When telling about the explorations of a new city, Google Earth presents itself as an obvious tool. The dataset for Cairo (and much of Egypt) is excellent, so I’ve started georeferencing places and photos.

Download the file at the other end of this link. it should open in Google Earth automatically. If not, open it from within Google Earth. Make sure you have Google Earth 4 installed. Download it here.

In the future, I whenever I write about a spot in Cairo, I will try to update the KML file. All you have to do is download it once and keep it in Google Earth’s “My Places”. It acts like a subscription to a newsfeed, except you’re subscribing to a “placefeed”. Everytime you start up Google Earth, it will update, if there is something new. As I add more places, I will start organizing them properly.

And for the Google Earth-impaired, here are two shots of where I will be moving to early April:

I almost forgot, you can also see the placemarks in Google Maps using just a web browser, by following this link. Just not that while you can also get road data in Google Maps (and not in Google Earth), it doesn’t match up with the satellite imagery.

I made two commitments yesterday (March 5), and I’m feeling much better for it.

First, I joined a gym — the one at the Marriott, Zamalek Island’s swankiest hotel. The gym is basically a large garden with a huge pool in the middle, half covered and half outdoors, with a weights room attached. You have to apply to the gym, though the main criterium for acceptance seems to be an ability to pay. In any case, I didn’t have to wait for a response to my application; I was allowed a provisional swim and workout. This did wonders to my increasingly bedraggled physique. Cairo is many things, but a park it is not.

Also today I paid a deposit reserving my room in a shared flat, into which I will move as soon as I am back from my trip to Sweden and Budapest at the end of March (for meetings). One flatmate is a Croatian woman studying Arabic; the other is an Italian woman. The languages we all have in common, more or less, are Italian and English, so I am looking forward to resuscitating my ailing Italian skills.

The apartment is massive by Swedish standards, on the first floor of a four-floor building in a very short street and quiet, across from a small local hospital. A week ago, I would have called the state of the building dishevelled. But that would have been before I arrived in Cairo. Now I think it is clean.

Tomorrow, I will make another commitment: I will order a 2-mbps broadband connection for the apartment, which conveniently will take as long to install as it will take me to move in.

So, how much does all this set me back? Here it gets interesting (sorry if it wasn’t before) because the prices are a good indication of Egypt’s relative scarcities: For the gym, I will pay EUR 110 per month. The shared apartment? EUR 150 per month. The broadband, which is the absolute fastest you can get here: EUR 90 per month. A grand total of EUR 350 per month.

Comparing to Stockholm: Apartment: EUR 700. Gym: EUR 65. Internet: EUR 30 (and for a godlike 100 mbps). A total of EUR 800. That leaves EUR 550 extra per month i savings to spend on flights to Europe, which I might if work weren’t paying for those.

I intend to get a tutor for learning Arabic, but my main constraint is time. There is so much to do, both for work and outside it, and just 24 hours in a day.

I know, I know, no photos. I will remedy that at the earliest opportunity, and georeference the pics in Google Earth

First impressions of a city are worth recording because the place will never look the same again. Within a few days, the mind’s blank slate is etched with the patterns of emerging habits, and these will mark all subsequent experiences. What follows is necessarily telegraphic in style, with no pretension to originality. Everyone gets to arrive in Cairo a first time.

Day 1: Thursday, March 1 The flight from Brussels to Cairo is on Alitalia, via Milan. A front-page article in that morning’s Herald Tribune is about how the Egyptian government has let down the people of Cairo, and how Cairo’s poor are managing by themselves in the absence of public infrastructure. Promising. Everyone on the plane seems to be reading it. What’s interesting is that very few of the women travelling to Cairo are wearing headscarves. Does poverty and conservative dress correlate? I presume so, but that’s one presumption I remind myself to check up on in the coming weeks. (By contrast, in the US, moral conservatives are not generally found among the poorest.)

