another file. These other files can be pictures, videos, docx files, bits of text, anything at all that can be stored as digital data.
When one person transfers an NFT to another person over a blockchain, they are basically transferring ownsership of the file to which the NFT is linked. Put another way, NFTs facilitate the trade of goods and value that can’t directly be traded over blockchains by tokenising these goods/value. This is what NFTs fundamentally offer.
Emergent facts
This background info leads to some implications:
Bitcoins have been exploding in value because a) their supply is limited, b) investors in bitcoins and/or blockchain technology have built hype around this technology, and c) taken together, the rising value of each bitcoin has encouraged the rise of many Ponzi schemes that require more people to get in on cryptocurrencies, forcing demand to rise, which further pushes up the coin value, allowing investors to buy low and sell high.
The demand for bitcoins, and other cryptocurrencies more broadly, has obscured the fact that a) permissionless blockchains need tokens to exist, b) these tokens in turn need to be convertable to bona fide currencies, and c) there needs to be speculative valuation of these tokens in order for their value over time to increase. Otherwise, the tokens hold no value – especially to pay for the real-world costs of computing power.
This computing power is very costly. It is highly energy-intensive – if it weren’t, anybody could validate any transaction and add it to the blockchain. In fact, one of the purposes of the compute cost is to prevent a hack called the Sybil attack. A copy of the blockchain is shared with all members participating in the chain. Say my copy gets corrupted for some reason; when the system encounters it, it will check it against the copy that exists on the majority of computers on the network. When it doesn’t match, I will have forked out of the blockchain and no longer be a part of it. A Sybil attack happens when multiple users work together to modify their copies of the blockchain (to, say, give themselves more money), confusing the system into believing the corrupted version is the actual version. A high computing power demand would ensure that the cost of mounting a Sybil attack is higher than the benefits it will reap. This power is also what leads to the cryptocurrencies’ enormous carbon footprint.
If you provide more computing power to the pool of power available to validate transactions, you have provided the system with proof of work. Another way to validate transactions is through proof of stake: the more value you have transacted using the blockchain, the more stake you are said to have in its proper operation, and therefore the likelier it will be for your transactions to be validated. Proof of stake is less energy-intensive, but its flaw is that it’s a ‘rich get richer’ paradigm. From a social justice point of view, both proof of work and proof of stake have the same outcome: wealth inequality. Indeed, a principal failing of the ethereum and bitcoin blockchains today is that a very small number of individuals around the world own more than half of all the computing power available to these networks – a fact that directly undermines the existential purpose of these networks: decentralisation.
NFTs differ in their uniqueness, but other than that, they also require the use of blockchains and thus inherit all of the problems of permissionless blockchains.
NFTs also have two problems that are specific to their character: a) they have to be scarce in order to be valuable, and this scarcity is artificially imposed – by investors but more broadly by tech-bros and their capitalist culture, in order to keep NFTs exclusive and valuable; b) the items that NFTs currently tokenise are simple crap made with conventional software. For example, the user named Metakovan purchased last year an NFT associated with a big collage by an artist named Tweeple for 500 ether ($69 million). This collage was just a collage, nothing special, made with Photoshop (or similar). Now, if I uploaded an image on a server and linked it to an NFT, and one day the server goes down, the NFT will exist but it will point to nothing, and thus be useless. This vacuity at the heart of NFTs – that they contain no value of their own and that whatever value they contain is often rooted in conventional systems – is emblematic of a bigger issue with cryptocurrencies: they have no known application. They are a solution in search of a problem.
For example, Metakovan said last year that using cryptocurrencies to trade in art was a way to use the anonymity afforded by cryptocurrencies to evade the gatekeepers of the art world, who, in his words, had thus far kept out the non-white, non-rich from owning the masters’ paintings. But many, many art critics have ridiculed this. I like to quote Laurie Rojas: “Even with all the financial speculation around NFTs, the point that Art’s value is determined within the parameters of a society in which commodification is the dominant form of social relations (i.e., capitalism) has too easily been abandoned for poorly defined neologisms. … NFTs are the latest phenomenon to express this.”
NFTs’ newfound association with artistic works is something for NFTs to do, otherwise they have no purpose. In addition, small-time and/or indie artists have criticised NFTs because they don’t solve the more fundamental problem of people not funding artists like them or protecting their work from copyright violations in the first place – much less because potential funders don’t have the requisite technologies. This criticism also speaks to the criticism of the bitcoin network itself: to quote Alex De Vries, “One bitcoin transaction requires … several thousands of times more than what’s required by traditional payment systems” to perform a transaction of the same value. Therefore it can’t be a functional substitute for the world’s existing banking system either. And we’ve seen in a previous point that they’re not decentralised either.
