Several months ago I wrote a 13.7 blog wherein I lifted up the specter of anti-science sentiment.

Blaming scientists serves another purpose as well. There's an impressive anti-intellectual-elite streak in American culture. "Those scientists are so arrogant, so know-it-all, so sure they're right about everything. And now look at the mess they've made of things." The tone is triumphant. The scientist concept is all-too-often shrouded in ominous Jekyll-Hyde fear. If assigned to portray a scientist in a game of charades, what might first come to your mind is a greedy eureka leer, freaked-out hair, manic arm movements. You'd presumably hesitate to portray an African-American with analogous caricatures. Scientists are fair game.

That said, I experienced considerable surprise, and yes chagrin, as I read some of the comments made in response to Adam's wonderful post below. His description of the way things operate in astrophysics maps one-on-one with my 40-plus years as a biologist, and it was my expectation that 13.7 readers were not among those who figured that scientists are fair game. Guess I was wrong about that.

Here are a few responses to some of the posts as of midnight last night -- where I see there've been more since, happily from both sides of the aisle.

Comment #1 (Peter Morgan):

In Science, "Tell the truth", within the formal and informal standards set by the Scientific community, yes; "Tell the whole truth", not so much. At the very least, labs are jealous and careful not to give away their precedence and their patent rights to their competitors. Celebrating getting to a result before another lab that one day you will compete with for funding is part of the game. Surely Wall Street tries quite hard to ensure that what they say is "true", within the formal, legal standard of "true" that holds for financial transactions, but for the officers of a company to tell their clients the whole truth would be to fail in at least some of their fiduciary duties.

Response:

I fail completely to understand the fiduciary duties that would fail if clients were told the whole truth by company officers, and would appreciate clarification.

But what does ambition have to do with truth-telling? Of course scientists are ambitious and celebrate success. So are football players and artists and software developers. We all work really hard to figure stuff out. We can only do what we love to do if we are funded, and if funds were plentiful we wouldn't need to compete for them -- rest assured that this feature of our job is not regarded with pleasure. It really startles me when scientists are pilloried for ambition while concert pianists and outfielders are celebrated for it.

It is no more consolation to know that some plagiarism or other gross ethical failing will be discovered and prosecuted than to prosecute a Bernie Madoff after the event.

Scientific misconduct is a serious and growing issue. As in all human endeavors, the probability of corrupt and unethical behavior increases as a function of the amount of money at stake.

Response:

I would appreciate factual URLs documenting the serious and growing occurrences of scientific misconduct and gross ethical failing in the scientific enterprise. If the posters have in mind the East Anglia "incident," a number of analyses, summarized here, indicate that misconduct and ethical failing were not involved. I agree fully with Adam that such events are extremely uncommon, and believe me, when they occur, we scientists all hear about them in publications like Science and Nature, not to mention when they're picked up by mainstream media.

Importantly, they are widely reported even when the scientist involved is a relatively minor figure at a relatively minor institution guilty of a relatively minor infraction. It's not just the Bernie Madoffs. If all ethical infractions in the corporate world were given as much press as all scientific infractions, our news media would be clogged.

Comment #3 (Pankaj Seth)

The practice of science is indeed governed by the search for truth. This is especially true of endeavors in pure research. In applied research, things get more complex as money interests from the business world get involved. When it comes to big business' generation and use of scientific data, then we might as well be talking about Wall St. There are many examples of scientists shilling for this or that industry... hiding or obfuscating data which shows harmful or useless medicines and procedures for example.... So please, lets not make scientists out to be some sort of modern saints driven by truth. Plenty of harm has been caused by scientists that have co-operated with big business to deceive the public.

The appropriate distinction is not between pure and applied research, since both are inherently governed by the same "truth code," but rather between those who are scientists and those who have elected to "shill for this or that industry... hiding or obfuscating data." The moment that decision is made, that person is no longer a scientist. She or he may hold a Ph.D. or whatever, and may pose in a white lab coat for a corporate ad, but to practice science and to shill or obfuscate are contradictions in terms.

For the next couple of days 13.7 is going to be looking at Goldman-Sachs and the banking fiasco that drove the world into its Great Recession. You might wonder why a blog exploring Cosmos and Culture would address an issue like high finance. The connection comes quite naturally.

Over the last few decades, Wall Street took on all the trappings of a large technical/scientific enterprise. The market, we were told, had become all about serious and even-handed analysis. Investment firms hired newly minted PhDs in theoretical physics.

Their job was to look into the global market's complexity. Supercomputers, in silent platonic mediation, peered into hyperdimensional simulations of market futures. Universities opened up programs in "financial engineering" developing advanced computer codes and data mining techniques to fill the analysis demand. The best and the brightest headed to Wall Street just like they had once flocked to science, medicine and engineering. There was only one thing missing in all this -- the community ethos of responsibility that science, medicine and engineering had developed for themselves.

Here is a question -- science manages to be self-policing, why can't investment banks do the same?

Sometimes people say that science is amoral, that it does not have a set of values inherent in its practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is one great rule in science, which none dare break. The rule every graduate student gets with their mothers' milk.

Tell the truth.

Fraud occurs in science but it's surprisingly rare. Scientists are loath to falsify data for a variety of reasons. One reason is that sooner or later the world will speak for itself and the fraud will be exposed. Another is that a scientist's worth is only as good as their reputation. Even a whiff of sloppy practice can be enough to sink a career. The last reason is a sense of community. Your results will be passed on and used by others. Falsifying results means stinking up the watering hole for everyone else. These three imperatives form a skeleton of the cultural "boundary conditions," which comprise science's ethical norms.

They are boundaries that one can imagine might have worked in a rapidly "complexifying" world of global high finance. But the harrowing culture of greed emerging from the go-go 1980s made those boundaries far too easy to cross.

In the current debacle, people knew the fraud was out there and might get exposed but, it seems, they would most likely have moved on by then. The banks would be "too big to fail" anyway.

As for reputation -- who cared? All that mattered was wealth, the more obscene the better. Community? Please, don't be a rube. This was the world of Gordon Gecko, hero to a thousand Masters of the Universes. Exalting the self was the only value.

In the end, it was not the complexity of Wall Street's deals that was its (and our) undoing. The crazy products like derivatives and collateralized debt obligations that seemed to demand advanced mathematics to understand them were just part of the problem. Other endeavors like science handle this kind of complexity just fine. The problem was human, all too human.

It is a culture that perverted its sense of reputation, responsibility and community that brought us so close to ruin.

Even in an era of light-speed trading guided by multi-dimensional modeling, it was the simple perversion of communally-held values that shook us to our foundations. It was not complexity alone but in the face of complexity we needed (and still need) integrity. And, finally, given the complexity of the issues we now face from the global economy to global warming, the kind of value vacuum Wall Street created is something we can no longer endure.

Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs' revolving door with the U.S. government, is not alone. "Everyone was doing it." We know more and more of the squalid facts, from fattened Moody's questionable AAA ratings, to dollar per dollar TARP pay-offs to the same UBS that readily seduced U.S citizens to hide their wealth.

Everyone seems to be in bed with everyone "up there" where we ordinary folks don't go. In a previous blog, "Its The Banks Stupid - And Us, And..." I mistakenly said that the financial sector garnered 25% of corporate profits in 2007. According to an Op Ed April 24th by Frank Rich in the New York Times, the right answer is a mere 40%.

Think how obscene this number really is. As we know, they make no mops, are not cops and brazen their funds by inventing bets that will fail, sell them to others and then short their own products.

Is an SEC civil suit against the trillion dollar armor of Goldman Sachs good? Yes. But criminal investigations, Grand Juries, and jail should be widespread in order to break the overweening power of the power that enfolds us now -- fast and unswerving.

