On the recommendation of catherwood on Discord, I had to watch this movie last night, Infested.

Eight tarsal claws up! Unless you’re arachnophobic, in which case you don’t want to get anywhere near this.

It’s pretty much the same plot as Arachnophobia: venomous spider is brought back to a city (Paris, in this case), it escapes, breeds, area is overrun with swarms of deadly spiders that require extreme measures to eradicate. The difference is that Infested has a much larger horror-fantasy element: the spiders spawn impossibly rapidly — like, catch one, next moment it erupts into a horde of tiny spiders — and the spiders grow at an impossible rate to an impossible size, so that within a day you’ve got millions of spiders, some the size of large dogs. I’ve measure spider growth rates, and generally we’re talking a few tenths of a millimeter per week, so my rational brain rejected much of the premise, but my irrational brain that tuned in to a horror movie about monster spiders was saying, “YES! Eat all the people!”

It also has a sympathetic protagonist who loves small invertebrates while hustling to keep his friends and family out of poverty, and huge host of victims living in a Parisian apartment building. There had to be a lot of them to fuel the explosion of arachnid biomass!

Sadly, it looks like the only place to catch it right now is on Shudder, but it’s worth it for the entertainment value.

Now, though, no more entertainment. I have to go sequester myself to work through a mountain of end-of-semester papers. If only I could solve that problem with a lot of precisely placed explosives…

Remember this story about Mitt Romney?

In June 2007 the Boston Globe reported that in 1983, current Republican presidential hopeful (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney had placed his Irish setter in a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to his parents’ cottage on the Canadian shores of

Lake Huron. He’d built a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog. He’d also made it clear to his five sons that bathroom breaks would be taken only during predetermined stops to gas up the car.

The dog spoiled this plan by letting loose with a bout of diarrhea during its rooftop sojourn, necessitating an unplanned gas station visit for the purpose of hosing down the pooch, its carrier, and the back of the car.

The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, says “Hold my beer.”

Noem reportedly writes in her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, that Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and that Noem hoped taking her on a pheasant hunt with older dogs would help to calm the young Cricket down. Instead, Noem writes that Cricket spoiled the hunt by being “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

The Republican reportedly writes that she failed to get Cricket under control with voice commands and an electronic collar, but then an even worse incident occurred after the hunt had ended. While traveling home, Noem writes that she stopped to speak to a local family—at which point Cricket escaped her truck and set about killing the family’s chickens, getting hold of one bird at a time, “crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

So what do you do with an out-of-control dog? Discipline? Find a professional trainer? Not this Republican!

Noem explains that she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “But it had to be done.” Afterward, she writes, she decided she also needed to kill a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, complaining that the buck “loved to chase” Noem’s children around and would wreck their clothes by knocking them down.

She reportedly writes of the goat that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” like Cricket, but the killing did not go as smoothly. The goat jumped when she pulled the trigger, Noem says, meaning the goat survived the shot. She adds that she went to her truck to get another shell and then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

What’s most surprising about this story is that she wrote it up and published it in a book for everyone to read, and doesn’t show even a glimmer of regret. I guess that’s what conservatives want, a politician who will kill without remorse.

Meanwhile, the Stevens Community Humane Society, our local no-kill shelter, is having their big annual fundraising dinner next Saturday. I’ll be there, come on by and support a group that doesn’t believe in clumsily gunning down animals we don’t like.

Aww, a heartwarming story before the weekend (when I’m going to be neck-deep in grading.) A Russian, Erik Beda, fled his country for good reason.

Erik Beda’s mere existence is practically a death sentence in Russia. He’s transgender, which is illegal and considered an act of terror in the country.

“There is a sense of despair and catastrophe,” Erik Beda, 36, said in an interview with MPR News senior producer Aleesa Kuznetsov. The two spoke in Russian. Being LGBTQ+ has long been socially unacceptable in Russia, and eventually became illegal.

“Younger people say they want to end their life,” he said of the law. “Their families don’t care about them, and now the government has turned against them.”

Guess where he ended up, after a horrific struggle and journey?

After his release from ICE custody, Erik Beda said he took a bus to a place full of makeshift tents. A nonprofit gave him food, asked if he needed to call anyone and said they would buy him a one-way plane ticket. They asked Erik Beda where he wanted to go. He said he wanted to go to Minnesota.

“It’s an obvious fact that Minnesota is a refuge for trans people, so we had no doubts that we had to go,” Erik Beda said.

As a cis man, it feels good to live in a place that at least tries to support the civil rights of all people. If you don’t live in such a place, I hope your state changes it’s laws and policies…and if they don’t, you’re welcome to move north.

I’ve mentioned my crazy evil cat before, but here’s another of my little friends, my greenbottle blue tarantula, Blue.

They are just coming down off a massive threat posture, which is a change. For a long time, they’ve been skittish and timid. I turn on the lights in the lab, they run and hide. I rattle the door a little bit when I go to feed them, they run and hide. A shadow moves across their container, they run and hide. I figured I’d adopted a cowardly spider.

