Possible birthdays

We need to know our birthdays. The hospital, the Passport Office, all sorts of official forms and documents, identify us by our date of birth. Laws and allowances come into effect depending how old we are. Our age, the people in our year at school, the options we've got because of when we were born – they make us who we are.

The thing is, none of us remember being born. Our birthdays are a matter of faith.

Usually, we know our date of birth because someone told us, long ago. Usually it's a trusted person, who underlined the date with presents and cake and a party. That person might well have been there at the birth: the mum who pushed us out into the world, or whoever held her hand.

These people are primary sources – people who can speak with some authority on the subject because they were there at the time.

There are also secondary sources – people who didn't see the birth for themselves, but whose memories back up the story. The grandpa who remembers what he was doing when he was rung with the news. The friend who remembers the trouble she had having flowers sent to the hospital. They don't prove the date, but they don't contradict it. Their evidence lends weight.

There's also a whole bunch of documentary evidence, everything from the official birth certificate and hospital records, to a time-coded video and the cards – and these days emails and text messages – sending best wishes. Taken together, this evidence tells us when we were born.

But it's possible this could all have been faked. We don't know when we were born because we don't remember. It's possible the people who tells us what day it happened is making it up. It's possible the documents have been faked – the cards would be easy, the birth certificate harder but not impossibly. The woman who throws the parties each year and provides the presents and cake might not even be our mum.

(There are DNA tests to check things like that, but you'd have to already suspect something before you went for the test. That's a fun thing to suggest to your mother. And I know a few people completely surprised to discover they were adopted.)

Even if you prove this woman is or is not your mum, you still can't prove what day you were born on. It's possible there's some huge conspiracy, or just some huge mistake. It's difficult to prove a negative: whatever evidence you present, it's still always possible...

The best we can do is judge the available evidence. We might suggest ways to test it. We might point out the flaws in the evidence we've got, welcome others to scrutinise it, or just name the sources we're using. But after that, it's still possible we missed something out. All we can truly say is, “As far as we can tell...”

And that's just with our birthdays.

There are people who don't like this trust in evidence, the 'authority' of science or history. There are those who speak out against scientific theories, or in favour of medical treatments that the evidence peer-reviewed, double-blind trials doesn't support. There are people who say that certain events never happened or were the result of some god. There are vested interests involved, too: conspiracies, industries and individual egos who profit from belief in their statement. They're all very different, but they all stand against the weight of evidence with the argument, "But it's still possible...".

Like our birthdays, these things bound up in our what makes us who we are. Our science, our history, our medicine, our gods - they define us and our behaviour. So challenging - or defending - them can feel like a personal attack. (Sometimes its meant as an attack.) We should not try to cause offence, and we should make our case with a weight of evidence.

Nor is it enough to argue against a weight of evidence, “But it's still possible...”. It's possible there wasn't a Holocaust or Moon landing, or that homeopathy might work. But then it's possible I was born not in June but September. On Mars. And that I'm made of turnips. These possibilities also need to be backed up by evidence. Until then, they're just so much hot air.

We probably can't know anything for certain – there will always be the possibility of something else. And we should endeavour to keep open minds. But that is an argument in favour of evidence, not one for abandoning it.

We shouldn't just believe what we're told, or what supports our assumptions and desires, makes us feel better or safer. We should challenge our beliefs, however sacred. And we should challenge them with the weight of evidence. Because that's the only way we'll really know who we are.

Holes in our heads and other stories

"People are too often terrible advertisements for their own beliefs."

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, p. 357.

The Dr took me to see Derren Brown's magic show, Enigma, for my birthday back in June. Even before I'd read his book I suspected how some of the tricks might be done. Perhaps he wasn't reading people's minds, he just remembered which cards they'd taken; perhaps he used a loaded die...

I'd thought the book, Tricks of the Mind, would be a magic primer, detailing his card-sharpery and the mechanics of illusion. Indeed, Brown begins with a simple coin trick and a simple card trick. He explains misdirection and showmanship – at least as important as the simple “trick” of palming a coin or remembering a sequence of cards.

But he then goes on to explore all kinds of gaps in our cognition that can mean we’ll believe very odd things. In doing so, we learn how to use our memories better, how to hypnotise ourselves, and see how neuro-linguistic programming, psychics and other belief systems are able to ensnare us...

Brown tells us he uses a mixture of these techniques himself. He also tells us something much more important: that what he does is a trick.

