This dialogue between Matthew Ritchie and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve first appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s exhibition Proposition Player, organized by Lynn M. Herbert, December 12, 2003-March 14, 2004, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in association with Hatje Cantz Publications

Many thanks to Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for permission to republish

I always thought the best magic tricks were the ones you knew how they worked but, the trick was so perfect you still couldn’t help believing it. There are seven kinds of magic trick. the disappearance, the production, the transformation, the mentalist, demonstration, the anti-scientific demonstration, penetration, and the transportation. Now imagine if one trick did them all at once.
– Matthew Ritchie, 2003

As the story goes, I’d like to begin with a brief history of the project. How did it all begin?

In 1995, after many years of working as a building superintendent and not really making art, I got started again by making a list, and then the list turned into a map, and the map turned into a story, and then the story turned into a game. Since then I have typically worked episodically, through a series of site-specific projects that cumulatively described elements of a system or, more accurately, a way of working. I think this accumulation sometimes created the illusion of a progression, with a hierarchy of meaning. But it turns out that impression is even less than half the story. This show is a good time for me to evaluate the truth of that first impression and how closely it is related both to the true intentions of the work and to the physical forms it has taken on over time.

What was the initial list?

It was a list of everything I was interested in. It was grouped as forty-nine categories arranged in a grid of seven by seven, things like solitude, color, DNA, sex, everything I could think of. Each element on the list was represented in seven ways: as a scientific function, a theological function, a narrative function, a color, a form, a dynamic function, and finally through a personal, hidden meaning. But once they started crossing over from their little boxes, which happened immediately, that’s when it turned into a map, like a place, as if all the elements had become little cities one would like to visit. And then it became a story, almost automatically.

What was the function of the forty-nine characteristics? I mean, ultimately, what were you trying to get at?

The forty-nine characteristics were originally an attempt to simply represent the conditions of any system. Light, color, mass, space, time, etc. are aspects shared by painting with any cosmology or any representation of the universe. The many shows that followed were an exploration of the possibility of building consensus, or form, from contradictory narratives. Cape Canaveral and Morris Lapidus for Miami, the Brockton Holiday Inn and glacier climbing in Svalbard for the shows in [respectively] Boston and Oslo, the geological oddity of the Seven Cities for a show in São Paulo. Each show added physical details to the overall information architecture, trying to extend the idea of an open system to the physical form of the work.

The more I’ve looked at and thought about your work, the more it has become about manifesting structures of information and the information age, not just about painting. Or better, you’re using the medium of painting not to represent the issues and ideas of the information age but to translate them into another order, an order that is physical, where, as you put it, everything is there all at once.

I want to be able to see everything. It’s a fathomless desire, a weakness and a strength. But to do such a thing, you have to turn information into a physical form.

Which is so interesting because one of the most dramatic distinctions between the information age and the pre-information age is the increasing invisibility and non-physical form of things, like subway tokens becoming metro cards; coins and paper, credit, and ATMs; films into digital streams, etc.

Yes, so we need to make a visual metaphor for all the things we cannot see. I grew up with the information age. When I was in high school a digital watch was a rare trophy. Now a tidal wave of information engulfs us. They have just introduced a unit of measure that calculates planetary information flow. More information was exchanged in the last five years than in all human history. How do we deal with all this? How do we create a meaningful information environment? How can we learn to see information as form? I’ve always been interested in this idea of anthropomorphizing information and have wanted to use painting to prove one of the fundamental premises of information theory, that any sufficiently complex system will acquire its own internal meaning. Not only can you see all of it, but it can see all of you. I have also wanted to see if I could introduce certain fixed relationships into painting that would allow it to acquire the status of language. Then maybe this thing could talk back. I don’t know much about linguistics, but once I came across a list of the properties of language, and painting has all but one.

Which is?

Intertranslatability. It fascinated me that painting could be considered mute. In language the word “blue” can be translated into any language and will still always mean “blue”. But in painting there is no way to translate Picasso’s blue or El Greco’s blue from painting to painting. Pigments can’t be translated; they are specific, never general, never translatable.

In 1997, in an interview with Jennifer Berman for BOMB, you said, “… there are a lot of artists… who are doing work that I feel close to, and it evolves around ideas of treating art as language, and consequently inventing narratives, but not in some sixties way…” [Matthew Ritchie, quoted in interview by Jennifer Berman, BOMB Spring 1997, p.64.] Could you elaborate on that?

I guess what I was getting at is any discussion of my personal narrative must be closely linked to the personalized global practices that emerged in 1995-2000, where cosmologies and mythologies were a common tool for artists as divergent as Liam Gillick, Gregor Schneider, Manfred Pernice, Andrea Zittel, Kara Walker, and of course Matthew Barney and his Yale classmates Katy Schimert, Michael Grey, and Michael Rees. Shows generated by these artists and others often used complex titling and installation strategies like books, super-graphics, and implied narratives as part of their fundamental structure. The overall effect was a collection of closed worlds, a house of doors. I was very interested in the possibilities this opened up, and after the collapse of the master narratives in the eighties, it seemed inevitable that artists would turn to a self-contained practice again. Typical of these projects was an implication of a larger vision, which underlay any given project. My own project was established both to take advantage of that desire and simultaneously to counter it. I created narrative structures which manifested themselves as a nonhierarchical game space, a magic square, open to multiple contradictory readings and based on an open source material from subgenres commonly relegated to the backwaters of historical curiosity, such as Gnostic angelology, unified field theory, conspiracy theories of all stripes, creation debates, and evolutionary arguments – in short, every field where the desire for a universal taxonomy, a context outside all contexts, had outweighed truth, proof, or consensus. My project was hopefully a generous construction of arguments that was always intended to be impossible to be read as any kind of closed Wagnerian master myth and to be more a kind of open, porous toolkit for thinking.

Unlike Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, which is often described as Wagnerian.

Barney was among the first artists of my generation who was not worried by his desire to include everything he wanted into his art. I had seen the work of [Robert] Rauschenberg, [Joseph] Beuys and [Sigmar] Polke and found them similarly freeing, but somehow that moment seemed lost to my generation. That was what I thought was so liberating about the early nineties: everyone seemed to say, “I’m interested in all this stuff and I’ll do it all at once, from Rikrit Tiravanija’s cooking to Andrea Zittel’s habitats. And that was fantastic. I was never attracted to this idea that art was somehow under siege or that preserving ideas of conservative technique was some kind of resistance. Nor did the myth of infinite progression seem particularly truthful either. I think something much more interesting has happened since then. An enormous space has opened up where we can see the possibility of these radicalized, spectacularized individual projects to change and evolve, to escape from the cultic and predictable obligations of art historical expectations. Instead of accepting a relationship to the Wagnerian model, which is based on the the model of traditional cult worship, I think we should be thinking about Milton, whose work was based on ideas of intellectual honesty, individual freedom, and responsibility. The ubiquity of cheap, low-res technology allows every artist to become their own NASA.

