The spiral galaxy Andromeda: a whirl of blue gas clouds shading to purplish and white at its centre, studded with white stars.

Terminus ad quem

Then, when the lack of water killed them,
and light went through them like a knife,
there, boiling out the sap that filled them,
the last soft creatures ended life
much as they long ago began it.
Come sunset, when the silent planet
is spared the sun’s red-swollen gaze,
still trembling through the choking haze
are constellations slowly turning;
in shapes that mean for other eyes,
and none that Earth would recognise,
new stars, old embers, go on burning.
And there, a faint but gleaming scar:
the onrush of Andromeda.

*

Notes

Title: the Latin phrase terminus ad quem, meaning something like ‘time by which’, is used in the dating of artefacts and manuscripts to denote the latest possible production date of something. The absolute terminus ad quem for any human artefact, for archaeologists of the deep future, is going to be “when the human race went extinct”.

6: Tip o’ the pen to C.S. Lewis. Much as I dislike his theology, Out of the Silent Planet remains one of the most unsettlingly evocative titles I have ever encountered.

14: This entire poem was inspired by an idle look at the Wikipedia page for the predicted collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way, expected 3 to 4 billion years from now. This is unlikely to bother the human race much, as all life, down to the hardiest single-celled organism, will have been wiped off Earth by the overheating sun long before Andromeda gets close, and if we’ve got the technology to dodge that bullet then a galactic collision shouldn’t be too disruptive either. I say collision; galaxies are so tenuous that it would be more like two clouds moving through one another.

Aiden sits down, back to the wall, and draws
his faithful guns. There’s light left; he ignores
the winter clamouring outside the walls,
and strokes the dim-lit rune-work, and recalls
the first they ever gave him, young and green,
a soldier minted new, his hands still clean.
The years of training meld into a haze
of bleary nights and yellow summer days;
the bells that tolled the faithful through the hours,
bright flags stretched in the wind atop the towers;
the shields on the gables, blue and white;
the river wide and radiant in the light;
the scent of lilacs drooping in the wet;
the sounds of home, his native alphabet,
the language of his homeland in the air.
But he is here, and king and kingdom there,
as far apart as they have ever been,
with half a bleeding continent between;
his masters, too, a thousand miles away:
it was not ordered, what he did today.

Across the steppe, in far-flung monasteries,
they chronicle defeats and victories:
this battle won, this lost, this vantage gained,
the war examined, analysed, explained.
Aiden does not read chronicles. Their themes
play out across his daylights and his dreams.

Before the birth of paper, there was hide,
cropped square and cleaned of blood, and stretched, and dried;
the squares made into books, and notes from scraps,
they set down scriptures, chronicles, and maps,
a thousand songs to sing and tales to tell.
Skin holds the impress of the stylus well:
a book may last – though it will wear and fade -
a thousand years or more since it was made.
And though the words should dim from black to grey
they will not fade entirely away:
beneath the scholar’s lamp they yield again
the words of wit or warning they contain.

The book that wears its skin outside the spine
so too records its travails, line by line:
wounds heal and fevers pass, but scars remain,
the fossil remnant of a buried pain.
Across the living page the reader sees
our love-songs and our ancient histories.

Aiden reloads his guns, face to the door.
At thirty-three he’s younger than the war.

One hand – the left – has bones; the other, spars,
articulated lengths of iron and brass;
a touch across his shoulder-blades would feel
the jagged seam where skin gives way to steel;
and downward, find another, older tale,
a tapestry of lines that tangle, pale,
across, across, across, again, again,
the souvenirs of capture and the chain.

Few hands have traced the scars. Aiden prefers
to keep the thick grey bulwark of his furs:
his greatcoat, gloves, half haven, half disguise,
protect him from the cold and from their eyes.

In all the time he rotted in the place
they never touched his fingers, or his face.
The colonel said it would have been a shame.
In months he never learned the colonel’s name,
nor the guards’ names, nor even where they were;
days became weeks, and weeks became a blur.

When there was nothing left, they made a deal:
hostage for hostage. Freedom seemed unreal;
the journey south, a phantom; home, a dream.
They patched him up and sent him back upstream.
Ten years, that was, ten years ago and more,
and he is not the boy he was before.
He speaks their language without thinking now;
his own has rusted. Times do not allow
for any thoughtless slipping of the mask:
he is a soldier, and he has his task.

Outside, the forest bends beneath the strain
of wind and snow that streaks the window-pane.
Drifts pile around the door. The night draws in.
Out here the winter wears the people thin:
grey, weatherbeaten, quiet, they do not care
who seeks the Empress’ gold-and-amber chair.
which distant city fell, which stands beset.
The Empress they adore in silhouette,
scarce closer than their God to matters here:
the freezing grind of time from year to year
does not respect Her Highness’ dreaded name,
nor all the prayers they offer to the flame.

Serenely, in a narrow, rented room,
the light gives way to early-falling gloom;
as the horizon claims the winter sun
Aiden reloads his pistols, one by one.