Lately, though, as they mature — I can tell by how their pigment is darkening to a deep blue from the prior orange — they’ve gotten aggressive. Now they boldly stand in the middle of their space and turn to face me when I walk up to them, but not in a friendly way. When I put a mealworm in their face, no more fleeing, but instead, they rear up on their 4 hindlegs and threaten with their forelimbs, and flash their fangs at me. I’m feeding them! Calm down!

It’s becoming a trend that any animal I take care of gets psycho hostile.

Whoa, wait…could it be me?

I suspect that most people who read this site don’t read the Gateway Pundit blog. I don’t either, but I know of it because that blog was founded a year or two after Pharyngula, and quickly skyrocketed to amazing amounts of traffic — it made me wonder what the secret was. It turns out that the secret was to lie constantly and make crap up, a strategy I wasn’t willing to adopt.

It was also run by Jim Hoft, The Dumbest Man on the Internet. I also wasn’t willing to lobotomize myself to compete.

Don’t waste your time reading it, though — Wikipedia has the short and extremely accurate summary.

The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.

It’s also going away, I assume. Gateway Pundit is bankrupt fiscally in addition to morally.

The founder of the Gateway Pundit, the infamous conspiracy theory site, announced on Wednesday that the company had declared bankruptcy.

Jim Hoft published a message on the website that read, “TGP Communications, the parent company of The Gateway Pundit, recently made the decision to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Southern District of Florida as a result of the progressive liberal lawfare attacks against our media outlet.”

They told one lie too many. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss won a lawsuit against them for their false report that they’d rigged the presidential election. One more propaganda outlet down!

On 9 February last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, called for the return of capital punishment to the UK. “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.” Six months later, the former nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of seven counts of murder and six of attempted murder for babies in her care. A poll taken soon after suggested that two thirds of the British public supported the return of the death penalty in cases such as Letby’s. Not for the first time, the idea of capital punishment was back on the agenda. But in some sense it has always been there.

Although the last execution in Britain took place in 1964, it was not until 1998 that capital punishment was finally abolished, with the remaining two instances – for treason and piracy with violence – replaced by life imprisonment. (Astonishingly beheading, from where we get the phrase “capital punishment”, the removal of the head, was still the punishment for treason as late as 1973.)

In truth, Anderson was on safe electoral ground in refloating the idea. UK polls have consistently shown majority support for capital punishment when it comes to certain crimes. These crimes have changed over time depending on particular social issues – having fallen below 50 per cent overall support in 2015, fear of terrorism seems to have pushed the figures back up, as the Yorkshire Ripper did in the 1980s, and child murders in the 2000s. The perceived merits of the most severe form of retributive justice seem to be a reaction to social events, at least for what we might sardonically call “swing voters” on the issue.

Capital punishment has, as a legal practice, been with us for millennia. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, composed between 1755 and 1750 BCE, calls for any man who burgles a home to be hung in front of the place he burgled. Later, the Old Testament lists a series of crimes requiring the death penalty, including murder, violating the Sabbath, sorcery and blasphemy, while in Ancient Greece the first recorded lawmaker Draco – from whom we get the word “draconian” – produced a written code setting out a number of crimes for which death was the punishment.

Famously, one of those who would be executed under Ancient Greek law was Socrates. Convicted in 399 BCE of “impiety” and “corrupting the young”, he carried out his own execution by drinking hemlock. If we grant that western philosophy as we have come to know it is born with Socrates, then we can see that its relationship to capital punishment is more than merely intellectual. The two are enmeshed just as surely as the death penalty is with western religion, via its other most famous victim, Jesus Christ.

In fact, the final Socratic dialogue by his student, Plato, is not far removed in tone from the Scriptures as they describe the last days of Jesus. Both, in their own ways, explore questions around the immortality of the soul. Both supply moving accounts of the victim’s last moments, their final words. And both argue that it is a corrupt and corrupting society which has led to this outcome, and that the “soul” of humans needs this purification.

More dramatically, in each case the “victim” in some sense offers themselves up to their fate. Jesus knows Judas will betray him, and accepts the kiss. In the case of Socrates there may even have been an option to name his own punishment, as the classicist Paul Cartledge argues in Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice. At first Socrates joked he should be rewarded instead of punished. Not seeing the funny side, the jurors – 501 citizens of good standing – voted for the death penalty, which Socrates accepted immediately. He said, as Cartledge puts it, that “he owed it to the city under whose laws he had been raised to honour those laws to the letter.”

In this, Socrates was not simply invoking the law, but also the religious strictures of his society. He was not against the state’s right to kill. By taking this position he established support for the death penalty as part of the western philosophical tradition.

Arguing for abolition

In a series of seminars given between 1999 and 2001, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was startled to find support for capital punishment running through western thought, held by some of its leading lights – from Plato to Kant, Hegel to Nietzsche. That a discipline which for the most part believes itself humane could show constant support for what many would regard as the least humane of acts is remarkable. But it must also mean something, Derrida argued. Perhaps only about philosophy, but more likely about all of society and life.

Derrida himself thought the death penalty was wrong. He talks with genuine anger about George W. Bush’s use of it as governor of Texas. But merely to say it is wrong, Derrida argued, is unhelpful. If one is to argue for abolition, one must do so as effectively as those who argue for its use.

