Complementarity And The World: Niels Bohr’s Message In A Bottle

Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of an intrinsic opposition between these quantities; better knowledge of one necessarily meant worse knowledge of the other. Talk turned to physics, and after Bohr had described Heisenberg’s seminal insight, one of his friends quipped, “But Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same thing ten years ago.”

In fact, Bohr had already convinced Heisenberg that his uncertainty principle was a special case of a more general idea that Bohr had been expounding for some time – a thread of Ariadne that would guide travelers lost through the quantum world; a principle of great and general import named the principle of complementarity.

Complementarity arose naturally for Bohr after the strange discoveries of subatomic particles revealed a world that was fundamentally probabilistic. The positions of subatomic particles could not be assigned with definite certainty but only with statistical odds. This was a complete break with Newtonian classical physics where particles had a definite trajectory, a place in the world order that could be predicted with complete certainty if one had the right measurements and mathematics at hand. In 1925, working at Bohr’s theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg was Bohr’s most important protégé had invented quantum theory when he was only twenty-four. Two years later came uncertainty; Heisenberg grasped that foundational truth about the physical world when Bohr was away on a skiing trip in Norway and Heisenberg was taking a walk at night in the park behind the institute.

When Bohr came back he was unhappy with the paper Heisenberg had written, partly because he thought the younger man seemed to echo his own ideas, but more understandably because Bohr – a man who was exasperatingly famous for going through a dozen drafts of a scientific paper and several drafts of even private letters – thought Heisenberg had not expressed himself clearly enough. The 42-year-old kept working on the 26-year-old until the latter admitted that “the uncertainty relations were just a special case of the more general complementarity principle.”

So what was this complementarity principle? Simply put, it was the observation that there are many truths about the world and many ways of seeing it. These truths might appear divergent or contradictory, but they are all equally essential in representing the true nature of reality; they are complementary. As Bohr famously put it, “The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth”. Complementarity provided a way to reconcile the paradoxes that seemed to bedevil quantum theory’s interpretation of reality.

The central scientific paradox was what is called wave-particle duality. In 1803, the British polymath Thomas Young had proposed that light, contrary to Isaac Newton’s view of it, consists of waves; an experiment like diffraction makes this wave nature clear. A hundred years later, in 1905, Einstein proposed that light in fact consists of particles, an idea he invoked in order to explain the photoelectric effect and which won him a Nobel Prize; these particles were later called photons. Soon it was found through other experiments that all subatomic particles and not just photons could display wave and particle behavior. In 1924, the French physicist and aristocrat Louis de Broglie saw a way through the impasse when he came up with a simple equation that related the momentum of a particle – a particle property – inversely to its wavelength – a wave property.

In spite of de Broglie’s insight, particles clearly don’t look like waves and waves don’t look like particles in real life. In fact the very names seem to put them at odds with one another. It was Bohr who saw both the problem and the solution. Particles and waves both exist and are equally valid and essential ways of interpreting the quantum world. Depending on what experiment you do you might see one or the other and never both, but they are not contradictory, they are complementary. Most crucially, you simply cannot make sense of reality without having both in hand. It was a powerful insight that cut through the complexities of intuition and language; it was not too different in principle from other counterintuitive truths that science has uncovered, for instance the truth that both lighter and heavier bodies fall at the same rate. Complementarity rationalized opposing tendencies of the physical world and indicated that they were one. It was what had made Bohr subsume the opposing quantities in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle under the same rubric.

Complementarity was also pregnant with far more general interpretation. The most effective application of it to human affairs in Bohr’s hands was the problem posed by nuclear weapons. Even before the bomb had been used on Hiroshima, Bohr saw deeper and further than anyone else that the very fact that nuclear weapons are so enormously destructive might make them the most potent force for peace that the world has ever seen, simply because statesmen will realize that nobody can truly “win” a nuclear war if everyone has them. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war”, Bohr said. The complementarity of the bomb continues to keep the peace through deterrence.