Larry Summers on the PBS News Hour recently opined that we need regulation of the banks, but still need banks that are too big to fail to serve our national needs. How utterly coy from a man who made millions consulting for a hedge fund while president of Harvard and now advises our president.

"Small banks failed in the Depression and are not a solution," he observed. How very coy. This is the Larry Summers who dismissed the question of why he opposed Clinton Administration investigation of derivatives with, roughly, "That was then." Well, where was he "then?" Why should we trust him now?

I've been living in Canada for five years until a few months ago. None of their banks are in trouble. Maybe it's the way they pronounce "out." As in "It's a bad idea to run 'out' of reserves." Canadian banks were and are heavily regulated. They were not happy about it in the go-go dancing days of yesteryear. All Canadians are glad now.

Meanwhile we have the putty mouthings of Mitch McConnell as the leading Republican Senator, aching with partisan passion to see a Republican victory in the mid term elections, telling us completely falsely that the Obama bank regulation plan is but an excuse to have tax payers bail out the banks yet again. Has the man no honor?

Anyway, I thought bailing out the banks was the task of the Federal Reserve, with its Fed Window wide open to Goldman, devaluing our dollars as it does so.

The ship is so wreaked, it is canted, reeking on the rocks.

We thought we were done. It was 1992, a small restaurant in Austria. I had just presented my thesis research at a major international conference. My thesis adviser and I, along with the other members of our collaboration, were all celebrating. We thought we had solved the problem (or at least taken a major step forward).

My thesis had been a study of Planetary Nebulae - light-year sized clouds of gas that surround dying solar-type stars. In the 18th century astronomers looking through their low power telescopes (by today's standards) saw circular glowing orbs that looked vaguely like planetary disks. Nebula means cloud and the name planetary nebula (or PN for short) stuck. By 1980s astronomers knew most PN weren't round, but cigar-shaped or looked like vast cosmic butterflies. These beautiful cosmic forms were more than mysterious. What happened to stars like the sun at the end of their lives that left them which such varied tombstones? Under the tutelage of Bruce Balick of the University of Washington and Vincent Icke of Leiden University in the Netherlands I was given the job of answering that question.

Using the best supercomputers of the day we thought we had found the answer. By assuming that powerful and variable winds flow off the dying stars we could match many of the shapes seen with ground based telescopes. Begin with a slow doughnut shaped wind blown off the star. Then allow that to change to a hyperfast spherical wind as the star continues to evolve. As the fast wind snowplows through the aspherical slow moving gas a gossamer butterfly shaped nebulae is the natural result. My simulations produced models that nailed many key aspects of the data. It all worked so well. We were very happy.

Then came Hubble and everything changed.

It's been more than 10 years since the first HST images of PN appeared. It took our field a while to get its legs back after being thrown for such a loop. Now we think we at least know what direction to look for in explaining these beautiful objects. But we still are not there yet. Our old ideas were wrong and, looking back, I am so happy for it.

That is the legacy of the HST. In a thousand subfields of astronomy like Planetary Nebulae we astronomers where given a chance to see deeper into nature's menagerie. It forced us to look on the world as children do. It forced us to renounce our cherished ideas. It forced us to think again. Most of all it renewed our respect for a Universe more creative and fecund than we could ever hope to imagine on our own.

I want to try to talk about something we all know, but have no science for: Opportunities and the becoming of the world. Our scientific minds are so ensnared by reductionism, and the "Dreams of a Final Theory" that we cannot see what is before us. We think that one day, the final theory will yield all that is and happens as entailed consequence.

I think not.

I do not see how a final theory entails a giraffe eating leaves on a tree in Africa. I don't see how, in the vast Hilbert space of the wave equation of the universe, the physicist could construct an "operator" on that Hilbert space algorithmically to project out the giraffe as an observable.

I leave doing so as a homework effort to the interested physicist.

We know a lot about the evolution of the biosphere. I have discussed in my previous blog, "Breaking the Galilean Spell", our apparent complete incapacity to prestate all the possible Darwinian preadaptions, even just for humans.

I asked, with the evolution of swim bladders, did a new function come to exist in the biophere? Of course, neutral buoyancy. Did the emergence of swim bladders alter the course of evolution? Of course, new species with swim bladders, new proteins. The becoming of the universe was altered.

Then I asked and ask again: Can you state ahead of time all the possible preadaptations that might arise, just for humans? Well, try it! No, we cannot. How would we state all possible selective conditions? How would we know we had completed the list? How would we prestate all the one or many features of one or many organisms that might become preadaptations. I feel my mind going blank. Do you?

Nor can we make probability statements about this evolution, because we do not know all the possibilities in the Adjacent Possible of the evolution of the biosphere. The evolution of the biosphere is profoundly unlike flipping a coin 10,000 times where we do not know what will happen, but do know the sample space of all the possible outcomes, thus do know all the possibilities that can happen, and can therefore make a probability statement. We know before hand the "sample space" for the coin flips. But we do not know the sample space of all the possible preadaptations for the evolution of the biosphere, so cannot make probability statements.

And if a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, we cannot have a law for the emergence of some Darwinian preadaptation such as the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish. How could we? We don't even know they are possible, let alone probable, let alone have a law for their emergence.

The becoming of the biosphere, economy and history are partially beyond sufficient natural law.

Another homework problem for the reductionist physicist.

But this we know: Given the species that exist at any time and the abiotic environment, they form what I will call "enabling conditions" for the emergence of new species for whom the existing species constitute the niche. To be trite, given the evolution of the swim bladder, unique bacteria and bugs could come to live specifically in the swim bladder, much as some mycobacteria live specifically in sheep lungs.

What comes to be, unspeakably beforehand, nevertheless is enabled by opportunities engendered by what is. The current biosphere is the plethora of niches for what comes next. Clams and starfish wage their evolutionary arms races, defensive shells versus five grasping limbs. The humming birds and insects co-evolve in a necessary mutualism with fields of flowers, one pollinating the other feeding the first.

Opportunities burgeon, are seized or not, pass into the night of evolutionary history while new opportunities bound forward.

Organisms make a living given the opportunities that form the selective environment to which they adapt by natural selection. We do not doubt this, but we have no clear way to talk about it, nor anything that constitutes a theory for this becoming.

Moreover, these opportunities, or adaptive possibilities, are not what Aristotle called "efficient causes." The opportunity for a new bug to evolve to make a living in the swim bladder of a fish is not, as an opportunity, a cause at all. It is an enabling condition. Next, the mutations that led to the evolution of our bug may have been acausal quantum events. Finally, the classical efficient causes that are the subsequent actual selective events that led to the selective success of the new bug cannot themselves be finitely prestated.

What do I mean? We just do not know the necessary and sufficient efficient classical causal conditions that must be present for the successful selection of the newly adapted swim bladder bug to emerge in evolution. Thus, the quantum occurrence of the mutation(s) are acausal, the opportunity, that is the adaptive possibility, the new selective niche, is not a cause at all, but an enabling condition, and we can have no law, no compact description, for how the bug came to be successfully selected.

Yet the biosphere becomes via these processes, including the emergence of ever new opportunities, new possibilities, afforded by existing species and the novel, often unstatable new niches they create.

This is what Darwin told us. Note that he used not a single equation in The Origin of the Species. We think, thanks to Newton, that everything is mathematizable. Is it?

Look out your window: This proliferation of opportunities, of adaptive possibilities, has been going on for 3.7 billion years on Earth.

We don't have the slightest theory of this becoming.

And, now, armed with a defense of ourselves, in previous blogs, as free willed agents, whether true or not, let's look at human economic technological evolution. Again, opportunities, new possibilities, bubble forth, as Heraclitus would wish.

