Racism And Astronomy

I am of course incredibly White, so the immediate question here is why a White non-astronomer is qualified to talk about racism in astronomy. Well, strictly speaking of course I can’t really, or rather, I am unlikely to be able to wade into it in enough depth to swim knowledgeably. Nonetheless I can give a kind of overview of it and comment on some of the active racism involved.

Photo by Faik Akmd on Pexels.com

This is a time lapse picture of the night sky. The main reason we can know it was taken here on Earth, apart from the fact that astronomical pictures taken from other celestial bodies are rare and poor quality (in fact I only know of one body they have been taken from, and that’s Mars) is the colour of the sky and the presence of liquid and solid on the surface at the bottom of the picture. It also seems to have been taken from the northern hemisphere because of the relatively stable and bright streak at the centre, which is presumably Polaris. Had it been taken from the south, the much dimmer Sigma Octantis would be at the centre of the swirl.

The sky seems non-specific and impassive to us, and also very little influenced by conflict or politics going on here on Earth among humans, and that is one reason I’m so keen on astronomy. Contemplating the Universe makes the problems we have here seem less important and seems to put them in perspective. I would personally say the stars are something to aspire to. I so want there to be humans out there among them one day. Of course, we are already among the stars but apparently only one of them hosts us. Nevertheless, there are cultural dominances and biasses in how we view the Universe and also very clear and overt racism exists among the astronomical community.

This sounds like an accusation, as the words “racism”, “sexism”, “ableism” and others often do, but that would imply that people are consciously and deliberately reserving much of the academic world to White people. That may happen as well, but it’s more important to look at the issue as a structural thing. As a White person, I have the privilege of firstly being unaware of racial bias among astronomers and secondly of being able to contemplate astronomy in a meaningful way. There are other ways in which I am trivially disadvantaged to do with my situation. For instance, I can’t see objects in the night sky very easily because of my poor eyesight, so the best I can usually manage to do is to view maybe first magnitude stars such as Antares, and basically nothing else. This is more on the disability side than ethnicity of course, but there is another set of issues which is fairly obvious to me regarding gender, namely that a man may feel much more confident to go out at night to a park or remote area to look at the sky in a place without light pollution than a woman might, and beyond that the kind of systemic biasses which prefer able-bodied middle-aged WASP men work against women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. Hence in the richer parts of the world, Black people are likely to live in places with more light pollution and less likely to be able to afford a good telescope. Ironically, much of Afrika, for example, would be very suitable indeed for telescopic astronomy. Here’s a map of the continent showing lighting at night:

(would’ve been better without the labels). And here’s Europe:

This means that treating every location as equally likely, which is not so because of lack of population, one stands a much better chance of seeing the night sky well in Afrika than in Europe. Also, along the Equator one can see both celestial hemispheres, so one can see more of it in Afrika than Europe.

There will inevitably be systemic racism in who becomes an astronomer in Europe and North America, although I’m guessing this isn’t any worse than who becomes a palaeontologist. The latter presents a rather different problem as there are issues regarding the plunder of resources by colonialists and the treatment of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the field, which may not be so big a problem with astronomy. However, there can be problems with the siting of observatories in a similar sense, the most well-known one at the moment being the positioning of the Thirty Metre Array in Hawai’i, which was to be situated on Mauna Kea, a sacred site to the people of that archipelago. The issue here is that the planned observatory is one of several near that site, and in the past the excavation of the site has desecrated the graves of ancient high chiefs. In the past, promises regarding the building of telescopes have been broken, with insistence that this would be the last development, followed by more of the same. The northern hemisphere is low in such observatories, and a possible alternate site in La Palma in the Canary Islands is less suitable for infrared astronomy due to the warmer climate and lower elevation. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain on Earth measured from its base, so there’s less atmosphere to look through. There is a peaceful protest ongoing there. Some of the indigenous people view the idea of looking for other habitable planets as encouraging an attitude that Earth is disposable. Despite losing their case in the courts, the actions taken to build the observatory seem to meet the legal definition of desecration. Elders in their seventies and eighties have been arrested for peaceful protests, and because the site is sacred all protestors are committed to non-violence. This has also divided the community as the police officers are sometimes related to the protestors. Beyond that is the issue of how the United States government acquired the islands in the first place, on the grounds that the White businessmen were more fit to run the island than the recently independent natives. The federal government also had no legal jurisdiction over the country.

This story makes me wonder about whether there are other observatories with similar histories. There is also a separate issue regarding the Arecibo Telescope, which is an enormous radio telescope built in a basin in Puerto Rico. This was used to send the first message into interstellar space for detection by aliens, although it was only a semi-serious attempt for publicity purposes. In 2020 CE, the telescope collapsed, primarily due to lack of funding making maintenance unaffordable. Like Hawai’i, part of the rhetoric for siting the telescope there is that it brings money into the local economy, but that money is no longer forthcoming. Elsewhere on the planet, the Karoo Square Kilometre Array in South Africa requires a 13 000 hectare “quiet zone” which minimises electromagnetic transmissions to enable the telescopes to detect signals from the sky more easily. The San used to live in this region and were forced to move north by the colonial government in the century before last, and there’s the issue of purchase of the land from White farmers to prevent radio interference. Employment is low and deprivation high in the area, and it’s possible that building the extra telescopes may lead to jobs. The San were, however, displaced when the government brought Black farmers to the area some time ago. The SKA is situated where it is thanks to a government bidding process which brought it into the area.

Then there’s the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. This was afflicted in 2013 by a workers’ contract dispute between the Washington CD-based organisation which runs the facility and the four-fifths of employees at the site who are Chilean. All of these things taken together look like a process where scientific institutions in the wealthy and light-polluted (and also electromagnetic radiation more generally) North of the planet uses places with colonial histories to site its astronomical facilities, without much respect being paid to the people who actually live there. As I say, I don’t know much about these things but it seems to be a clear example of racism in astronomy. The Polynesian people and the San do of course also have their own astronomical traditions. Western astronomers were not the first.