Another noteworthy example was a speech delivered by Bohr in 1938 to the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at Kronberg Castle in Denmark. Apologizing at the outset for presuming to speak about a topic on which he was not an expert, Bohr proceeded to provide a succinct summary of complementarity in the context of atomic physics. Turning to biology, he then made the perspicacious observation – still the subject of considerable debate – that reason and instinct which might appear to be opposed to each other are complementary, both providing a complete picture of a sentient being. Bohr then came to the crux of the matter, pointing out that complementarity is of the essence when people are judging other cultures which might seem divergent from their own but which turn out to be different and equally productive ways of looking at the world. As Bohr eloquently put it: “Each culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent potentialities of human life can unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety.” Bohr believed that contact between cultures can go a long way in not just dispelling biases but in mutually enriching both parties: “A more or less intimate contact between different human societies can lead to a gradual fusion of traditions, giving birth to a quite new culture”. This is as clear an appeal for internationalism and mutual understanding that one can think of; if everyone had understood complementarity, maybe we might have had less fascism, imperialism and genocide. The final goal of complementary views of societies, as Bohr pointed out powerfully in the same lecture, isn’t different from the goal of science as a whole – it is “the gradual removal of prejudices”.

As we approach what seem to be novel problems in the 21st century, Bohr’s complementarity is a message in a bottle from one fraught world to another, telling us that seeing these new problems through the lens of an old principle can be most rewarding. We seem to live in a time when many see social and political problems through a binary, black-or-white, zero sum lens. Either my viewpoint is right or yours, but not both. Complementarity bridges that division. For instance consider the problem of individualism vs communalism, a divide that also hints at the cultural divide Bohr spoke about, in this case largely an Eastern vs Western divide. Western society is fiercely individualistic; self-interests guide people’s lives and most people don’t want others to tell them that they should live their lives for others. Meanwhile, Eastern and some European societies are much more communal; community interests often override self-interest and individuals are told that their self-development should take a backseat to the development of their community and society. Bohr’s complementarity tells us that this divergent view should not exist. Communal and individualistic views are both essential for looking at the world and building a more productive society; in fact one can gain self-knowledge and wisdom by working for a community, and likewise a community can be improved when people engage in individualistic self-improvement that helps everyone.

There are other problems for which complementarity provides a potential solution. I will speak mostly for the United States since that’s where I live, but these problems are in fact global. Consider the problem of immigration, one to which Bohr’s 1938 address is directly applicable. People criticized as “globalists” think that unfettered immigration is a net good. The opposing camp thinks that preserving a nation’s culture is important, and too much or too rapid immigration will weaken this culture. But complementarity tells us that nationalism is in fact strengthened when immigrants work together for the common good of the country. At the same time, immigrants should put their country first and prioritize work that will strengthen their nation’s economy, military and social institutions. We are global citizens, but we are also shaped by evolution and culture to take care of our immediate own. The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth.

Even scientific debates like the nature (genes) vs nurture (environment) conundrum can benefit from complementary views. People criticized as biological “essentialists” believe that genes dictate a lot of an individual’s physical and psychological makeup while the opposing “nurture” camp believes that much of the effect of genes can be changed by the environment. But complementarity says that just like the joint wave-particle view of reality, individuals are whole and complete, and this wholeness arises from a combination of genes and environment. In that sense, how much of a person’s mental and physical constitution we can control by either manipulating their genes or their environment is almost irrelevant. What’s relevant is the basic understanding in the first place that both matter; even if both camps agree with this baseline, they would already be talking a lot more with each other.

A third application of complementarity to international affairs, one which stems directly from Bohr’s view of the complementarity of the bomb, is to the relationship between United States and China, a relationship which will likely be the single-most important geopolitical determinant of the 21st century. China clearly has an autocratic regime that is not likely to yield to demands for more democratic behavior, both internally and externally, anytime soon. This has led to many in the United States to regard China as an implacable foe, almost a second Soviet Union. An important consequence of this view has been to see almost every technological development in the two countries, from gene editing to artificial intelligence to new weapons, as a contest.