An exceptionally speedy airport arrival process later, I’m in a cab on my way to Cairo, along the airport road. Absolute first impression: Cairo is more normal than I had imagined it, and richer than Pakistan, my last major experience in the Islamic world. The driving is genteel compared to the chaos that was Pakistan.

Along the road, there seems to be a surfeit of pharaonic monumental art, and we pass by several statues of Ramses II, who has a predilection for traffic roundabouts. It’s not warmer than 22 degrees — perfect, especially with rolled-down windows. First datapoint — the nicer the car, the less likely any women in it will have headscarves on.

In fact, the more I look at pedestrians, the more women’s fashion seems polarized — it’s either traditional garb with headscarf, or flashy western. If there is a middle ground, it is lost amid the extremes. (Or maybe it’s just early days.) In subsequent days, I’ve only seen two women in full hijab, though I haven’t gone to the more traditional areas. Headscarves ceased to be a head-turner after day one for me, but I still am curious about the motivation behind wearing them — unlike in Europe, there is no identity politics to play here — or maybe I’m just not privy to it yet.

A roadblock. Some VIP is travelling on the main highway ahead, and so the army closes all the feeder roads to ease his way. Drivers get progressively more annoyed with the lone soldier holding up traffic at the on-ramp, en when the all-clear finally comes, he has to scurry to the sidewalk to avoid being run over. Silver lining: we get to drive on the VIP’s coattails all the way into town.

Somebody is shouting in Arabic on the car radio, for the duration of the trip into town. A demonstration? A political diatribe? Angry extremists? I ask. It’s football, two local teams. I can tell when the goals are made from the tone of the voice, just not which side scored.

The destination is Zamalek, the upscale island in the middle of the Nile, where many of the embassies are. I had had a room lined up in a big shared apartment there, but it fell through. The person who was supposed to be leaving wanted to stay longer, and I was welcome to sleep on the sofa until I found another place. None of that. I booked myself into the Lonely Planet’s favorite mid-level accommodation, Hotel Longchamps, and set to work finding another place to live. It was 4pm.

First, though, I would need a local phone number. I set out in a spiral pattern from my hotel along the streets of Zamalek, and soon enough found a mobile phone store who’d sell me an Egyptian sim card. Here’s my new Egyptian phone number: +20 18 352 7638. I also found some bookshops, some cafés, and internet cafés. Many of these I would visit repeatedly in the coming days. The coffee in Cairo is excellent, I am happy to report.

Cairo has far more high-rises than I imagined — the buildings are sand colored, higher and closer together, and Zamalek is denser than an examination of Google Earth had led me to believe.

Day 2: Friday, March 2 I have work to do. Hotel Longchamps has a wireless internet connection, so I spend the morning on the terrace catching up on work emails. I also email friends of friends that I’ve been told to contact in Cairo. By the afternoon, I’ve been invited to a dinner party that evening. I also manage to get in touch with an old friend and fellow SAIS alumnus from my Bologna days, now working for an NGO in Cairo. He’s travelling all of March, and had offered me his apartment, but I had said no. I now say yes, please. I thus get some breathing room in the apartment hunt.

Before the party, it’s time to get my head shaved at a local barber I had spotted. It’s probably the best shave ever, and it comes with a head massage and then the application of a hot towel. All for a quarter of the price of in Sweden — 25 £E.

The dinner party is great. In attendance are assorted expats working for NGOs in Cairo, or passing through Cairo to and from Darfur. It turns out I had already been in email contact with one of them, a blogger — it’s a small world.

There is something about self-selecting groups that make them so fascinating — what motivates people to move to Cairo? Learning Arabic, Islamic studies, journalism, Egyptology, human rights, documentary photography, development aid… Not the types to settle in the suburbs and get cable TV. This means interesting people with interesting stories.