In 2017, only nine percent of US STEM academics were POC. The Black population of the US is 13.6%. As for Black women, only sixty-six of them got doctorates in physics compared to 27 000 White men. This is not about problematising STEM departments or the scientific community in particular, but in a racist society this kind of disparity can be expected if nothing is done to address it. In general, diversity is an asset because new perspectives can be brought to bear on research, so this is not simply about justice for ethnic minorities but about having a well-functioning scientific discipline. Problems encountered in physics and astronomy for POC include microaggressions from White students, not feeling welcomed or included, imposter syndrome, a lack of role models, financial struggles and an absence of academic support. There is a second problem with examining racism specifically in astronomy caused by the tendency for physics and astronomy to be lumped together, perhaps because physics is perceived as a more “useful” subject, and it may also be that astronomers are less aware of the need to combat racism in their discipline than physicists. Researchers into the issue have not managed to visit astronomy departments as easily as physics ones, meaning that no firm conclusions can be drawn about the relative differences.

The White Florida emeritus astronomy professor Haywood Smith has state

d that he does not believe systemic racism exists at a time when only two percent of American astronomers are Black. His own department had had one Black employee, in admin, hired in the early 1990s. On the positive side, Black students report that the environment in the department is generally very positive and supportive. However, I can’t help but be reminded of Patrick Moore, who was chair of the right wing United Country Party, which opposed immigration. He was also an admirer of Enoch Powell, condemned the Race Relations Act and regarded the absolute monarchy of Liechtenstein as the “best political system in the world”. This last point is more complex, mainly because Liechtenstein is a microstate, but it still means that, like Britain, Liechtenstein’s head of state is very likely always to be White.

It would be unfair to use both of these astronomers as typical of their profession. Even so, it does remind me of the interesting phenomenon of right wing animal liberationists. There are people whom I might describe as “animal lovers” who look at the world very differently than I do, and whose veganism, if that’s an accurate description, is also very different to mine. For instance, there are some animal liberationists who are anti-abortion and see that as consistent, and there’s also an attitude that whereas humans are terrible, and behave terribly towards each other, other species do not perpetrate deliberate cruelty but simply try to survive and thrive, and take care of their offspring. For such people, other species seem to constitute a similar escape from the woeful interaction of human beings with each other as astronomy does for me. Maybe actively racist White astronomers are similar. I don’t feel I’ve exactly captured the issue, but I can see the sense in this apparently incongruous juxtaposition.

The way it might work for White astronomers is that they want to rise above this morass of apparent nonsense that infests the world, but their nonsense is not the same as my nonsense. Mine is the endless grind of global capitalism, greed and hatred between groups to ensure divided opposition to oppression. Theirs is a reflection of the privilege which enabled them to become astronomers in the first place. It could also be a kind of innocence. They may be so focussed on the stars that they’re oblivious of what’s happening on the ground. But it’s been said that not taking a position in a dispute about oppression is taking the side of the oppressor. Some might also say that there’s an issue with even having astronomy departments “when the world’s in such a mess”. I completely disagree with this though, because awareness of the existence of the rest of the cosmos has a function similar to spirituality and art in allowing one to continue and cope in order to continue fighting for a better world. Being a science, astronomy also has the usual function of science in training people in critical thinking. This is how astronomy graduates will be coming out the other end of the degree machine, whether or not they use their qualification vocationally. Astronomy is also just plain useful, for instance in detecting asteroids hurtling towards the planet and wiping out all life as we know it.

Another aspect of astronomy and racism is the question of sky cultures and names for objects. I’ve already mentioned the Square Kilometre Array and the observatories on Mauna Kea. Both of these are unsurprisingly both associated with indigenous communities, namely the San and Polynesians respectively. A sky culture is how a particular culture sees the sky. There are several Polynesian sky cultures just as there are many Polyesian languages. It could be expected that a set of people who have settled in various places across the Pacific and Indian Oceans would have a highly disparate set of cultures. The Austronesian language family had the largest geographical range of any language family before colonialism: Hawai’i and Madagascar both speak Austronesian languages and are 17 000 kilometres apart. Their broad distribution is a factor in their astronomy, as it was important to have some understanding of constellations in order to navigate. In order to record the positions of the stars, some Polynesians used “stick charts”, made from palm fronds, cowries and plant cordage:

By Sterilgutassistentin – This file has been extracted from another file, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51775534

Curved links indicate ocean currents and winds and the charts are effectively maps of the ocean. Pacific Islands tend to be around one to three hundred kilometres apart with the exception of such outliers as Hawai’i. The information was memorised and navigators were also spiritual and political leaders, navigation being a spiritual and religious act. Astronomy was part of this. Guiding stars were used when low in the sky, with imaginary vertical lines projected onto the horizon to indicate direction, but these move as the night goes on due to the rotation of the planet. The direction indicated by the star is maintained until another star rises. The paths between these stars are referred to as “kavenga” – “star paths” – named after the brightest star and all stars are referred to by the name of the brightest. However, these are not applicable all year round, so the year is divided into four unequal seasons with different kavenga. These are Ke Ka O Makali’i (the northern winter – Hawai’i has no seasons of course), Ka Iwikuamo’o (northern spring), Manaiakalani (northern summer) and the overlapping Ka Lupu O Kawelo (northern autumn into winter, including some of Ke Ka O Makali’i). Kavenga could also be kept on one side or other of the boat, or the boat could be aimed between two kavenga. There is also the star compass, which uses the presence of Polaris and Crux Australis, as we in the West call them, and the stars around them as they rise and set, to locate the north and south celestial poles. They also picked out a number of other asterisms (star patterns), including what we call Orion’s Belt, Scorpio, and the Pleiades, and used their rising and setting to mark another six points on the horizon and construct the directions in which other stars were since their positions would then be known. This enables the navigator to find out where the boat is when the sky is partly cloudy. There are also, unsurprisingly, stories associated with the star paths and asterisms. Apart from being meaningful in other ways, these serve as mnemonics for the location of the star paths.