But irrespective of the moral wisdom of engaging in this contest, complementarity tells us that such contests are likely to lead to the mutual ruin of both China and the United States, and by extension the rest of the world; for the same reason that any arms race would hollow out countries’ coffers and ramp up the specter of mutual annihilation. The reason is simple: both computer code and the physics of nuclear weapons are products of the fundamental laws of science and technology discovered or invented by human minds. Both can be divined and implemented by any country with smart scientists and engineers, which basically means any developing or developed country. An arms race in AI between China and the United States, for instance, would be as futile and dangerous as was the nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Both countries would be fooling themselves if they think they can write better computer code and keep it secret for a long time. In that sense the fact that computer code, just like nuclear fission, is essentially a discovery of the human mind poses inconvenient truths for both countries. Whether we like it or not, we need to realize the complementarity of artificial intelligence akin to how we grudgingly realized the complementarity of the bomb: we need to realize that AI is powerful, that it is dangerous, that its secrets cannot stay secret for very long, that there are no real defenses against it, that the very dangers of AI cry for peaceful solutions to AI, and therefore that mutual cooperation between China and the United States under an umbrella of an international organization like the United Nations would be the only solution to avoid mutual cyber-destruction. China might be autocratic, but it has self-interests and wouldn’t want to see its own ruin. In the end, harmony between the United States and China might not be forced by bridging the moral divide between the two countries’ social and political systems: it would be forced by the very laws of science and technology.

Without oversimplifying the issue, it’s clear to me that Bohr’s complementarity provides a mediating middle ground for almost any other social or political issue I can think of; it’s not so much that it offers a solution but that it will compel each side to see the importance of the other side’s argument in providing a complete view of reality that cannot be provided by either viewpoint by itself. Pro-life or pro-choice? One can respect both the life of an unborn child and the life of the mother; the two are complementary. Socialism or capitalism? One can certainly have a mixed market economy – of the kind found in Niels Bohr’s home country for instance – that would give us the benefits of both. Climate legislation or rapid economic growth? One can create jobs related to new climate technologies that will result in economic growth. Science or religion? They address complementary aspects of the world, Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria”.

If we accept the idea of complementarity, we are in essence accepting the validity of all ways of looking at the world, and not just one. This does not mean that all ways are equally right – we can’t accept the germ theory of disease and the “theory” of diseases as a punishment from God on equal terms – but it is precisely through placing them on a level playing field and letting them play out their logical flow that we can even know how much of which view is right. In addition, Bohr realized that the world is indeed gray, that even flawed visions may contain snatches of truth that should be acknowledged as potential building blocks in our view of reality. But ultimately, Bohr’s plea for complementarity was a plea for what he called an “open world”, an ideal that for him was the highest that the peoples of the world could aspire to, an ideal that arose naturally from the democratic republic of science. If we accept complementarity, we automatically become open to examining every single approach to a problem, every way of parsing reality. Most importantly, we become open to true, unfettered communication with our fellow human beings, a tentative but lasting step toward Bohr’s – and science’s – “gradual removal of prejudices”. That seems like an important message for today.

First published on 3 Quarks Daily.

On free speech, crossing the Rubicon and the need to unite

I woke up to some welcome news today, news that after an extended period of disappointment and disillusionment, has left me feeling better than I have in a long time. Harper’s Weekly published an open letter signed by an eclectic blend of writers, political scientists, journalists and thinkers across the political spectrum, many of whom have been pillars of the liberal intellectual community for decades. In the letter, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis, Fareed Zakaria, Arlie Russell Hochschild and many others deplore the state in which liberal discourse has descended into for several years.

"The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty." 

The entire letter is worth reading and takes aim at several acts by self-described liberals and Democrats over the years that have been attacks on the values of free expression and debate that they professed to have stood up for for decades. It takes to task institutions which are dealing out disproportionate punishments for minor infractions, if one can call them that. It makes the seemingly obvious case that writers can only thrive when they are allowed to experiment and say controversial things – a whole string of historical writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and D. H Lawrence to Nabokov and Franzen attest to this fact. Rushdie himself of course infamously had to go into hiding for several years after the fatwah. The writers of the letter cite dozens of cases of controversial speakers being disinvited from college campuses, professors being censured for citing “controversial” books like Greek classics, editorials being withdrawn from leading newspapers because of internal rebellion and people’s livelihoods and reputations being threatened for simply tweeting about or referring to something that their detractors disliked. In most cases there was a small group of outraged people, usually on Twitter, responsible for these actions.

Most of this of course has been going on for years, even as those of us who believed in free speech without retaliation and diversity of viewpoints have watched with increasing dismay from the sidelines. Some of us have even been targets in the past, although we have not had to face the kind of retribution that other people did. And yet, compared to what has been happening this year, the last few years have seemed tame. I have to say that as much as my disillusionment has grown steadily over time, this year truly seems like the watershed, one that should squarely force us to take a stand.