In other words, for me, the original idea that any sufficiently complex system would acquire its own internal meaning (information theory) has mutated into an omnivorous visualization system constantly generating multiple meanings. This system is not really being generated by me; it is a story by, for, and about everyone and everything. And so, without either falling or concluding as scheduled, my project has taken on an internal life. It has escaped. The separate characters have become highly individualized characters, places, landscapes, and organs, all competing and dreaming in an endless conceptual war consisting of endless victories for all. None of the work in the current show corresponds to the initial table of characteristics, colors, names, or functions. Instead the works all contain multiple and polluted variants and offspring of the original structure. One way to describe what I am doing is I am trying to describe and include what cannot be systematized. The classic regressions of [Bertrand] Russell’s set of all sets, or the Binding Problem, or the question of a priori consciousness, or the origin of source material for the Big Band, are all ultimately about asking what can and cannot be known. They are outside context questions.

What do you mean by “outside context questions”?

How can we perceive the structure that contains the model of our perception?

Do you think you have successfully given back to painting the idea of translatability? If so, isn’t it only within your system?

I think I have sort of, but the result has turned out to be a kind of conjuring trick with only one useful function: to show that all language requires an internal consistency, not only to function but to have integrity.

Does critique enter into your work? Is that even a relevant question? Or desire to get out of your work?

Could you expand on that a little?

About critique? What I mean by that?

Yeah.

The belief that art is less about creativity than it is about questioning art, society, power, money, master narratives. I came out of that tradition through academia and the Whitney program in the 1980s. But the more I got to know and write about art in the ‘90s after I left academia, the more narrow that view became, which is why Barney’s, yours, or Ellen Gallagher’s work became of such interest to me. In this more generative kind of work, critique is not the impetus so much as generating new systems. Creativity returns but through the lens of a very diffracted (post-Derridean / Haraway) space.

It’s an interesting question because the third thing I was interested in at the beginning of this project was the idea of the Ius Utendi, the model of law proposed by William of Ockham (one of the first proponents of intellectual freedom), which concerns the structures and questions that underly any self-critical, self-sustaining, open game of thought.

How has he appeared in your work?

Well Ockham is most famous for Ockham’s razor, a deductive mental tool.

Which is?

The simplest solution is the likeliest one. But determining the simplest solution requires an understanding of the entire context. In Ockham’s time, the simplest solution was to assume God was responsible for everything from wood floating on water to the motion of the planets. But that led to heresy because it conflicted with the idea of free will and to idiocy because the basic laws of observable science were constantly being challenged by this idea that they were “against the will of God”. It’s the same kind of thinking that opposes stem cell research today.

But Ockham is most interesting as an example of the power and limits of logical thinking – what you could call critique. He single-handedly challenged the rights and limits of the papacy at a time when it was the unchallenged arbiter not only of the present, but of the spiritual future of every Christian. He won through the force of logic on what he called the “right to use”, the belief that each of us has both rights and responsibilities that no larger structure can mediate for us. In short, he presents the individual as a moral ecology. Real critique must begin with an understanding of the entire system and one’s personal relationship to it.

Okay, so now I’ll come in from that other side. Your generation’s reliance on baroque internal myths, or even baroque public myths (science) in your case, has been interpreted as this kind of irresponsible system, because you could be interpreted as saying, “Well, everything is meaningful and everywhere, and it can go anywhere”. If that’s the case, then nothing means anything, and everything’s up for grabs, and it’s that awful postmodernism stuff, right?

Well, science is hardly a myth and like any truly complex system, it demands internal integrity. But I usually get asked the opposite question instead.

Which is?

“Why do we even have to know what it means?” I’ve heard that thousands of times. Most people don’t want to know that there’s an internal architecture, or background information, and that it all holds together.

That’s so depressing. Why can’t people understand that this is what makes the art so interesting. Certainly it’s what is strong and breathtaking about yours and Barney’s.

The criticism of the complexity is based on this unfortunate idea that we in the visual arts should be afraid to make big, beautiful, complex things in case we somehow “alienate” a frightened and timid potential audience. I do not underestimate the audience in that way. It’s so odd. The same people that worry about contemporary art in this way are completely unafraid of the Sistine Chapel, or The Matrix, or jet planes, which are much more complicated. Part of the premise of this show was the idea of shared and lost information, so to make the heads for The Fine Constant, I worked with ten-year-olds in Houston and New York, and they were not alienated by the complexity; they embraced it. They were less confused than anyone I worked with. So I think any audience can and will rise to the challenge of complex work as long as they feel they can trust the artist’s integrity. This is the most important thing, because only an internal integrity can guarantee an implicit order than transcends these kinds of questions.

That’s excellent.

There are also big differences between the various types of work that suffer from the criticism of complexity or hermeticism. You are the Barney scholar here, but it seems to me his work is based on the idea of constructing a mythology that builds upon itself. He’s forcing a kind of concentration on the viewer. Someone like Beuys was interested in placing himself at the center of a postwar absence, and his meaningful system was a conduit with himself as the social lubricant. Kara Walker, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in an epic David Lean-like portrayal that focuses less on one individual than on articulating the giant voice of moral betrayal. Whereas what I’m interested in is an opening up of consciousness, a reversion, a reversal, so that what happens to viewers is they think about things from the outside through the context. Information becomes the material, the form. So I see the paintings and all the things that I’m making as parts of something like a telescope. I’m trying to create a class of objects whose main property is that they turn the viewer’s consciousness back out. All the information in my work can be found in the public realm, on the internet or in any public library, but what I try to deliver is the idea of personal intellectual freedom, the right to think any thought on any scale.

In previous interviews you talk about how important it is that the systems you are exploring are real, i.e., part of the public or social order. The abstract, self-made, total fantasy system of the Cremaster is your exact opposite. You start with the rules in the universe that determine us as a game and watch the story grow.

Yes, we are all an expression of the game. We are part of a particular spread of cards, and those cards are going to be reshuffled tomorrow and the day after. This is the hand you’ve been dealt, so it’s up to you to make a story out of the random insane collection of things that are happening to you right now.

It seems like your story of life has an awful lot to do with rules, doesn’t it? Would you say, for you, rules are almost the primary material?

Wow, that’s a really rich question. Especially since a good part of my life was about circumventing rules. [Laughing.] And I’d really like them to answer it for you. [Ritchie hands her “The Rules of the Game”.]

Are you kidding?

No. You are right – the relationship between the rules and the information, between signal and noise, is the question. It’s the question for everything. Not just for art making, but life. Life is about rules. You can say you “don’t want to learn”, but you have to learn about gravity. You have to learn about food and water, and then you have to learn about social life to keep getting food and water. The rules that we tend to think are the most important end up being, in the larger picture, nothing compared to the fundamental rules in your own life. Like when you will die. The whole point about rules is that they are what allow you to play the game. But just because you know the rules doesn’t mean the game is any more predictable, or any less fun, or any less absorbing. You know you’re going to win and lose, and that’s what counts.

Most rules aren’t about learning, just obeying. One doesn’t have to understand or even know about gravity, but one does have to obey it.

Yeah, that is certainly what we have been told. But who told you that, and why? The new show is very much about this. Like, in the end, is a story really more about its rules? Is it all about the setup? Or can we look at all the rules at once?

Of any one moment in time, a person – or anything? Why is that important? What does one get by seeing all the rules at once?

Everything. All those rules are conspiring in a nonhierarchical space, where everything is potentially observable at the same time. Maybe the rules are just another way of asking what will happen next?