Leaving aside Anderson’s argument about the death penalty’s “100 per cent success rate”, the traditional contemporary argument for the death penalty tends to be that it acts as a deterrent. To kill is to be killed. But there is little solid evidence to support the idea that an individual who has reached a point where they wish to kill, due to passion or dispassion, will reconsider in light of the possible consequences. While some philosophers have proposed this as a sound argument, for most this has not been the central concern.

For Socrates and Plato, for instance, one argument for the death penalty was that it provided society with a form of expiation. Here we have the idea of the scapegoat, not unfamiliar to Christian or Jewish scholars, its antecedents in some societies predating written law. In English, the term “scapegoat” is derived from the Book of Exodus, describing an ancient Jewish practice on Yom Kippur where a goat was literally driven away to die, taking the sins of society with it. We can see that the way a society designates its current threats, real or imagined, brings out the desire to scapegoat. The only way to avoid “all against all” is to make “all against one”. We hide our animus towards everyone by aiming it at someone in particular. Thus we bond. It is easy to see how this can be used for political power.

More often, however, philosophers have seen the central question as logical rather than emotional. Does the state have the right to take the life of one of its citizens? Is it ever morally justifiable to do so? And if so, what grants the state this right?

These questions tend to be considered in two different ways, broadly aligned with the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and deontology. The former argues that we must aim for the “greatest good for the greatest number”. So if the death penalty is good for the most people, for instance as a deterrent that reduces crime, it is arguably a moral good. The latter argues there are moral rules or absolutes, applicable in all situations (“deon” means “duty”).

Deontology tends to focus on the idea of retribution – an eye for an eye. Immanuel Kant, who is often seen as the philosophical father of deontology, argued that there are moral absolutes, which he called “categorical imperatives”. It was on a principle of equality that the law of retribution was upheld. “If ... he has committed a murder, he must die,” Kant argued. “In this case, there is no substitute that will satisfy the requirements of legal justice.”

Note that Kant here only calls for capital punishment for murder. Philosophical discussion around the death penalty has increasingly coalesced around the idea that only crimes in which others are killed deserve death, and that the method of execution be as humane as possible. (No horrific tortures such as that suffered by the attempted regicide Robert-François Damiens in 1757, whose dismemberment was described in the opening chapter of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.) Perhaps disingenuously, capital punishment in philosophy texts often seems a bloodless affair. The one time that capital punishment was suspended in the US, it was over questions of cruelty of method rather than absolute right.

So absolute is Kant’s moral imperative that “even if a civil society were to dissolve ... the last murderer in prison would first have to be executed” so that nobody could be “regarded as accomplices in the public violation of justice”. The act of murder demands the death of the murderer – not for practical reasons, but for moral reasons only. It is hard to think of a position further from utilitarianism than this. The death penalty is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself, caused by the committing of the crime.

But Kant’s notion that there is equality between crime and punishment here is a difficult one to sustain. To believe it “categorically” is to believe that anyone who robs should be robbed, or anyone committing arson should have their house burned down. As Derrida has noted, no two killings can ever be the same, whether by an individual or by the state as punishment for the first, since neither the circumstances, nor the reasons, nor the consequences can be replicated. But Kant remains, at least in philosophy, the strongest and most unequivocal advocate of the death penalty. So it is against Kant that we must argue.

Of course, all the usual arguments against moral absolutism apply. Kant’s argument does not take into account the circumstances of the killer in question. It could be that the act was committed in self-defence or in ignorance. There are also cases of diminished responsibility – such as the mental capacity of the murderer at the time of the killing, or factors such as previous abuse suffered by the perpetrator. There are cases which we would now class as “manslaughter”, where the perpetrator is ruled to have acted without malice aforethought.

A question of sovereignty

But the question Derrida wants to ask is not necessarily about moral right or wrong (although he asks that too). Nor is it about whether mistakes might be made – the argument that one innocent death invalidates any number of “correct” executions. What is vital here is the structural implications of the death penalty. Not so much “does the state have the right to take a life?” as: “what does it mean if we grant the state that right?”

This is a question of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the state, and the sovereignty of our selves. In consenting to the death penalty, we have decided that our society should have the right to set the time and date of our death. But more than this, for Derrida, the death penalty is in fact the foundation of law. By establishing whether the sovereign can kill us, we build the laws and our idea of justice. The sovereign in a state with the death penalty has not only the power to kill, but the power to absolve. This means they are able to stand outside the law.

We see this in the US in the concept of the pardon – the president has the right to intervene. So the body which makes the law (the king, or the parliament, or the president) can also go beyond it. Thus the death penalty is not simply about punishment. It is also about death – all death – since we are offering the state the right to decide the limits of our mortality.

In some cases, such as the UK – our titular head of state aside – sovereignty rests with a government to which we allow certain powers, and which we limit through democratic institutions (voting, the courts and so on). The British government in the 21st century has so far resisted re-introducing the death penalty, despite widespread support from the public. Yet our laws can seem increasingly oppressive, and while the fury over the Letby murders may have died down (and Lee Anderson has departed from his role as Conservative deputy chair) there are sure to be future periods of political pressure.