* * *

Context

Following on from my post ruminating vaguely on the gradual retreat of verse from genre fiction, I was kicking around some half-baked ideas for stuff, and it occurred to me that I might as well have a shot at putting my metre where my mouth was, as it were. Back in my fanfic days, I did a few of these types of character sketches – short (this one is in the region of 750 words), circumscribed snapshot portraits of a single person. Those, however, were all in prose. And so my embryonic plan to keep my writing hand in with a few more character sketches collided with the drifting wistful thoughts about a lack of genre poetry, and then this happened.

Captain Aiden Kane is a tabletop RPG character of J’s, hailing from the third-party Iron Kingdoms setting for D&D 3.5. Any readers familiar with the IK universe will probably have no trouble identifying which country Aiden works for and who he’s spying on (although I did take a certain amount of liberty with the details, because our particular campaign went off the rails from IK canon rather early on.) However, I wanted to make this piece as free-standing – and as comprehensible to people who don’t happen to be acquainted with the same bits of geekdom I am – as possible, and so deliberately left out names of places and so forth.

Form

Here I write in rhymed iambic couplets, traditionally known rather grandly as heroic verse, or occasionally the Heroic Line. As the Wikipedia article on heroic couplets notes, this has historically been the favoured form in which to render in English the dactylic hexameters of Classical literature, and several famous translations of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have been in this form. As such, it seemed simultaneously apt and whimsical to borrow the same structure for a portrait of a character who, while fitting a similar narrative slot to Classical heroes – fingered by a deity to save his country – is hardly heroic in the moral sense of the word.

All the rhymes are so-called masculine rhymes, with the line ending on the stressed, rhyming syllable; this was not intentional until I was about three-quarters done, at which point I noticed that there wasn’t a single feminine rhyme in there, and wondered if I could keep that up all the way through. (You may wish to quibble with me on the subject of hours and towers. I maintain that in my accent they are, at least, closer to one syllable than two.)

Some poets, notably Milton and Wordsworth – who was a total Milton fanboy – avoided feminine line-endings on stylistic grounds. I don’t especially understand why; I mainly mention it because it gives me the opportunity to quote Stephen Fry’s frustrated remark that trying to find two consecutive feminine endings in Paradise Lost “is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican”. While I’m here, though, it is worth noting that the extra weak syllable of a feminine line-end does alter the flavour of a line, its speed and balance, and sometimes it’s what you want and sometimes it isn’t. If you’re interested in observing the differences in effect this particular nuance can convey, have a look at Kipling’s “If”, which alternates strictly between masculine and feminine endings, and at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, which uses only feminine endings (widely taken to be a kind of structural pun on the feminine quality of the Fair Youth’s good looks). You might also wish to investigate the Onegin stanza, which requires a particular pattern of masculine and feminine rhymes and has a very distinct rhythm as a result. (Here is a post about how much I love the Onegin stanza, with links to various attempts thereat.)

It seems to me that there is less verse around than there used to be.

Partly this must be accounted for by the gradual prevalence of writing, rather than memorisation, as the preferred way to preserve literature. The patterning of formal verse, be it alliterative, rhyming, metrical or some combination, can be a tremendous help in memorising long chunks of text; such mnemonic strategies are less crucial when you have a written-down crib available. (See also, the possibility that people memorise less general knowledge now that the Internet, repository of everything, is readily accessible.) But writing has been around for an entirely ridiculous length of time; verse continued in use. Literacy rates got higher and higher; verse continued in use. Printing happened, cheap printing, which relied on a large, literate customer base; verse continued in use. The Internet happened, and suddenly it seems that there’s more verse around than ever, because now everyone with two words to string together and a blog to put them on can put their efforts out there for the world to inspect.

Verse has never gone out of use, of course. Poetry is still a thriving art today. But at some point in that trajectory, the scope of writing-in-verse – in English, at least; I cannot speak for any other culture, and am only really speculating in any case – seems to have narrowed. There seems to be, now, a relatively narrow conception of verse-writing that is closely tied to the concept of Poetry with a capital P, as it were. Poetry, the impression seeps in, is for profound reflections. An exception is allowed for light verse, exploiting the patternings of verse for comic effect; likewise, verse set to music is exempted, because songwriting is (rightly or wrongly) considered a separate form with separate rules. But there does not seem to be, currently, a concept of the middle ground – non-musical verse works that are neither avowedly comic nor deep and serious. It’s as if prose consisted of P.G. Wodehouse on one end and Serious Literary Fiction at the other, and very little else.

Let me digress for a moment. In fact, let me digress all the way back to the High Middle Ages, when there was an extraordinary flowering of verse in English. Some products of this period have been better acknowledged than others. Works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the other religious poems attributed to the same hand, and Langland’s Piers Plowman have long been held up – rightly – as extraordinary achievements. Ditto Chaucer. Certain other poets from broadly the same period also get acknowledged: Gower, for example, and Lydgate. But these works are, to simplify somewhat, the Serious Literary Fiction of their day: dense and sometimes difficult, dealing with weighty issues of life and death and love and faith, in gorgeously turned verse. Comedy of the period is under-represented, but it is there: Chaucer (again), the Mystery Plays, any number of small (usually dirty) songs and lyrics and riddles.