Here's another example we know well: It is World War II, the United States urgently invents the ENIAC, the first computer at the University of Pennsylvania, to calculate the trajectories of shells from our big guns in the sea war with Japan. Thomas Watson Sr. of IBM judges that there will be a market for perhaps three computers in the world.

By the 1970s, maturation of computer technology in technological evolution within a technology, of which more below, leads Steven Jobs and friends to conclude that the personal computer has a huge potential market. So the maturation of the large frame computer has been an enabling condition for the new opportunity for personal computers. Soon hundreds of thousands of people have personal computers, IBM in a hot race with Apple. But then, the existence of wide spread use of the personal computer creates the conditions, is an enabling condition, is an opportunity, for the invention of word processing. Microsoft gathers the technology, and makes a killing.

But then what happens? Word processing creates the opportunity, not only to write a file, but to save it on your personal computer. Not possible in 1940, who would have thought it? But a saved file could possibly be shared, so a saved file is an enabling condition, an opportunity, to share files. Modems hop into reality. Then at CERN near Geneva, scientists wanted to share files beyond easy modem reach, and invented means to share files in a markup language.

But the capacity to share files easily was an enabling condition, created an opportunity, a possibility, to invent the World Wide Web. Once the web was widespread, it created a new possibility, a new opportunity. It was an enabling condition for selling things on the World Wide Web. eBay flourished.

Once eBay and other information populated the web, the opportunity arose to make money with web browsers. Google is doing very well, thank you. Given the web, Craigslist became possible and blossomed, Facebook appeared.

We all know this. Could we have said "Facebook" fifty years ago? No, no more than we could have said "swim bladder" before its evolutionary emergence.

In the technological evolution of the airplane, from the Wright brothers onward, what existed became the platform, the opportunity, for what came next. An initial biplane? How about monoplanes, planes with seven wings, vertical stabilizers in front, in back, horizontal stabilizers in front, in back, propellers in front, in back? Keeping the wheels underneath seems a good idea. Given the initial airplane engine, watch it mature as tinkering with its features led to the supercharged engines of the B-29.

Our technologies grow out of existing technologies by a loose analogue of evolutionary process. The first metal bridge was made in England using metal bricks. We knew how to make brick bridges, why not try metal brick bridges? Then we hollowed out the metal bricks, knew about rope suspension bridges and built the Golden Gate bridge.

Brian Arthur, in his new book, "The Nature of Technology", rightly claims that all technology grows out of existing technology. Each is an enabling condition, an opportunity, for what comes next, and what comes next arises as the economic opportunity for it literally comes into existence in the Adjacent Possible of the economy.

I ask you to reread my co-blogger's piece about My I-Self and the role of the proliferation of symbolic forms that have grown in the past thousands of years. Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher of mind, asks in her, "Dynamics In Action," "Could we have cashed a check 50,000 years ago?" It is a stunning question. Think of the social inventions, law, courts, contracts, banking, credit that had to be created in the Adjacent Possible of our culture to allow us to cash checks -- and now move toward a largely cashless society!

Whatever is happening in this burgeoning, creative becoming is beyond any Final Theory as far as I can tell. Yes, we have Newton's laws, Einstein's General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. But the universe is also bubbling forth as Hericlitus said.

In my last blog and and in my blog,"The Hard Problem Consciousness", I raised the issue of whether reality includes both the actual and the "possible", both as real. What then are these opportunities, these possibilities, we know so well? We cannot weigh them, measure them, yet know and live with and create them by our own agent activities. It would be a vast change to give up the view, since Empedocles and Newton that what is real in the universe is only the Actual. With Aristotle, Whitehead, I am strongly tempted to say the real includes both Actuals and Possibles.

I close by noting, as I did in my last post, that a consistent intepretation of quantum mechanics is that what is waving in the Schrodinger linear wave equation are ontologically real possibles.

Maybe we have to rethink reality,

By Adam Frank

Raise your hand if you have enough time. Raise your hand if you do not feel squeezed for every second of the day as you run through electronic calendar mandates of meetings and e-mails, playdates and doctor appointments.

I doubt many hands went up.

No one has enough time.

If, however, you consider your situation to be nothing more than the human condition, you should reflect for a moment. While all human lives have been bounded by the sleep of birth and death, the hyper-metered, hyper-scheduled, just-in-time life you live now is an invention. We made it up. We created this Time becuase our technologies allowed it and it made sense for reasons of economics and production and efficiency. But, while this time we live is a product of the science and technologies we develop, it is not a consequence of the laws of physics or cosmic history.

In the 50,000-year march of human culture we have had many Times. We have had many uses for, and experiences, of time. None of them have been God-given or science mandated. In fact, these Times, these day-to-day experiences of life through time, arise exactly at the intersection of cosmos and culture. We invent them and they invent us.

I am in the middle of writing a new book. Depending on your viewpoint it's either a social history of cosmic time or a cosmic history of social time. The best of part of writing is reading. In doing research I have encountered amazing material on the emergence of modern time consciousness in Europe of the Middle Ages. The key development was, it turns out, the distribution of public clocks.

Perhaps the most important transition in all of this was the lifting of time from natural cycles of daylight and human or animal work. This includes the very natural experience of exhaustion. In its place came an abstract time. The hour was a unit devoid of context and with this stripping of embodied duration came the ability to turn time into a commodity. Time could become money in a simple equation that equated two abstract de-contextualized units (duration and currency).

So began wage slaving. The world, our world, has never been the same. Time economies emerged and with it a wave of "isms": Taylorism; Marxism; Existentialism (no, I don't think the last one is a stretch).

Now here comes the interesting point for cosmos and culture -- that same abstracted time flowing through the factories of the industrial revolution was also the very lifeblood of the new sciences gaining footholds across Europe. This absolute, abstracted time allowed the grand theories of Newton, Laplace and others to recreate both heaven and Earth in the image of a powerful all-encompassing universal physics. The time of celestial mechanics and the time of the mill worker were the same -- both new, both invented, both transformative.

Our view of the Cosmos changes and our culture changes with it. Or does it happen the other way around? Which way do the influences flow and does that flow only move in one direction? Human invention and human discovery, cultural artifacts and scientific truth -- how do these overlap? Does one always lead the other or can they change places like horses on the track?

If I were to tell you that we have not the faintest idea how the universe came into being out of nothing, I would not be telling any of you anything you don't already know full well. How can we get "something" from nothing? The ancient Greek philosophers said, "Nothing from nothing." The ancient Hebrew's started with Yaweh. Every society has its own creation myth for the origin of "the world", life, its people.

I am about to try to state a creation myth. I do not believe it. But I do not not believe it either. There will be just enough sense in what I will say, that the right skeptical response seems to be, "Well......maybe."

Paul Dirac, famous physicist, famously told one young student that his theory, "Was not even wrong!". It is a wonderful line and, I hope a true tale. But in some defense I say back, "Any idea at all cannot be worse than no idea."

I think, however, we are safe. I do not envision armies of the converted rising to defend my speculations below.

It all has to do with some odd characteristics of "Possibilities". I am going to try to build a prototheory in which a sudden explosion of possibilities underlies the creation of the universe out of nothing but "The Possible."

A first clue that we might want to take an ontologically real "possible" seriously arises from the 19th Century American philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce noted that there were three categories of "the the Modal: Actual, Possible, and Probable. It all is related to "The Law of the Excluded Middle" in logic:

Consider the statement, ("Princess Diana died in a car crash." AND "Princess Diana did not die in a car crash.") This can be schematized as (A AND NOT A). Taken together, "A AND NOT A" is a contradiction, forbidden by the Law of the Excluded Middle.

Now flip a coin 10,000 times and conisder the statement, ("The probability of 4723 heads is 0.214 AND the probability of 4723 heads is NOT 0.214"). Again this is a logical contradiction forbidden by the Law of the Excluded Middle.