Two last issues – one about a new way in which blockchain tech is trying to find relevance and one about a pernicious justification to allow this technology to persist.
The first is what has come to be called “web3”. The current iteration of our web is known as web2, supposed to have begun around the mid-2000s. Web1 was the first iteration, when the web was full of websites that offered content for us to consume. Web2 was about content production – social media, blogs, news sites, etc. Web3 is supposed to be about participation – based on Metakovan’s logic. In this paradigm, web3 is to be powered by blockchains. This is a stupid idea for all the reasons permissionless blockchains and NFTs are stupid ideas, and others besides.
Second, some entrepreneurs have started to buy carbon credits from various parts of the world and offer them for a price to blockchain entrepreneurs, to help ‘neutralise’ the carbon footprint of the latter’s efforts. This is wrong and evil because it’s a wasteful use of carbon credits that diverts them away from more socially responsible uses. It’s also evil because, in this paradigm, cryptocurrencies and NFTs foster two paths towards greater inequality. First, as mentioned before, they impose a prohibitive energy cost to use them. Second, developed countries need to cut down on their carbon emissions right away – but many developing countries and most under-developed countries (in the economic sense) still have room to emit some more before they can peak. Carbon credits, the demand for which cryptocurrencies are increasing, reverse these outcomes – allowing the former to keep emitting while purchasing ‘room to emit’ from less developed nations, and thus lowering the latter’s emissions ceiling.
Finally, a fundamental flaw of the carbon credits system is that it assumes that emissions over one part of the world can be compensated by supporting forests in another. So carbon credits may in fact make the problem worse by allowing cryptocurrency folks to keep kicking the can down the road.
Today is Lord of the Rings Day (previous editions: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.). Every year, I spend a part of March 25 thinking about the continued relevance of this book; even though this may have diminished significantly, it remains for better or for worse the work that founded modern fantasy literature (in the English language) and which subsequent works sidestepped, superseded or transcended. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, thinking about Lord of the Rings has largely been, to me at least, thinking about fantasy as escape, but this year, it may represent something else – and in doing so also become a little bit more relevant in my own imagination.
This year, on this day, war is on all our minds. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Middle-Earth saga, of which Lord of the Rings is one important part, there are many, many wars. The fundamental themes of Lord of the Rings, the greatness of friendship and the triumph of good over evil, are themselves consummated by victories in battles, a motif that Tolkien establishes in the (fictitious) history of Middle-Earth from the very beginning itself. Some of them come immediately to mind, for being more poignant than the others: the Battle of Sudden Flame, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the War of Wrath and the Defence of Osgiliath. Three of these four conflicts are tragedies.
In the Battle of Sudden Flame (‘Dagor Bragollach’ in Sindarin), Morgoth, the primordial antagonist in Tolkien’s works, breaks the siege around his fortress by the high-elven Noldor and marches forth with a great army, including the first dragon, to reassert his power in the region of Beleriand. Shortly before this battle, some of the Noldor had contemplated an assault of their own to quell Morgoth once and for all, but didn’t proceed for want of consensus. Most of the Noldor believed the siege alone, which by then had lasted over four centuries, would suffice and that Morgoth would fade away. But after the Battle of Sudden Flame, Morgoth rose and rose in power.
Two decades after the siege was broken, many of the high-elves, dwarves and Earthlings – led by Maedhros – united once more under his banner, inspired by the heroics of Beren and Luthien against the kingdom of Morgoth, and intended to take the fight to him instead of, as with the siege, letting him muster his forces. But through a network of spies and turncoats, Morgoth got early wind of the Union of Maedhros. This led to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (‘Nirnaeth Arnoediad’), in which the Noldor were decimated, by the end of which Morgoth had an iron grip on the continent’s north, and had only three kingdoms left to challenge him: Gondolin (which had secluded itself anyway), Doriath and Nargothrond.
Some six centuries, and many interim epics, later, Eärendil pleads with the Valar – the angelic peoples called the “Powers of the World” in the Middle-Earth mythos – to help the elves and the humans defeat Morgoth. They agree, thus the Host of Valinor is assembled, and thus begins the War of Wrath, which by one account lasted fully 40 years. The exchange of power is so great in this time that Beleriand itself is reshaped and many of its mountains and plains are drowned by newly recast rivers and seas. Morgoth himself is defeated and cast into the “Timeless Void” (that favourite place of fantasy authors in which to consign villains who have become too mighty for anyone’s good).