Which is the fundamental structure or definition or narrative. But what you are talking about is more about breaking through all the dimensions and seeing everything at once. Maybe it’s the word “rules” that throws me. Is there another word for what you’re talking about?

Yes, there are lots because I don’t even think what I’m interested in is about “rules” in the narrow sense. I’m really looking at the fundamental properties in nature (that are sometimes called constants) that underlie everything. Laws tend to express the relationships of constants. But the other thing that’s specifically interesting to me, in terms of what you’re asking about, is that every individual person is building his or her own information mass, and although each mass is derived from the laws underlying most of the universe, everybody becomes their own set of dice – or their own pack of cards. We are all making our own rules – in defiance of the underlying ones.

The difference between the pre-information age and post is precisely this issue of pen access to “all” knowledge. We suffer from what William Gibson calls “information sickness”. Survival, of the fittest is no longer who is the one who knows everything, because everybody can do that to some extent via the internet and technology. But power or success or achievement or breakthrough comes form the ingenuity in how one makes sense of the information. In your model, it is what roll of the dice or division of cards each person develops.

Yes, when you have a new experience, the hippocampus actually rebuilds itself. Information, new information, literally makes the brain change shape. They’ve been doing these studies recently with monks that show the alpha brain waves calm down during meditation. The hippocampus actually changes shape. Buddhist monks and people who don’t meditate have brains that actually work differently. It’s actually a physical change. So every day we’re making a map of our life in our brain. We’re doing what we’re talking about in a very abstract way, processing everything into a physical object, inside our heads, every day.

So one can look at your work as much as a kind of map of the brain, and not just the idea of the universe and the cosmos? You put it beautifully in 1997 in the Jennifer Berman interview: “… you’ve got hundreds of competing impulses – your skin is itching, you’re responding to pressures and thoughts of your age, your body is deteriorating, you’re going to the gym. It’s a mess. This temple of activity. This hive. The heart’s beating, you can hear it ticking in the back of your mind. And your brain, god knows what’s going on in there. No one’s even close to figuring that out. And so this is an attempt to try and map what it is like to be a person”.

Yeah.

Have you ever experienced the sense of your brain growing?

Oh, God, yeah! And not just taking drugs. If you pay attention, you can feel it all the time.

But isn’t that amazing? I remember the point when I felt my brain matter growing. There was this feeling, literally, of more stuff going in and growing, and I could understand things I couldn’t before.

Yeah, that’s amazing. And then the real trick is you’ve got to figure out a shape for it all. Like will the form the information takes become a useful tool – like a personal cosmology – or more important, can you make it into something you can use or at least tolerate?

Tolerate is an interesting word. It’s about finding a level we can tolerate in the sense of a threshold we make, manage, and use. Otherwise information saturation becomes painful, and as Gibson says, we get sick. Is that what your paintings do? Are they ways of tolerating information overload?

I think so. Raw information has the ability to cause real disorientation. Information has to be cooked. The paintings are a kind of immune system; literally pictures of thinking.

Like what hydrogen actually looks like if it turns into knowledge?

Yes.

And yet, color and line are your vocabulary. Color’s the most important element, in a way, right? Are there specific associations with each color?

Well, originally there were seven colors with very specific hues that were in fact directly related to certain ideas I had about color theory. But then as they started to bleed and cross-mingle and procreate with each other, it was like all these children emerged. Children in the form of really dirty colors. But in truth, I would say that formally the paintings rely as much on the idea of “fill” as they do in color.

Territories.

Yes, in a way this goes back to the map and to the problem of how to contain or shape information. There’s actually a mechanical model of how much information one can contain in a space, based on the number of colors and how dense they are. It’s why maps look the way they do. They’re not brightly colored all over because, if so, you wouldn’t be able to look at and read them anymore. So when I was figuring out how to make these paintings, I had all these books on color. There was this book called Envisioning Information, which is very famous. It is all about how to make good and bad models for presenting information.

And yours, are they good or bad models?

I think mine are terrible models. [Laughter.]

Now why is that? Why would that be more compelling for you than doing “good” models?

Well, a “good” model for information is one where it’s totally legible to any person, for instance, a train schedule. Such models shouldn’t be confusing but completely ordered.

So, good models for presenting information are by definition not very interesting art. If so, where does your work stand? Or why work within these boundaries, which seem to contradict one another? What I’m getting at is, you seem caught between representing or modelling information via painting and making art. Art and information seem to be totally at odds, and yet those are the two things you are working with!

Well, a train schedule is very limited – its presentation of order relies on the absence of all other information. The real world is also a terrible model for presenting important information since it includes everything. But this project, as it stands in the Houston show, represents a kind of crisis, climax, or collapse of the earlier way of working precisely because of this conflict. For me this is an attempt to take advantage of the energy released as the first wave generated in 1995 comes crashing down. From this conflict, an alternate ecology, an ecology of information, has emerged, casting spaces against time, matter, energy. This ecology, rather than the initial rules, has emerged from inside the whole project. Rather than an episodic recapitulation of previous stories and structures, this show seeks to collapse all the categories, characters, and stories into one moment – a moment where the viewer can enter and begin to play the game him or herself. This entire show was also built around the idea of participation from the very beginning, not only from the side of the viewer, but also from the side of the maker. I wanted to explore how information as a material could be scaled and worked with by different kinds of collaborators using different technologies. I wanted to see how much could be lost and then regained as I scaled the different elements. So I worked with a totally diverse team of collaborators around the country who were each making a component, like the programmer making the game in California, or mold makers casting dice from prehistoric elk bones at the American Museum of Natural History, or ten-year-old children making the heads in Houston from Sculpy, or the water-jet cutter putting the sculpture together in his barn. I wanted part of the process to be about breaking this system of mine into parts and surrendering it to chance in the hands of others. This way the idea of a scalable language could really be tested out in practice. And their independent decisions ended up directly influencing the paintings and drawings, returning me to this idea of an endlessly opening, collapsing and infinitely generous structure. In terms of the viewers’ experience too, I have made it participatory. For instance, there is an interactive digital craps game, and there’s this pack of cards that I’m making. It’s a pack of all the characters, the forty-nine characters. So everyone who comes can play the game. [Ritchie pulls out a pack of cards.]

You have the pack of fifty-two most wanted Iraqi cards. Wait, this is your color – these are your colors?!

No, these are the US government colors.

Give me a break!

Funny, that is. [Laughs.]

So, you did dodge the question about the meaning of your color scheme, because there is a kind of army green throughout your world of color.

No, it’s just coincidence.

It’s just a coincidence?

People use these colors because they’re heavy on white. They’re cheap.

Okay, so talk about your craps game and cards. How do they function in the show?

You come into the show and are given a playing card with a character on it. But the show is not about all the characters. It’s not like they’re all over the walls or anything. There are also four suits in a pack of cards. So, now you’ve got forty-nine characters, and they’re divided into seven families each, and then they’re divided into four suits, which splits them up into their functionality. And the four suits represent the basic forces of the universe. (Which, by the way, were never included in the original seven families or the basic characters or properties, because I didn’t know enough to include them. Thank goodness.) So now, literally, these characters build the stories, but the stories are only a superstructure placed on top of the underlying structure, which is these four basic forces of the universe, and they then build through the craps game into a central figure, “the swimmer,” that ties everything together.