Now consider the two slit experiment at the statement, (It is possible that the photon went through the left slit AND it is possible that the photon did not go through the left slit."). This statement is not only not a contradiction, but on the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the statement is true!

As Pierce pointed out, Actuals and Probabilities obey the law of the Excluded Middle.

Possibilities do not obey the Law of the Excluded Middle.

This fact alone is an important clue that an interpretation of quantum mechanics in terms of an ontologically real "possible" is a legitimate interpretation, and can be taken as one line of evidence for an ontologically real "possible."

Pause to take this in. Empedocles said that only Actuals exist in the world. Aristotle seemed to say both Actuals and Potentia were ontologically real. The early 20th Century philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, believed that both Actuals and Possibles were ontologically real. He held that Actuals give rise to Possibles which give rise to Actuals which give rise to Possibles."

In an earlier post, I pointed out that with the interpretation of quantum mechanics in which quantum possibilities, like Feynman's sum over all possible histories, are ontologically real, a very important feature arises: Constructive and destructive interference of the Schrodinger wave to give the famous interference light and dark band pattern in the two slit experiment. If the "possibility waves" are ontologically real, then interference must be interpreted as ontologically real interactions among ontologically real possibilities, just as real possibilities "out in the world." As real possibilities they can partially or completely block one another in destructive interference, when Possibility peaks coincide in space with Possibility troughs, yielding a dark band on the photodetector screen. Conversely, these ontologically real possibilities can augment one another when wave peaks coincide or wave troughs coincide.

Then, on this interpretation of quantum possibilities, in a sum over the history of all possible pathways photons can take to the light detector via the two slits, those ontologically real possibilities "out there" can interact with one another.

It is, in fact, a mind bending idea. But let's hold onto it.

This interpretation suggests that the Possible is real.

But first, let's back track to Newton. His laws, say for billiard balls on a table, are a predicted succession of only Actuals. The Actual positions and momenta of the balls exactly determine, via integration of his laws of motion, the next Actual position of the balls. There are no possibles, except perhaps in the weak sense of the forward and backward time trajectory of the deterministic Newtonian system.

With Einstein's wonderful General Relativity and the four dimensional block universe of space-time, there are only world lines of events that weave through the block universe. In this block universe, time itself disappears. This disappearance is called the problem of time in General Relativity. But even more strongly, there are no Possibles at all. All is purely Actual.

It seems deeply interesting to me that Einstein's General Relativity, widely regarded as the highest culmination of classical physics, deals only with Actuals. Yet Einstein received his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect, a major step towards modern Quantum Mechanics which can deal with possibles.

It is commonly realized that fitting General Relativity together with Quantum Mechanics is very hard because GR is a strongly non-linear theory and Quantum Mechanics is a linear theory. I'll return to this below, for the linearity of Quantum Mechanics is the heart of this blog.

But beyond non-linearity and linearity, there can be a metaphysical difference between General Relativity, with no Possibilities, and Quantum Mechanics which at least has a consistent interpretation in terms of Ontologically real Possibilities. The two cannot match one another, if this claim is true, and these fundamental ontological differences may be a deep reason for difficulties finding a theory of quantum gravity.

So: I begin with the assumption of an ontologically real Possible. In my creation myth, The POSSIBLE WAS, before a single universe emerged.

The next thing I want us to do is to start without any laws at all. I want the laws of the universe to emerge. Indeed, I want the laws of the universe to emerge by a kind of abiotic selective advantage, out of the Possible, all on their own, and naturally.

Next, let's notice what might be two huge clues:

First, consider all the known subatomic particles in the Standard Model. It is a famous fact that these form a mathematical group. That is, they reflect the symmetries of an underlying mathematical structure with the property that each particle can stay the same, can convert to some other particles, can revert back to the initial particle and most importantly, this entire process gives rise to exactly the same set of particles.
Why should this be true? One can imagine particles giving rise to jets of ever new particles forever. Why should the particles form a self recreating group?
I will suggest that any such group has an enormous abiotic selective advantage in an early universe or pre-universe. compared to particles that jetted off in streams of ever new particles. In biological terms, the group of particles is a "self maintaining set" in the minimal sense that, once formed, the set recreates only itself. Let the jets of particles jet away, the self maintaining set "gets to exist", even as quantum objects. More if the particles in the group can ever multiply, so particle number in the pre-universe or early universe was not conserved, a group becomes the abiotic analogue of a "replicator". It produces more of exactly itself in The Possible.

Second, Quantum Mechanics has two magical properties. It is a linear wave equation and the square of the amplitudes of the all the waves, representing all the possibilities, add exactly to 1.0. The latter property means that a global property of the amplitudes is exactly conserved. Each property confers what I am again going to call enormous "abiotic selective advantage" on such a set of Possibilities.

The first linear property of the Schrodinger wave equation, say of an electron in a box, or potential well, has as mathematical solutions what are called eigenfunctions, showing the space-time pattern of amplitudes for the position of the electron in the potential well. But in fact, mathematically, there are for a linear theory two further magical properties. There are an essential infinity of eigenfunction solutions to the Schrodinger equation for the electrons in the potential well.

More strikingly, since the theory is linear, all the infinite possible sums and differences of any pair of eigenfunction solutions, are also possible solutions of the Schrodinger wave equation.

Thus there are vastly, indeed, infinitely, many possible solutions to the Shrodinger partial differential equation. The possibilities of the Schrodinger equation can diversify wildly, yet their squared amplitudes sum to 1.0 so a feature of their total amplitudes is exactly conserved. In The Possible, solutions, or possibilities, derived from the Schrodinger equation can explode yet, in total, via the sum to 1.0 of their squared amplitudes, the ontologically real possibility amplitudes do not disappear. In a pre-universe, such possibilities have enormous abiotic selective advantage compared to possibilities for which these properties do not hold.

Of course there is no normal biological selection and competition, but if we can think about the total number of possibilities in the Possible, the Schrodinger equation real possibilities would do very well compared to possibilities that remain few in number.

These abiotic selective advantages will be the basis for my hoped for natural emergence of both the group property of our particles and something like the linear Schrodinger equation linking the behaviors of those particles.

For those of us not familiar with eigenfunctions, we can be helped by a familiar guitar string. It's ends are fixed. It can vibrate in its harmonic mode, or any octive above that to infinite frequencies in classical physics. These patterns of vibrations are the eigenfunctions of the equations for the guitar string. Just as in quantum theory, the sums and differences of these different string vibrations correspond to different proportions of the diverse harmonics of the base tone.

In short, a first magical property of the linear Schrodinger equation is that it yields an infinite spray of Possibilities. We'll see below that this does not seem to be true of most possibilities and that fact is central to my creation myth.

And again, the other amazing property of the Schrodinger equation is that the square of the absolute values of the amplitudes of the ontologically real possibility waves, sum exactly to 1.0. So as Max Born first pointed out, these squared amplitudes can be interpreted as the probability (probability, not mere possibility) that if the electron is measured in the potential well, the probability of its location being detected in such and such a spot and moment is as given by the squared amplitude for this possibility.
Thus, for my creation myth, we have two remarkable features of Quantum Mechanics and the Standard Model which unites the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces, but not gravity. The particles form a self maintaining group. The probabilities of the Schrodinger equation, by always summing to 1.0, maintain themselves. Both exactly.

Why?

Let's turn to what we know in real life about possibilities in biological evolution and our practical life as, I hope, free willed agents.