It’s a decision of great importance, even if the punishment would apply to a tiny minority of cases – for the “absolute worst crimes”, as is often proposed. The death penalty is not simply another expansion of state power, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and each individual. It is to consent to an absolute power of the state. This in turn changes all of our relationships to death. It is no surprise that US states with capital punishment have the highest rates of homicide. Mortality becomes a plaything.

Whether to reintroduce capital punishment is not only a policy question. It is an existential one. From the time of Socrates until now, it has not only been a question about death, but about the very nature of life.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale Elevate) by Justin Brierley

Justin Brierley’s new book is a strange thing indeed. The ex-host of the hugely popular Christian radio show Unbelievable? is on a mission to convince us that belief in God (within any religion, though he admits his interest is Christianity) is on the rise. The problem is, he doesn’t offer any evidence that this is true. Why? Because the very opposite is happening.

In every meaningful sense, the data tells us that the world is becoming less and less religious. Even as some countries become more faithful, they are outnumbered by those that are losing their religion. Just before Christmas 2022, the Pew Research Center reported that in Europe and the US, people are becoming far less religious, especially if they are young. But Brierley doesn’t want to look the numbers in the eye. He doesn’t even think that a fall in church attendance and a rise in the number of people describing their religion as “none” are enough to contradict the title of his book.

In some ways, this isn’t surprising: the book is published by an imprint of Tyndale House, which specialises in helping readers “discover the life-giving truths of God’s Word”. So we might expect some level of wishful thinking. But the book might also tell us something about the state of the discourse within the Christian community. The reaction seems to have been extremely positive so far.

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God begins by pronouncing the death of New Atheism, with various parochial disputes listed as the causes. These pale in comparison with schisms within Christianity, of course – gay marriage; female priests; rampant sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet apparently Brierley doesn’t see the irony in a sentence like: “The question of which particular values we should celebrate and support was the issue that came to tear apart the New Atheist world, as proved by the rancorous infighting of its factions over feminism, race, gender, and LGBT issues.”

Indeed, an alarming lack of self-awareness pervades the book. To bolster his thesis that “attitudes towards Christianity among serious thinkers in many fields seem to be changing”, Brierley – a Christian himself – relies on a strange cast of characters. The psychologist Jordan Peterson is repeatedly cited as the main driver of this change. He also notes the influence of Douglas Murray, a divisive polemicist, and Russell Brand, who is currently facing sexual assault allegations (which Brand denies). None of these men actually believe in the Christian God – a fact that Brierley repeatedly acknowledges in the book. All three have had nice things to say about Christianity, but this hardly makes them ideal models of inspiration.

Peterson has made himself popular, especially among disaffected young men, by espousing an old-fashioned, disciplined philosophy that borrows from Christianity but is largely characterised by its opposition to “woke” politics. His popularity with the average 20-year-old man surely relies in part on him not explicitly saying that religion is the solution. Brierley’s honesty should be commended but the only thing he proves is the very opposite of his thesis. When he proudly quotes Russell Brand lamenting the worship of the self, it is almost beyond parody.

Admitting that it is best to start by wanting Christianity to be true, Brierley embarks on a quest to prove that the world is best explained through deism and the Bible. In doing so he makes various errors familiar to anyone acquainted with Christian apologism: citing Christian anti-slavery efforts as though they trumped the biblical licences for slavery, for example. Every objection an atheist might have is breezily solved by an assurance that proves nothing at all. God could have ended slavery earlier, for example, but he didn’t want to rush it.

In truth, the book reads as though it were written exclusively for people already convinced of the Christian story. Despite the ongoing, life-ruining abuses by Christian and other religious institutions, Brierley only fleetingly alludes to the failings of the Church – and argues that we can only say they’re failings “on the basis of Christian values and virtue”. His time might have been better spent reflecting on how significant these abuses were in precipitating the unmistakeable fall in faith in recent years. On the divisive subject of equal marriage, he has nothing to say at all.

In his work so far, this book included, Brierley has been animated by a desire for people to become not just religious but Christian. Here he is desperate to piggy-back on the success of the Petersons and the Brands of this world in order to make Christianity appear exciting and new, perhaps mainly to a younger generation. But The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God is unlikely to persuade anyone who isn’t already on the brink of a conversion, and is likely to irritate non-believers who happen to pick up a copy.

Brierley is clearly one of Christianity’s most appealing apologists. Though the world is certainly not becoming more faithful, this won’t slow the progress of his tireless campaign.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Why metaphor? Because that is how we think, how learn, how we parse the world. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora, a “transfer”; literally a “carrying over”. The very act of understanding (from the Old English: to stand in the midst of) implies the existence of a “between”, a bridge between new and known. In effect, a metaphor. How could it be otherwise? How else can we assimilate a new piece of knowledge, other than by linking it to something we already know? In doing so, we weave a web. When we wonder what something means, what we’re really asking is: what will it impact? If I pull on this thread here, where will my web tighten, where might it unravel?

When we can’t find a suitable metaphor to describe our scientific reality, we run into problems. Take, for instance, quantum mechanics. Most of the devices we use every day are built upon eerily accurate calculations made using quantum theory. Operationally, the theory is wildly successful, yet no one can make complete sense of it. Even scientists who wield the equations with ease don’t claim to truly understand quantum theory; we still don’t have a metaphor that works.