There isn’t time to cover all Polynesian sky cultures here, so I will now move on to the San. Although it must be remembered that the biological construction of ethnicity as race is distinctly dubious, politically speaking, it’s also worth noting the identity of the San, whose genetic profiles are highly unusual. The San appear to be the group genetically closest to the earliest examples of Homo sapiens. Both their Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA branched off early from the rest of the species and they seem to have diverged from about two hundred millennia in the past. They’re also the most diverse group of humans genetically. Two San can be as different generically from each other as two randomly chosen people from anywhere on Earth. Besides this, albinos are unusually common among them. I mention all this to indicate that they are very much not simply Black people even though Europeans might lump all Afrikans who are not fair-skinned together. They have a very distinct identity. Afrikans generally are more genetically diverse than the rest of the human race, so as I’ve said previously, if you want a construction of race based on genetics, and I don’t really know why you would, it makes sense to see Afrika as including about ten ethnicities and the rest of the world about fourteen, but with entire continents in some cases only having a couple, so the human race basically consists of a series of genetic groups which often vary in skin tone and other features within those groups plus a large number of mainly dark-skinned groups all of whom originate recently from Afrika. The idea of skin tone as a major feature distinguishing ethnicities makes no genetic sense, and of course people don’t just “breed” within their own hermetically sealed racial units.

One tantalising possibility exists regarding San sky lore, which is that it may be directly descended from early human mythology. On the other hand, behavioural modernity seems to have appeared after the split between them and the rest of the species, so maybe not. One difficulty with recovering it is that Christian missionaries have obscured and suppressed the content, but one story is that a woman was baking a root vegetable on a fire and wouldn’t let her daughter eat it, so the daughter kicked at the fire and scattered the ashes across the night sky, forming the Milky Way, and the red embers formed the red stars in the sky. Kham (the Moon, Cynthia) is a man who has angered the Sun, gains weight each month and then is cut away by the Sun until only the backbone is left, and he pleads that this crescent he has become be left for his children, who then repeat the cycle. The Sun, in a possibly different tribal tradition, becomes a rhino at sunset, is eaten by a different tribe who then throw her scapula over to the east, where it becomes a new animal and rises again. The celestial bodies are the elder race and all personified. The Sun, and again this seems to be a different tradition, is a man with luminous armpits, armpits being considered a source of sweat which contains supernatural power, who refused to share his light to dry out the termites for eating, so the first San threw him into the sky so that his armpits could illuminate the world. The “Moon”, is the shoe of a male trickster deity, /kaggen, the name literally meaning “mantis”, who threw it into the sky, and an alternate theory is that it’s an ostrich feather also throw into the sky by /kaggen, who commanded it to become that celestial body. All of /kaggen his possessions are magically intelligent and the “Moon” alone speaks using a retroflex click. Like many other cultures, there is an association between a lagomorph, this time a hare, and this luminary. The spirits of the dead are carried by the dark side, so the full phase is considered good luck for hunting, as is a blood moon. The stars are named after various animals such as lions, antelopes and tortoises, and a stone used for digging. For them, the sky was a stone dome with holes in it through which the Sun shone. The three stars of Orion’s belt are zebras, the Pleiades the daughters of the deity of the dawn and sky, Tsui. Her unnamed husband is Aldebaran. Betelgeuse is a lion who is also stalking the zebras, so Aldebaran can’t get them without getting killed, so he’s slowly starving to death.

There’s quite a contrast, then, between the sky cultures of the Polynesians and those of the San, and of course there are plenty of others, but the dominant one, used by Western astronomers, is of course the Greco-Roman and more widely European eighty-eight classical constellations with stars named using Greek letters, numbers and often Arabic names. The presence of Arabic in this system demonstrates how the Arab world didn’t go into the Dark Ages like Christendom and for a long time their astronomy was more advanced than ours. There is a clear division in the names of the constellations between north and south because of what was visible from the Med at the time, so the zodiacal and the more prominent northern constellations were given names by the Greeks and Romans, but there are also fainter northern constellations with newer names and the southern names, also given by Westerners, tend to be very different. Some are neutral and uncontroversial, such as Crux Australis and Triangulum Australe, and the southern polar constellation is called Octans due to its obvious association with navigation. Several others have nautical or navigational names, such as Sextans, Quadrans (which is obsolete), Pyxis (the Compass), and some more are named after birds such as Tucana and Apus. The rather dim Indus was named by a Dutch astronomer and is clearly supposed to represent an individual of non-European origin, but their exact ethnicity is unclear due to the practice of referring to native Americans as “Indians”. There are also some obsolete constellations, one of which, Quandrans, has already been mentioned. Unfortunately one of these is Antinous, the homosexual lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. There was also a pangolin, and some others whose names seem perfectly normal and acceptable, such as the Cat, the Bee and the Sundial. Others used to be nationalistic or partisan, such as Sobieskii’s Shield, now known simply as the Shield, and Charles’s Oak. Also, in the seventeenth century, an attempt was made by one astronomer to give all the constellations Christian designations, replacing the northern constellations with New Testament names, the southern with Old Testament ones and the zodiac with the twelve apostles. This is a diffeent kind of cultural bias.