Let’s first understand that America in 2020 has made everyone’s job difficult: the country is now being led by a racist, ignorant child-president with dictatorial aspirations who calls the press the enemy of the people and whose minions take every chance they can to try to silence or threaten anyone who disagrees with them, who actively spread misinformation and lies, whose understanding of science and reason is non-existent, and who have been collectively responsible not just for the dismantling of critical public institutions like the EPA and the justice department but for orchestrating, through inaction, one of the deadliest public health crises in the history of the country that has killed hundreds of thousands. One would think that all of us who are opposed to this administration and their abandonment of the fundamental values on which this country has been founded would be utterly horrified and unified at this time.

Sadly, the opposite has happened, and it’s why the Harper’s letter seems like a bright pinprick in a dark landscape to me. For an increasing portion of the self-professed liberal establishment, the answer to Trump has been to go crazy in the other direction. Until this year, I generally used to reject the slippery slope argument – the argument that those even with whom I strongly disagreed will keep on going down a slippery slope. I thought that that would stop at a reasonable juncture. Sadly, I no longer think that way. Three examples among many will suffice, and I think all three are emblematic of larger trends:

First: After the horrific murder of George Floyd, while we were standing in solidarity with the black community and condemning the use of excessive force by police departments across the country, peaceful protests across the country turned into violent demonstrations accompanied by looting. Now most of the protestors were peaceful, so I thought that my fellow liberals would cleanly draw a line and denounce the looters while supporting the protests. But this seldom happened; both on my private social media accounts as well as publicly, people started excusing the looting as a justified act of desperation. Worse still, they started to recruit cherry-picked historical examples of civil rights leaders to make their case, including this speech by MLK Jr. in which he seems to justify violence as a desperate act before making it very clear that it is not the right way of going about things. But even if you hadn’t heard the entire speech, to hold someone who is literally the biggest symbol of non-violent protests in modern times along with Mahatma Gandhi as a spokesperson for violent protests is bizarre to say the least. 

The ahistorical anomalies continued. One of my favorites was a tweet by Charles Blow of the New York Times who justified the looting by comparing it with the Boston Tea Party. I find it hard to believe that Blow doesn’t know what happened after they threw the tea into the water – they not only stripped naked and castigated a fellow Son of Liberty after they found out that he had secretly pocketed the tea, but they came back later and replaced the lock of the ship they had broken. Unlike the looters, the Boston Patriots had a profound respect for private property. In fact, it was precisely British insults to private property by way of quartering soldiers in private residences that served as a spark for the revolution. In addition, as Richard Rothstein painstakingly documents in his superb book "The Color of Law", laws were explicitly enacted precisely to deny African-Americans and other minorities access to private housing for decades, so it's ironic to see mobs destroying private property in their own communities and crippling the livelihoods of folks - many of whom are poor immigrants with small businesses - who had nothing to do with the cause of the protests.

But all these distinctions were lost, especially at the New York Times who tied themselves up into a real knot by publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. In the last few years Cotton has emerged as one of the most racist and xenophobic of all Trump supporters and I detest him. Cotton wrote a biased and flawed op-ed that called for the army to step in to pacify cities where looting was taking place. Knowing his past this was a convenient position for him and I completely disagreed with it; I did think there needed to be some way for law and order to be imposed, but the last thing we need in the middle of a militarized police force is the actual military. Nevertheless, it turned out that a fair percentage of the country agreed with him, including a fair share of Democrats, and Cotton is a sitting United States senator after all, so as an elected public official his views needed to be known, not because they were right but because they were relevant. I suddenly felt newfound respect for the New York Times for airing dissenting views that would allow their readers to get out of their echo chambers and take a stroll in a foreign country, but it didn't last long. As we now know, there was a virtual coup inside the paper and the op-ed editor resigned. As Andrew Sullivan said in a must-read piece it is deeply troubling when an ideological faction – any ideological faction – can hold a news source hostage and force it to publish only certain viewpoints conducive to their own thinking.

A similar reaction against what were entirely reasonable responses to the looting spilled over into other institutions and individuals’ lives. In perhaps the most bizarre example, David Shor who is an analyst at a New York City firm - and whose Twitter profile literally includes the phrase “I try to elect Democrats” - was fired for tweeting a study by a black professor at Princeton that said that non-violent protests are more effective than violent ones. Just chew on that a bit: an individual was fired merely for tweeting, and not just tweeting anything but tweeting something that MLK Jr. would have heartily approved of. When people actually face retribution for pointing out that non-violence works better than violence, you do feel like you are in a mirror universe.