But there’s also a rich and fascinating vein of verse that was popular and unashamedly non-Literary without being comedy per se. Around the middle of the Middle Ages, there was a burgeoning of verse romances in English. “Romance” then didn’t mean what it does now: while the modern use of “romance” to describe a literary genre is descended from the medieval one, the focus of the term has shifted. The medieval usage of “romance” is remarkably broad, and refers generally to a longish poem describing the adventures of A Hero, which usually but not always includes a very idealised love story (hence the modern usage). In spirit, popular medieval romances are often closer to action movies: hero goes to exotic locations, kills the bad guys, gets the girl, the end. To judge from the number of surviving romances (several dozen) and the number of manuscript copies of some of them that have been preserved (double figures, in some cases), it was a very popular genre.* “Genre” is an important word there: I cannot overstate that the romances were genre fiction. They tend to display a subset of a very particular set of conventions, they tend to proceed in a familiar and formulaic way with just enough variations to be interesting, they tended to be cheap and relatively easy to get one’s hands on (insofar as any text was readily accessible before mass production), and – like modern genre fiction – for all these reasons, they are often remarkably revealing of social mores. You’re going to learn a lot more about a culture from what its people actually read than from what a small elite think they should be reading.

To return out of that morass of generalisations to something approaching my original point: as well as being a cheap and cheerful and popular form of literature, the medieval romance was a verse form of literature. Different types of verse, yes – most are in couplets, some are in short stanzas, a few alliterate – but verse. (Prose romance existed alongside, but seems to have been less of a thing, and commoner in the French tradition than the English.) Arguments about whether romance was a primarily oral or written form are still ongoing, but the number of manuscripts is pretty conclusively proof that people did write them down, and did read them as opposed to hearing them.

So when did verse as a legitimate medium for popular but non-comedic writing go out of fashion? It still persists, undoubtedly, but it’s no longer a mainstream thing. You can’t walk into a bookshop and find dodgily versified treatments of the Cold War nestling next to the Tom Clancy. There is no rhyming equivalent of Ruth Rendell, no alliterative Asimov, no Stephen King in couplets. (I wish there was. Also: franchise spin-offs. I believe I would actually pay money for a Torchwood novel or one of the endless succession of Drizzt books in verse.)

I can’t quite think why. I doubt there’s a single cause; these kinds of literary trends never have them. I have a vague feeling that partial responsibility may lie with the Romantics, who helped to create the image of Poetry as a serious and profound pursuit; but there’s probably something in there about mass-production, the relative speed at which people produce prose and verse,** hell, even publishing conventions. (Medieval poetry often isn’t lineated, which saves on space; modern practice, while making verse way easier to follow, also makes it much more space-inefficient, and hence proportionately expensive to publish, than prose.) The increasing tendency to regard poetry and songwriting as separate media (and respond with contempt or confusion when people analyse song lyrics the way you analyse non-musical verse). Anti-verse sentiment as a general manifestation of anti-intellectualism. EDIT: Rhiannon identified another major one: the broader trend in literature towards naturalism – the attempt to represent how people actually talk, or to give that impression – tends to exclude the artificiality of formal verse. You can do naturalistic speech in formal verse (see for example Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”) but it’s harder.

Any number of things. Theories?

*

*For comparison, Beowulf survives in only one manuscript. So too does Gawain and the Green Knight. But those two poems are now well accepted as capital-L Literature, and there is probably more scholarship on either one than on all the popular romances put together. On the subject of manuscript survivals, consider a modern parallel: if the archaeologists of the year 50000 were trying to construct a history of twentieth-century film from a random sample of accidentally fossilised DVD collections, they’d be likely to find a lot more copies of Star Wars than they would of Citizen Kane. Popularity ups a work’s chances of physical survival way more than abstract artistic merit does. At this point we get into an argument about what constitutes artistic merit: I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather watch Star Wars than Citizen Kane.

**I don’t know if there’s a difference, or what it is. I know I can produce workaday, un-stellar blank verse at about the same speed as workaday, un-stellar prose once I’ve got into my stride. Rhyming takes a bit longer. Anyone else have data to contribute on this head?

*

Irrelevant To The Main Post: A Note About Medieval Romances

Much to the joy of romance specialists everywhere (all six of them – I kid, I kid), many of the most popular romances have now been digitised and are available for free on the Interwebs. There is a small hitch, however, in that most of them have been digitised with their original Middle English spelling and grammar intact, which is great for academics studying textual minutiae but less great for non-academics who just want to read the story. Reading aloud can often help, and the Rochester editions – a few of which I have linked below – have moderately thorough in-line glossaries. Links go to the introductions, to give people a chance to read a summary of the stories before going to the actual text. (I will hold it against nobody if they decide to give the whole genre a miss: it tends to be full of gratuitous violence, staggering amounts of racism, misogyny and religious bigotry, and individual romances add in bonus episodes of threatened or committed rape, threatened or committed incest, child abandonment, and many other assortedly nasty things.)