I’m sure there’s plenty more to be said about racism and astronomy, but I want to finish by mentioning the recent renaming of certain celestial objects such as NGC 2392, formerly known as “The Eskimo Nebula”. The name “Esquimau” is considered racist because it isn’t what the Inuit call themselves and it was widely believed to mean “eater of raw flesh”. In fact, it may not do but instead may be derived from “Ayeshkimu”, meaning “netters of snow shoes”. However, whatever its origin it’s considered as a colonial term with a racist origin by the Inuit, so the colloquial name has now been replaced by the New General Catalogue number. Similarly NGC 4567 and 4568, twin galaxies, were formerly referred to as the “Siamese Twin Galaxies”, which has again now been dropped. NASA also has an Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity which addresses issues affecting marginalised groups.

As I said at the start of this post, I am not really the right person to be talking about racism in astronomy as I am White and not an astronomer, but I hope I’ve been able to provide some kind of sketchy survey of some of the issues involved. There’s bound to be a lot more.

The Central Science

Photo by Artem Podrez on Pexels.com

When I was a youngling, for some reason my image of chemistry was a man in a white coat doing something with test tubes of orange liquid. I have no idea why the liquid was orange and in fact there probably aren’t many compounds which are that colour. It’s all the stranger that this was my image because my father was an industrial chemist, so one might imagine I was more grounded in that particular respect.

I don’t know how the process worked exactly because he was a rather distant influence on my life in some ways, but by the time I was about seven or eight I had abandoned my childish ambitions to be a nuclear physicist and decided I wanted to be a biochemist. If you imagine science as a three-tier system with biology at the top and physics at the bottom, chemistry is in the middle: the central science. In this schema, biochemistry would be about two-thirds of the way up, with organic chemistry under it down to the middle point and below that would lie inorganic chemistry.

At secondary school (and we’re kind of on homeedandherbs territory here so I won’t dwell on it too much), I excelled at chemistry and out of my year of ninety selective (11+ passers) pupils I got the highest mark at the end of the third year, which is Year 9 or Key Stage 3 in contemporary terms. My year head (who is now a successful folk musician incidentally and has been on TOTP) was very happy about this. However, I had a problem. My best friend was doing German with me and although I was very close to him emotionally I also thought he was a bad influence in the sense that if we were in the same classes it would be difficult for us to concentrate on our work, so I had to eliminate German and the way the block system worked with options, I couldn’t do both that and Chemistry. There was also the question of balance, which I’ll come back to. I therefore gave up Chemistry and instead did the unpopular combination of Biology and Physics at O-level. To my mind at the time, I’d also heard that the concept of molarity was important in chemistry and I’d failed to understand it a couple of years previously and found it intimidating. This was a very unpopular decision with my Year Head, and he later anxiously asked me whether I was planning to do A-level English because again my results during the O-level years had been the best in the year. I did, but it was a bit of a disaster really for reasons I really shouldn’t go into on this blog. In case you’re wondering, I did eventually take GCSE Chemistry at evening classes in the ’90s when it was an entry requirement for my herbalism training and got an A, although to be frank getting anything other than an A at GCSE when you have a postgraduate qualification basically means you’ve failed calamitously. I also have a B in Spanish and it’s worse than my French, which I failed at O-Level.

Continuing with the school theme for a bit, pupils who followed science were generally encouraged either to do one science or Chemistry with either Biology or Physics because the two were closer to each other than Physics and Biology. My approach was different of course. I decided that since biology and physics both impinged on chemistry, studying Biology and Physics would enable me to learn some chemistry from either end, and it did in fact do so to some extent. This is of course because chemistry is the central science of the three.

This phrase, “The Central Science”, is in fact the name of a popular textbook on the subject, first published in 1977, and the idea was also posited by the philosopher Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Chemistry can be seen as central because it deals with entities which are the concern of physicists such as electrons, protons and marginally neutrons, and is also used to explain the behaviour of organic molecules such as DNA, proteins and lipids which are the basis of life as we know it. As such, chemistry is isolated from other sciences and is able to develop concepts of its own which may not connect as closely with reality as the other two, although it’s probably true that right now physics isn’t doing too well in that respect either. There’s also the question of turning the current ladder on its head. Right now, most people who think about it at all probably consider physics to be the basis of, well, physical reality, but it’s possible to invert this and consider the Cosmos to be centred on life, which in the carbon-based biochemical form we’re familiar with can be used as the basis of science by implying certain things about the nature of the Universe. For instance, Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, predicted that because there was organic life in the Universe, and carbon was unexpectedly common, the energy of the carbon nucleus must be unusually close to the sum of the energies of three helium-4 nuclei, since that was how it formed in the first place, and he turned out to be correct. We can safely start off from the idea that our kind of life exists and work out what that entails for the nature of reality. It’s therefore fairly simple either to regard biology or physics as the most fundamental science, but the same can’t so easily be done with chemistry because of its central position.

Physics can leapfrog chemistry into biology to some extent: there is such a thing as biophysics. For instance, the way birds and insects fly or the emergence of turbulence in a blood vessel leading to arterial disease rely more on physics than chemistry. By contrast, there’s nothing to leapfrog to in chemistry. It’s either going to become biology or physics on the whole, although there’s also the likes of geochemistry and astrochemistry, though these are more specialities of the subject itself. Chemistry cannot claim, therefore, to be the basis of anything in a fundamental way. It’s always going to have to rely on other sciences to some extent. This is not a criticism of the science so much as a musing on its nature, but it has practical consequences for academia.