You mean these forces are undeniable?

We describe the universe through four forces that make up everything. The Weak Force, which is radiation, the Strong Force, which holds atoms together, Gravity, which holds the universe together, and Electromagnetism – most commonly understood as light.

Is that four because there are only four? Or have you chosen just four?

No, I hardly ever need to make anything up. There really are four forces that combine to make everything, including the four constants represented here: e = the elementary charge, c = the speed of light, G = the constant of gravity, and h = the constant of actio. For this book we made those letters each of of the four colors.

So according to Big Science, there are four?

You’re having a hard time with this aren’t you. Well, the theory is that they were all once one force – before the Big Bang, but there are lots more fours, just as there were lots of sevens when I needed them. You know, four seasons, four directions of the compass, four suits of cards. They’re all actually dependent on each other. The four forces also generate the four fixed units of measurement. So they’re all completely contingent on each other.

So, how does all of this work in your show?

The viewer walks in, gets one of these cards and then gives it to a guy at the gaming table. He then gives them the digital dice, which are four-sided dice cast from prehistoric animal bones, and then they play the digital craps game. And as they play the game they build the paintings.

Literally? During the show? How does that happen? Where’s “the painter”, meaning you? And why are the dice prehistoric animal bones?

The first dice ever used were astragals – ankle bones of a cloven hoofed animal. They are four-sided and were what were first used as dice, so in this case they’re cast from prehistoric giant elk ankle bones. They have four sides. One dice has four numbers and one has the four symbols of the suits: spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds – and they’re colored. Blue is spades, green is clubs, and so on.

I also made a one-person craps table that serves as a projection surface. You throw the dice onto the table and they have tiny computers inside them that register what you throw and send a radio signal to a computer above. The computer then builds and projects random animated elements from a digital game onto the surface of the table, depending on your score. The evolution of the game resembles the main sequence of the paintings. Another version of the game, based on the same dice throw but using the random quality of the game to build a different image, is being projected on the wall as you play.

The game has five levels, because it’s also based on the voodoo universe, which has five levels and because voodoo is the only chance-based religion that I could come across.

This is all sounding like mad associative ranting.

And yet this is how I think. In voodoo you pray to a certain kind of god, but you might get another god coming in and at you. It’s also the only one where the universe invests itself in you, rather than you having to pray to it; it’s an inverted religion. And it’s sort of related to Christianity, which is something that I think is a legitimate context for me, if you do all these strange things in the gaming room, alternate versions of the structures of the paintings will build themselves in front of you each time.

How does one win?

Winning has to do with acquiring enough light and gravity and mass to get to the next level. It’s really just about play.

What if the first person who comes in ends up playing the whole time the show’s up?

Well, that’s great! But there is an end to it. Proposition Player goes through five stages, evolving from the first diagram, which is the underlying structure of the universe, to a painting, which is the evolution of atoms, and then, at the end, a figure emerges out of all of them, built out of the same parts.

Is there another metaphor besides “game” that works for you?

I think “life” is a good metaphor. [Laughs.] Or going back to the word I used before: “context”. Because all rules are interdependent on each other, they build a context. Light is dependent on nuclear fusion, which is dependent on the space / time structure of the universe, which is dependent on gravity. In other words, everything is linked together in a chain, in a context, which is the game. The game is much more than just the rules of the game. It’s the whole thing. If you talk out one part, one rule, the whole game collapses. So if that happens, how do you represent the context?

Like an organism. Is context another name for history?

The real context is the structure that contains the model of our perception that we think is the context – it is the framework that allows the rules of the game to be rule. So, how do you step outside a context that includes everything? This is the thing that I’m always talking about. it is the defining problem: context as theory. How do you represent the presence of the defining absence?

Defining absence, there’s a great definition of God. In a way for you to talk about history is off the mark because history, as a system for making sense of events of experience, is really just another kind of perception?

We can only see 5% of the universe. We’ve called another 25% “dark energy” and the remaining 70% “dark matter”. We’re working from a model with 95% of the information missing – so no wonder everybody’s acting like they’re in the dark. So the big question for me is: how do you visually represent that absence?

In The Fine Constant, each of the heads is based on a sculpture made by a ten-year-old in Houston who participated in a workshop based on my stories. The heads were decimated by a computer: we scanned the original head, turned it into polygons and reduced the polygons by 95%. This whole fabrication process was intended to represent the radical and persistent information loss that characterizes human experience and to show how in a way, it doesn’t matter.

Yikes!

And despite the fact that these heads derive from a story told to a child, who made a sculpture of the story that was then reduced by 95% in detail and then cast – we still have enough to understand it as a head! So the universe is still legible. It’s still working for you, even when you can only see 5% of what is there. But truthfully, as human beings, we can probably only even grasp about 5% of that visible universe. So we discard another 95% and make our daily decisions based on 5% of the available information we have left and yet we still feel the rightness of it all. Even though we’re only able to see only one quarter of one percent, we still feel we are connected to the underlying order. We can go further and further down in resolution, but as long as the underlying grain remains true, we can be convinced we are connected to the whole – we can ignore the overwhelming absence.

Sounds like the Bush administration.

But it’s how all of our information is produced. It’s like, how can you think about your own consciousness from outside your brain? I was making yet more Sculpy heads at a charity event and another ten-year-old came up to me during the workshop and said, “I want to make a model of the universe.” And I though, “Did someone send you to me? Is this a setup? You know, Candid Camera?” And then she said, “No, okay, the universe is too big. Let’s make the solar system.” And I was like, “Okay – phew!” And then she said, “But what does the universe look like anyway?” And all I could say was, “Good question.” I mean, isn’t that it? There she was, age ten, standing outside the universe going, “And so, what does this look like? How can I put it altogether all at once?”

And to her it wasn’t a game.

No, to her it was just like, life.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations
from the Beaten Track – Richard Feynman

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Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, Richard Feynman (1918 -1988) is also regarded as a legendary man extraordinaire, a moniker that is rarely fitting for scientists. The bongo-playing physicist practiced a self-deprecating sense of humor that spoke volumes of the importance of humility in a field replete with arrogant robots.

As a recent graduate of Princeton, Richard Feynman took up work on the Manhattan Project. But he is best known for his work on particle theory, the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and quantum electrodynamics.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track is a collection of his letters dating from 1939 to 1987. Feynman was a man of many interests. He is also one who was not troubled by embracing contradictions. Even though a winner of the Nobel Prize, he remained suspicious, if not altogether bored, by heavy handed conferences and some of the people who find that pursuit laudable. Being a rigorous scientist, he was, of his own admission, one who did not “speak writable English.” A free spirit in the truest and most sincere sense of the word, Feynman did not claim to know anything about politics. Yet he recognized that in order for science to take place there must first exist the liberty and political freedom to embrace such a task.

Also not one to tow the line, in 1964, prior to his being awarded the Nobel Prize, he refused to attend a conference sponsored by the Soviet Joint Institute for Nuclear Research because “I would feel uncomfortable at a scientific conference in a country whose government respects neither freedom of opinion of science, nor the value of objectivity, nor the desire of many of its scientist citizens to visit scientists in other countries.”