Metaphors aren’t only a means of description, they can also lead to revelations. Centuries ago, Newton was able to calculate the gravitational attraction between two objects given their masses and the distance between them. But, while he could describe this interdependence precisely, Newton would “feign no hypothesis” as to why it was so. He had the equation, but he did not understand gravitation. It took Einstein to do that. In most situations, the answers that arise from Einstein’s and Newton’s equations are so close, the numerical discrepancy is practically negligible. The real difference is that, with Einstein, we finally have a metaphor. When we picture space-time as a dynamic “fabric” that responds to the mass with dips and ripples, we begin to understand what gravity means.

Not only are metaphors connective, they are also generative. The mere comparison of space-time to a fabric suggests questions that were previously inconceivable: Can space-time be torn? Can it be punctured? Can it gather in folds? While gravity remained Newtonian – a force acting instantaneously across an inert space – such lines of thought were not possible. They arise only in this new liminality. They live because of a metaphor.

New directions

So why do we still not appreciate the crucial role of metaphor? Metaphors in science may seem like a subjective, even literary insertion into what is meant to be an objective and rigorous discipline. Scientists themselves often play into this misconception by keeping metaphors out of academic discourse, reserving them for watered-down conversations with the general public. But in trading their personal metaphors, scientists can nudge each other’s thoughts in new directions, and push the boundaries of science forward.

There is more to consider. If metaphors create possibilities and encode meaning, it should come as no surprise that they also impact our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. As is the case with any tool, we shape our metaphors – and then our metaphors turn around and shape us.

Even the limits of metaphor can take us forward. It can actually be quite instructive to push a metaphor to where it breaks, and mark the boundary. Take the now-standard comparison of a brain to a computer. Do you know that it started the other way around? The computational power of early computers made such an impression that people started likening them to human brains. The comparison was a compliment, an expression of awe for these magic machines that seemed to mimic human thought. As computers advanced, their calculational abilities surpassing ours, traffic along the bridge of metaphor changed direction. We came to think of the brain as a computer, reducing this complex organic marvel to a mere machine.

Now that we’ve hit a wall trying to understand how the mechanical brain makes a conscious mind, perhaps it’s time to consider that we have exhausted this particular metaphor. But that in itself is very useful information. One of the most important things to know about a metaphor is where it breaks down and why: if you use a spring, you should know its elastic limit.

When James Clerk Maxwell first turned his attention to electromagnetism, he visualised this unfamiliar entity as best he could, in terms of what he knew. In Maxwell’s early papers, Faraday’s magnetic lines of force are modelled by a large array of spinning gears, connected by strings of ball bearings. Given Victorian England’s fascination with machines, this vivid picture made the invisible electromagnetic field much less uncomfortable an idea. The image only goes so far (which is why we don’t think of electromagnetism in terms of gears and pulleys today) but by the time the limits of the metaphor were breached, enough scientific progress had been made that new models were suggested. The metaphor had just been a stepping stone, but it enabled us to move on.

To the philosopher Max Black, metaphor not only describes, but can in some instances create the similarity between two terms. Any idea you hold up is like a source of light shining from a particular angle – each illuminates or casts into shadow different parts of the object you are studying. Both light and shadow carry information.

Vacuum cleaners of the cosmos

Metaphors are perhaps most useful in situations when we understand the least. Over the past century we have employed many different metaphors for black holes – which science still does not completely understand. Looking back, these metaphors trace our changing attitudes to these perplexing astronomical objects.

Black holes announced themselves in the humblest way possible: as a tiny equation appended to a letter, encased in a wrinkled, dog-eared envelope. The letter, written in the trenches of the First World War by the physicist, astronomer and German lieutenant Karl Schwarzschild, was addressed to Albert Einstein. It contained the first ever solution of his new theory. General relativity was an absolute triumph, but its equations were so difficult to solve that Einstein had doubted the task would be accomplished in his lifetime. Yet barely a month after his theory was published, here came a perfect solution – a mathematical dream drifting out from the nightmare of war. You would think he would have been overjoyed. You would be wrong.

Schwarzchild’s equation was simple, concise and elegant, but the implications it carried were, at the time, unthinkable. According to the solution, a black hole contains at its centre what is now known as a singularity: a point where the smooth rubber sheet of Einstein’s space-time is punctured, and physics as we know it breaks down. In the words of the physicist John Wheeler, “The black hole teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but.”

Fortunately this dreaded singularity, which tears space-time to shreds, is sheathed within an “event horizon”. Outside it, we are safe. One foot on the edge, and we are doomed. Encoded in Schwarzschild’s equation, there is a radius that marks this sphere of no return. Some called it “the barrier” (stay out!); others, the “sphere catastrophique”. Black holes show no mercy. In the words of the physicist Steven Gubser, they “hijack the future of every object that falls into them”. Nothing can escape, not even the most fleet-footed thing in the Universe – not even light. They were framed as demons, greedy gluttons that gobble up everything. The Bermuda triangles of space. The vacuum cleaners of the cosmos. But perhaps most sinister is the association carried by the name that eventually stuck. The “black hole of Calcutta” was a tiny, cramped cell in which over 60 prisoners of war were incarcerated in 1756, more than half of whom suffocated in the heat.