Chemistry is impinged on from all sides. In the ’80s, I was unsurprisingly involved in campaigning against cuts in higher education, and at the time they focussed very much on the arts and humanities. I would partly put this down to the influence of another industrial chemist on this country and my life, namely Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s government concentrated very much on slashing funding and resources to the humanities while leaving chemistry relatively untouched. Although I can’t remember the details particularly well, I do remember participating in some kind of dispute on campus regarding the injustice of this unbalanced approach to research and teaching, and at one point we found ourselves confronting chemists, who were apparently of the opinion that the humanities were less important than their own faculty and department. Incidentally, the layout of Leicester University reflected the central position of Chemistry because it had three linked buildings dealing with physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, with Chemistry in the middle joining the others together. I don’t know if this is coincidence, architectural conceit or logistical. The chemists’ hostility to us, and at the time chemistry graduates tended to be politically on the Right, was in fact ill-founded because from a twenty-first century perspective this looks like a case of divide and conquer, and Chemistry turned out to be particularly vulnerable to funding cuts. It’s a case of Martin Niemöller’s famous dictum, “first they came for the Socialists. . . “, though in some ways not so serious, but who knows the consequences?

During the ‘noughties, there was a rapid decline in Chemistry departments. This came rather close to home, as one of our closest friends worked for such a department at De Montfort University, formerly and much more appropriately known as Leicester Polytechnic, but all over England Chemistry departments were closing down. Between 1997 and 2002 there was a fifteen percent drop in British chemistry graduations compared to a nine percent drop in graduations overall. Chemistry is an expensive course to teach, which rather annoys me as the Humanities which bore the brunt of the cuts from 1981 on are probably cheaper than any of the natural sciences. Nonetheless a university looking for savings is going to be eyeing Chemistry suspiciously. This has consequences for the pharmaceutical and materials sciences industries in this country, which is particularly serious in the former case as it’s a major British industry (even though it must be nationalised to preserve the NHS and engages in animal abuse on an appaling scale). It’s also a less popular course with students because they see the careers as less lucrative than others, and also see the subject as less exciting than some others, so there was a decline in applications during the ’90s. This may reflect the unhealthy shift towards a “vocational” rather than a truly academic approach to higher education. The way the National Curriculum lumped all the sciences together and for some reason allowed major errors to creep into the syllabus can’t have helped either. However, this is not just a British phenomenon. The same is happening in North America, Europe and Japan, although there has been a rise in interest in China and India. Even so, nowadays only half the universities in the “U”K offer Chemistry per se as a complete degree.

This could easily turn into a discussion about Britain vs the rest of the world but the pressures are the same everywhere. Chemistry is also vulnerable to inroads being made into it due to its central position. Physically-based materials science can advance “upwards” from physics into chemistry and biotechnology can advance “downwards” into it. There’s also nanotech, which does the same kind of job as applied chemistry might’ve done in the past. Biotechnology and pharmacology are difficult to tell apart in some ways. For instance, biotech is used to manufacture drugs and since it aims at altering the function of cells it clearly applies to medicine. Chemical engineering also uses a lot of nanotechnology nowadays. Hence the territory of chemistry is easily invaded.

Ever since I studied it at school, I’ve felt that geography isn’t a real subject. It seems to be more a collection of bits of other disciplines such as economics and geology rather than having a real core. Of course a circle can easily be drawn round a subject and it can simply be called something, but it means it has neither a claim to being fundamental in a way most other disciplines are nor its own theoretical basis. I may of course be wrong about this because of Dunning-Kruger, but my perception of the nature of geography, which is I admit fairly dismissive, has some similarities with how I apprehend chemistry. Chemistry has too many connections with other fields to stand a good chance of holding together in the long run except in a significantly reduced area, although I have a great deal more respect for it than geography. Part of the subject’s predicament could be linked to the rather confusing possibility that scientific and technological progress is actually slowing down rather than speeding up. There was an exponential growth in the number of synthesised substances between the start of the industrial revolution and the 1990s, but it isn’t clear that this has or will continue, and it may be deceptive. For instance, in pharmacology, an area I tend to know more about due to being a herbalist, the so-called “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs” (NSAIDs) are all cycloöxygenase inhibitors despite the fact that there are many possible points along which the inflammatory pathway could be modified and in spite of large numbers of compounds being known to interact with them. Likewise with broad-spectrum antibiotics, there are many antimicrobial compounds out there, but the ones used tend to be quite similar. This is partly due to capitalism of course, because altering a compound you know works and which is already well-known and manufactured on a large scale is easier than coming up with a completely new one. This can also be seen in my post on fibres, where Du Pont owned the patent on Nylon-66, leading to the development of new nylons which were somewhat different from the first but also had a lot in common with them. The restriction imposed by the patent did spur creativity, but in a specific area. Also, it’s notable that the most recent organic synthetic polymer mentioned in that post was first marketed in 1958, and there was a peak of synthetic fibre production in the mid-twentieth century.

The exponential growth in the number of different compounds synthesised in the past two and a bit centuries could be expected to follow other markers of technological change and go into decline. It’s partly driven by population growth, which possibly goes some way towards explaining why India and China now have more chemists than they used to because they’re developing nations with large populations. In principle, the more the population is, the more people there are to have useful ideas, in chemistry and other areas. Once development has got past a certain stage, population growth slows and this is likely to happen for the whole species, potential extinction events notwithstanding. The date for a technological singularity has been steadily postponed and is according to some people now in the early twenty-second century, and some consider it to be the end of exponential progress followed by a decline. In other words it’s a peak. It’s possible for one person to have been born the year of the first powered plane flight and retire during the Apollo programme. By contrast, a person born the last year humans left low Earth orbit will now be forty-nine. By 1970, most of the technologies that made the biggest difference to standards of living were already in place. The exception, of course, is Moore’s Law, but that too has now ceased to operate due to transistors being too small to operate reliably owing to the laws of physics. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another way forward though.

The problem with chemistry is that it was particularly useful for those kinds of mid-twentieth century achievements, such as antibiotics, plastics and synthetic textiles. Once we’ve got those the situation changes, and in particular it’s held back by capitalism and the emphasis on vocational training in universities rather than actual education, although slowing population growth is also likely to be a factor.