Second: The statue controversy. The killing of Floyd set off a wave of protests that extended to many other areas, some because of feuds brewing for years; for more than a hundred years in this particular case. I am all for the removal of Confederate Statues; there is nothing that is redeeming in them, especially since many of them were put up by white supremacists decades after the war ended. While the bigger issue of acknowledging memory and history is complicated, the latest ray of light for me came from Eliot Cohen, a dean at Johns Hopkins who cut through the convoluted thicket to come up with a simple rule that’s as clear as anything in my opinion for weighing historical figures in the scales of justice. Cohen asked those who were demanding the statues to be taken down to ask if the thing that they were criticizing a person for was the most important thing he or she was known for. This question immediately creates a seismic divide between Confederates and Founding Fathers. If the Civil War had not happened, Robert E. Lee would have been a better than average soldier who fought with distinction during the Mexican-American War. If Thomas Jefferson had never owned and abused slaves and had illegitimate children with Sally Hemings, he would have still been the father of religious freedom, the Louisiana Purchase, the University of Virginia, scientific inquiry and the Declaration of Independence – a document that, even if it was not applied universally, had such abstract power that it kept on being cited all the time by figures as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and Ho Chi Minh, not to mention Frederick Douglass and MLK Jr. Jefferson would have still done these great things if you took away his slavery and hypocrisy. Washington is even more unimpeachable since he led the country to freedom during the war and unlike Jefferson freed his slaves. The fact that these were flawed men who still did great things is hardly a novel revelation.

Sadly, you know that your side is losing the war of ideas when they start handing propaganda victories to the side you despise on a platter. Three years ago, in the context of a Lee statue that was going to be taken down, after that terrible anti-Semitic Charlottesville rally by white supremacists, Trump made a loathsome remark about there being “fine people” on all sides and also asked a journalist that if it was Lee today, would it be Jefferson or Washington next? I of course dismissed Trump’s remark as racist and ignorant; he would not be able to recite the Declaration of Independence if it came wafting down at him in a MAGA hat. But now I am horrified that liberals are providing him with ample ammunition by validating his words. A protest in San Francisco toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant – literally the man who defeated the Confederacy and destroyed the first KKK – and defaced a statue of Cervantes, a man who as far as we know did not write “Don Quixote” while he was relaxing from a day’s fighting for the Confederacy or abusing slaves. University of Wisconsin students recently asked for a statue of Lincoln to be removed because he had once said some uncomplimentary words about black people. And, since it was just a matter of time, the paper of record just published an op-ed calling for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington to be taken down. Three years ago, if you had asked me if my fellow liberals would go from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson and Washington and Grant so quickly, I would have expressed deep skepticism. But here we are, and based on recent events it won’t be paranoid at all to ask that if Washington statues are next, would streets or schools named after Washington also be added to the list? How about statues of Plato and Aristotle who supported slavery as a natural state of man? And don’t even get me started on Gandhi who said some very unflattering words about Africans. The coefficient of friction on the slippery slope is rapidly going to zero.

Third item in the parade of items signifying a spiraling descent into intolerance - A call to bar Steven Pinker from the Linguistic Society of America’s list of distinguished fellows and media experts. This call would be laughable if it weren’t emblematic of a deeper trend. My fellow liberal Scott Aaronson has already indicated the absurdity of the effort in his post not in the least because Pinker has championed liberalism, evidence-based inquiry and rational thought all throughout his long career. The depressing thing is that the tactics are not new: guilt by association, cherry-picking, an inability to judge someone by the totality of their behavior or contributions, no perception of gray in an argument and so on. The writers don’t like the fact that Pinker tweeted a study showing that police encounters with black people aren’t particularly violent (but that there are more encounters to begin with, so the probability of one turning violent is higher), tweeted that a horrific fatal attack by a disgruntled man at UCSB on women did not imply higher rates of violence against women in general and said in his widely-praised book “The Better Angels of our Nature” that a seemingly mild-mannered man in New York City shockingly turned out to be violent. Pinker has never denied the suffering of individuals but has simply pointed out that that suffering should not blind us to progress at large. As hard is it might be to believe this, liberals are punishing someone who says that the world has at large become a better place because we have embraced liberal values. Again, this feels like we have stepped into a surreal mirror universe.