Over time, attitudes to black holes became less severe. Where once the emphasis was on their “grotesque deformities and grim instabilities”, writes physicist Janna Levin, we now think of them more often as anchors that provide “a centre for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars”. We tend, instead, to describe the “throat” of a black hole as the “lip of a waterfall, beyond which space-time cascades ineluctably downward”, or the neck of “a glass bottle in the hands of a skilful Murano glassblower”.

Wondering what occasioned the change in tone? The simplicity of the equations eventually won us over. It turns out that astrophysical objects are extremely difficult to model. Stars, with their nuclear reactions, internal pressure and fluid dynamics are a particular challenge. A black hole, by comparison, is wonderfully simple. In short, we discovered the mathematical uses of black holes, and our association with them changed. We “tamed” them, until they became objects of fascination, safe even for elementary school children to handle.

Mathematical metaphors

There is yet another way that metaphors can lead to scientific discovery, and that is within the field of mathematics itself. Mathematical equations are schematic representations of the relationships between various aspects of a system. Equations describe how these quantities are tied together, how they tug or push at each other, what sort of web they weave. Regardless of the circumstances that inspire them, once written down, symbols in equations are like words in a poem: multi-layered, saturated with meaning. Occasionally, when we are very lucky, we come across a pair of systems that bear no apparent physical similarity, but are described by the same equation. Insights gleaned in one system carry over into the other. Every symbol now has two meanings – one per system – giving us a map between two seemingly unrelated entities; we have, in short, a mathematical metaphor.

One of the most fundamental and perplexing discoveries about black holes came about in exactly this manner. It started with the simple observation that just as entropy (a measure of the disorder of a system) can never decrease in classical thermodynamics, neither can the area of a black hole. Moreover, the equations that describe how these quantities grow have exactly the same form. It’s almost as if the area of a black hole is a measure of its entropy.

This seemed preposterous. Because of their celebrated mathematical simplicity, black holes were assumed to have minimal, if not zero entropy. The resemblance was put down to mere coincidence until Jacob Bekenstein, one of John Wheeler’s students, decided to take the equation at its word. In order for the metaphor to hold, one of the symbols in the equation had to correspond to “temperature”. Some radiation (something we could register as heat) would need to be emitted from the black hole – the very same black hole that notoriously swallowed even light. It was an audacious suggestion, dismissed by many experts in the field including, at first, Stephen Hawking. But the theory of Bekenstein-Hawking radiation is now a standard topic in any conversation about black holes.

Metaphors can also be visual. An idea can be linked to a picture as easily as to a word, and it is quite instructive to explore which aspects of the idea are illustrated and which are left out. Images mine depths words cannot, so when a concept is new to us, images are some of our most effective tools.

Stephen Hawking’s deep discoveries about black hole mechanics came after he lost the use of his hands: he reached his famous conclusions through manipulating visual images in his head. “The happiest thought” of Einstein’s life – the insight that led to a complete reconceptualisation of space and time – was the result of comparison between a window washer suspended outside his building, and a man falling in a gravitational field. How do you link one to the other? By rethinking gravity.

Anchoring ideas

New concepts have a tendency to fly away. Unanchored, they billow out, expanding through space – expanding space – in mysterious, unnerving ways reminiscent of dark energy. We can lose sight entirely unless we reel them in, anchor them to other ideas, and hold them in place by the weight of their connections. Whether these metaphors are structural, mathematical, verbal or visual is immaterial. Each is a strand in the net with which we draw knowledge in.

Physicist-philosopher Carlo Rovelli says the success of science depends partly on “the creative liberty taken with conceptual structure, and this grows through analogy and recombination ... It is not easy to change the order of things, but this, at its very best, is what science does.”

In his recent book, The Warped Side of Our Universe – a collaboration with artist Lia Halloran – the physicist Kip Thorne used poetry to talk about black holes, gravitational waves and other topics he has previously addressed in prose. When asked about the experience, he said he found poetry harder to craft than prose, “but the surprise to me was that I could use it to get much more deep into the essence of the science.”

Should that really be surprising? Within the lines of poetry, words are released from their literal, everyday associations; they exist as symbols, ripe for metaphor. Freed from the constraints of a linear narrative, words conjoin in wild, unexpected ways. They may defy the rules of grammar, they may not make prosaic sense, but these flagrant juxtapositions give rise to new images – impressionistic flashes from the lush world of the mind.

One argument against the use of metaphor is that a single metaphor can seldom encompass the whole truth of a physical theory. But that’s exactly why we need more of them. We’ve learned this lesson already, with coordinate systems in geometry. (Think of how shapes can be plotted out in three dimensions, on diagrams with x, y and z axes.) Only the simplest, flattest space can be covered by a single coordinate system. For more interesting, curved spaces – like the ones around black holes – we need to patch together many overlapping coordinate systems. Each expands into places the other can’t reach.

Taking a similar approach with metaphors would be infinitely rewarding. Through both comparison and contrast, each new metaphor adds a layer of richness to our understanding, each is a foil for argument, a source of insight and a path to generating new questions.