Another problem, affecting academia across the sciences, is scientometrics. This is the attempt to measure and quantify research papers and publications, and is used to assess funding and resources allocation in science. It can be seen to encourage the “publish or die” approach, where research is divided up into “minimum publishable units”, which increases the paper count but doesn’t particularly contribute to progress. It also distorts it. For instance, in palæontology there’s been a tendency to report a very large number of species in our genus and I suspect that this is because it’s newsworthy and attracts funding rather than anything else. The result is poor quality research. Recently I noticed that a number of medical papers seemed to have oddly small sample sizes which didn’t seem to be the kind of numbers you could do reliable statistics on. Maybe there’s been some advance in stats which means that tests are now able to be trusted with smaller samples but I strongly suspect this is publish or perish. I cannot see this not having an influence on chemistry, although how is another question.

Finally, there are some philosophical issues associated specifically with chemistry rather than other natural sciences, although of course they would have their own too. Chemistry is in broad terms the science of the structure and transformation of matter, although it’s possible to take issue with that because not all materials science is chemistry and not all matter is atomic. It also impinges on quantum physics a fair bit. For instance, there’s mesomerism. An atom might form a double bond with another but a single bond with a third and fourth at the same time, in which case the two single-bonded atoms would be negative ions, but because of the quantum nature of electrons it’s uncertain which of the three atoms it’s bonded with have the double bonds and which are ionised. There is, I think, no definitive fact about this, and in the many-worlds interpretation this means that we don’t know which universe we’re in, and in fact may be in three different worlds until we are able to observe the fact of the matter, or create that fact. Atoms also lack a definitive radius, and have different radii according to whether the bond they’re making is covalent or ionic. Also, the very distinction between ionic and covalent bonds is not black and white, since some bonds are closer to being covalent and some closer to being ionic but they can’t be neatly pigeonholed. This is partly because atoms are not really atoms. They’re not indivisible (α-τομοι) units of matter.

The idea of describing a compound in terms of a certain number of atoms of each element joined together also doesn’t always make sense. For instance, tantalum carbide’s formula is TaC_0.88 because it doesn’t in fact consist of equal amounts of tantalum and carbon. This happens a lot with minerals. Some chemists claim there are chemical properties which can’t be reduced to physics, such as Roald Hoffmann, who questions the reducibility of pH (acidity or alkalinity of a substance dissolved in water) and aromaticity (ring-shaped organic molecules) to non-chemical concepts.

Note the resonances – there’s a degree of uncertainty here

Aromaticity famously came to the chemist Kekulé in a dream where he sees carbon atoms joining hands and turning into snakes who swallow their own tails. I’ve just realised this is going to sound odd unless I explain the difference between aliphatic and aromatic compounds. In organic chemistry there are two main types of compound. Aliphatic compounds are based on chains of carbon atoms and aromatic compounds are based on rings of the same. They’re called aromatic because early on, some of them were noted to be smelly, such as benzene, but this is not an essential feature and many aliphatic compounds are also smelly.

As noted yesterday (to me, not to you), hexagonal rings of carbon are particularly strong, which is why it might be feasible to build a space elevator with their help. The above ring is therefore particularly stable. Each hydrogen can also be replaced with something else. Phenol, for example, replaces one hydrogen with an hydroxyl (OH) group, or a larger entity such as the rest of an amino acid can occur to, as with phenylalanine:

(Hydrogens and carbons are not routinely drawn in structural formulæ).

That alternating double and single bond in the hexagonal ring may not represent reality, partly due to resonance structures, and consequently they’re more often represented thus:

There is a problem with drawing it this way, because it’s easy to forget that every carbon has four bonds, leading to impossible structures being drawn if you’re not careful, but it’s plainly quicker and reflects the non-local nature of the electrons, which is where things get a bit imponderable for me. Atoms, and in particular their orbitals, are not spheres but collections of lobes meeting at a point in which the electrons are most likely to be located. This is irreducible probability: there is no hidden mechanism which determines where they are, and there cannot be – it’s been proven. Hence there are situations where two lobes on one atom can overlap with two lobes on another, and these are known as π bonds. They’ve been evoked as an explanation for the existence of free will, as they occur aplenty in human brain cell microtubules. In the case of an aromatic compound there are six of them, each overlapping with two adjacent carbons. Double and single bonds between carbon atoms have different lengths, but X-ray crystallography shows that all the carbon-carbon bonds in benzene are the same length, so the picture above of alternating single and double bonds is unrealistic. It’s also a little hard to imagine how such a molecule could be a regular hexagon, and this leads to knock-on effects in different parts of the molecule if it’s bigger than just benzene. Hexabenzocoranene, for instance, consists of a sheet of thirteen of these rings, and it seems they’d need to tessellate for this to be possible. Therefore the orbitals can be thought of as a pair of parallel tori on either side of the molecule, and the molecule must also be flat even though the classical understanding of the bond lengths would mean it couldn’t be. This is an emergent property of resonance, and as such could be considered a purely chemical concept or property, not reducible to physics.

When this idea became popular, it underwent “mission creep”: chemists started to see these non-localised bonds everywhere. It also changed the definition of what an aromatic compound was again, because for instance that structural formula of phenylalanine above is no longer as neatly alternating as it’s shown to be. Aromatic compounds become compounds including carbon rings with delocalised electrons, themselves in rings.