Day 3: Saturday, March 3 I check out of the Longchamps and head for my friend’s apartment down the road — I don’t have much with me, so it is an easy move. The apartment is huge, with a view of the Nile. Just no internet. That’s fine, as my explorations in the afternoon find several more cafés with internet access, and a proper internet café as well, with mini offices and some serious bandwidth that will set me back €1 per hour. I try Second Life to chat with a person in Sweden, and it works without a hiccup. In other words, the slight gamble has paid off — I’ll be able to work on building Sweden’s virtual embassy in Second Life from Cairo.

In the meantime, an ad for a room posted on a Yahoo group for Cairo scholars leads me to an apartment in central Zamalek. There is a room available, and my roommates would be a Bosnian and an Italian PhD candidate. I could move in by the end of the month. The timing works — I’ll have my friend’s apartment for a few weeks, and then I’ll be in Sweden for a week for meetings at the end of the month.

Day 4: Sunday, March 4 Time for some sightseeing. Pyramids, anyone? In the afternoon, I find a very western-looking supermarket — in fact, both in terms of choice and prices, I feel like I am back in Sweden. I also decide to take the apartment.

Initial impressions of Cairo to follow, though obviously not chronologically.It’s already Day 4 of my stay in Cairo, and it was high time I took a break from apartment hunting and internet-café hopping to doing something touristy. Like seeing the pyramids.

I decided to take a taxi. You don’t need to find them, they find you. You’ll get honked at every couple of seconds when you walk the streets of Cairo — taxis looking for a ride.

The trip to the Pyramids on the edge of the city from the center is about 12 kilometers, all of it in hectic but flowing traffic. Wearing seat belts is not really an option — it appears to be an affront to the otherwise friendly driver if you wear them, as if you’re questioning his evident driving skills. Lucky for you, the seatbelts don’t work anyway.

It turns out that taxis honk at anything, not just you — and do so with the absentminded frequency of a smoker’s cough. I think honking is meant to work like some kind of repellent force, as a substitute for braking or giving way, and it does appear to work.

How to visualize a 15 million-person metropolis on the edge of the desert? For the entire drive to the pyramids, on either side of the road, tenements — like in those 19th-century photos of the Lower East Side, but higher, and with satellite dishes. Everything has a beige-ish hue, covered in a thin film of Saharan dust.

And then, in the corner of your eye, popping up beyond some buildings, the Pyramid of Chephren. The spine tingles. We’re getting close. The taxi driver also begins to try to steer me to commission-generating sideshows, but the Lonely Planet Guide pays for itself by preëmpting any such move, and giving me the courage to stay firm when haggling down the price retroactively — it appears the driver hadn’t heard me when we had agreed on the original 20£E amount. He got 25£E in the end – $4. (Of course, the Lonely Planet cost me $30, but its the thought that matters.)

And then it was just me and the pyramids — and a steady drizzle of would-be souvenir sellers and camel ride purveyors. Alas for them, I now live here, which affords me the easy insouciance of someone who doesn’t have to do it all or do it now. I can start asserting a kind of ownership over the pyramids, much as I like to do with my favorite museums in New York — by walking around them as if they’re my own private collection, without needing to glare at every tableau. Because I’ll be back.

And so I just went for a short stroll, past the Pyramid of Cheops, along the Pyramid of Chephren — the one with the smooth top, and on higher ground — and then left and back down to the city, towards the Sphinx.

Yes, I did all this without a proper camera. Okay, ask.Don’t ask. But maybe you’ve recently seen those ads where camera phone makers send famous photographers to pristine nature spots to take photos with the latest models? Well, here are some shots of a no-name photographer taking pictures of something wholly manmade with an rather cruddy Sony Ericsson K610i:

That last photo is of the Sphinx’s ass. Not many people take that photo because not many people get to it from behind. Notice the tail. I didn’t know s/he had one.

As I had my laptop with me, i thought I might jot down these notes in a shady café within full view of the pyramids. Alas, no wifi, so you’ll have to wait to read this until the trip back to Zamalek.