Sir Eglamour of Artois

Sir Bevis of Hampton

Lybeaus Desconus (The Fair Unknown)

Sir Gowther

My next issue is with some of the people calling for this reduction. I’m not going to demonise the road transport industry as this is clearly something important to them, so obviously they are pressing hard for this price stabiliser, but the government must ignore it. They have cut the subsidies to the booming solar industry for this very reason – they need help to be competitive. If road transport companies are worried that their business will be replaced by rail transport because it’s cheaper, then tough! Rail freight will be a much better option for the environment if we get on with upgrading and electrifying the railways, so all the better if it’s cheaper. Businesses seem to love the free market until they realise it’s about to screw them over, and suddenly they want subsidies and regulations to help them.

Finally, my biggest concern is that nobody is thinking through the consequences. If the government are guaranteeing to maintain the current price, what will stop the oil companies and petrol retailers pushing the price up? Raising their margins won’t lower the demand for their product if someone else will pay to keep the price the same, so what motives do they have? Concern for the British Treasury? Their own generosity? I don’t know about you, but I have my doubts.

Around ten years ago, there was a similar system put in place in California for electricity prices. The government didn’t subsidise prices, but put a cap on the retail price (the price us customers pay to the supplier) so it wouldn’t go any higher even if oil and electricity wholesale prices went up. The wholesale price was much lower than the retail price at the time, and there were lots of power stations about to be finished so they couldn’t see a reason the wholesale price would go up. This cap was put into place at the start of 2000, and for the first few months it worked as expected. Between April and December 2000, wholesale electricity prices went up by 800%, meaning that the suppliers were being forced to sell electricity to customers for much less than they had bought it from the power stations.

In January 2001 California declared a state of emergency, and eventually managed to stop the massive price spike, but only after blackouts affecting a few million people, one of the three electricity suppliers in the state going bankrupt, and another requiring massive state bailouts to remain afloat. They put a cap back onto the wholesale price, at three times as high as it had been the previous year, and let retail prices go up to allow suppliers to make profit again, and ten years later California still has electricity prices higher than almost every other state, 40% higher than the US average.

Some of you may know this as the Enron scandal, as they were instrumental in raising prices, but other electricity producers followed suit – artificially lowering supply to drive up demand. At no point during the blackouts was there a lack of generation: they had nearly double the amount of power stations needed to meet demand, but they switched them off because it was more profitable to drive up demand and leave people in the dark. Do we really want that to happen here with petrol prices? They might not be as fraudulent as Enron, but if they can shut down some refineries to save costs without losing any revenue, it’s a win-win situation for them. We, on the other hand, have to suffer with more cuts to lower our deficit, plus the redundancies from these closing refineries to add to our unemploymed, all for nothing when the government finally realise they can’t afford the stabiliser and petrol prices are allowed to rocket up again.

This is the conclusion I want people to understand: the stabiliser is very unlikely to do what it is supposed to, and will cost us a lot in the process. It might give us a short-term stem from rising petrol prices if we are lucky, but eventually it will have to be dropped and prices will catch up to where they should be if not more. The state of California had to pay $40-45 billion for their energy crisis, with the ultimate conclusion that prices were higher than they would have been without it. Could you imagine the uproar if David Cameron came to the media and said “Oops, we cost the taxpayer £25 billion for nothing. Sorry.” Oh wait, that’s already happened…

~

* The budget deficit for 2011/12 is £121 billion according to the UK 2011 Budget in March. Fuel duty is expected to raise £26.9 billion in the same period at it’s current rate of 58p per litre, so around £0.46 billion per penny per litre.

*

Damien Hirst's "Anatomy of an Angel", a white marble sculpture of an angel with some of its surface cut away to show internal organs.

On Thursday, I went into Leeds to meet a friend who I hadn’t seen for just about a year, to catch up, make further plans, and – most crucially – append my illegible scrawl to two copies of a deed poll officially certifying that {Common Very Gendered Name} is now {Possibly Unique and Much Less Gendered Name}. We had lunch in the Tiled Hall café, and then wandered over into the art gallery. First, we looked into the temporary Damien Hirst exhibition (today is its last day), which has attracted some comment because, well, Damien Hirst.  The preserved sheep in its glass box was, perhaps ironically, the least interesting piece there, I thought; I was much more interested by the lightboxed, zoomed-in photos of what P assures me was aspirin (pills have so much detail close up) and by the enormous cabinet piece entitled “Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology”, consisting of various anatomy models – you know, plastic cross-sections of various bits – carefully arranged and painted.