I mentioned X-ray crystallography. This involves working out what shape a molecule is by crystallising a lot of it together and X-raying it. This leads to a distinctive pattern of X-rays bouncing off it in the same way as a diamond with a beam of light shone through it would produce a distinctive pattern of reflection which would reveal its symmetry, and it’s possible to work back from this scattering to a shape which the molecule in question must be. This was later joined by NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, since renamed MRI so as not to scare patients that the process was dangerously radioactive. The magnetic fields induced cause the electrons and protons to behave in a distinctive way in aromatic compounds, and therefore the test for whether something is aromatic or not is now several steps away from being the same thing as containing a hexagonal ring of carbon with alternating single and double bonds. Computers also made determining their form faster, and this is significant because it changes the definition of stability. It means that a molecule only needs to be stable enough to last as long as it takes for a NMR scan to be computed of it, meaning in turn that less stable aromatic compounds can be said to exist than before. However, on the other side again, the reason for their instability may be that they are on Earth at a certain temperature interacting with other molecules, and there are in fact polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in interstellar space. They do exist, and our understanding of them is in a way parochial, because just as pH makes most sense considering compounds dissolved in water, so does our understanding of polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

It even gets to the point that all that’s needed is for atoms of any kind to form a loop. There’s a square molecule of four aluminium atoms, which probably exists transiently but doesn’t persist but could in a sense be called aromatic, and again in deep space there’s C₆, which is just the tiniest and loneliest possible piece of graphite. On Earth it would either oxidise to carbon dioxide or find other carbons and become graphite, graphene or a carbon nanotube.

This brings me back to the minimum publishable unit. At some point the concept of aromaticity got out of hand and it’s suspiciously similar to the plethora of supposèd species of Homo. It seems that it might be quite exciting and publicity-seeking, and maybe in a way fashionable, to declare something an aromatic compound just to crank out a paper, and I’m not blaming anyone here. It’s the system. In doing so, this pressure to publish erodes and blurs the originally nicely defined concept of the benzene ring, and later the delocalised electron thing. It’s an example of how capitalism influences science, not in the sense of forcing scientists to develop new antibiotics which are basically the same as their predecessors and therefore have the same drawbacks and potential to lead to resistance, but in the sense that it subtly pervades the scientific consciousness and very concepts used in it. In a way it was better for this concept before there was a means of measuring the length of atomic bonds, and it was certainly a more sensible environment before scientometrics started to make a serious impact on chemistry.

In conclusion, then, I wonder if anyone at all has read this far, and also that chemistry is in danger of being eroded precisely because it’s the central science, and also due to political and social pressures, the concepts within it, which may be unique to chemistry and not helpfully explicable in reductivist ways to physics, are like much of science in danger from capitalism via scientometrics. The issue of aromaticity is a single but insidious example of that. Also, calling chemistry “the central science” kind of makes it sound fundamental, but in reality what it means is that it’s the most “sciency” science, since it’s the one which is furthest from anything non-scientific. It’s the middle rung of the ladder, and as such has special status, but that also makes it especially vulnerable.

Love And Other Gods Part II

This is the second part of my reaction to Michael Nangla’s autobiographical description of his mental health journey, which I started yesterday

Michael Nangla, just to fill you in, is an acquaintance of mine from the Continental Philosophy MA at Warwick, academic year ’89-’90. As I never really integrated myself into Warwick University successfully for reasons I mentioned yesterday, he or any other student there could never be more than an acquaintance, but he interests me because we are the same age and made the same decision to follow this course, and he later got sectioned and diagnosed as bipolar. Michael is a passionate, serious and genuine person whose life, experiences and opinions are very interesting and thoughtful.

The second major psychotic episode was provoked by the second Gulf War. He felt the suffering and death perpetrated substantially by Tony Blair very intensely as a personal loss. By this time, I had already been through a rather numbing personal crisis regarding the first Gulf War, and by the second one I was rather more immured from it than I found desirable. The issue for him was confronting this loss at every turn. This wasn’t helped by his friend David’s death by his own hand. He began to feel that his work at the BBC, which one of his friends had criticised, seemed vapid and dishonest, which exposed the void and emptiness behind everything. An early sign of what an outsider might recognise as a psychotic break occurred when he heard a voice saying “everything is infinitely divisible”. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but this is metaphysically the view that hyle is the ultimate reality of matter rather than atoms. However, there’s also a famous quote by Demokritos:

νόμωι (γάρ φησι) γλυκὺ καὶ νόμωι πικρόν, νόμωι θερμόν, νόμωι ψυχρόν, νόμωι χροιή, ἐτεῆι δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν.

• By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void. 

I’m not suggesting for a moment that this had any influence on his experience, but it is literally true that what we live in is largely an illusion, although his take on it is social in nature. Then he says something which has direct relevance to a conversation we once had at Warwick. As you probably know, I’m panpsychist and tempted to accept hylozoism. I believe that all matter is conscious. I once gave a work in progress seminar to this effect, to which Michael responded that it seemed like I’d been influenced by too much Cannabis. I’m paraphrasing here. When I expressed this belief, it impressed him as deeply delusional. The response he suggested, and which I took, was to base my ontology on ethics – as Levinas put it, “ethics as first philosophy”. I followed exactly this and found it led me in a circle back round to panpsychism. This is probably the most significant interaction between him and me, because it determined my future views and the foundations of my later philosophy of life. On the occasion Michael recounts here, he says that “everything outside and inside me was abundantly sentient”. This is notably close to panpsychism, except that the claim there is universal consciousness rather than sentience. For me, panpsychism is an almost prosaic fact of life, though one which means I have obligations to everything, even inanimate objects. For Michael, his similar belief was apparently a sign of madness, but the difference, apart from the fact that sentience and consciousness are not the same, is that it was a much more vivid reality to him than it usually is for me, although I have my moments. I actually feel that it would be better if I felt this as strongly as he.