The frontiers of science – cosmic or subatomic – are far beyond the reach of direct experience. If we are to comprehend what we encounter there, we have to find a way to link it to that which we already know. Metaphors can make meaning from the new information we uncover. It’s time we acknowledge their crucial role, and give metaphors in science the attention they deserve.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely

As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with Azerbaijan dubbed “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2023” near its border with Armenia – a nation whose ethnic forebears were massacred inside Turkish territory in the prelude to the foundation of the Republic. More than a million died.

Erdoğan still refuses to acknowledge this internationally recognised genocide as such, outlawing any mention of the term “Armenian Genocide”. These developments underscore how readily national histories of bloodshed can be erased or recast to sustain any number of political and ideological narratives.

It is into this world of state violence, corruption and obfuscation that author and translator Maureen Freely draws her readers in her latest novel, My Blue Peninsula. The story unfolds from Istanbul, where Freely (who is American by birth and now lives in England) was raised.

Her protagonist Dora has a more complex identity, being part-Ottoman, part-Armenian and part-American. The novel centres around Dora’s attempts to untangle the fraught strands of her own family history and fortune, extending back over a century and including both perpetrators and victims of the genocide in 1915. It’s structured around a series of “notebooks”, authored by the late-middle-aged Dora and addressed to her two adult daughters, in an apparent attempt at explanation and restitution.

Having grown up in Turkey, Freely witnessed at close hand the repercussions of the Armenian genocide and its censorship. After her friend, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, was assassinated by nationalists for his campaign for justice in 2007, Freely herself became involved in the translation of oral histories by Turks as they attempted to uncover the truth of their pasts. This work, Freely says, fuelled the writing of My Blue Peninsula.

Opening in present-day Istanbul amid the spectre of Islamist violence, the narrative promptly dives back into Dora’s own youth in the city as she begins to uncover the secrets of her parentage. The notebooks then veer off into the intersecting stories of family members – chiefly her elusive, charismatic mother and bohemian artist grandmother. Some 400 pages later, all (or most) of the dots are joined up and we arrive back in the Turkey of today under President Erdoğan, though he is never explicitly named.

Over the course of this epic family history, Dora documents multiple acts of betrayal, deception and violence – both between individual family members and at the hands of the state and other political actors.

These narratives are centred around her effort to discern the facts behind her own parentage and the veil of deception with which her various family members have shrouded their actions. Among these, we see the removal of children, collusion in murder and the theft of Armenian wealth, alongside the lengths to which people will go to obscure or expose the truth.

At times Freely captures this history with nuance and poignancy, while conveying some of the anger, grief and disorientation that many experienced with the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Yet the complexity of the family tree makes for a difficult read. The density of these details risks obscuring a deeper – and arguably more interesting – insight into the genocide and its aftermath. For example, significant attention is paid to the movement of the bourgeois family’s jewels, while the mass displacement and internment to which certain family members are subject receive little more than a sentence.

Similarly, Freely crafts a vivid picture of mid-20th-century Istanbul with its fading imperial grandeur, decadent and culturally diverse middle-class and vibrant street life. Yet these sometimes slightly hackneyed descriptions appear to come at the cost of a portrait that gives more solid insight into the historical and political developments of the period, with which readers may have limited familiarity.

So too do the rough notebook structure and miscellaneous narrative style – including Dora’s own voice, correspondences between family members and omniscient narrator, third-person style accounts – mean that the book seems to lack stylistic cohesion. The breadth of the cast of characters is impressive, but can sometimes come at the expense of their originality.

There is plenty of rich material in this complicated novel. But unlike the ultimately enlightened Dora, the reader of My Blue Peninsula may be left with more questions on closing the book than they did on first opening it.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Gen Z are given a great deal of credit these days. Born between 1997 and 2012, they’re the generation with their heads screwed on, trusted to sort out the mess the rest of us have made of the world. This generation, now aged 12 to 27, were the first full “digital natives”, having never known life without the internet. If you have a Gen Z person in your life, you will know that each one is an IT Support Department for their entire family. I was able to keep the wolf from the door during lockdown because my children were on hand to get me onto Zoom calls and set me up for online gigs.

There are other, more subtle ways in which this generation are distinct. Gen Z schoolchildren do not seem to shun others for their appearance. Not even ginger kids. Not even ginger kids who wear glasses and not even if they are also fat. I told my 10-year-old daughter tales of kids shouting “Ginger nut!”, “Four-eyes!” and “Fatty fatty boom boom!” She was baffled. “That’s like laughing at someone for having feet.”

Messages of self-care are plastered all over their school walls. On my way to a parent-teacher meeting, I passed a notice on a door saying, “You Matter. You Are Enough.” Misty-eyed, I marched down the corridor, my head held high. “THANK YOU DOOR! I needed to hear that. I do matter. I am enough.” I burst into the meeting singing Shirley Bassey’s “I Am What I Am”.

They learn about the importance of equality, along with what “gaslighting” is, in PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education). When his friend came out as non-binary, my son reassured me, “It’s okay if you get their pronouns wrong, Mum, we know you’re old.”