The one that made me stop and stare the longest, however, was “Anatomy of an Angel”, the sculpture pictured at the top of this post. Done in gorgeous white Carrara marble, it’s an angel sculpted in a style reminiscent of a Renaissance Venus, all soft curves and sidelong gaze; but here and there the ‘skin’ is taken off, like an all-white version of one of the garishly coloured plastic models, to show carefully detailed muscle and bone underneath. It’s unearthly and uncanny and rather disconcerting and took my breath away. P commented that it looked like a zombie version of one of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who; my first thought was how alien it was to see a traditionally-styled angel represented as, well, having insides. The physicality of angels – did they eat? did they have sexes? (how) did they reproduce? – was a matter of much concern to medieval theologians, and for all I know there are still serious men with beards arguing about it somewhere, but in popular discourse the insubstantial/otherworldly idea of the angel seems to have won out.*

Given that this is a sculpture which creates its effect by making visible what is usually hidden, by exposing to view an interior which I, at least, hadn’t ever really considered might exist, this seems as good a place as any to bring up the maybe-relevant point that making sculpture is a collaborative process. For “Anatomy of an Angel”,

Although his studio prefers not to discuss the matter, it’s no secret that Damien Hirst never visited Studio Sem; he sent a resin model [...] and approved the marble through photographs.

The article from which that quote is taken, a 2009 Financial Times piece by Rachel Spence on the marble workshops in Pietrasanta (which I unfortunately can’t find the original web-home of, assuming it had one) gives examples showing that Hirst isn’t particularly out of the ordinary here. Many artists have the idea and then pass it on to a specialist to realise – which is, in itself, no different than, say, a theatre director who envisions a production and then delegates much of the practicality to the stage manager, choreographer, costume designer and composer. A theatre company, though, is a company: even if we talk about Gregory Doran’s Hamlet or Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado there is still a general acknowledgement that a lot of other people were involved. Similarly, agents, editors and research assistants are understood to be part of how novels happen, even if only one name goes on the cover: they are talked about in interviews, thanked in acknowledgements, joked about when an author publishes something over-long or over-indulgent. But there’s usually no such visibility for the backstage crew, as it were, who assist in getting other artistic media from idea to reality – an absence which both perpetuates and is perpetuated by the image of the artist as lone, brilliant genius.

I think the image of the lone genius is one of the thousand faces of the fantasy of self-determination: people like the idea that they could do great things and realise their dreams entirely unassisted. While this is an especially popular narrative in the current political climate – because pretending that you got where you were totally on your own helps insulate you from the idea that there but for the grace of God go I - I suspect it’s always been around, as admitting to yourself that you need help, of any kind, is a realisation that will never not bruise your pride. And pride is timeless.

*

* Although of course there are subversions, including, of all things, a recent Lynx advert: the “[wear Lynx and] Even angels will fall” tagline is precisely as tiresome as you would expect, but the portrayal of an angel trying to navigate an average house and getting her halo caught on lights, wings trapped in doors, and so on is genuinely funny. It’s an unusual look at the problems a creature actually built with the accoutrements given to the traditional angel would have to deal with.

Damien Hirst's "Anatomy of an Angel" shown from the chest upwards: a white marble sculpture of a naked angel, looking down and to the right. Portions of the surface are cut away, as in an anatomy model, to reveal part of the skull, the muscles of the neck and shoulder, and the soft tissues of one breast. In the background, out of focus, is another of Hirst's works in the style of a stained-glass window.

The sinew, here, that stretches to sustain
the elegant inflection of the eye,
echoes the femur in the open thigh:
here one white axle-span, and here again,
the scaffolding of what we are, displayed.

The smooth-edged fissures in the marble skin
show off the subtle armatures within:
bones, organs, guts, immaculate, arrayed,
at once angelic, animal, machine.

Poised, as a dancer waits to start the scene,
with gaze turned down, obliquely, into space,
three-quarters of a head frames half a face

which, though serene, is not so beautiful
as are the silent contours of the skull.

*

Note

4: axle-span is my translation of the Old English term eaxlegespanne, a unique compound found in the OE poem The Dream of the Rood. It comes from eaxle, ‘shoulder’ and gespann ‘joining, fastening, binding’; in context, it probably refers to the horizontal bar of the Cross.

• a papyrus bookmark, plastic-sleeved, printed with hieroglyphs. The ink had faded; what had once been black was now purple.
• a small pencil, much used, hiding in an extremely bulky edition of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.
• a typewritten program, very carefully folded, for a Pontefract Girls’ High School production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, no date.
• flashcards/index cards, again typewritten, for a few of the major speeches of Othello, on blue paper.
• a bookmark advert for a gay drama and erotica press called Star [Something] Books, on purple card, with bonus picture of a shirtless dude.
• a piece of glossy A5 paper, folded three times to fit into the back of an Edna O’Brien paperback, which had written on it in very faded pencil the words “inevitable” (very faint, might have been “new table” for all I could tell), a gap, then below this “he becomes”, then below that “something from my past”.

Having established that, I would now like to put forward some ideas of my own about Special Relativity that seem to have been (in my opinion) unfairly dismissed or not really considered. I will try and keep this simple, but it is complex physics, so I can’t guarantee it will be easy reading.1 – What if faster-than-light particles do not follow the rules of Special Relativity?