An objectivist by temperament, he understood that human reality has more to do with the nature of reality proper, the constants of nature, let us say, than with personal desire. On a similar vein, his attack of philosophy exposes his ignorance of the metaphysical foundation and building block of science.

To his critics and debunkers, Feynman was too eccentric, too much himself, a model individualist. An interesting man without a doubt, his letters showcase a profound zest for life. The letters range from those pertaining to love to serious scientific discussions to his patience in entertaining the whimsical notions of admiring fans.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track is replete with anecdotes that make it easier to tackle the scientific work of this colorful man. The book also contains many pictures that capture the essence of the man in his diverse poses. Ironically, these letters also prove the quintessential wisdom that man cannot live from science alone.

Rocks of Ages – Stephen Jay Gould

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In his book Rocks of Ages, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who had Harvard professorships in both zoology and geology, presents a philosophical thesis on the relationship between science and religion. Chestnuts don’t come much older.

Some background on Gould first. He wrote much on the influence of geological events on the evolution of life. Other evolutionary theorists – such as arch neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins – do not hold much truck with this punctuated equilibria theory, but it was influential while Gould was its champion.

In this book, Gould takes a step back from his area of expertise and looks at the idea that science and religion can play together without fighting. Moreover, he holds, they have been doing so for many hundreds of years. Now, Gould is an accomplished essayist and a fine writer stylist; he must be forgiven for his occasional pomposity.

His argument is christened the thesis of ‘non-overlapping magesteria’ (NOMA for short). A magesterium is ‘a domain where on form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for a meaningful discourse and resolution’ (p. 5; cf. Kuhn’s paradigms). Thus, the magesterium of science covers the empirical: the composition of the universe (‘fact’) and the way it works (‘theory’). Religion, on the other hand, examines questions of ‘ultimate meaning and moral value’. ‘These two magesteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry.science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how we go to heaven’ (p. 6).

Wrong. Science and religion do cover the same ground. Whereas science does not produce answers to moral and ethical questions, it is indeed the case that religion claims the patent for its ideas on the ‘composition of the universe.and the way it works’. For, without this claim, on what rock of authority does a religion found its morality? You cannot give a sermon that endorses one or more of the Ten Commandments without the concomitant assumption that Moses did indeed climb the Mountain of God, did indeed speak to God and return with tablets of stone. To deny the reality of this act – which one could do by rendering it metaphorical – is to remove its most critical component. It becomes another story. No different, no more powerful, and no more worthy as a root to moral truth than the Icelandic Sagas.

NOMA is a simple idea, beautifully expounded. It attempts to quell disquiet. It seeks to find a ‘golden mean’ between science and religion. But there can be no mean. At the risk of paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, it is not necessarily the case that a mid-point between two extremes is optimal; one extreme can be wrong. Furthermore, and more crucially, religion’s components are not discrete; though it does contain a magisterium of ‘meaning and moral value’, it cannot be divorced from its other magisteria. They are integral.

This conclusion takes no stance on the ultimate question that Gould tries to avoid, for science and religion do indeed battle for the truth. In the endeavour, each will cross the other’s path. But whereas science will remain silent on matters of conscience, religion cannot afford to remain silent on matters of fact. To do so would be to build a house on sand.

Of A Fire On The Moon – Norman Mailer

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Here is Norman Mailer, born eighty-one years ago, married six times, the great egotist and American literary lion. In 1968, Mailer was jailed for his part in the Washington peace rallies. Soon after, he ran against five others for the Mayor of New York. He attracted five per cent of the vote. In 1969, Mailer covered the moonshot and by then he was exhausted, haunted, even, by the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. But the Apollo programme was an immense story worthy of Mailer’s famed prose. And what prose it is: often convoluted, arcane; staggeringly self-important and confessional by equal turns. Mailer was in his mid-forties when he wrote Of A Fire On The Moon. He was looking down on the work of the next generation: postgraduate students in black glasses, white shirts, speaking a language all of NASA’s own. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was eleven years old. For Mailer, it played a young man’s game, and it captured the blandness and arrogance of corporate America.

What did Mailer find in the dusty Houston Manned Spacecraft Center and the swamps of Cape Canaveral? The Apollo-Saturn programme was a grand enterprise indeed. In a tiny capsule — named Columbia — Neil Armstrong, a man who learned to fly before he could drive, Michael Collins, and Dr Edwin Aldrin, hoped to free themselves of Earth’s gravity, orbit the moon, land, and return to Earth not dead. Their capsule sat above a Saturn V rocket, the most powerful transport ever built. It was thirty-six storeys high. During blast-off, it would use as much oxygen in one second as half the population of the planet could draw in one gasp. And gasp they did.

The journey is dangerous. With hindsight, the odds look good. They looked good for the shuttles Challenger and Columbia too. What comment does Mailer have about the psychology of astronauts? He sees astronauts as stoics. They are inert like moon rocks; solid and dependable, even moronic, trained to click switches and provide a commentary in any emergency, the better for their successors to survive the catastrophe that might kill them. Fifteen of the sixteen NASA astronauts have blue eyes. Most of them are balding. Facts. Hints.

Prior to launch, Collins, who will remain in the service module Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin step into history, receives lengthy attention. Does Collins choke on the achievement? Does he feel cheated? No, Collins does not (Mailer reports sadly). These men are team players. They talk about the moon like David Beckham talks about the football match to come or Schumacher about the race already won: in stock phrases, tonelessly, with endless elaboration on a stultifying, simple theme, and it’s all for the team, the team.

Armstrong replies to journalists in a way that cuts to Mailer’s novelist core: with their scientific language — riding science all the way up while hiding in its skirts — these astronauts dare to weaken the moment’s drama while Mailer, the novelist, knows it should be inflated. When asked what contingency plans Armstrong has for a failure to lift-off from the lunar surface, Armstrong shrugs: “We haven’t thought about that. That’s not going to happen.” But prior to the launch, when the odds don’t look so good, it might happen. And Armstrong accepts it. He is ready to die on a rock for the team.

Describing the day of the moonwalk, Mailer writes: “Armstrong and Aldrin were to do an EVA that night. EVA stood for Extra Vehicle Activity, and that was presumably a way to describe the most curious steps ever taken. It is one thing to murder the language of Shakespeare – another to be unaware how rich was the victim. Future murders stood in the shadow of the acronyms. It was as if on the largest stage ever created, before an audience of half the earth, a man of modest appearance would walk to the centre, smile tentatively at the footlights, and read a page from a data card. The audience would groan and Beckett and Warhol give their sweet smiles.”

The team extends to the wives of the Apollo astronauts. They repeat NASA phrases as tirelessly as their husbands. (There were no female astronauts in 1969, of course, and the number of female astronauts killed in service is disproportionate.) But those wives know the risks. It is only two years since the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee died in the Apollo-Saturn 204 launchpad fire; in their honour, the test was renamed Apollo-I. But risks be damned, there is a party line at NASA. The wives tow it and smile. Armstrong and Collins will set down in the Sea of Tranquility, and there can be no better name for the calm, dramaless NASA mission. The risks remain. Most centre on mechanical problems. No-one has tried to ignite the LEM engine in a vacuum. It may not fire for the return journey. Armstrong: “We haven’t thought about that. That’s not going to happen.”