The joy of magic, I think, is in knowing it’s a trick – a way of fooling our perception a given event. The performer doesn't really have psychic abilities or a way to sidestep physics. We just have to puzzle out how it was done. Brown talks about laying false clues to muddle the audience when they try to review what they've just seen. But even if we can't figure out how trick is done, we know there is an answer.

On that basis, it's easy to see where Brown's thinking overlaps with scientific enquiry. He's intrigued by NLP but cynical about its cult of personality and resistance to meet its great claims with evidence. Brown is a doubter, though he also talks earnestly about having previously been an evangelical Christian. There's a sense - one I sort of share - that he hates the thought of being fooled again.

He might labour the point, but Brown’s good at explaining why, if you have a proposition – that a certain chemical has healing properties, that the world works in a certain way, that there’s some kind of God – the onus is on you to prove the proposition is true, not for others to prove that it isn't. That's especially important if your proposition encourages some kind of action.

With the zeal of the convert Brown hopes to convince us to doubt. In many ways, Brown's book reminded me of Dawkins' The God Delusion – it's smart, it's lively, it covers a great deal of ground and it explains complex ideas simply. Yet the petulant tone makes it read as if written by a clever 17 year-old. It’s hectoring, ranty and the jokes are often forced. That can give the impression – in both books – that the author has all the answers, whereas the whole point is that we don't settle on easy answers.

Rather, Brown explains the strangeness of reality. In the section on lying, he explains how people telling the truth include all kinds of odd, incongruous details. (I'm reminded of Orwell on Charles Dickens and the genius of his “unnecessary detail”.)

On which point, though I've still not got to Ben Goldacre, I'm hesitant about m'colleague Jonny's review of it:

"Yes! That’s exactly what I already thought, but put slightly more clearly!"

As Brown and Dawkins both spell out themselves, a lot of science is counter-intuitive. In fact, one good test of a scientific theory is whether it confirms what the proponent already "knows". Brown has a whole section on "confirmation bias".

That in turn reminded me of Flat-Earth News by Nick Davies – and especially the bit on heroin use and the war on drugs, where policy seems based on comforting, fundamental beliefs and not on physical evidence.

In fact, Brown’s book has make me connect dots between all sorts of disparate stuff. I shall blog at some point on Father Christmas and on birthdays – two subjects much scrawled in my notebook.

Tricks of the Mind is then a primer not in magic trickery but in strange and wondrous reality. Despite the painful jokes and adolescent tone, it’s an extraordinary book.

Other recent reads:

Austerity Britain by David Kynaston
Loved this; intend to blog my notes. But then I said that about Flat-Earth News, too. Oops. So here’s the Telegraph’s glowing review.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
A funny, provocative collection of leftie newspaper columns full of sharp one-liners. Not as heavyweight as the other stuff of his I’ve read, but more hits than misses.

The Ghosts of India by Mark Morris
Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with Ghandi. Mark explores the last complex and controversial days of the Raj, for ages eight and up. Plus there’s spooky monsters. I wish I’d thought of this.

Johannes Cabal – The Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard
Reviewed for Vector, but didn’t think that much of it.

Me, Cheeta by Cheeta and James Lever
Another birthday present, the autobiography of the chimpanzee who played Tarzan’s mate. I thought the joke might wear thin quite quickly, but it’s an often very funny read. Sometimes it’s funny because we read between the lines, sometimes because of Cheeta’s animal perspective. Cheeta’s last meeting with the aged Johnny Weissmuller is beautifully moving. What’s more, it’ll be hard to hear salacious showbiz tales without thinking of that ape.

Now reading Spies by Michael Frayn.

Shambolic fantasy

Here's my review of Debateable Space by Philip Palmer, as published in the BSFA's magazine Vector last month:

Space pirate Flanagan declares war on the evil chief executive officer of the human universe by kidnapping his daughter. The “Cheo” has already allowed thousands of his offspring to die, so what makes young Lena so special? Well, for one thing she's not nearly so young as she seems...

Philip Palmer's Debateable Space is a sprawling space opera set over hundreds of years. It's lively, exciting and packed with ideas, yet the author's afterword might be about another book entirely.

Palmer says this is rigidly hard sf. He quotes books on quantum theory and emergence and mocks the teleportation booths in Niven's Ringworld. Yet while the physics might be extrapolated from the real thing the story is shambolic fantasy.