3.7 billion years ago, life emerged on the earth or jumped here via space. In any case, over these eons, species have come to be, created opportunities, or niches, for other species to come into existence and make a living, have gone extinct, and a rolling wave of becoming. Each species creates possibilities, adaptive opportunities, for other species, which in turn create opportunities and also block other opportunities for other species to come into existence. Thus, I have written about the non-prestatable emergence by Darwinian preadaption of the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish. But once there were swim bladders, we can imagine bugs that could only live in swim bladders arising in evolution. It is not fanciful. A very small bacterium lives only in the lungs of sheep. So the coming into unforeseeable existence of some species and organs creates the possibilities for other species to come into existence. And presumably the same process blocks the coming into existence of still other species. Given the wolf, a similar predator cannot easily come to occupy its niche.
In evolution, selective opportunities - or selective possibilities - arise, are selected, enable some other further possibilities, swim bladder to swim bladder bug, but block other possibilities, wolf blocking evolution of near wolves from alternative founder species.

Now lets try our real life. You go to your lawyer about founding a business, business plan all worked out. You start talking. You say, "But of course the plan is reasonable. I've assessed the risks as I must. They check out. But of course, if X, which is quite unlikely to happen, did happen, that would ruin or at least lower the likelihood of this part of my plan. On the other hand, if Y then occurred, now possible because X occurred, it would tend to wipe X out, so my plan would be safe. On the other hand...."

Your lawyer, looking at her watch, says, "Enough, we can go down these alleys of ever more remote possibilities until Doomsday. We don't know, let's cut back to the short term and get real."

We all know this experience. In short, in our real lives, opportunities seem to have likelihoods and to enable or block one another. More we are aware that as we extend to possibilities further in the future that tend to be enabled by or blocked by earlier opportunities in our planning imagination, they become ever more unlikely, precisely because the become ever more "contingent". X only happens if Y does not happen, but could, and Z occurs first to make X more possible, and...

Both in human life and planning and in the evolution of the biosphere, possibilities, like the quantum wave constructive and destructive interferences, enable or block one another.

But something critical is different about these possibilities compared to Quantum Mechanics, which thanks to its linearity gives rise to an infinite set of eigen-function solutions of possible behaviors for the Schrodinger equation for the electron in the potential well, and also the infinite set of the the sums and differences of these solutions are further possibilities, and more magically, the square of the amplitudes of all these possibilities sum to exactly 1.0 and is conserved.

No, in normal common variety possibilities, they do not give rise to an infinite, or at least vast spray of new possibilities, nor do they have a known measure, which, summed over all the possibilities and their likelihoods, let's call those likelihoods "amplitudes", can be squared or some other simple constant mathematical operation acting simultaneously on all the likelihoods to sum to exactly 1.0.

In short, our familiar possibilities are not like quantum possibilities at all.

A brief comment about "bifurcation theory" will be useful. Consider a bowl with a dip in its bottom, honey on the side and a marble rolling down the bowl to the bottom of the dip. This bowl is a "potential well." It has a single minimum, the dip in the bowl. Now imagine an outside control "parameter" P, for piston, that can move the dip upward into the bowl. At some point the dip disappears and a little bump appears in the bottom of the bowl. Now the bowl suddenly loses its single minimum, and the marble will roll into the "mexican hat" well around the bump. If, for simplicity, we tip the bowl a bit so the Mexican hat has a lowest point in its "well", the marble will roll there. OK, we have just seen a "bifurcation", one solution of the ball's behavior disappeared, the dip in the bowl, and a new behavior, a steady state of the marble on the lower side of the Mexican hat well, appeared. If the piston goes down again so the dip reappears, the marble will again roll into the dip.

The point about this is that as the piston moves, say very slowly, old possibilities disappear, (the dip minimum), and new ones appear, (the low point on the Mexican hat well), then the new ones can change further, in our case, disappearing and the dip reappearing.

These bifurcation appearances and disappearances are well known in ordinary and partial differential equations, and may bear a similarity to the possibilities in our life appearing and disappearing. Note there is no infinity of possibilities here. I will try to use this below.

We do not have yet any clear idea how to mathematize the likelihood - amplitudes - of normal possibilities which, in some sense, match how the biosphere evolves and the world in which we human live. But it is important to point out that those amplitudes, if we try to mathematize them, would very likely be non-linear and, ifcoupled, interact non-linearly. And they would probably have a modest number of solutions and have bifurcations.

Why nonlinearly? Well, we're just creating a creation myth. However, it is mathematically true that there are vastly many nonlinear partial differential equations. Linear partial differential equations like the Schrodinger wave equation are a "set of measure zero" in the space of all mathematical partial differential equations. So if one picked a pot full of partial differential equations as a zeroth order trial mathematical model of our familiar possibilities propagating in time and space, almost all would almost certainly be non-linear.

I am about to propose that such non-linear partial differential equations for possibles would be expected to give rise to blocking and enabling of one another of these possibles, more or less as we are familiar with in our everyday and evolutionary experiences of possibilities.

The next point to consider is mathematical, and a difficult area concerning partial differential equations. Some partial differential equations are known to have a set of solutions, eigenfunctions. This set is the spectrum of the partial differential equation. But some partial differential equations are known NOT to have solutions, hence do not have eigenfunctions and a spectrum of solutions. The relative density of arbitrary linear and arbitrary non-linear partial differential equations which have solutions, eigenfunctions and a spectrum of solutions is, I feel confident, not yet known.

More some nonlinear partial differential equations have only one or a few solutions and undergo bifurcations in which old solutions disappear, new ones appear, further new ones can appear, then some can disappear. This again is rather like possibilities in our ordinary life.

I am going to hope the mathematicians one day prove that arbitrary linear partial differential equations are far more likely to have solutions, eigenfunction spectra, than do arbitrary non-linear partial differential equations. One day, we may know. If non-linear partial differential equations often do not have solutions, or better, have only a few solutions and have bifurcations as is already known for some nonlinear partial differential equations, Then such nonlinear partial differential equations propagate no possibilities at all if they have no solutions, or only a few bifurcating solutions otherwise!

But a further point that seems likely, and may well be known, is that linear partial differential equations often will allow all possible infinitely different sums and differences of solutions to be further solutions. Such equations generate infinitely many possibilities.

By contrast, why should linear sums and differences of a set of solutions to some non-linear partial differential equation also be solutions? If not, for those, probably more rare, nonlinear partial differential equations that even have solutions, they cannot generate the infinite set of all possible sums and differences of solutions as further solutions.

Then if we can imagine "mathematizing" possibilities by arbitrary non-linear and linear partial differential equations, (in some unknown dimensions of the Possible before time and space), linear partial differential equations are special in that those that do have a spectrum of solutions also have all the possible sums and differences of those solutions as further solutions. So such linear partial differential equations are expected to generate vastly more possibilities than, I hope, non-linear partial differential equations.

Therefore, this may be a hint that a subset of linear partial differential equations that have vastly many possible solutions may have, as suggested above, the abiotic "proliferative advantage" in a "Possible" with a welter of vastly many arbitrary nonlinear and the many fewer linear partial differential equations in my attempt to even imagine mathematizing propagating possibilities.

Then just perhaps, the linear Schrodinger partial differential equation is "the winner" in this space of "The Possible." Its possibilities proliferate wildly and it "wins". If so, the start of quantum mechanics emerges on its own by a rough but natural abiotic natural selection.

But the Schrodinger equation operates on photons, electrons and other quantum particles and degrees of freedom in the Standard Model. But here I have noted another clue above: why do the particles of the Standard Model form a GROUP, all transforming into one another? Why don't particles generate jets of ever new particles?

Could this Group property, of obvious selective advantage in a soup of possible types of particles since it recreates itself, possibly emerge on its own in the Possible?

Just maybe.

Thus, one more preamble then my creation myth. Some years ago Walter Fontana, then at the Santa Fe Institute, did a wonderful computer experiment. Lisp is a computer language. Lisp expressions can act on Lisp expressions to yield Lisp expressions. Fontana populated his computer with 60,000 random Lisp expressions. Random pairs of expressions bumped into one another, one was chosen at random to act on the other. Fontana iterated the process for a long time.