As biologist Jerry Coyne has explained on his blog, none of these accusations hold water and the protestors are on exceedingly thin ice, but what is noteworthy is the by now all-too-common accusation by selective misrepresentation and the detailed combing through (and a disastrous one at that) of every tweet, every “like” from Pinker that would be evidence of his awfulness as a human being and affront to the orthodoxy. If this does not seem like a job for an incompetent and yet obsessive Orwellian bureaucrat or a member of the NKVD during Stalin’s show trials, I don’t know what is (as Robert Conquest described in his famous account of Stalin’s purges, going through someone’s entire life history with a fine-toothed comb and holding up even the slightest criticism of the dear leader or disagreement with party orthodoxy was almost de rigueur for the Soviets and the Stasi). Perhaps completely unsurprisingly, the doyen of American linguistics, Noam Chomsky, refused to sign the letter and instead signed the other one; Chomsky has consistently been an exemplary supporter of free speech and has famously pointed out that if you support only free speech that you like, you are no different from Goebbels who was also a big fan of speech he liked. But Pinker’s example again goes to show that the slippery slope argument is no longer a fictitious one or a strawman. If we went from Milo Yiannopoulos to Steven Pinker in three years, it simply does not feel paranoid to think that we could get to a very troubling place in three more years.

The whole development of course is very sad, certainly a tragedy but rapidly approaching a farce. Liberals and Democrats were supposed to be the party of free speech and intelligent dialogue and tolerance and viewpoint diversity. The Republican Party, meanwhile, is not a political party anymore but a “radical insurgency” as Chomsky puts it. It is a blot not just on true conservatism but on common sense and decency. The reason I feel particularly concerned this year is because I have always felt that, with Republicans having descended into autocracy and madness, liberal Democrats are the one and only thing standing between democracy and totalitarianism in this country. I have been disillusioned with their abandonment of unions and disparaging of “middle America” for a long time, but I still thought they upheld traditional, age-old liberal values. With Republicans not even making a pretense of doing this, one would think the Democrats have a golden opportunity to pick up the baton here. But instead you have a party that has embraced diversity provided it’s of the kind they like, allows for no nuance or sliding scale of disagreement, accuses people of being some kind of “ist” with the spirit of the Inquisition and refuses to see individuals as individuals rather than as part of their favorite or their despised groups. If Democrats give up on us, what other group of influence can save the country?

Quite apart from how this behavior abandons the values that have made this country a great one, it is a disastrous political strategy. Currently, the number one goal of any American citizen with any amount of decency and intelligence should be to hand Donald Trump and his unscientific, racist, ignorant administration the greatest defeat in American electoral history. Almost nothing else is as important this year. There are sadly still people who are on the fence – these people cannot let go of the Republican Party for one reason or another, but especially in the last few months one hopes that enough of them have become disillusioned with the Trump administration’s utter incompetence, casual cruelty and dog whistle signaling to consider voting for the other guy. The Democrats should be welcoming these people into their ranks with open arms, so would it be harder or easier for fence-sitters to think of voting Democrat when they see self-proclaimed Democrats toppling random statues, unleashing Twitter mobs on people they disagree with and trying to destroy their careers and basically trying to disparage or eliminate anyone who may think slightly differently from the sphere of discourse?

I came to this country as an immigrant, and while several reasons brought me here just like they do all immigrants, science and technology and freedom of speech were the top two things that I loved and continue to love about the United States. When I was growing up in India, my father who was an economics professor at a well-known college used to tell me how he taught econometrics classes during the Indian Emergency of the 1970s when the Constitution was suspended by the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. He told me how he used to occasionally see a government agent standing behind during his classes, taking notes, making sure he was not saying something subversive. It can only be amusing if parts of partial different equations used in econometrics were regarded as subversive (and if the agents understood them), but it was nonetheless a sobering experience. It would have been far worse had my father lived in Cambodia during the same time. While it’s to India’s democratic credit that it escaped from that hole, even today much of freedom of speech in India, while enshrined in the Constitution, is on paper. As several recent incidents have shown, you can get in trouble if you criticize the government, and in fact you can get in trouble even from your fellow citizens who may rat you out and file lawsuits against you. Even in Britain you have libel laws, and of course free speech is non-existent in countries like Saudi Arabia. In my experience, Americans who haven’t lived abroad often don’t appreciate how special their country is when it comes to free speech. Sadly, as the current situation shows, we shouldn’t take it for granted.