Armstrong employed the same slow, measured prose as vice-chairman of the Presidential Commission that investigated the loss of shuttle Challenger in 1986. On the same committee was Chuck Yeager (the first man to penetrate the sound barrier) and Sally Ride (the first woman in space). These people had the Right Stuff. Mailer does not get to the bottom of this issue: What makes a person leave their planet? What is the Right Stuff? Perhaps it is a fundamental inertness, the kind that allowed Armstrong in an earlier mission to talk through scenarios with mission control while his space capsule spun faster and faster, while he was only seconds from blackout and certain death. Where will Mailer find the drama in the soul of the astronaut?

Mailer, of course, is no team player. He is an example of the arch individualist, but he tackles his subject thoroughly and raises questions where he can. We all know that there was a second fire on the moon – the LEM engine worked, and it sent Armstrong and Aldrin up to their rendezvous with Collins. Cold technology would not always prevail, but, it did for a while, and Mailer’s book charts it breathlessly, dramatically.

For the subject of his most recent and most popular book, Simon Garfield chose a man whose funeral was fastidiously reported in the periodical “Gas World,” and whose birthplace was suggested as a point of pilgrimage by “The Dyer, Textile Printer, Bleacher and Finisher.” The man was Sir William Perkin, an alchemist’s grandson. In 1856 he had accidentally invented the first artificial colour, which happened to be beautiful, and, as it turned out, widely consequential. It overturned the prevailing belief, shared by Perkin’s own father, that the science of chemistry was not especially useful, let alone lucrative. Perkin’s discovery also initiated the betrothal, however stormy it has since become, of science and industry. For elucidation of these curiosities there is no better volume than Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World.

Garfield’s fifth book was undertaken, as many worthy projects have been, by happy accident. “I’ve got a 13-year-old son,” Garfield explained over the telephone from his London home. “Maybe three years ago he was reading a book, called Chemical Chaos. It was a mixture of text and cartoons, and there were about 20 examples of inventions that have come about by chance.” Among them was the brilliant byproduct of coal tar found by William Perkin, and called mauve – a French name for the like-coloured mallow plant. “I thought, well, this is a story that I haven’t heard,” Garfield said. “I hadn’t thought about a colour being invented before.”

It would be a precocious 13-year-old indeed, at least in America, who’d have the attention span to fully read the book this epiphany inspired Garfield to write. As he put it: “Chemistry as we know it is not necessarily the sexiest topic.” On the other hand, William Perkin was only a precocious 18-year-old when, trying to synthesize quinine (then the only known treatment for malaria), he made a lasting fashion statement instead. “My main criterion for doing a story.” Garfield said, “Will it be interesting for me to spend.in this case, 18 months with it? It’s something I’ve heard fiction writers say,” he recalled. “Once you embark on a topic, wherever you turn you then see things that relate to your story. Almost every book I opened, there would be the colour mauve on the page.” Readers of Mauve will unfailingly enjoy-or perhaps come to resent – a similar experience.

As a benefit of earned trust, it’s the nonfictioner’s prerogative to export his own preoccupation to his readers, preferably in the form of tasty, ponderable truths; to offer new insights on old subjects, or even new subjects, about which we hadn’t even known to say, “Oh, how interesting.” To Garfield’s credit, Mauve often feels like a cozy and companionable public television documentary-one that you may not have even planned to watch, but that enraptures you at least enough to delay your other plans:

Within two years of Perkin’s invention, it seemed that everyone was having a go at dyemaking. Industry had showed Victorian chemists what was possible, and now nothing seemed beyond achievement; an eighteen-year-old had created a new shade for a woman’s shawl, and the full force of chemical ambition was unleashed. And of course there was much money to be made, and many fortunes to be lost, and a great amount of litigation.

“I couldn’t possibly imagine myself as one of these scholars,” the author confessed. “I’m finding these things out as I go.” However humble that sounds, though, some readers may still shudder at the implied research shimmering below Garfield’s lines, or his sizeable bibliography, or, well, the chemistry.

Garfield studied chemistry enough to matriculate from high school, but hadn’t then considered it of special interest. “What you don’t learn is any history. You learn things as they are now,” he said, explaining that the scientific community has expressed gratitude for the publication of Mauve. “There’s been a huge amount of books about physics, chaos, genetics,” he said, yet few on the early and enduring achievements of chemistry.

One simple way Garfield has managed to popularize his subject (and enjoy the fruits of painstaking research) is by opening his chapters with enlightening and often amusing quotations, regarding mauve, from such diverse sources as Goethe, John Fowles, Sports Illustrated, and USA Today. “It was a great joy to kind of drop in quotes,” he said. And it goes a long way toward affirming the idea that a colour deserves its own book. Garfield allowed, too, that Mauve is “very much an English tale.” That seemed to please him, and it’s no surprise given some of his previous titles: The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, and The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS.

Garfield is now deeply immersed in his next book, set roughly 30 years before Perkin’s discovery, about the birth of Britain’s railways. He described the project as very detailed. “I’ve got some material which hasn’t been seen before. It’s a good tale.” Meanwhile a British TV company has bought the option to film Mauve, somehow. Garfield doesn’t know if or when or how such an endeavour will proceed, but, he said, “If it’s to work, you can’t deviate from the facts.” Whatever form it takes, the movie Mauve promises vividness at the very least-as long as it’s not in black-and-white. Whether to focus on the history he made or on Perkin himself is the pressing question. “He was a brilliant man and awfully important, but he wasn’t the most fascinating man at home,” Garfield conceded. “A very humble, churchgoing chap. He was not Mr. Twice-Nightly, really.” Still, international attention has proven Garfield right to think Perkin’s story worth telling. Mauve really does explain how Perkin’s colour changed the world, and thereby makes an estimable contribution to our written history of technology. “It’s a colour, and a curiosity,” said the author, “that kind of permeates throughout the world.”

Time Lord – Clark Blaise

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For the chief engineer of a national railroad company, especially one so industrious as Sandford Fleming in 1876, misreading a timetable – and thereby missing a train – was especially irksome. Fleming redressed this embarrassment with the most enduring achievement of the Victorian era. He invented Standard Time. We of the Information Age owe him a debt of gratitude, and so, more than a century later, Clark Blaise has honored Fleming’s feat with a book, Time Lord.

Folding Fleming’s story into a survey of the Steam Age, and distilling the historic, philosophical and aesthetic repercussions of 19th-century progress, Time Lord reaches higher than its stock science-fictiony title might suggest (with all due respect to Dr. Who). It isn’t Blaise’s scholarship, however, that allows him inside Fleming’s mind, but rather his empathy and poetic sensibility. The book charms and fascinates precisely because it embraces the romance of a new frontier – as first surveyed by a quiet revolutionary.

"We are back again in that moment, identified by Henry Adams in 1844, when the world changed perceptibly, due to railroads, ships, and the telegraph; or perhaps it is the moment of Britain’s standardization, noted by Dickens; or of Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond. We are back to the generation of Melville’s Bartleby, and the struggle to mold time, language, and character into a single coherent story."