He also created "selective conditions". If the total number of lisp expressions in the computer pot became larger than 60,000, he randomly threw out some Lisp expressions down to 60,000. So he was selective for Lisp expressions that got themselves formed easily.

Here is what he found. First, he saw a very long sequence of ever new Lisp expressions, then began to see some of the same Lisp expressions. In due course, a Lisp expression arose that could copy any Lisp expression, including itself. This copier Lisp expression took over the computer pot and became the only expression. Note that the copier is a self maintaining Lisp expression.

Then Fontana tired of copiers and just disallowed them and reran his experiment. He got a wonderful results: He got a collectively autocatalytic set of Lisp expressions" that each made one another. This collectively autocatalytic set of lisp expressions is also an "identity operator" in the vast space of Lisp expression. A second wondrous property of Fontana's collectively autocatalytic sets is that they formed a mathematical algebra. It is not a group, for it lacks an identity operator in which a Lisp expression stays the same, and more importantly it does not have an inverse. That is expression A acting on B gives expression C. But B acting on C does not, in general, give A.
Fontana's algorithmic chemistry, or, in Santa Fe, Alchemy, demonstrates that random rules can evolve to form a self identity set, and in his case it can also reproduce.

I'm ready for my creation myth: In the Beginning was the ontologically real Possible and it was without Word and all was Void. But it was full of an interacting, seething broth of ever becoming, enabling, blocking ontologically real possibilities. On average, the number or total likelihood of these propagating and interacting possibilities stayed roughly constant.

We can, in principle, try to test that the possibilities stayed roughly constant using random sets of non-linear partial differential equations as a zeroth order mathematical model of this Possible. Amplitudes of the equations or even newly interacting nonlinear partial differential equations, on average, neither grew nor died out. Any ontologically real possibility was as likely to be more or less blocked as it was likely to be enabled.

Thus, the total "amount" or number of possibility stayed low. On average, not much changed in The Possible. (At least I can hope so.)

But one non-day, a set of Quantum Mechanical possibilities came forth from the Possible, that is, from Actual nothingness, and there was a sudden burst of a vast number of Possibilities due to the linearity of the Schrodinger equation describing their ontologically real behavior. And magically, the squared amplitudes summed to 1.0, so there was something conserved in the vast sea of possibilities. The proliferative advantages of the Schrodinger equation vastly outpaced all other possibilities in the Possible. (Since the electroweak and strong forces have been unified, my creation myth actually needs those partial differential field equations to generate all the burst of possibilities.)

And lo, particles forming a group came forth and even replicated, preserving exactly themselves as a Group identity, and were describable by the same Quantum Mechanics. The particles proliferated and persisted. Later they would stop proliferating.

Suddenly there was a vast set of ontologically real possibilities, the different excited states of all the particles as they transformed as a group into one another. Or it all started just with photons, quarks and gluons, and later the whole particle group formed.

If we are allowed an energy state to each of these modes or the spectrum of the eigenfunctions of the partial differential equations, there was an explosion of a vast amount of energy, where the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency.

You may object, "Where did the energy come from?" But that sudden emergence of energy is already postulated from nowhere in the Big Bang which is obviously still magical, so I don't see why I cannot magically say the diverse modes of the Schrodinger equation and photons and other particles it described did not have the energies they do. (I hope the LHC finds the needed HIggs particle to give mass and energy to the particles.) And in any case a universe with gravity and spacetime and the Standard Model does not, my physicist friends tell me, conserve energy.

Do I believe my creation myth? No. But myths can become a shared framework that later can become science.

While Democrats and Republicans tore each other to shreds over a much-needed health reform bill a couple of weeks back, physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Research were making a different kind of headline.

After 16 years and $10 billion, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) managed to shatter the current energy record for particle accelerators, reaching a staggering 7 trillion electron volts. That's about 3.5 times more energy than the Tevatron, the American machine at Fermilab, near Chicago.

Over the next few years, physicists will have a new tool to probe deep into the heart of matter. The hype is well-deserved: The LHC is the largest machine ever built in the history of civilization, the collective effort of thousands of scientists from across the world. But what will it do, really? Will it be able to solve all the questions that it's meant to? Or is the PR surrounding it masking the reality that, if it fails, it may well represent the end of high-energy physics as we know it?

The list for hoped-for discoveries at the LHC is exceedingly long, representing decades of data-starved theoretical modeling. Here are the top three, ordered from least to most speculative: first, finding the elusive Higgs boson, a mass-giving particle predicted to exist more than 40 years ago. The Higgs is supposed to explain why particles like electrons and quarks have the masses they have. Of course, we will still have to figure out how the Higgs got its mass, which makes one wonder how many layers there are to this onion.

A second hoped-for discovery is the hypothetical supersymmetry, a symmetry that effectively doubles the number of particles that make up matter. Supersymmetry is also the foundation of the famed superstring theory (that's where the "super" in "superstring" comes from). So, it can provide indirect evidence for superstrings.

A third expectation is the discovery of extra dimensions in space, which would be necessary to unify Nature into a single scheme, the so-called theory of everything. Superstrings, the leading candidate for this scheme, are supposed to inhabit no less than nine spatial dimensions.

Einstein spent the last two decades of his life trying to find this answer. He, and everyone else so far, have failed. The notion that Nature hides some kind of code -- an overarching mathematical structure -- is a scientific version of monotheism, a theme that has dominated philosophy for millennia. Now that the LHC has been turned on, we must ask ourselves if we're pursuing the right questions.

The experimental evidence of the past five decades sets the record straight: asymmetries -- not symmetries -- play the key role in determining the complex material structures we see in the universe. The existence of matter and of life depends on the violation of symmetries. Indeed, expectations of perfect symmetry have been methodically demolished by experiments in particle physics, especially those involving the weak nuclear interactions. We really have no evidence whatsoever that Nature is unified at its core -- even the unifications that we have achieved to date, such as the famous electromagnetic theory of electricity and magnetism, only work under certain assumptions. If Nature is telling us that it likes imperfections, that our expectations of all-encompassing symmetries are the result of centuries of monotheistic baggage, we should listen. Beauty, it turns out, is not truth.

There is no question that the LHC is an important tool of discovery and that it will open new windows into a realm presently unknown. Hopefully, the results will be relevant enough to keep this fascinating field alive. If, however, great results are not forthcoming, physicists will be hard-pressed to accept that the era of smashing bits of matter into each other with giant machines has reached an end. Nature, of course, will still have countless surprises up its sleeve. After all, the energies reached at the LHC are thousands of trillions of times smaller than those after the Big Bang. To test physics at these conditions we will need much ingenuity. We will also need the humility to accept that Nature is not what we want it to be, but what it is.

I did an interview a while back during which I made the point that, biologically, human beings are apes. A few days later, I called the interviewer to ask how the article was going.

She paused and then said, "Promise you won't laugh?"

It will be complex and daunting to do what needs to be done to keep apes with us, requiring the kind of commitment that best bubbles up, and perhaps only bubbles up, with love. (Courtesy Marian Bruckner)

I promised.

"Well," she said, "I thought I was really sophisticated about these things, but when I went home after our interview I found myself sobbing in my husband's arms in the deep realization that I'm an ape. An ape!" And she proceeded to describe the anguish she was experiencing in coming to grips with this understanding.

I'm happy to report that she recovered and indeed came to embrace the notion. But it haunted me. Why is it that so many humans find this concept so distressing?

Well, I figured, maybe a lot of the problem is how we feel about apes. Where does that come from?

So I oversaw production of a children's book, the goal being to nurture a child's love for bonobo apes and hence embrace and identify with their own ape-selves.