When I complain about problems with free speech in this country, fellow liberals tell me – as if I have never heard of the US Constitution - how it only means that the government cannot arrest you if you say something incendiary. But this point is moot since people can stifle each other’s ideas as thoroughly as the government does, and while informal censure has been around since we were hunter gatherers, when it gets out of hand as it seems to these days, one can see a pall of conformity and a lack of diversity descending over the country. This also puts in a dim light the objection that there cannot be speech without consequences – as David Shor’s example shows, if the results include getting fired or booted out from professional organizations for almost anything you say, these “consequences” are almost as draconian as government oppression and should be unacceptable. As he did with many things, John Stuart Mill said it best in his “On Liberty”,

“Protection, therefore, against tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”

It’s also worth remembering that there is much less distinction between “the people” and “the government” than we think since today’s illiberal anti-free speech activists are tomorrow’s politicians, community leaders, writers and corporate leaders. And we would be laboring under a truly great illusion if we think that these supposedly well-intentioned activists cannot become repressive; everyone can become repressive if given access to power. The ultimate question is not whether we want a government which does not tread on our freedom - we settled that question in 1787 - it’s about what kind of country we want to live in: one in which ideas, even unpleasant ones, are confronted with other ideas in a sphere of spirited public debate, or one in which everyone boringly thinks the same thing, there is no opportunity for dissent, nuanced thinking is thrown out of the window and anybody who challenges the orthodoxy is to be eliminated from public discourse one way or another? Because those are definitely not the values that made this country the envy of the world and the one that its founding ideals envisaged.

So what should those of us who squarely believe in free speech, viewpoint diversity, dialogue and good faith debate do? This year it has become clear that we should take a stand, and as Scott indicates, if supposedly traditional, plain vanilla liberal values like speech without harsh retaliation - values which go back to the founding of the country and beyond – are suddenly “radical” values that are increasingly the province of a narrow minority, so be it: we should not only embrace these radical values with alacrity but be unhesitant and full-throated in their defense. The signers of the Harper’s Weekly letter have set an excellent precedent, and they are saying something very simple – if you want to call yourself a liberal, act liberal.

Carl Sagan's 1995 prediction of our technocratic dystopia

In 1995, just a year before his death, Carl Sagan published a bestselling book called “The Demon-Haunted World” which lamented what Sagan saw as the increasing encroachment of pseudoscience on people’s minds. It was an eloquent and wide-ranging volume. Sagan was mostly talking about obvious pseudoscientific claptrap such as alien abductions, psychokinesis and astrology. But he was also an astute observer of human nature who was well-educated in the humanities. His broad understanding of human beings led him to write the following paragraph which was innocuously buried in the middle of the second chapter.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

As if these words were not ominous enough, Sagan follows up just a page later with another paragraph which is presumably designed to reduce us to a frightened, whimpering mass.

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

What’s striking about this writing is its almost clairvoyant prescience. The phrases “fake news” and “post-factual world” were not used during Sagan’s times, but he is clearly describing them when he talks about people being “unable to distinguish between what’s real and what feels good”. And the rise of nationalist prejudice seems to have occurred almost exactly as he described.

It’s also interesting how Sagan’s prediction of the outsourcing of manufacturing mirrors the concerns of so many people who voted for Trump. The difference is that Sagan was not taking aim at immigrants, partisan politics, China or similar factors; he was simply seeing the disappearance of manufacturing as an essential consequence of its tradeoff with the rise of the information economy. We are now acutely living that tradeoff and it has cost us mightily.

One thing that’s difficult to say is whether Sagan was also anticipating the impact of technology on the displacement of jobs. Automation had already been around in the 90s and the computer was becoming a force to reckon with, but speech and image recognition and the subsequent impact of machine learning on these tasks was in its fledgling days. Sagan didn’t know about these fields: nonetheless, the march of technology also feeds into his concern about people gradually descending into ignorance because they cannot understand the world around them, even as technological comprehension stays in the hands of a privileged few.