Inspired by affinity and curiosity, Blaise delivers that dizzying, inventive epoch, the velocity-spawned birth of modernism, the shock of a shrinking world, the motion sickness of sea change, and the necessary "sophisticated abstraction" of standardized time.

To accuse him of overstating the confusion and anxiety born from a multiplicity of pre-standardized "local" times is to forget what life in 19th-century North America’s 144 "official" times was like. Back then, even the best and brightest wrestled unsuccessfully with very real world problems about trains leaving stations at different times. Railroad accidents, as Blaise explains, "were daily events." The oceans, full of competing "prime" meridians and ships of varied national loyalties, were no safer. It took the Prime Meridian Conference, a diplomatic and political juggernaut tirelessly organized by Sandford Fleming, to sort everything out.

"The nineteenth century struck down God but didn’t bury him," Blaise suggests, "it erected standard time in his place." Time Lord reads like a labour of love, formally imperfect, perhaps, not precisely balanced, but hand-crafted and singular. It’s a book for the bookish, written not for the student of engineering, but for the student of literature. Blaise offers a hunk of Dickens here and there, for support to be sure, but also to share the pleasure of reading those sentences. He attributes Hemingway’s low comma-count to a new kind of "temporal anxiety." He finds irresistible fodder in Faulkner: "… Only when the clock stops does time come to life."

The truly impatient might charge Blaise with digressing too much, descending into name-dropping or mere literary criticism. But the author’s most revealing and engaging moments depend on such deep reading. What’s more, Blaise has learned, through 15 other books of various forms, restraint, good humor, and humility. He has learned the right way to include himself. Remembering the wild success of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary), or, a closer relative, Dava Sobel’s Longitude (about the creation of longitude) offers reassurance that Time Lord will find its deserved niche. Such books do important work, and attest to our gratitude and ongoing collective affection for the real, often unsung idea-people, whose single-minded-if mind-numbing-pursuits have literally changed the world.

Mendel’s Dwarf – Simon Mawer

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Nature has played a cruel trick on Dr. Benedict Lambert, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics. He’s achondroplastic, phenotypically abnormal, macrocephalic with pronounced lumbar lordosis: a dwarf. A brilliant geneticist himself, Ben has devoted his life to isolating the gene that made him the way he is. There’s not a lot else to do. Sex is generally unavailable to him, though his vantage point offers a few pleasures, and he gets by on vigorous masturbation. His passion for a librarian called, inevitably, Jean goes unrequited. But the vagaries of chance, which threw up his own spontaneous mutation, eventually offer him the opportunity to manipulate DNA for his own ends.

In the best traditions of speculative fiction, Simon Mawer’s discursive, beautifully plotted novel explores ethical dilemmas at the cutting edge of science through the eyes of a complex, engaging character. Alternately likeable, witty, bitter, lecherous and even vengeful, Ben invites our sympathy and then rejects it. "To be brave, you have to have a choice," he repeats through gritted teeth to those who praise his bravery. "A nanosecond is defined as the maximum length of time in normal company during which a dwarf may forget his condition," he observes after yet another sexual rejection.

Slowly the novel coalesces into an argument about eugenics, which is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear. Ben’s own condition is the result of an identifiable single-letter error in the transcription of the human genome. Should the world be spared freaks like him? And what about those with cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia or hay fever? In the new genetic marketplace, we could eliminate chance by selecting the strong, tall and socially acceptable. But as Ben is quick to point out, although we’ve already identified the genetic trait shared by 90% of murderers and 100% of rapists, there’s no great rush to eliminate the Y chromosome. All well and good, but given a chance to pass on his own genes and determine the phenotypic outcome, what will he choose?

Mawer serves up a few good in-jokes at the expense of evolutionary biologists along the way along the way. Two of the young Ben’s classmates are named Jones and Dawkins; no relation, presumably, to Steve and Richard. "Stop talking , Dawkins," snaps their biology teacher. "You never stop talking, boy, and you never have anything worth saying." But such gags are never allowed to swamp the engrossing story, which twists and turns all the way to the dark denouement that you both fear and hope the author will bottle out of delivering.

When We Die – Cedric Mims

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The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets purple on the underside of the body where the blood accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal microbes gobble up the gut and take the opportunity to have a romp around those previously forbidden parts of the body. The pancreas digests itself. Green substances and gas are produced in the tissues, causing the skin to take on a bluish tinge and develop blisters, many of which expand into large sacs of fluid. After four to six days in normal conditions, the body starts to become really unpleasant. The tongue protrudes from between the teeth, the chest swells up, fluid from the lung trickles out of the mouth or nostrils and a "disagreeable odour" develops . . .

Cedric Mims, former Professor of Microbiology at Guy’s Hospital, spares no grisly detail in his self-styled "light-hearted but wide-ranging survey of death, the causes of death, and the disposal of corpses". If it’s the Afterlife you want, he’s not of much use. There’s a perfunctory trot through the beliefs that sustain the world’s major religions, but Mims’ heart isn’t really in it. When We Die is shot through with genial atheism, religion impinging only when it has shaped some of the more peculiar things human societies have done with bits and pieces of the deceased. But don’t mistake this for a lack of humility. In his introduction, Mims offers this fascinating statistic. Since the emergence of our species, 130,000 million humans have lived and died. You could comfortably pack every last one of us into a mass cubic coffin measuring three miles long on each side and dump it underground without making the slightest impact on the landscape.

Mims contends that we have undergone a reversal in social attitudes since Victorian times. Then, death was a national obsession while sex remained taboo. These days, virtually anything goes on the sexual front but few of us ever see a corpse, since most people die in hospitals or institutions. Anyone who expresses an interest in the subject is routinely accused of "morbid curiosity". While it’s difficult to sustain the claim that death is the last taboo, When We Die offers what might be described as a handy palliative. The anecdotal approach makes it ideal for dipping into, serving up themed funereal fun in bite-sized chunks of historical, scientific and cultural information.

Take the section on suicides, for example. Here we learn that in the 18th century the British were thought to have a lax attitude to topping oneself. The French philosopher Montesquieu argued that this was because of the dismal climate and our predisposition to gloominess, which in turn impaired the ability of the body machinery to filter nervous juices. But trustees of Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge who fret over how to stop gloomy Brits hurling themselves to a watery doom from Brunel’s landmark should consider themselves lucky that we don’t share the Japanese enthusiasm for copycat suicides. In 1933, a Japanese schoolgirl threw herself into the mouth of a volcano on the island of Oshima. Over the next two years, 1,208 people followed her. The authorities eventually responded by building a small fence and banning the sale of one-way tickets to the island.

The past, as we know, is a different country. And they certainly did things differently when it came to death. Mims describes the process of classical mummification in all its colourful detail, beginning with the extraction of the brain through the nostrils using a pair of pliers, but also drolly reveals that economy class mummification was available to the Ancient Egyptian lower orders. This ignominious process consisted of pumping cedar oil into the anus and then plugging the hole. Before refrigeration, important folks dying overseas also presented a problem. When the Bishop of Hereford perished in Italy in 1282, his body was chopped into pieces and boiled in vinegar until the fat and flesh separated from the bones. The squidgy bits and bony bits were then sealed in separate leaden cases and shipped back to Blighty, where they received a suitably reverent Westminster funeral.