His lieutenant, the necromancer Thû, however escapes and hides in east Middle-Earth, eventually creating the dreaded kingdom of Mordor and himself becoming known as Sauron. The Defence of Osgiliath transpires when Sauron is preparing to assault Gondor, a great kingdom of humans on Middle-Earth. Osgiliath, by this time, is an outpost with a military garrison. A small scratch force from Gondor sets out to prevent Sauron’s forces from occupying Osgiliath, and fails miserably. One of the casualties is Faramir, younger son of Denethor, the steward of Gondor. Faramir, as captain of the party, sets out to defend Osgiliath though he knows he can’t, that he may even die, simply because Denethor had wished Faramir had died in battle instead of his older, and favoured, son, Boromir.
I was hoping in the course of this recollection to find parallels to Russia’s war in Ukraine. I don’t know what they might be. However, the battles of Beleriand – especially the ones the ‘good guys’ lost – in Tolkien’s telling are not about underestimating Morgoth’s might or miscalculating one’s own, even when they are. They are ultimately animated by the spirit of resisting a mindless tyrant irrespective of the outcome. It’s certainly folly to found one’s attacks on flawed strategies, but in the face of an enemy who can’t be reasoned with and who just won’t back down, there are times when waiting for the numbers to add up, for the skies to clear, for the stars to align can be more indefensible. Ukraine may not have wanted this war but it must fight anyway to resist Russia, and Vladimir Putin.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration.
I was at a wedding this weekend. It had a distinct Omelas-like quality throughout. For most of the elders present, it was an oru naal koothu — a single-day celebration that has been many weeks in the making. But the bride, whom I knew, didn’t want to get married, especially to the groom her parents had picked out without her consent. I was told they had gone ahead anyway because the bride’s parents had liked the groom’s parents, and the two families had liked each other and wished to be related.
When the bride insisted, as best she could, that the wedding be postponed (or the groom be replaced — not a bad idea considering this was a man who believed sincerely that the women who spoke out in #MeToo were doing so only for attention), she was first met with a barrage of emotional blackmail: “think of what will happen to your mother”, “your grandmother will have a heart attack”, etc. — followed later by her father insisting that she provide a good enough reason, only to dismiss each one (‘don’t like the groom’, ‘don’t want to get married now’) promptly as not being “good enough”.
The wedding itself was a deeply patriarchal affair — an upper-caste conclave in which its members asserted their caste and “culture”, made a display of observing and preserving ancient traditions, brought two families together by unanimously waylaying the life of one woman. Like the story of the Mahabharata seems so different from that pieced together in Yuganta, viewing a Brahmin wedding through the eyes of an unwilling bride can reveal a very different picture from the wedding that everyone else experiences. It is no different from a tradition that her parents, the groom and his parents, and the extended family on both sides — enabled by a swarm of priests — further using the body and soul of one woman, with or without her willing participation. Good wedding ceremonies with willing participants exist, but only the bad ones truly demonstrate their totalitarian character.
For example, furthering the agony are the rituals immediately preceding the knot-tying, in which the bride and the groom are led through a series of joint activities by the priests and the extended family. They are apparently modelled on the rituals of two gods who got married: sitting on a swing together, exchanging garlands while perched on the shoulders of their fathers and brothers, and so forth. Surely these sound like the activities of a pair of people excited about getting married; to force them on a bride who has been brought there by (emotional and social) force has really no meaning, other than to reinforce the importance for all these rituals of a pliant woman, the ultimate vessel of Brahmin assertion.
The instrumentalisation of the bride and her functions begins in fact from the make-up — slathered on the bride, who also has to don silk sarees and other ornaments with no regard for the Chennai weather, while the groom stands next to her in a cotton shirt, a cotton veshti and the customary streak of vermillion on his forehead. She also has to sit through more rituals than him, some of which happen late at night or early in the day (she was woken up at 2 am for the make-up); cannot know when or what she can eat, or if she can visit the canteen or must have food brought to her; and, of course, she is expected to smile at all times for the cameras. While the matrimonial traditions of the families of the bride and the groom overlap for the most part, there are a few differences – yet all of them impose an equally unforgiving information asymmetry on the bride.
Meanwhile, the priests are chanting something in Sanskrit, a language no one in the room understands. It is hard to know what they are saying and why, but even as they are, there is another man with a bag full of cash standing just behind them, possibly belonging to the bride’s side, handing bills to them as part of rituals that require people to exchange wealth or give it away to others — i.e. to more relatives or to the priests themselves. There are some new observances as well, and while everyone is keen to observe them, no one asks the priests of their provenance or meaning. If they’ve been invented, it seems they will be observed — like the bride’s father having to carry a plateful of cash (intended to be donated to a temple) out of the room. They’re clearly nothing other than more lines drawn to distinguish between those whom the priests claim are “real Brahmins” and those who aren’t, and charging a fee to do so.