The huge incidents described don't see to have much consequence - plans either work or fail, the characters just keep buggering on. At one point, for example, an army fills the years on its way to a battlefield by breeding thousands of reinforcements. We start to get to know some of these individual children, who are then abruptly sacrificed without a second thought - born and killed off in the space of a few pages. Only one parent is traumatised by the loss.

The textual cleverness doesn't help. Different typefaces convey different voices. There are gaps in the text to spell out when people are thinking or flying. Kidnapped Lena is editing her own story, even as we read it. At one point we're told to skip through an infodump to get back to the action. At its most annoying it takes three pages to spell out the word “Antimatter” in giant letters and seven pages to say, “You are prey”.

This all gives the sense of brash effect with little substance behind it. Characters rarely seem changed by their experience. In fact, there's little differentiation of character other than their being pissed off or horny. The cast are crude sf archetypes - a space pirate rock star, a sexy cat woman, a socially inept geek, an alien made out of fire. They're clever but also shallow and cruel. There's no wit or kindness and any surprises come from Flanagan out-manipulating people or having to commit appalling acts of violence (with the noblest motives).

Lena is no better - spoilt, selfish and resentful of the long past. She's had an eventful life fighting international criminals, creating the links between the stars and becoming the first President of Humanity. I'm not sure we're meant to believe all of this - the book doesn't say she's lying as such, but she's been pivotal to the major developments in civilisation for 200 years, yet without ever getting the credit.

Lena first made her name through a radical interpretation of emergence theory. But her life's work (until that point), a mash up of hard physics, psychology, history and pop culture, was ridiculed by the academics. Palmer's book likewise mashes up all kinds of wild ideas into one brash and teaming narrative. But there's little subtlety or insight, it's an excess of explosions and mad violence.

It's fun and exciting, with some great twists (and some which feel too much like cheating). But ultimately this is a brash, adolescent adventure. And that would be fine if Palmer didn't seem to think he's written something else.

Nine lives and counting

Space, said Douglas Adams, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is…

But there’s a small and dwindling group of men who do. Men pushing 80 who’ve seen the Earth from deep space. The Apollo astronauts could hide our planet, all our lives and worries, behind the end of one thumb.

Journalist Andrew Smith was interviewing former astronaut Charlie Duke when word came through that Pete Conrad had been killed in a motorbike crash. Smith was taken by Duke’s forlorn comment that now there were only “nine of us” left – just nine remaining of just 12 men to ever have walked on the Moon. And so Smith set out to find and interview the remaining astronauts, before it was too late.

Moondust is an extraordinary, brilliant book, full of wit and revelation, Smith struggling to tease out what such an experience can have been like. He interviews not just the Moon men but their team-mates left 60 miles up in lunar orbit, the wives and children who suffered such heroes in ordinary life, the journalists who covered the show first time round and those now trying to prove whether it even really happened.

Throughout, Smith works hard to explain context: the context of these men’s lives now (signing autographs at conventions when they’re lower in the billing than some bloke from Lost In Space); the context of the unreconstructed worldview prevailing in their time; the context of international, domestic, office and personal politics which dictated the decisions being made; the context of Smith’s own life and the impact the Moon landings had on him.

This latter aspect might not appeal to everyone – and I found it a bit wearying at times. It’s in complete contrast to In The Shadow of the Moon, which the astronauts tell themselves accompanied by cleaned-up NASA footage. But Smith’s argument is that the missions to get “out there” is important only in what it showed us about ourselves. Standing on that barren, grey rock redefined our position and meaning here.

This human story should appeal to those who’ve never really got into Moon porn. It’s not all just Top Men talking at length about real, manly physics. In fact, the book is full of detail and observation that punctures the cool, controlled image of spacemen. Snot, for example, is,

“no fun at all in a weightless environment.”

Andrew Smith, Moondust, p. 163.

The unglamorous realities of space travel have long been reported – kids queued up at the space museum in Washington DC was astronauts’ toilet, which I think was from a space shuttle. But that strange looking contraption was modern, extravagant comfort compared to the first pioneers. As early as 1973, Buzz Aldrin’s book Return to Earth revealed,

“That the condoms they’d used for collecting urine were a great source of anguish because ‘our legs weren’t the only things that atrophied in space’… [and] that hydrogen bubbles in the water supply they used to rehydrate food had given them the farts and Columbia’s interior didn’t smell so good (there was ‘a considerable fragrance’) by the time they got home.”