And so I can check off another item from the to-do list I wrote when I was twelve or so — I wasn’t very imaginative, however, and not all that ambitious, as I only have Antarctica, Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat to go. With a bit of luck I’ll get those done before the decade is out.

An article in Scientific American about dark energy is well worth reading for its overview of the current state of research in the field of cosmology, but certain passages seemed strangely analogous to a debate I’ve been following on economics blogs, and I just couldn’t help but snigger my way through them…

The virtual cessation of [galactic] mergers is not the only way the universe has run out of steam since it was half its current age. Star formation, too, has been waning. Most of the stars that exist today were born in the first half of cosmic history, as first convincingly shown by several teams in the 1990s. […] More recently, researchers have learned how this trend occurred. It turns out that star formation in massive galaxies shut down early. Since the universe was half its current age, only lightweight systems have continued to create stars at a significant rate. This shift in the venue of star formation is called galaxy downsizing [see “The Midlife Crisis of the Cosmos,” by Amy J. Barger; Scientific American, January 2005]. It seems paradoxical. Galaxy formation theory predicts that small galaxies take shape first and, as they amalgamate, massive ones arise. Yet the history of star formation shows the reverse: massive galaxies are initially the main stellar birthing grounds, then smaller ones take over.
 
[…]
 
Worse, dark energy might be evolving. Some models predict that if dark energy becomes ever more dominant over time, it will rip apart gravitationally bound objects, such as galaxy clusters and galaxies. Ultimately, planet Earth will be stripped from the sun and shredded, along with all objects on it. Even atoms will be destroyed. Dark energy, once cast in the shadows of matter, will have exacted its final revenge.

Now that’s what I call a hard landing. And no amount of outsourcing is going to help.

(Oh, sorry, and my point is? That it’s good to see the hard sciences borrowing metaphors from the social sciences for once.)

I’m now up to apartment number 10 in Stockholm in the four years I’ve been here. It will be the last for a while, though — I’m moving to Cairo at the end of February. More about that below. First, November and December.

November started with a trip to Taipei for the Swedish Institute. I arrived to what felt like the set of Blade Runner — rain-washed pavements glistening under bright animated advertising, throngs of mopeds driven by people in neon parkas, outdoor night markets selling strangely shaped foods, and a city of shopping malls surrounding Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building.

Taipeians have a ferocious appetite for consumption, and for selling. In my jetlagged night-time walks, I chanced upon Eslite, a 24-hour multilingual bookshop that slots into a solid third place in my list of favorites, after Foyles of London and Powells of Portland, Oregon. This sense that the city never sleeps is something I haven’t felt since New York — and there are many more clues that Taipei is, consciously or not, fashioning itself as the Gotham of the East. Taipei 101 looks very much like one of the Twin Towers in a pagoda suit. In front of it sits an edition of Robert Indiana’s Love, which also has a home on 6th Avenue.

And the latest meme to invade Taipei is the coffee shop, with local chains carefully studying the methods of a famous American brand, down to the logo, but adding a certain Eastern existential je-ne-sais-quoi…

Alas, my stupid Nikon D70 decided to stop working after my very first foray into the city — I was looking forward to making a photographic essay of Engrish coffee shop signs.

Taipei never ceased to impress.
My only wish — that we’d also be told how long we have to wait before the light goes green again. Later, a friend who had visited Beijing told me this is the case there.When crossing wide boulevards, pedestrians are helpfully given their time left, in seconds, before they need to get to the other side. The little green man starts running faster as the seconds run down. I found these hyperlocal planning tools everywhere, down to subway platform markings showing where the doors of the carriages will open, and where to stand to allow passengers a quick exit.