As the groom tied the three knots and everyone in the hall blessed them, and came away smiling, the wedding ended. Everyone was happy, nodding at each other in an implicit acknowledgment of having brought another conclave to a successful finish. The bride and groom were still onstage, next to a “holy fire”, spelling out the remainder of their prayers. The camera crew was taking a break, the relatives were heading in droves to the canteen, and the bride had to take a quick break in between as her new mother-in-law approached her with a make-up kit.
One of the defining features of quantum mechanics is that it shows up human language, and thought supported by that language, to be insufficient and limited. Many of the most popular languages of the world, including Tamil, Hindi and English, are linear. Their script reads in a line from one end of the page to the other, and their spoken words compile meaning based on a linear sequence and order of words. It is possible to construe these meanings in turn only after word after another, through the passage of time. If time stops, so does language.
Such linearity is incompatible with the possibilities in quantum mechanics for simultaneity, in both space and time. Quantum superposition is not exactly a system in two states at once but in a linear combination of states, but without the specialised knowledge, language can only offer a slew of metaphors, each of which hews asymptotically closer to the actual thing but never captures it in its entirety. Quantum entanglement, similarly, causes one particle to affect another instantaneously, over hundreds of kilometres, defying both the universal information speed limit and the ability of human minds that remain constrained by that limit, as well as a human language that has no place for, and therefore can’t identify, simultaneity. All we have something after another, effect after cause, the first step and then the second, and never both at once.
Indeed, the notion of causality – that cause will always precede effect – is one of the load-bearing pillars of reality as we strive to understand it.
But while quantum mechanics is so kooky, it is also excusably so, considering it represents a paradigm shift of sorts from the truths of classical physics (it plays by different rules, that is). It is almost simply natural that our languages do not encompass the possibilities afforded by a phenomenon we didn’t encounter until the 20th century, and still don’t except through specialised apparatuses and controlled experimental conditions.
However, there is another system of things that plays largely by the rules of classical physics – our interactions with and formalisation of which paralleled the evolution of our languages – and yet increasingly defies the ability of our languages to describe it faithfully: climate change.
True, weather and climate patterns include aspects of chaos theory, which explains how minute differences in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. But chaos theory still only takes recourse to non-linear effects, which, while harder to conceive of than their linear counterparts, are easier than to grapple with non-locality and non-causality. Of course, climate change doesn’t violate any of these or other similarly foundational principles, yet it complicates interactions in the global weather system and intensifies the interactions between the elements and human culture, technology and biology – both to such a degree that they have consequences both different and new.
Climate change will further exacerbate marine heatwave risks in the [Indian subcontinent] region, according to [Ming] Feng. This could suppress coastal upwelling – the process by which strong winds move surface water in the ocean, permitting water from below to surface – and reduce the amount of oxygen in the water. This in turn could have a “great impact” on fisheries.
A big part of climate change’s (extant as well as impending) devastation is in the form of surprise – that is, of the emergent phenomena that it makes possible. Expounded most famously by the brilliant physicist Philip W. Anderson, especially in his 1972 essay ‘More Is Different’, emergence is the idea that we cannot fully describe a large system only by studying its smallest components. Put another way, larger systems have emergent properties and behaviour that are more than the sum of the ways in which systems’ most fundamental parts interact. Studying climate change is important because the additional complexity it imbues to existing weather systems are ripe with emergent effects, each with new consequences and perhaps more effects of their own.
At the same time, the bulk of these effects, taken together, anticipate such a large volume of possibilities that even though they certainly won’t defy reality’s, and human languages’, assumption that causality is true, they will push it to extreme limits. Two events are still at liberty to happen at the same time, each with a distinct and preceding cause, but even as the ways we communicate wait for cause before composing effect, climate change will confront us with a tsunami of changes – each one reinforcing, screening or ignoring the other, rapidly branching out into a larger, denser forest of changes, until the cause is only relevant as an historical artefact in our grammar of the natural universe.
The Journal of Molecular Structurehas temporarily banned manuscript submissions from scientists working at state science institutes in Russia. The decision extends the consequences of war beyond the realm of politics, albeit to persons who have played no role in Putin’s invasion and might even have opposed it at great risk to themselves. Such reactions have been common in sports, for example, but much less so in science.
The SESAME synchrotron radiation facility in Jordan, operated by CERN and the Jordan atomic energy agency and with support from UNESCO, takes pride in promoting peace among its founding members (Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey). CERN in Europe, born in the aftermath of World War II, has a similar goal.