I did have a problem with their pronouns, because I could not remember what a pronoun was. (Grammar and me have never been friends.) Once my daughter explained what one was, I was outraged. These pipsqueaks had no idea that the freedoms they have to be themselves are hugely down to the efforts of us “old” people. Changes in culture don’t happen by accident, they happen when people fight for them. So as we appreciate Greta Thunberg and all the bold and brilliant Gen Zs, may I remind you they were raised by my generation: the much-maligned Generation X.

We, the binge-drinking, pill-popping ravers of the 90s, have raised kids who have the self-esteem not to murder their brain cells. (And given the state of the economy, they also can’t actually afford to be the hedonists we were, poor things.) Social media is their language and they use it to promote self-acceptance and inclusivity, because they don’t internalise prejudice the way we did.

Generation X were the latchkey kids whose mothers were vilified for going to work. Our teachers were shackled by the brutality of Section 28. We had to look to Eastenders storylines to support our belief that being gay was not a perversion. It was ordinary for non-white kids like me to brace themselves for a racial slur called out to us from a window of a car. We did not have TikTok to turn to, in order to share our hurt. We thought we were alone.

For most of our childhoods, my generation had a prime minister who insisted poor people were deliberately poor, just to annoy everybody. Our newspapers heaped shame on those who struggled, so that kids at school wearing hand-me-downs were called “tramps”. We had to stand up for each other IRL (that’s In Real Life, grandad). We made placards and marched against racism at a time when the National Front had their meetings in the very same pubs where we enjoyed our first under-aged drinks. We marched for gay rights with hope in our hearts and Lambrusco in our rucksacks. Old indeed!

So when my son’s non-binary buddy came over, I thought, “I’ll show you who can’t get pronouns right!” But annoyingly, there’s no grammatical need to address people directly by their pronoun. Desperate to prove myself, I ended up asking, “Would thee like a drink?”

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Hi there,

I am delighted to say that I am back performing at the Edinburgh Magic Festival this year.

First, on the 28th December I will be exploring the strange world of illusion, mystery and magic in a show called MIND MAGIC. This will involve showing some of the best optical illusions in the world, revealing whether paranormal phenomena really exist, showing how we can all achieve the impossible, explaining how to transform a tea towel into a chicken, and much more. All the info is here.

Then, on the 28th and 29th December, I am presenting a new and experimental show about the invention of magic. This will be an intimate affair for a small number of people. It will examine how magicians create magic, and explore the mind and work of a magical genius who created the world’s greatest card trick. Info here.

So, if you are around, please come along, and fun will be had!

Some exciting news from me! I have just written my first book for children.

It uses magic to teach youngsters a range of essential life skills, including social skills, confidence, creativity, lateral thinking and much much more. Readers will learn how to perform lots of seemingly impossible feats, including how to defy gravity, read minds, pluck coins from thin air, and predict the future. Most important of all, these tricks have been carefully chosen to help boost mental wellbeing and resilience. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s magic!

I am delighted to say that Magic Your Mind Happy will be published by Wren and Rook in May 2024, and is available to preorder now here.

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Two quick bits of news.

First, The Royal Society have kindly given me the prestigious David Attenborough Award. This is a lifetime achievement award for my work promoting psychology and critical thinking, and focuses on my research combatting pseudo-science and examining the psychology of magic. Previous recipients include Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Professor Alice Roberts, and I will give an award lecture about my work in August 2024.

Second, I have a new academic magic book out! It is part of the well-known Arts For Health series and reviews work examining how watching and learning magic is good for your wellbeing, including how it boosts confidence, social skills, dexterity, curiosity and much more. It was lots of fun to write and also includes interviews key practitioners, including Richard McDougall (Breathe Magic), Julie Eng (Magicana), Mario the Maker Magician (USA), David Brookhouse (UK), David Gore and Marian Williamson (College of Magic), and Tom Verner (Magicians Without Borders).  More details here.

I am delighted to say that the second series of our On Your Mind podcast has launched today!!

Each week, science journalist Marnie Chesterton and I will explore aspects of the human psyche, including astrology, how the clothes we wear influence our thoughts, attraction, friendship, dreaming, mind control and much much more.  We will also be joined by some special guests as we attempt to answer all of your questions about psychology. The first series reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts, and so we hope that you can join us. 

Our first episode looks at creativity and explores how to have good ideas and whether children are more creative than adults. You can listen here.

I am excited to launch a new fund raising initiative for the amazing College of Magic in South Africa. The College is a non-profit community youth development organisation that uses magic to offer hope to young people in and around Cape Town.  They do incredible work and for the past two years I have been working with them and Vanishing Inc (the largest magic retailer in the world ) to produce a unique  magic booklet and custom deck of cards for budding magicians. 

This gorgeous full-colour booklet involves students from the College teaching magical illusions, and tells inspirational stories of diverse historical magicians. Both the booklet and cards showcase great artwork by South African illustrator, Ndumiso Nyoni, and readers have special access to videos of the students teaching the tricks and offering top tips.

All the profits raised from the sale of the booklet and deck of cards will go towards furthering the important and wonderful work of the College. It’s a lovely gift for friends and family and it would be great if you can support the project.

To find out more, please click here. 

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]