At university I had the honour of being taught by a leading professor in the field of quantum entanglement, and after lectures I would chat to him about various science fiction concepts like faster-than-light travel, time travel and the possible uses of quantum entanglement. I enjoy reading and writing, especially science fiction, but I can’t stand it when authors get the science completely wrong, so what better way to make sure I get it right than by asking the experts? One thing that always bugged me, though, was that he kept saying FTL travel and communication would break causality, which didn’t make sense to me. My view was that the cause happens before the effect, regardless of which order you saw them in, so causality wasn’t affected.

It turns out that this is all due to Special Relativity. If you have a particle travelling faster than light, putting it into the equations for relativistic motion gives you a particle with an imaginary mass and negative time.* Since nobody knows what on earth imaginary mass could be, this makes things awkward, but they also travel back in time. You can remove the imaginary mass component, but only if you remove any interactions with slower-than-light particles. Basically, if faster-than-light particles exist, we cannot see them or interact with them in any way, so they effectively can’t exist in any useful way. Also, using time dilation you can directly prove causality breaks using faster-than-light communication, via the amazingly-named thought experiment of the tachyonic antitelephone.

But, all of this hinges on one assumption that may or may not be true: that faster-than-light particles use the same relativistic equations of motion that slower-than-light particles do. Given that we don’t have anything else to use it’s not a bad assumption, but that kind of assumption lead to embarrassments like the ultraviolet catastrophe, and ruling out any other possibilities without any evidence at all is not good science. If these neutrinos did travel faster than light, then clearly FTL particles do not use relativistic laws of motion, and we then get on with figuring out what they use instead. If the experimenters made a mistake and they didn’t travel faster than light, then nothing has changed, but we still don’t know what laws (if any) FTL particles use. For now though, we will just have to wait and see.

2 – Does instantaneous travel or communication count as faster-than-light?

My next issue is that all of the above doesn’t seem to apply to instantaneous travel and communication like quantum teleportation and entanglement, but they are also ruled out. There is the no-communication theorem, which I will look at in a minute, but most people don’t even go this far. I’ve seen some people try to argue that instant communication isn’t possible from the assumption that it breaks causality, which is about as useful as saying things fall down because they fall down. If you start from the assumption that instant communication isn’t possible, of course you will conclude that instant communication isn’t possible!

The only argument I have seen that actually appears to make sense is based on the no-communication theorem, which is so mathematically dense I can’t even begin to follow it. However, there seem to be some criticisms levelled at it that it too assumes FTL communication isn’t possible as its starting point, and experiments which seem to disprove supraluminal communication completely. With nothing actually travelling faster than light, then the laws of relativistic motion don’t break as they are not required – there isn’t any motion – so there is nothing I can see that would prevent instantaneous travel and communication from happening. In fact, since we already know teleportation happens on a tiny scale (like quantum tunnelling), I think it looks quite likely that this would be possible.

3 – A extension of Einstein’s postulates

Finally, this is something slightly different that I’ve been wondering about. Galileo originally came up with the original Theory of Relativity (also known as the Galilean Invariance): the idea that you cannot tell how fast something is travelling without an outside reference. For example, without watching the scenery go by outside, you don’t know how fast a car is going.** Everything inside the car is the same, and if it had no windows you just wouldn’t be able to tell. You can feel it speed up and slow down, but at a constant speed it feels exactly the same as if you weren’t moving at all.

This is what caused Einstein to come up with the Special Theory of Relativity in the first place: if you were travelling at exactly the speed of light, you would know immediately how fast you were travelling without an outside reference, as everything would suddenly go black. This is because as you approached the speed of light, there would be a bigger and bigger gap between photons reaching your eye, until you got to exactly the speed of light, when the photons that were just about to hit your retina suddenly can’t – your retina is travelling at the same speed, so they can’t catch up! This also does not count as an outside reference, as you won’t be able to see anything, inside or outside.

Bizarrely, even though his theory has been proven right (time dilation and stuff does actually happen), I suspect his original basis may have been wrong. Well, not actually wrong, just not quite thought out far enough. His theory shows than you cannot reach c – the speed of light in a perfect vacuum – but wouldn’t the situation I described above happen if you were travelling at the speed of light in air? Assuming you are stood in an atmosphere identical to Earth’s in your spaceship, wouldn’t you know when you reached the speed of light through that atmosphere, because the photons wouldn’t be able to reach your eye? The Special Theory of Relativity says nothing about this, and we know particles will sometimes travel faster than light can in a given medium, because it happens in the cooling fluid of nuclear reactors.

So, what’s the deal with this? Was Galileo wrong about needing an outside reference, or is there another part to relativistic motion that we haven’t discovered yet? I’d really like to know, but I cannot find anything or anyone at all that has mentioned this – I can’t be the first or the only person to consider this, can I?

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*Also, using the equations from Special Relativity FTL particles have less energy the faster they go, until they reach zero energy at a speed of infinity. This just can’t happen, they must have an infinite amount of kinetic energy at an infinite speed (unless it is something to do with that pesky imaginary mass they have), which also means if FTL particles exist they just can’t use Special Relativity.

**The speedometer does not work for this purpose, as it only measures your speed relative to the ground – a car on a treadmill might say 30mph but not actually be moving. It also doesn’t take into account the 67,000 mph we are travelling at around the Sun!