Modern cultural differences are equally fascinating. Islam dictates that the corpse must not be violated by cremation or dissection, which presents something of a dilemma for medical students in Muslim countries. Consequently, there is now a discreet but roaring trade in infidel stiffs, which are shipped out to Saudi Arabia en masse. Those peaceable Tibetan Buddhists have some interesting rituals too. On a mountain crag near the Ganden monastery in Llasa, a special bunch of holy folks called Body Breakers are employed to chop up corpses to make them more agreeable snacks for the local vulture population.

Only one subject seems to gross out Prof Mims and that’s necrophilia, to which he devotes a single meagre paragraph. But it’s those peculiar little factoids that stay with you long after you’ve put down his entertaining tome. Did you know that Lenin gets a week-long bath and a new suit and tie every two years? Or that the British police have seven sniffer dogs trained to detect the gases of decomposition coming from bodies underwater? Or – and this is my favourite – that a company in Wales has just contributed to the sum of human inventiveness by designing a camel cremator for the Dubai government?

The Joy of Pi – David Blatner

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Ever since Longitude and Fermat’s Last Theorem leapt off the shelves in quantities so-called bestselling novelists can only dream about, publishers have been falling over themselves in the scramble to find the next slim tome that humanises some arcane corner of scientific research while flattering its readership into believing that they’ve acquired a grasp on the concepts involved.

There have been a fair number of books on the mathematical mystery of pi over the years and David Blatner seems to have read them all. To be fair, he credits all his sources in this slight, flashily designed tome, whose gimmick is the inclusion of the first million digits of pi, reproduced in a vanishingly small point size and running across virtually every page. It’s an entertaining yarn taking us from the earliest mathematicians, whose ingenious but ultimately pointless method of calculating the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter entailed the detailed production of polygons with billions of sides, all the way to the latest supercomputers which have now calculated pi to 51 billion digits. In between, we meet all manner of obsessives who devoted their entire lives to working out the first hundred or so digits (often, amusingly, getting it hopelessly wrong).

The breakthough, when it came, was not a matter of understanding but of sheer number-crunching power: in the late forties a certain D.F. Ferguson spent a year calculating the first 700 digits; tens years later, an early IBM computer achieved the same feat in 40 seconds. Now that computers have taken over the challenge of calculation, humans have turned to memorisation. The current record is held by one Hiroyuki Goto, who recited 42,000 digits from memory in February 1995.

For all this, there’s little practical application in knowing more than the first ten digits of pi, the exception being in testing of Pentium processors (if one digit is wrong then all subsequent digits will be wrong too, allowing easy detection of errors which may occur only once in a billion calculations). But David Blatner’s all-too-brief yet anecdote-rich romp through history and across cultures gives a hint of the enduring fascination inspired by the number that is, in the strict mathematical sense, both irrational and transcendental (i.e. it cannot be expressed algebraically nor as a ratio of integers), and may yet have secrets to yield. And if you thought the pi freaks were bonkers, wait until you read about the circle-squarers, or Geometric Cyclometers, who continue to insist that generations of mathematicians and scientists have been engaged in a sinister, sub-masonic conspiracy to conceal the real value of pi.

“I am Human”, cries the protagonist in Will Self’s novel Great Apes. A phrase that may sound like a sturdy truism, in Self’s novel rings heavily: the protagonist has waken one morning only to find all human beings transmogrified into chimpanzees. The reader and the protagonist are both kept in the same suspense: what are the fundaments of this world? Is he mad, is he subject to a sinister experiment of psychiatry or ­ worst of all ­ are his experiences a virtual simulation?

The boundaries for what we regard as “human” are highly unstable in contemporary culture. In the movie The Matrix, what we call “reality” is just code in a giant computer, constructed by artificial intelligences. Similarly, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is about a computer game that is so biotechnologicaly complex that no one can tell whether they are in the “game” or in “reality”. Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel Glamorama shows that people are literary just as virtual as real, and Ormus Cama, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet constantly sees through into parallel world, right along the “real” one.

Science fiction literature and ideas have slipped into a wider cultural current and has dragged what we regard as “human” with them. At American universities it is nowadays common to speak about the “posthuman” condition. Old sci-fi concepts of androids, virtual reality and cyborgs are seriously discussed by computer scientists and cybernetic researchers. Researchers Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram claim, for example, that reality is a program run on a cosmic computer ­ a theory highly similar to the one fictionally launched in The Matrix.

In her book How We Became Posthuman, UCLA professor of literature N. Katherine Hayless describes the robot scientist Hans Moravecs vision in Mind Children: how a sophisticated robot purées a human brain and downloads it onto a computer disc. Operation concluded, the human awakes with her conciousness intact, but liberated from the chains of the flesh. Now she exists forever in the form of eternal, incorruptable information. And off to inmortality we go.

Moravec, obviously, is one of the most anti-biology researchers in the field, and would happily see the human body join the dinosaurs in historical oblivion. In her book, Hayles emphatically opposes the idea that posthumanism would implicate the destruction of the human being. Rather, Hayles regards posthumanism as a beautiful thought: to see the human as a distributed cognitive system, where part of the intelligence lies in the human brain, part in intelligent machines and part in the interface between them. Hayles is decidedly opposed to the thought of people wandering about considering their bodies as fashion accessories; for her, posthumanism means welcoming the possibilities of information technology, without being seduced by dreams of de-biologized immortality and unlimited power.

The posthuman vision smashes the pedestal on which humanity has put itself and reconfigures the human condition to incorporate a frictionless interlacing with intelligent machines. In the posthuman condition, there are no differences between bodily existence and computer simulation, not between cybernetic mechanism and biological organism. Information is the originate, the phsysical body is the derivate.

This way of perceiving human beings shoots the Western idea of a coherent, independent subject to pieces. Certainly, for those familiar with the jargon, posthumanism borrow some of its theoretical underwear from postmodernist thinking, or at least some of the theoretical idols are the same. Throughout her book, Hayles enroles the work of among others Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. The texts she analyses cover vast ground: ranging from sci-fi icons such as Bernhard Wolfe, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson through toWilliam Burroughs and Italo Calvino.

Just as is the case with postmodernism, one can argue at length wether posthumanism is really a forum for reactionists or radicals. For Katherine Hayles ­ as for Donna Haraway ­ it is decidedly the latter: a springboard for feministic and postcolonial thinking. Hayles’ vision of posthumansim does not implicate the end of humankind, but an end to a particular way of looking upon humans, a way which only suits those with enough power, money and time to regard themselves as free, individual and unique subjects. You know who I’m talking about? Of course: the Great White Male.

I believe she’s right. A large part of the inhabitants in the Western civilisation is already to be considered cyborgs. For example, 10 percent of the U.S. population already carry around different forms of artificial implants as pacemakers, plastic joints and electronic pumps ­ cyborgs in the technical sense of the word. The rest of us, who daily use computers to think and communicate, are so in a metaphorical sense. There is no longer any reason to regard the intelligent machines and the smart cards as vicious enemies. Machines spit out our cash, heat our food and open our doors. Perhaps Philip K. Dick expresses the deepest (post)human truth in his classic story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: “The electric things have their lifes, too. Paltry as those lifes are”.