Finally, lest I should start to doubt that I was in an Asian city, every so often I was confronted by something like this:

Yes, it’s the iGallop, in the front window of a shop in Taipei’s most upmarket mall. Is it USB-powered, you think? It’d make a great game controller for a cowboy-themed first-person shoot’em-up…

The second half of November and the first week of December, Felix and Michelle went on a cruise to Antarctica, one of the few places on Earth where you cannot blog from. Coincidence? It certainly meant Felix needed a guest blogger for his day-blog, Economonitor, and so I managed to take three weeks off from work and blogged pretty much full time about economics news. Not having watched marcoëconomic events unfold with an eagle-eyed gaze these past few years, it was certainly a daunting prospect, but the opportunity to read just about any economics blog I could lay my mouse on and then mouthing off to a wide readership prepped by Felix was a fantastic change of topic, work-wise.

As if to compensate for those three weeks of sedentary pursuits, I then travelled to Edinburgh for the Swedish Institute, my first visit (but certainly not my last) to this wonderful city. I managed to take some time off to walk all over the place, visiting those pubs that have a particularly good reputation for their whisky selection — among them Kay’s and The Bow Bar.

PS: I’ve been acutely aware these past two months that if I don’t write to this particular blog (as opposed to my other blog), I will forget in years hence where I lived at the time of writing; not because I write about the apartments I happen to live in (I haven’t), but because I remember the rituals of writing when I reread my posts, and these rituals involve pacing about, making coffee, and staring out of windows — with different rooms, kitchens and views each time that I move.
 
Reïnhabiting the spaces where I lived, in turn, reminds me of my state of mind at the time. So while this website may look like a blog, it has become a big cryptic memory palace to me.Also in December, a push to get International Polar Year’s new IPY.org site out the door. It’s almost ready — you can check it out here in the meantime. And then it was Christmas in London, where the niece stole the show.

All this left little time for reading books, but I did manage to squeeze in Spinoza: A Life and Absurdistan.

Which leaves us with plans for 2007. Since I deliver almost all my work via the internet, it’s time to take advantage of that fact and move to Cairo, where they also have broadband. I’ll be there for three months for starters, from March to May. I’m already reading up on the place. Expect much more blogging here in the coming year.

This month, my literary attentions returned to religion. Religion vexes me. The notion of a personal God — of God as a personality with incentive plans for goodness — is patently ridiculous to me, and yet it remains a notion ardently subscribed to by an overwhelming majority of humanity. Religion sits atop nationalism and ideology in my unholy trinity of dogmatism — breeding grounds for arrogant intolerance, boosted by insider-outsider group selection dynamics, combated by rationalism and science.

It vexes other people too, and some of them write books explaining why. Last year, the most notable such book was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. It came across as shrill in places, but the arguments it musters are stark and compelling. A decade earlier, Carl Sagan wrote The Demon-Haunted World (“Science as a candle in the dark”). Sagan was too polite to attack religion proper — he took aim instead at pseudo-science and superstition, hoping perhaps that the credulous among his readership would spontaneously apply the lessons of the book to their own beliefs. He was optimistic.

Now Richard Dawkins has stepped up with the angriest book yet, The God Delusion. We all know Richard Dawkins can write — he has penned one of the best science popularizations ever — so I snapped up his latest effort, only to be hugely disappointed. Here’s why:

First, I think the condescending anger he sustains throughout the book is most ineffective if — as he writes — he intends the book to be used as a tool for enlightening the credulous.

Second, the books bears all the hallmarks of a rushed job, cobbled together from prefabbed opinion pieces. There is little continuity between chapters — some are excellent, such as the one on the secularism of the founding fathers of the United States and the one on the atheism of Einstein, while other are embarrassing attempts to throw anything at his target to see if it will stick. He also quotes Sam Harris’ book far too frequently as an example of somebody who said it just right. In other words, just read Sam Harris’ book instead.

I have a suspicion that Richard Dawkins is in fact a pathological atheist — he’ll advance both good and bad arguments in favor of atheism without differentiating between the two. In a similar fashion, there are people who were against the Iraq War for all the wrong reasons — this didn’t make the Iraq War just, of course; I just wish they weren’t advancing my cause.

Had Richard Dawkins instead blogged the contents of his book, the result would have been pitch-perfect, the to-and-fro far more entertaining, and his readership comprised far more of the kinds of people this book is intended to reach — American Christians.