Ibid., p. 101.

It changes our view of these healthy American heroes, filled to the gills with the “right stuff”, to hear of leaks in the condoms that resulted in reeking, “blobbing globules of piss”. (What a brilliantly vivid image; it makes me think of weightless Klingon bleeding in Star Trek VI, or the title sequence of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross.)

“This happened to Gordon Cooper on his Mercury flight and all he could do was herd them together every so often, so that he knew where they were. The rubbers on Apollo had the same problems, but were connected through a hose and valve directly into space. Not only was it easy to catch yourself in the mechanism, but opening the valve brought the hungry tug of absolute vacuum.”

Ibid., p. 247.

And it gets worse. The following grotesque quotation is not suitable for those of a nervous disposition:

“Defecation was the real deal. To do this on Apollo, you had to climb to the lower right side of the craft while your crewmates moved as far away from you as they possibly could – which anyone who’s seen one of the capsules will appreciate wasn’t far. There, you got completely naked, removing rings, watches, everything, because you couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next; then you positioned a special plastic bag as best you could, and went, hoping that everything went in it. Remember that you’re floating; the bag is floating; your shit is floating. Charlie [Duke] says: ‘Anything you can imagine happening… happened.’ Thus there is the tale of the stool that went freelance on one flight … So unspeakable was the hour-long process of dumping and getting cleaned up afterwards that I heard rumours of one astronaut dosing himself with Imodium, which enabled him to hold it for eight whole days.”

Ibid., p. 248.

It’s like some kind of disconnect; the extraordinary aspiration and physics and enterprise, yet inextricable from such humbling, basic human functionality. Smith is also good at connecting the dots, using this beastly detail to explain – though not excuse – the absence of women in the crews.

“Even I find it hard to imagine men and women of his generation sharing these experiences.”

Ibid., p. 247.

The lesson is that space isn’t just big, it’s weird and counter-intuitive. Smith explains space sickness – where those of us who use exterior signals completely lose our bearings – and the complexities of orbital mechanics. Thrust lifts you into a higher orbit, which has weaker gravity and where it’s further to get round to the same place again (because the circumference of the orbit is bigger). Thus increasing your speed to catch something up actually puts you further away.

“Bizarre as it sounds the solution … is to decrease velocity, so sinking to a lower, shorter, faster orbit, then to gradually transfer back up to the original one at precisely the right point to meet the target. This stuff is called ‘orbital mechanics’ and it manifestly is rocket science.”

Ibid., pp. 147-8.

And even more incredibly this stuff was being sussed out and tested, with men putting their lives at risk, by, in Aldrin’s own phrase:

“earnest young engineers, their holstered slide rules slapping against their belts.”

Ibid., p. 211.

The computers by which mission control monitored proceedings were, by modern standards, not even pocket calculator stuff. It makes the whole thing as much foolhardy as brilliant. And so, you’d think, a whole lot more endearing. But there’s also a dark side to the story.

On the side of these engineers was German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, a controversial figure then and now. As in the James Bond novel Moonraker, German rocketry was a valuable commodity in the early Cold War, but came with a difficult moral dimension. Reg Turnhill, the BBC’s aerospace correspondent for two decades, couldn’t shake von Braun’s hand for some years. Reg’s

“eldest son was born prematurely when one of the first V-2 rocket-bombs von Braun designed during World War II fell on Sydenham.”

Ibid., p. 39.

And the man Reg describes working for NASA could come right out of Bond:

“To begin with, his thick accent and mouth full of metal teeth were ‘quite revolting for the viewer’, but one day Reg turned round and, lo, the engineer was speaking perfect English through a gallery of gleaming white teeth.”

Ibid.

Smith teases at the controversy. Did von Braun know about the slave labour conditions under which his work for the Nazis was carried out? Was he complicit in the regime? Did he see the punishment and executions? How much of his past was swept under the carpet so as not to inconvenience the mission? And, madly, mixed up in all that is what sounds like some insanely inspired sitcom.

“Prior to his flight, [Apollo astronaut Edgar] Mitchell spent a week sharing a house with the rocket scientist [von Braun] and Arthur C. Clarke, who was by then regarded as one of the most influential futurist thinkers on the planet, because for that brief period sci-fi was seen as something more than escapism.”

Ibid., p. 69.