The article itself is by one William J. Bennett, who was apparently Secretary for Education in the mid-80s (which is kind of alarming after reading this). He starts off with the oh-so-popular cry that now women are doing so much better than they used to be, men must therefore be suffering. This doesn’t seem to understand that women were significantly worse off before, and, while things might be improving more for women than for men, men are still generally better off.

The article then goes into a mish-mash of random statistics and hypotheses, as Bennett tries to set the scene of a long, dark decline in young men’s lives compared to those of young women. He talks about how women earned 57% of all US university degrees in 2006 compared to 40% in 1970, and that women’s earnings have improved by 44% between 1970 and 2007 while men’s have only improved by 6%. Oh noes, how unfair on us poor men – now our wages are only 20% higher than women, instead of 40%! (The 2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings puts the UK gender pay gap at 22%, down from 22.5% in 2008.) Also notice that the numbers he cites are from before the recession, during which everyone’s wages have fallen . . . if you even still have a wage.

Next, he stops comparing statistics directly between men and women. He says that “in 1950, 5% of men at the prime working age were unemployed. As of last year, 20% were not working”. After grabbing some statistics from the US Department of Labour, I guess that by “men of prime working age” he means men aged 16-24, as the 2010 US figures show that for men aged 16-19 the unemployment rate was 29%, and for men aged 20-24 it was 17%. What he doesn’t say is that for women aged 16-19 the unemployment rate was 23%, and aged 20-24 it was 12%.* For men and women aged 25-34, the unemployment rates are 10% and 9% respectively – almost identical to the unemployment rates across the whole country. Checking back to the figures for the year 2000, unemployment rates for all these groups are much lower, as they are for 1970, 1980 and 1990. In fact, up until 2008 unemployment for young men (and everyone else) is fairly flat if you discount the short term ups and downs of the economy. A much better comparison would be to say “from the 1970s until 2007, around 10% of young men were out of work; in 2010 it was 20%” – but that would highlight the fact that the recession of 2008 caused this particular rise, and not all the other rubbish he talks about.

Having established what he thinks is a convincing foundation with statistics, Bennett then leaves the real world behind completely. His next line claims that “men still maintain a majority of the highest paid and most powerful occupations, but women are catching them and will soon be passing them if this trend continues.” I’m not sure what he means by “soon be passing them”; according to studies on the boards of Fortune 100 companies, women held about 20% of board seats in 2010, an improvement of 1% since 2004. (Also, notice the domination by not just men but white men in that study.) If this trend continues as Bennett fears, at 1% every 6 years, women will overtake men in just 185 years! Better than the FTSE 100 companies in the UK, though, where only 6.5% of board directors are women, and the number of companies with any female directors is falling.

He then gives some more stats that are irrelevant to the whole thing: he mentions the rise of children living without fathers (I’ve covered my views on and experiences with divorce previously, so I won’t go over it again); that more women regularly attend church than men (47% and 39% in 2010, respectively); and most bizarrely, that more than 40% of children in America are born out of wedlock. He doesn’t compare this to anything, or talk about it going up or down, so I think we’re supposed to be shocked by that number alone. He talks about marriage later so he presumably thinks it’s important, but this is a fascination I don’t share, as I know from my parents that being married or unmarried doesn’t determine the quality of a relationship and the upbringing of children.

Finally, he gets to the main points of his article – the reasons why men are “in decline”:

“Man’s response has been pathetic. Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families.”

Here he  uses a random statistic about gamers to bolster his own strange view of the world, while ignoring other facts that don’t fit – for example, that after adult men (at 45% of gamers), adult women are the next biggest gamer demographic at 37%. If more women and fewer men are going to college and getting jobs, it can’t have much to do with gaming. Also, if fewer men are getting married and raising families, surely that must mean fewer women are too? The vast majority of marriages are heterosexual. In the US, too, there are more women than men to begin with (155 million to 151 million; population figures from the US Census Bureau via Wikipedia). The marriage data from the American Community Survey, taken last year, shows that roughly the same number of American men and women married in the preceding twelve months – if anything, slightly more men got married than women did.**

So we reach my original issue, which doesn’t seem as important as the ones above, but is still a problem. Like a lot of people, including most of the games industry itself, Bennett has fallen for the old-fashioned assumption that computer games are for children, or teenagers at best. The ESA study above shows how far from the truth this is, but it doesn’t stop everyone parroting the idea – hence the gasps of shock when adults are revealed to play computer games (people are still ashamed to admit it until someone else has). This also explains why the media get so outraged when someone mentions a game containing violence or nudity: games are obviously for kids, so these games must be also aimed at kids! Never mind that a lot of countries actually restrict these games’ sales to children, like our 18 rating in the UK;  in the US Mature-rated games are sold to children much less than M-rated music or movies. Even the games companies don’t always see past this, and continue to make and market games to their apparent target audience of teenage boys (some examples of this are the atrocious Dead Space 2 adverts or the widely-criticised Duke Nukem Forever). It doesn’t make sense to keep targeting such a small market, especially when they don’t actually have much disposable income. Why not make games that appeal to more mature people of all sexes? There are many more of them, they have more money, and a lot of the teenagers will keep on buying games anyway if the games are good. (I want to work in the games industry myself, but I worry that I would be fighting a losing battle in trying to shift attitudes.)