There is redemption, however, in one of the best little nonfiction books I’ve read in a long time, Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza — The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated at the age of 23 from the Amsterdam community of Jews in 1656 for his supposed atheism, managed to flourish among a small community of free thinkers in the relative tolerance of 17th-century Netherlands. To Spinoza, God is synonymous to Nature; there is no mind-body duality, there is no afterlife — and wonder of the natural world around us amounts to a rational love of God.

This repurposing of the term “God” was radical for his time, but it is a notion that coexists without difficulty with modern science. Einstein strongly associated his own metaphysical stance with that of Spinoza. When Einstein refers to God, he is referring to a Spinozan god, a synonym for Nature.

What Goldstein’s book brings out especially well is that Spinoza is the very model of a virtuous atheist. He abhorred violence, he relied on reason to persuade, and he lived unperturbed by the disapprobation of the prevailing dogmas. He applied the principles of his magnum opus, <a href="http://www.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica-front.html" title="The Ethics“>The Ethics, to his own life, and in so doing presents the best rebuttal yet for the prejudices mainstream religionists in the US and elsewhere still carry against atheists. This is why I think a newfound appreciation of Spinoza in the US would be more likely to bring about a change of attitudes there than Dawkins’s book.

I also think that Spinoza’s ideas are essential to the 21st century, which is shaping up to be the century where dogma has its last hurrah. If we are going to come out of it alive, it will be because we learn Spinoza’s lessons sooner rather than later.

Last weekend I was in Antwerp for a wedding, so I took the opportunity to go visit Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg, a two-hour drive north:

The house has this poem affixed to the wall:

In English:

If only people were wise
And wished each other well!
Earth would be a paradise
Now it’s mostly hell.

My sentiments entirely.

This has been one of Sweden’s sunniest, most pleasant September months on record. I was lucky enough to spend the first third of it on Sandhamn, at the far edge the Stockholm Archipelago — Joachim and Elise have a summer house there, and I was welcome to use it while looking for an apartment in the city.

In the summer months, a ferry connects Sandhamn directly to the center of Stockholm.I tracked the course of the ferry with a GPS device and put the results up on Google Earth. More details over on my other blog, Ogle Earth. When I took up residence on the island, the vacation hordes had already left, so I had the boat practically to myself for my daily commute to work — a capacious floating living room with a bar, good food, and big windows for watching hundreds of pine-tufted islands drift by. In the evenings, on the trip home, all this was usually tinted by the colors of a spectacular nordic sunset.

Watching the archipelago ferries dock should be a spectator sport. First, the captain sets the ship on a collision course for land. He then raises the nose of the prow and a gangplank is primed to extend from the front. Just when the ship looks sure to crash into a fast-approaching dock, the captain starts playing an aquatic version of Lunar LanderLunar Lander is the first computer came I ever played — on the school’s Commodore PET computer., where he reverses the engines with a view to reaching zero velocity just as the prow kisses the lip of the dock. The gang plank is then extended, people surge off and on, and almost immediately the ship sets sail again, another island in its sights.

Not at all unhappy to be deprived of the distractions of the internet, I used the hours onboard to read. I’ve had an unusually lucky streak of good books to read this past month, so the remainder of the post is about them.

First, the fiction. Magnus Mills’ most recent novel, Explorers of the new century, is a short but engrossing read. His allegorical intrepid explorers in an arid polar region start off by sounding human, all too human in the face of adversity, but then Mills takes a turns for the bizarreDon’t go reading too many reviews if you plan to read the book. Many give away the secret. in a way that makes you want to reread the book, this time in on the cleverness of a macabre joke he’s played with our assumptions.