I’ve previously mentioned (not sure that’s the right link) that I feel disquiet at what I perceive to be an Ayurvedic negativity about birth because it means one is still trapped in the round of reincarnation. Remarkably, Michael makes a very different claim about Indian and British attitudes towards birth. In his view, and this is from the horse’s mouth so I can’t really dispute it, that “in India birth betokened a gift from God. In Britain one sensed a feeling of it being sinful.” I can’t account for this discrepancy. To me it seems that in the Abrahamic tradition, as we at least would be expected to be here, birth is an unequivocally positive event. In our tradition, a baby is an entirely new creation rather than someone who has become trapped in another life, and therefore is a blessing. I can’t account for this discrepancy. I also don’t know how it would be for a Sikh, apart from this particular Sikh, because their tradition combines these two strands of faith. I just don’t know what to make of it except maybe to say that the grass is greener on the other side.

It’s often quite hard to distinguish which events are taking place in Michael’s head and which are “real”, but I’m immediately going to restate that. Michael’s reality and account appear to include elements which would not be widely observed. This is actually very effective. It reminded me a little of the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, where it took me a while to register that Nash had become psychotic, because of course this is what psychosis is like. There’s a lack of what a psychiatrist might call insight into the condition. But it isn’t only Michael who experiences the world in this way. None of us know what it’s like to be anyone else or if that even makes sense. As Sartre might put it, there’s the world, which is our phenomenology, and then there are holes in that world which are other people. Hence Michael has a conversation with his counsellor and Tony Blair about the morality of the war, and whether this is a literary creation or a memory of how he experienced the situation at the time doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Blair was not held to account for his actions by the British public, and has still got away with it. His therapist, Peter, is, interestingly, also part of Michael’s account even when he would not be agreed to be present by others, and this is a dream-like situation, as is unsurprising because of the nature of many states others might classify as psychotic. Peter becomes a positive influence in Michael’s life by being able to be internalised in this manner. It’s like he’s his guardian angel. He is however decidedly not Michael. For instance, he appears to contradict Michael’s view of samsara.

Peter’s fees were very high, and this raised the feeling in me that help should not be so expensive, including my help. As a healthcare professional myself, I often feel guilty (not ashamed) at asking clients for money. It isn’t that I don’t feel I deserve it although that can be there too, but more that we shouldn’t be living under an economic system where people’s suffering becomes profitable.

One thing that surprised me about this account is how left wing Michael seems to be. This leads me to think even more that we were presenting masks at Warwick to an extent which went well beyond how Kierkegaard meant it. I was much more myself at the philosophy department at Leicester Uni than I was there. It seems there was a kind of emergent consensus beyond anyone’s individual control, but I would raise a caveat there. Whereas this may have been true, it was also the case that I was constantly removing myself physically from the site. It should probably also be said that Warwick is a campus university separated physically from Coventry and that many students, Michael included, actually live in Leamington Spa. Also while we were there, there was a peculiar and I think irresponsible art project to make the site unfriendly with the use of searchlights and other things, which was supposed to be replaced later by a contrastingly friendly and welcoming atmosphere. Bearing in mind the mental health issues rife among students even then, this feels like they were playing with people’s lives. I suppose the people we think we know are merely projections of our own minds a lot of the time, and the atmosphere of the campus and my attitude towards it contributed to that.

It got to the point in reading ‘Love And Other Gods’ that I couldn’t even tell if his daughter existed for a while. People who know me will be aware of our “phantom baby” situation, a kind of game we played as a family to account for a child I felt we were missing a couple of years after our son was born. I won’t go into it here, but given my uncertainty regarding the connections between Michael’s reality and mine, and the apparent non-existence of several of his protagonists, it took me a while to register that Hayal is real. This reflects his own difficulty in adjusting to her birth. He wanted to be there for his child, but catastrophically the passion of his love for her once again tipped him over the edge. This reminded me of post-puerperal psychosis, the situation many mothers find themselves in after they have given birth, and in a way it’s a tribute to his empathy and involvement with his wife’s pregnancy and birthgiving that this happened. Practically, however, it was a disaster, as it meant that he got sectioned mere hours after becoming a father, missed those crucial early days with his daughter and was unable to support the two of them as they settled in at home. It also reminded me once again of Warwick, because one of the MA students took a year out when he became a father. He describes himself as “ashamed to call myself her father”, which I’m going to have to say is misplaced, but it is also interesting that he chose the word “ashamed” rather than “guilty”.

I love how Michael is so openly emotive and feel also that this is part of his diagnosability, by which I mean that the psychiatric profession as it is can technically fit him into ICD-10 F30-31 somewhere quite easily, but this should only be taken as a guide to how he might be approached and doesn’t reflect the florid reality that this is a whole person with entirely valid experiences in front of us, whose experiences moreover arise as a substantially valid response to circumstances such as parenthood, romantic love and grief at the loss of life from an illegal war. It felt like the people he encountered in his episodes were aspects of himself or a dramatisation of his internal conflicts, perhaps along the lines of dissociation, where action and conversation can take place projected out into his sensory perception which do appear to reflect what’s going on for him. It’s as if his inner critic is a literal figure standing there in the room with him, along with others who are also participating in his drama. I imagine this would be useful for a playwright.

I’ll finish by quoting Peter, Michael’s therapist: “I don’t believe existential problems can be medicated away indefinitely”. Now I don’t want anyone to go away from this thinking I’m down on anti-psychotic medication. I have known too many people whose lives and and the lives of those around them have taken a nosedive after discontinuing the likes of haloperidol or chlorpromazine, and I do recognise their value. I also think it’s potentially an insoluble problem for some people when they become psychotic, but there is also art and meaning in Michael’s life which he successfully emphasises in his writing.

So, I haven’t done this book justice at all in these two posts and I strongly recommend that you read it. You can get it here and it’s quite an experience to read. It was published as part of a larger project which aims to open conversations about mental health, and is hugely worthwhile. Please do the man some good and get it if you can.