The saddest part of the end of this article is that some things he says may actually make sense, but his proposed solution doesn’t. Men are allowed more social tolerance for immaturity than are women (witness the million adverts starting from the premise that men are stupid children requiring constant nannying) and often permitted, even encouraged, to treat women as objects rather than people. But I wouldn’t say these mindsets arise because of mixed messages towards men. On the contrary, this seems to be by far the main message aimed at us by advertising, television and the media, including computer games (see Sociological Images’ post on the marketing for Duke Nukem Forever for a prime example.)

Everyone seems to know what you have to be to be a man, and everyone wants to tell you, regardless of whether you want to be that or not. The mixed messages he talks about are coming from people like me, who cry out “why must we behave like this?” There is no “deciphering” needed to figure out how be a man: we just are men because we are. There is no specific role of men, no list of requirements to fulfil, just as there isn’t for women. There also seems to be more criticism of men who aren’t or don’t want to be masculine (like me) – it is more acceptable for women to be ‘like men’, as this is seen as aspirational (see for example this Sociological Images post on androcentrism), but being called ‘feminine’ or being compared to a woman is still considered by many to be a mortal insult for a man. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying we have it worse, especially as it only arises from femininity being seen as inferior to masculinity; just that it is a problem we need to address along with many others.

We could do with more people out there saying men can do what they want, but more importantly we need more people saying that men and women and everyone else can do what they want, be whoever they want, and that the only people that will judge them are the people that should not matter. (All too often they are in a position of power and do matter, but the more we get our message out, the more likely it is that these positions of power will eventually be taken by more open-minded people.)  We are all people, and we should try to behave like good people, but we don’t need the media, religion*** or Bennett to tell us how to do this, and we do not need to follow any other rules based on any physical or mental differences between us.

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*With women making up a smaller percentage of the workforce in total it makes sense that their unemployment figures are slightly lower – there are still more men in work than women, because women are more pressured to stay at home or work part time (I believe part time workers do not count in the US Labour Force figures).

**And more women got divorced than men did. Thinking about this, the disparity is probably accounted for by a) US citizens marrying non-US citizens and thus only half of the couple showing up on the records and b) widows and widowers remarrying, thus creating a new marriage datapoint without also creating a divorce datapoint.

***Religion helps a lot of people in living good lives, but is hardly a prerequisite for doing so. [Ed.: People who imply that religion is the only thing making them behave like good people scare the crap out of me.]

This post brought to you by the Pyro. (A fat videogame character in an all-concealing red protective suit, heavy boots, huge gloves, and a gas mask, pointing a flamethrower towards the camera.)

Yesterday I was in town, and had a look in a couple of charity shops, as you do. In one of them, I was browsing a rack of jeans when a couple of goths about my age walked in and asked the bloke on the counter about the price of a dress on one of the window mannequins – a little black thing with lots of buttons and a ruffle or two. Having established that it was £3.99, they started bickering over who should get it whilst the volunteer was taking it off the mannequin.

Both of these two were a little taller than me, both long-haired – one with dyed-black hair worn loose, one with a wavy brown ponytail – and both in the kind of goth gear that (and here, finally, the point) defies attempts at conventional gender-classification. Baggy long-sleeved T-shirts, capacious black jeans with chains, trainers, nail varnish. And arguing over who got to wear the little ruffly dress. (Eventually they agreed that the slightly taller one got first dibs, and if it didn’t fit, the slightly shorter one could have it.)

The incident stuck in my head, both because it’s not every day you run into pretty goths in charity shops, let alone two at once, and also because I had been having thinky thoughts about gender and stuff anyway and they gave me more food for thought. After all, both of these two were presenting a clear, consistent and legible identity: they might as well have been holding big signs saying “GOTH”. And yet too often, no matter how obvious it is what somebody’s outfit is supposed to ‘say’, it’s not treated as a valid or complete message if it isn’t clearly gendered. (I’ve written about gender and other messages before.)

The temptation to assume that there must be a simple, binary answer, and then to try and deduce one from circumstantial evidence, is deeply conditioned. I suspect it’s also helped along, or at least bolstered, by the way that we (as a society) currently talk about and understand sexuality. Ambiguity can be threatening, because if you’re vastly attracted to someone and then it turns out they’re the ‘wrong’ sex underneath, opprobrium awaits: even in relatively progressive communities, the reactions to people whose self-stated orientation is perceived not to ‘match’ with their sexual history can be toxic. (You can’t be straight/gay, you’ve slept with someone of the same/a different sex. You can’t be bi/pan, all your partners to date were the same/a different sex to you. You can’t be asexual, you slept with someone once. Etc.) It’s not always entirely externally imposed, either: sexuality is a cornerstone of identity for a lot of people, of all orientations, and it’s disquieting to have things you thought were axiomatic about yourself show signs of mutability.