I had some misgivings about Robert Harris’ first historical novel about the Romans, Pompeii. Now Harris has come out with another, and it is far better. Imperium reïmagines The Life of Cicero, a real but lost biography written by his long-time secretary and inventor of shorthand, Tiro. Harris writes an interesting piece in the UK Times portraying Cicero as the first modern politician. If there is a remaining gripe about Imperium, it is that he sometimes pushes the similarities between Roman and modern politics just a little too unsubtly.Gone are the textual anachronisms and unlikely plot twists that strained Pompeii. Instead, we get a compelling narrator imparting the minutiae of Roman politics and life.Look, a blog about Roman history books!

In the Roman historical fiction genre, Vidal’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Julian-A-Novel-Vintage-International/dp/037572706X" title="Julian“>Julian and Graves’ <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Claudius" title="Claudius series“>Claudius series are the obvious standouts. What’s interesting about the most recent worthy contributions — Harris’ Imperium, for sure, but also the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/rome/" title="BBC television series Rome“>BBC television series Rome — is that these newer works paint a Rome that feels far more anthropologically whole. The past decades’ rise of historical anthropology as a worthy field of study is having a clear payoff in the fiction of Rome, I think. Just compare how the <a href="http://www.historyinfilm.com/claudius/" title="BBC's I, Claudius“>BBC’s I, Claudius portrayed Romans vs. the current Rome — the former is far more revealing about the mores of the 1970s that those of the Romans.

On to the non-fiction. Two major critiques of the state of contemporary physics hit my favorite bookshopHedengren’s book buyer, whoever s/he is, has impeccable taste, and not just in the sciences. And how do they get these books so quickly? this month: Peter Woit’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756/ref=pd_cp_b_title/104-3152749-3935958?ie=UTF8" title="Not Even Wrong“>Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618551050/ref=pd_cp_b_title/104-3152749-3935958?ie=UTF8" title="The Trouble with Physics“>The Trouble with Physics. They both argue that string theory, which has usurped the bulk of the resources, faculty positions and mind share allocated to theoretical physics over the past 20 years, has ceased to be science, for it continues to lack a rigorous theoretical framework, any predictive power, and hence cannot be falsified (so it’s “not even wrong“). Instead, argue Woit and Smolin, it’s time to push in new and promising directions, but sociological forces and belief bordering on religiosity among string theorists is delaying such a necessary realignment, which makes for a serious crisis in this most fundamental (and I think important) scientific field.

I found the arguments made in these books to be compelling (and I’ve blogged some of them before). Not Even Wrong came out first, and I read it first, though I’d recommend a reverse reading order. Several of the reviews I’ve read so far inevitably compare these two books, and tend to find that Not Even Wrong comes out lacking. I don’t think that’s really fair. Not Even Wrong is certainly less accessible; The Trouble with Physics provides a far gentler slope for the lay reader to climb, and Smolin’s book will therefore do a better job of convincing the general public that physics is in crisis.

But Woit’s book is more of a blogger’s book, a pugnacious report from the trenches that isn’t afraid of a good dust-up, and where tendentiousness is a literary form because you’re smart enough to think for yourself — not surprising, as Woit has a blog, and it comes with the ultimate in blogger’s cred: a stuffed comments box. Not Even Wrong is also less polished — and I mean that in a good sense. Far too many physics popularizations I’ve read, including many of the best sellers, set out to simplify the science they want to illuminate but end up warping it to the point of misrepresentation. They will also present hypotheses as near certainties for the sake of clarity, but in doing so miss out on all the places where things don’t quite fit, and where the most interesting science is being done. Or as Woit puts it:

Readers who like their science always inspirational are advised to stop reading this book and to find a version of this story [of the history of string theory] told by someone with a much more positive point of view regarding it. Some suggestions of this kind are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe or The Fabric of the Cosmos…

I smiled when I read that, because I’ve found Greene’s books to be insufferable in that regard. String theory is clearly not elegant, and yet I keep on being told that it is, most recently in Lisa Randall’s book Warped Passages, even as more and more abstruse constructions are posited to shoehorn the universe into something string theorists can model.