We used a series of splendid close-up photographs, taken by Marian Brickner, that depict two young bonobo half-siblings, Lucy and Kaleb, who live at the zoo in Jacksonville, Fla. with their mothers and an aunt. The story, by writer Mathea Levine (full disclosure: my daughter), was told in the first person.

"Hi," the book begins, with a stunning Lucy looking straight at you and holding out her hand. "My name is Lucy. I'm a bonobo. I'm a whole lot like a chimpanzee and a lot like you."

We mocked it up, obtained an impassioned Forward from Jane Goodall and sent it out to some publishing houses. In each case, they expressed interest but, we were told, major changes would be needed.

One editor, for example, wanted the inclusion of information about Africa ("when we swing on ropes it's like swinging on liana vines") so the book would have an "educational component" to encourage schools to use it.

But the most telling rejection, and indeed the last straw, was the editor who wanted it all to be in the third person.

"This is Lucy. She's a bonobo. She's a whole lot like a chimpanzee." And, perhaps needless to say, the "she's a lot like you" line would have to go.

So we gave up and found the resources to produce a very classy book with the original first-person text intact. It's called I'm Lucy: A Day in the Life of a Young Bonobo and it's available here, where any profits (none yet!) will go to the wonderful Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI).

Our proximate goal was to nurture a child's love for apes and hence for his or her ape-self, but our long-term goal was and is to foster planetary concern for the survival of bonobos (and indeed all great apes) in their native habitats. This entails, of course, conserving these native habitats, which turn out to be rich in timber and other so-called "human resources." Both the apes and the habitats are terrifyingly endangered. Hence it will be both complex and daunting to do what needs to be done to keep them with us, requiring the kind of commitment that best bubbles up. and perhaps only bubbles up, with love.

Admittedly, a giant volcanic eruption is not an everyday event, but then again neither is pushing the Earth's climate system into a new dynamic state.

There is chaos in Europe as the continent spanning plume of ash from volcano (I can't even spell it) shuts down the airspace of one country after another. The mess reaches far beyond the tens of thousands of trapped travelers. If the volcano continues to erupt for a long enough time shipping of perishable goods, military resupply and a host of other domains could be severely affected.

The eruption renews our respect for the awesome amounts of energy planet's have at their disposal. It also has me thinking about sensitivities inherent to the "systems" supporting the modern global village. Everyday a web of air traffic links the world's economies driving the hyperactive, just-in-time flow of goods and services. The effect of the volcano's plume shows one boundary condition on the operation of the air transport system. And while the eruption and the plume will pass, this experience throws a stark light on the sensitivity of all the complex systems keeping us in a "normal" that is really just half a century old.

Given the very real possibility that we have pushed the planet onto a changing climate trajectory how sensitive are these systems we depend on. What are the boundary conditions for their smooth operation? If, for example, rainfall patterns change a little will it be easy worldwide systems of agricultural production and distribution to adapt? What if they change a lot?

We know that we are changing climate. We do not know how dramatic the changes will be. In light of that uncertainty do we understand our own flexibility?

We've heard much of it: Mortgage backed securities i.e. bonds, touted as spreading the risk for high-risk, would-be home owners to abet home owning, but relieving the lending banks of the risk of default by off loading that risk to the bond holders. Credit default swaps, called swaps after intense lobbying by the big banks to avoid the name "insurance," to avoid being required to hold reserves against prospective losses. Rating agencies paid by the very companies whose credit-worthiness they rate. The finance committees of both Houses of Congress that, according to Bill Moyer's journal, received $120,000,000.

Names should be named: Alan Greenspan explained to Congress recently that he had no effective influence on Congress. But he and Larry Summers successfully helped block in Congress a Clinton Administration effort to investigate the derivatives market. No influence? My foot. Greenspan lobbied for giant Pimco after he stepped down as Fed Chairman, to save a class of Fannie May bond holder's bonds. One wonders just what fee was earned. Larry Summers earned several million consulting for a hedge fund while President of Harvard. He is President Obama's Economic Advisor. If he now favors "regulation", where was he when he argued to Congress against investigating the derivative market? It seems no one was responsible. No one. Greenspan, Summers, our Treasury Secretary, the presidents of the big banks. Our Titans were, well, so persuaded of their world view, or so greedy, that they were blinded. But look at the havoc they have wrought. Is that accepting responsibility? Is that "leadership?" Is that moral? I don't notice that the answer is "Yes."

But we too: Those who did borrow money for homes who should have known they were poor risks for repayment bear moral responsibility too.

Yes we need regulation. For example the banks have started microcredit at enormous interest rates. Is this legitimate compensation for risk, or just greed because the microcredit market will bear it? And still derivative trading is largely off screen, hidden, non-transparant, while derivatives that may be the famous economic equivalent of weapons of mass destruction can proliferate unchecked and with little or no insight into their dangers alone or used together. For example, a substantial fraction of trading now occurs entirely among computers outguessing one another. We have no idea of the stability or instability of these coupled algorithmic systems, nor the effects on stability of yet another trading algorithm added to the community of trading algorithms.

Yet regulation, if Congress and the Administration have the wisdom to conceive good regulation and the gumption to impose it, will not be enough.

You see, perhaps the most salient fact is this: In 2007 something like 25% of total US corporate profit was in one industry - the financial industry that makes no mops, drives no trucks, builds no ships. Do we need banks, including those large enough for national and international business? Of course. But how big is big enough? Is there big enough below the "too big to fail" level? Would reducing the sizes of our dwindling number of vast banks reduce their undue influence on Congress? Smaller banks can make the same mistakes and failed during the Great Depression, but at least are not likely to spend $120,000,000 lobbying the House and Senate Finance Committees.

But why so much profit? Mike Brown, former Chairman of NASDAQ has permitted me to give his theory. Fast cycles. Suppose it takes you fifteen years to conceive of a new business and bring it to success for an Initial Public Offering or to sell the company and realize your earmings for your 60 hour weeks. Now consider making the same money in a few hours of millisecond trading via a hedge fund on Wall Street. Brown's argument is that money flows from long to short cycles for earning money.

The vast flow of money into the financial sector has sucked it out of Main Street which desperately needs those funds.

The answers would seem to be beyond regulation. The Obama Administration is seriously considering a high tax on the profits of big banks. That seems a very useful idea. If the big banks cannot so readily make vast profit, maybe money will flow back to Main Street. Perhaps the sprawling, egregious influence of the same banks over our public life will dwindle. That seems a good idea, since, now, thanks to the Supreme Court, they are legally individuals whose money is free speech.

It is time for We the People to rise up and speak. Loudly, now. Benjamin Franklin was right, We The People will get the government we deserve.

By Adam Frank

We won't be getting out of the hood anytime soon.

It's the planetary neighborhood I am talking about here. The stars may beckon but it's an interplanetary, rather than interstellar culture that we will likely inhabit for hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. Baring the miracle of a "warp drive," the stars are simply too far away in space and time (via the theory of relativity) for a true interstellar culture to develop. The solar system with its 8 planets, 166 moons and countless asteroids and comets is likely to be our home -- our only home -- for a long, long time.

We should consider the implications of these limitations on coherent human cultures in space because today the president unveils his new plans for NASA.

The Obama administration made headlines recently when it reversed direction on NASA's Bush-era push to return to the Moon. The new plan turns to hungry young private space ventures to give us access to Near Earth Orbit. Stepping back on any present space mission the plan calls for development of the next generation of space technologies for the next generation of space exploration. But critics fault the Obama plan for its lack of any clear goals for these new technologies. Without a bold choice of destination -- Mars is the obvious choice) -- critics say the human space program will simply drift.

Horse-trading is, of course, at work here as real world issues like jobs, aerospace contracts and congressional districts are up for grabs. But if there is anything our young global culture needs to learn right it's how to think long term. Once we recognize the solar system to be humanity's sole habit, our only niche for expanding the meaning and reach of culture for millennia, then a new set of imperatives begin to appear.