There’s a definite sense of the transcendent in that period up to Apollo 11; a sense that anything can be and will be achieved, whatever the sacrifice needed. I’ve talked before that the term “single-minded” is a euphemism for someone being a shit. Here, marriages suffered and collapsed; children suffered dad’s who were impossible role models and who set impossible standards. And von Braun’s involvement is troubling because it exemplifies the any cost approach.

Other German scientists were found out for their part in torture and horrific treatment, and were retired from the programme. Even those who worked with von Braun, who liked him, are sceptical of his innocence; they argue he would have worked under any flag, that the politics didn’t matter half as much as the achievement.

Certainly, von Braun had bold ambitions for where the programme would go next. In 1969, with the Moon landing still a tantalising probability, he presented Congress with a plan for,

“nuclear rockets assembled in Moon bases, to reach the red planet in the early 1980s.”

Ibid., p. 107.

Which is ironic, really. There’s a suggestion that NASA would have been better served with space planes instead of rockets – they would have been safer and more sustainable, so the space age might have lasted longer than December 1972. But von Braun’s lobbying and the fact rockets could be produced faster than new versions of the X-15 seem to have decided things. The single-mindedness turned out to be as counter-intuitive as space.

All the astronauts Smith speaks to yearn to go back to the Moon. I’m not sure whether that’s because they personally need to return – infected with a bug for moondust as some people are bewitched by Africa. Perhaps, like Tennyson’s Ulysees, the old men crave one last great adventure. They’ve all got reasons for insisting on the importance of man going back: science; pioneering spirit; resources and profit; just to beat the Chinese. John Young even claims we have to get off-planet if the species is to survive, that there’s a

“1 in 455 chance of humanity failing to see out the next century … You’re about ten times more likely to get killed in a civilization-ending event than you are of getting killed on a commercial airline flight.”

Ibid., p. 215.

But is this all just skirting around the debilitating sense of anti-climax, the mundane paucity of the human world they have returned to? Is the yearning to return just a way to validate those incredible 10 days off-planet, and the shadow they cast on the rest of their lives?

Smith following them round, begging for interviews, seeing them at expensive dinners and signings, and sadly reports their tetchy in-bickering. There’s a sense that the astronauts – every one of them either an only child or eldest sibling – are still squabbling alpha males.

They are all in their own ways competitive, high-achieving and selfish. They have their own obsessions – religious, artistic or political – and nothing gets in the way. These are, of course, the necessary characteristics to achieve something so improbably and audacious as getting to the Moon. Something so manifestly incredible that huge numbers don’t believe it.

The restless disquiet with life that Smith charts is not down to what they saw out in space. If they have had trouble adjusting to post-lunar life, it seems it’s because there’s nowhere further to go. They can’t describe or explain what it was like to be there, but that can’t stop the endless queue of people asking that very question. The tragedy is not that there are only nine Moonwalkers left, but that, despite our protests, they could never hope to share the experience with the rest of us.

I went ape

For reasons of research on something I cannot yet speak of, I have been looking into physics. Specifically, I have been learning about orbital rendezvous and delta-v calculations – the sorts of tricky manouvre one does in rockets in space. You know, real space travel, not all those sci-fi cheats.

The Dr has patiently zoned out of my efforts to explain some of this stuff. She ignored almost all of the DVD of In The Shadow of the Moon, though she was rather moved by the former moon-walkers having trouble coming back to reality. They found God, they drank, they just fidgeted about – though none of them got a job in the music industry in the way that Polly ffaze-Avatron did.

As I’ve said before, the Dr considers all this space stuff to be “moon porn”. Not even my top facts impressed her – like that it took the Apollo missions three days to reach the moon; less time it took the first passenger flights to reach Australia.

I even foolishly attempted to explain to her the late Craig Hinton’s theories that Martian civilisation would have seemed somewhat Egyptian, what with the Ice Warriors and Khufu both being under the yoke of the Osirans. She likes Egyptians. She’s even quite tickled by the idea that the pyramids came from space. Just so long as it wasn’t from mid-70s low-budget Doctor Who space.

She’s also not a great fan of monkeys, and points out that they’re always the baddies. See, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean or the apes that kidnap Mowgli. Against this, I can offer… er… Muggle Wump in The Twits and... um… Cheetah off of Tarzan. And Bernice’s friend the lemur.

Can anyone do any better?

More importantly, what a marvellous conjoinment of the Dr’s two horrors is this news of space monkeys.

The title for this post is, of course, the greatest Knock Knock joke ever.