In fact, in the science-adjacent enterprise of spaceflight, the corresponding US and Russian agencies have cooperated against the shared backdrop of the International Space Station even when their respective heads of state have been at odds with each other on other issues. But as Pradeep Mohandas wrote recently, Roscosmos’s response to sanctions against Russia have disrupted space science to an unprecedented degree, including the ExoMars and the Venera D missions. Update, March 8, 2022, 7:14 pm: CERN also seems to have suspended Russia’s ‘observer’ status in the organisation and has said it will cooperate with international sanctions against the country.
Such virtues are in line with contemporary science’s aspiration to be ‘apolitical’, irrespective of whether that is humanitarian, and ‘objective’ in all respects. This is of course misguided, yet the aspiration itself persists and is often considered desirable. In this context, the decision of the editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure, Rui Fausto, to impose sanctions on scientists working at institutions funded by the Russian government for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes across as enlightened (even though Fausto himself calls his decision “apolitical”). But it is not.
Science in the 21st century is of course a reason of state. In various conflicts around the world, both communities and nation-states have frequently but not explicitly appropriated the fruits of civilian enterprise, especially science, to fuel and/or sustain conflicts. Nation-states have done this by vouchsafing the outcomes of scientific innovation to certain sections of the population to directly deploying such innovation on battlefields. Certain communities, such as the casteist Brahmins of Silicon Valley, misogynistic academics in big universities and even those united by their latent queerphobia, have used the structural privileges that come with participating in the scientific, or the adjacent technological, enterprise to perpetrate violence against members of “lower” castes, female students and genderqueer persons, for reasons that have nothing to do with the latter’s academic credentials.
However, the decision of the Journal of Molecular Structure is undermined by two problems with Fausto’s reasoning. First, the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be the most prominent in the world right now but it isn’t the only one. Others include the conflict in the Kashmir Valley, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the Yemeni civil war and the oppression of Uyghur and Rohingya Muslims in South and Southeast Asia. Why haven’t Fausto et al. banned submissions from scientists working at state-sponsored institutes in India, Israel, Saudi Arabia and China? The journal’s editorial board doesn’t include any scientists affiliated with institutes in Russia or Ukraine – which suggests both that there was no nationalistic stake to ban scientists in Russia alone and that there could have been a nationalistic stake that kept the board from extending the ban to other hegemons around the world. Either way, this glaring oversight reduces the journal’s decision to grandstanding.
The second reason, and also really why Fausto’s decision shouldn’t be extended to scientists labouring in other aggressor nations, is that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is an autocrat – as are the political leaders of the countries listed above (with the exception of Israel). As I wrote recently in an (unpublished) essay:
… we have all come across many stories in the last two years in which reporters quoted unnamed healthcare workers and government officials to uncover important details of the Government of India’s response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. Without presuming to know the nature of relationships between these ‘sources’ and the respective reporters, we can say they all likely share a conflict of ethics: they are on the frontline and they are needed there, but if they speak up, they may lose their ability to stay there.
Indeed, India’s Narendra Modi government itself has refused to listen to experts or expertise, and has in fact often preempted or sought to punish scientists whom it perceives to be capable of contradicting the government’s narratives. Modi’s BJP enjoys an absolute majority in Parliament, allowing it a free hand in lawmaking, and as an authoritarian state it has also progressively weakened the country’s democratic institutions. In all, the party has absolute power in the country, which it often uses to roll over the rights of minorities and health and ecological safeguards based on science as much as to enable industrial development and public administration on its own terms. In this milieu, speaking up and out is important, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about how much we can expect our comments to achieve.
Similarly, in Putin’s Russia, more than 4,700 scientists and science journalists recently signed an open letter protesting the invasion of Ukraine, potentially opening themselves up to persecution (the Russian government has already arrested more than 5,000 protestors). But how much of a damn does Putin give for scientists studying molecular structure in the country’s state-funded research facilities? In an ideal scenario, pinching the careers of certain people only makes sense if the country’s leader can be expected to heed their words. Otherwise, sanctions such as that being imposed by the Journal of Molecular Chemistry will have no effect except on the scientists’ work – scientists who are now caught between a despot and an inconsiderate journal.
Ultimately, Fausto’s decision would seem to be apolitical, but in a bad way. Would that it had been political, it would also have been good.Modern science surely has a difficult place in society. But in autocratic setups, there arises a pronounced difference between a science practised by the élite and the powerful, in proximity to the state and with privileged access to political power, and which would deserve sanctions such as those extended by the Journal of Molecular Structure. Then there is the science more removed from that power, still potentially being a reason of state but at the same time less “open to co-optation by the powerful and the wealthy” (source).