What Woit does is scrape a couple of layers off the veneer with which physics is often presented to a lay audience. This makes for a harder read, but I for one felt rewarded with a glimpse of the actual discourse physicists are having. Woit attempts explanations of Hilbert space, symmetry, supersymmetry and gauge theory — short of embarking on an undergraduate physics course (or a read through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality) Or maybe it’s time for a new genre of popularization — for fast learners not afraid of a few equations. John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession comes to mine as a model.this is about as much as an interested generalist can be expect to fathom.

As an aside, one of the footnotes in The Trouble With Physics — Chapter 16, footnote 15 — is an email dated June 8, 2006. I bought the US edition in Sweden on September 8, 2006. Wow. But maybe that also explains the typo on page 45:-)Ultimately, though, it is Smolin’s book that transcends the everyday trials and tribulations of theoretical physicists to address some of the perennial questions about the nature of science and its role in society, and this is what makes it a must-read for people who would otherwise never touch this kind of book. There are several chapters in particular that should get as wide an audience as possible: The introduction, which presents all his arguments (and easily sells the rest of the book); the first chapter, in which Smolin outlines “the five great problems in theoretical physics” (available online!), and chapter 13, “Surprises from the real world”, where he reviews some very recent evidence that may turn out to question some fundamental principles in physics (such as an unchanging fine structure constant).

So that’s September for me so far. Good books, and good weather.

Preliminary national election results for Sweden’s xenophobic Sverigedemokraterna are in… and they’re up to 2.79% of the vote according to SvD — way above the exit poll’s 1.9% forecast, and around double their showing in 2002.

We can thus conclude that 1 in 3 Sverigedemokraterna are ashamed of their vote:-) But this figure could rise — the counting of outsider parties in the Skåne region (in the south) is still ongoing, and that’s where the Sverigedemokraterna are strongest. It’s still possible, for example, that when the counting’s done, the party exceeds the 4% threshold to gain representation in parliament.

One milestone has definitely been reached: By passing the 2.5% mark in the national results, the Sverigedemokraterna are now eligible for state support as a party.

What’s in store for Sweden? First, it will try the Belgian option, the cordon sanitaire (quarantine), as reported by The Local:

The party has also been successful in local elections, particularly in Skåne, in the south of the country. In the Skåne town of Landskrona, the Sweden Democrats have won over 22 percent of the votes counted so far. The Social Democrats in the town have said to Moderate and Liberal representatives that they are willing to discuss a grand coalition to keep out the Sweden Democrats.

That won’t make them go away — quite the opposite. Then, my guess is that attempts will be made to declare the Sverigedemokraterna an illegitimate party on the grounds that they are racist, so that they do not get access to tax-funded state support. This won’t stall their momentum either, for exactly the same reasons why it hasn’t worked in Belgium.

Add to this indications that young first-time voters voted disproportionally for the Sverigedemokraterna, and you have yourself the makings of a very different political landscape in Sweden. The solution? Learn from Belgium’s mistakes. Engage the Sverigedemokraterna now on the merits of their arguments — and yes, this means discussing immigration and integration, two topics that both the left and right ignored during the campaign.

Bizarre: While the election results are coming in (and the right-of-center has now won), the most remarkable fact of the evening to me is that the “övriga partier” — outsider parties, which are expected to garner fewer than the 4% cut-off for representation in parliament — have practically doubled their share, to around 5.7% from 3.1% in 2002. This is big news, and yet there is not a peep from commentators about this. Furthermore, 8% of first-time voters cast a vote for an outsider party — most of it likely to the anti-copyright pirate party or the xenophobic Sverigedemokraterna — and this isn’t being commented on either.

Most frustrating is that while the election results are displayed live both online and on TV as they come in, there is no information anywhere about the breakdown of the vote for the outsider parties. It’s not possible to see, for example, what percentage of the vote is going to the SD. This is a big institutional shortcoming of the electoral reporting tonight, both by the media and by the electoral commission.