Thinking in century's rather presidential terms throws a new light on the entire enterprise of a space program. Critics are right to point out the lack of bold, clearly articulated and properly funded goals NASA has been given over three decades. While lip service was paid to reaching Mars or building new bases on the Moon, we as a society were never really ready to pay for those goals. That left NASA cutting back every other effort to even reach underfunded status for big missions.

If shifting funds from NASA launch programs allows the creation of a vibrant commercial space culture then we should support it. Such a move might establish a truly broad platform for driving the human future in the solar system. If a stepping back on unfundable goals now allows us to develop next generation technologies for spacecraft propulsion later then we should support that too. If these proposed changes can, in a measured fashion, move us towards the real goal of a trans-system human presence then I am all for it.

The real question, the one that really matters, is do we have the patience to keep our eyes and efforts on that prize.

By Adam Frank

The Babylonians didn't do it. The Romans didn't do it. The Chinese of the Tang Dynasty didn't do it. The Persian Empire didn't do it. For 50,000 years of human cultural evolution it didn't happen. For 6,000 years of civilization it didn't happen.

Then, in the space of a mere hundred years, we manifest pathways to utter ruin not once but twice. We have managed to put the entire project of civilization up for grabs first through nuclear arms and then through the twin perils of climate change and resource depletion.

How did this happen?

In the wake of this week's nuclear summit, my co-blogger Marcelo Glieser and I have been exchanging thoughts on the meaning of our penchant for scientifically mediated destruction. Marcelo was happy that finally the subject of nuclear arms was getting some love (so to speak). I then wondered out loud about the democratization of apocalypse in our post-arms-race world with the rise of sustainability as a pressing concern for global survival. This morning Marcelo asks the question of questions -- what kinds of political forms are required to keep up with our scientifically muscled-up, destructive inclinations? This afternoon I want to leave you with a simple question and a simple start at an answer.

Are technological advanced societies doomed to fail by their own actions?

The question obviously touches on our deepest fears and the hopes for our kids. It sticks in our mythic imaginations in visions of apocalypse from the Bible to The Terminator. It strikes at the heart of fundamental scientific questions like the existence of intelligent life in the Universe. So, why do we find ourselves here twice in a century? The answer for both nuclear arms and global sustainability is, I think, linked by a single term.

Fossil fuel.

There is so much free energy in a cubic centimeter of oil, it made miracles possible, allowing us to literally move mountains in months. Before fossil fuels all development was based on human labor (often slaves) and animal power with dung or forests being used for fuel (forests tend to disappear quickly).

Without coal, oil and natural gas used as fuel, fertilizer, raw material for plastics and a zillion other uses, we would not have leapt so far and so fast.

Most of all we would have never have not been able to carry forward something like the Manhattan project nor would we have been able to develop the globe-spanning network of submarines, missiles systems and warheads that made up the arms race. We liberated the energy in the atom with fuel oil.

And, of course, when we now speak of global sustainability, we are imagining trying to do without everything fossil fuels made possible -- from the depletion of fisheries to overproduction of CO².

Perhaps, just perhaps, not all technological societies are doomed to destruction. Perhaps they just need time to mature, time to allow their understanding of themselves and their own natures to grow at the same pace as their mastery of the universes' fundamental forces.

Could it be that having all this free energy lying around in fossil fuels offered us a dangerous dose of cultural steroids, the evolutionary equivalent of human growth hormone?

Perhaps, just perhaps, our muscles grew faster than our wisdom.

With our ongoing discussion on the nuclear threat and how it's shaping our century, we should pause to reflect upon the causes for this mess. How did we get to this situation of having the power to destroy our civilization? What does it say about who we are as a species?

It may be a good idea to bring back what is apparently a disconnected topic: the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In the early '50s, while having lunch with some colleagues at the cafeteria of the Los Alamos lab -- the same place where a few years earlier the first atomic bomb was invented -- the great physicist Enrico Fermi stopped eating and asked: "Where is everybody?"

His friends raised their heads and looked around for who was late. "No, I mean, the aliens. Where are they?"

Fermi went on to show, in his masterful back-of-the-envelope way, that if our galaxy was 10 billion years old and about 100 thousand light years across, an alien civilization that happened to flourish just, say, a million years before we did would have had plenty of time to spread about, colonizing the entire galaxy. In this case, he asked, why aren't they here?

There are many answers to this famous Fermi Paradox. But the one that matters the most to our discussion today is that aliens aren't here because any civilization that hits on nuclear weapons ends up obliterating itself.

Very gloomy indeed.

The truth is nuclear weapons are monsters that will never go back into the box. No scientific discovery will ever go away. Once out, it will stay out, even if morally condemned by a majority.

The Faustian bargain we play with power has a very high price. The deal is irreversible. We cannot realistically contemplate a world without nuclear weapons. But we can still contemplate a world with a future?

Fear and greed got us to where we are now -- a deadly combination. For thousands of years, scientists and engineers have served their states in exchange for money and protection. We surround ourselves with enemies and must protect our country and homes at all cost.

Patriotism is the biggest sponsor of war. No wonder Einstein wanted borders to be abolished. We look at the United States, a country, or the European Union, where borders are there but increasingly invisible, and we have an experiment on stability and survival. Unless things get real bad (maybe California and Arizona fight for water?), it's hard to see this stability breaking down. So, is the solution, admittedly a very far-fetched one, a world without borders, a truly globalized society? Or is there another way that we can provide a safe environment for us to survive with deploy-ready ballistic missiles carrying nuclear heads with different flags painted on their fuselage? You tell me!

By Adam Frank

So Marcelo led off this week of nuclear diplomacy with a paean to the change today's summit represents. It is wonderful that attention is finally being paid to an issue that slipped from public consciousness for too long. Today's event raises issues that hit ground zero of our Culture and Cosmos blog.

After all, nuclear weapons, nuclear warfare and nuclear annihilation are all products of a culture that learned, through science, to control the cosmos' fundamental modalities (a nuclear weapon depends on knowing fine details of three of nature's four forces).

First up, have we truly managed to dodge the bullet of full-scale nuclear war? For those of us who grew up with the cold war, our nightmares were shaped by dreams of immanent worldwide immolation. You kids today (God did I just write that) have no idea what that was like. After the Berlin Wall came down there was an audible sign of relief that we had, somehow, made it through the eye of the needle. In the intervening years many in the US and Russia worked hard to deal with the existing weapons (thank you Richard Lugar). The emphasis now is containing proliferation of these weapons. Keeping them out of the hands of terrorists or smaller states.

Proliferation is one part of democratizing (at least a local) apocalypse that these terrible weapons allow. This is the focus of much this week's summit. Still, with so many U.S. and Russian weapons still deployed, I wonder how far we really have come from the bad old days when images from the The Day After hovered in our imaginations.

The other issue that lurks in the background is the way science and technology has managed to give us other means to threaten the project of civilization. In this century, unlike the last, our fates do not rest with a few superpower leaders with red phones and red buttons. In the years since the cold war's zenith, we discovered another democratization of destruction appearing in a new Age of Limits. From climate change to resource depletion (fisheries, fresh water etc) the threats we face now come from our own choices. Its our cherished lifestyles that are now pushing hard on us and the civilization we rightly hold dear (note these new "Armageddon's" are ours alone not the planet's. The Earth will be fine under even large swings in climate. It's been through it before. We, on the other hand, could have a very, very hard time of it.) Such are dangers haunting imaginations the college kids I teach today.

We have gained so much power in so little time with so little cultural preparation (no cultural memory or myths or collective wisdom). So which threats have we learned from and passed over so far? Any at all? If so can we take those lessons and apply them to the new ones we now face?