In terms of people “losing the ability to set their own agendas or question those in power”, consider how many of us, let alone those in power, can grasp the science and technology behind deep learning, climate change, genome editing or even our iPhones? And yet these tools are subtly inserting them in pretty much all aspects of life, and there will soon be a time when no part of our daily existence is untouched by them. Yet it will also be a time when we use these technologies without understanding them, essentially safeguarding them with our lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness. Then, if something goes wrong, as it inevitably does with any complex system, we will be in deep trouble because of our lack of comprehension. Not only will there be chaos everywhere, but because we mindlessly used technology as a black box, we wouldn’t have the first clue about how to fix it.

Equally problematic is the paradox in which as technology becomes more user-friendly, it becomes more and more easy to apply it with abandon without understanding its strengths and limitations. My own field of computer-aided drug design (CADD) is a good example. Twenty years ago, software tools in my field were the realm of experts. But graphical user interfaces, slick marketing and cheap computing power have now put them in the hands of non-experts. While this has led to a useful democratization of these tools, it had also led to their abuse and overapplication. For instance, most of these techniques have been used without a proper understanding of statistics, not only leading to incorrect results being published but also to a waste of resources and time in the always time-strapped pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

This same paradox is now going to underlie deep learning and AI which are far more hyped and consequential than computer-aided drug design. Yesterday I read an interview with computer scientist Andrew Ng from Stanford who enthusiastically advocated that millions of people be taught AI techniques. Ng and others are well-meaning, but what’s not discussed is the potential catastrophe that could arise from putting imperfect tools in the hands of millions of people who don’t understand how they work and who suddenly start applying them to important aspects of our lives. To illustrate the utility of large-scale education in deep learning, Ng gives the example of how the emergence of commercial electric installations suddenly led to a demand for large numbers of electrical engineers. The difference was that electricity was far more deterministic and well-understood compared to AI. If it went wrong we largely knew how to fix it because we knew enough about the behavior of electrons, wiring and circuitry.

The problem with many AI algorithms like neural nets is that not only are they black boxes but their exactly utility is still a big unknown. In fact, AI is such a fledgling field that even the experts don’t really understand its domains of applicability, so it’s too much to believe that people who acquire AI diplomas in a semester or two will do any better. I would rather have a small number of experts develop and use imperfect technology than millions adopt technologies which are untested, especially when they are being used not just in our daily lives but in critical services like healthcare, transportation and banking.

As far as “those in power” are concerned, Sagan hints at the fact that they may no longer be politicians but technocrats. Both government and Silicon Valley technocrats have already taken over many aspects of our lives, but their hold seems to only tighten. One little appreciated story from that recent Google memo fiasco was written by journalist Elaine Ou who focused on a very different aspect of the incident; the way it points toward the technological elite carefully controlling what we read, digest and debate based on their own social and political preferences. As Ou says,

“Suppressing intellectual debate on college campuses is bad enough. Doing the same in Silicon Valley, which has essentially become a finishing school for elite universities, compounds the problem. Its engineers build products that potentially shape our digital lives. At Google, they oversee a search algorithm that seeks to surface “authoritative” results and demote low-quality content. This algorithm is tuned by an internal team of evaluators. If the company silences dissent within its own ranks, why should we trust it to manage our access to information?”

I personally find this idea that technological access can be controlled by the political or moral preferences of a self-appointed minority to be deeply disturbing. Far from all information being freely available at our fingertips, it will instead ensure that we increasingly read the biased, carefully shaped perspective of this minority. For example, this recent event at Google has indicated the social opinions of several of its most senior personnel as well as of those engineers who more directly control the flow of vast amounts of information permeating our lives every day. The question is not whether you agree or disagree with their views, it’s that there’s a good chance that these opinions will increasingly and subtly – sometimes without their proponents even knowing it – embed themselves into the pieces of code that influence what we see and hear pretty much every minute of our hyperconnected world. And this is not about simply switching the channel. When politics is embedded in technology itself, you cannot really switch the channel until you switch the entire technological foundation, something that’s almost impossible to accomplish in an age of oligopolies. This is an outcome that should worry even the most enthusiastic proponent of information technology, and it certainly should worry every civil libertarian. Even Carl Sagan was probably not thinking about this when he was talking about “awesome technological powers being in the hands of a very few”.

The real fear is that ignorance borne of technological control will be so subtle, gradual and all-pervasive that it will make us slide back, “almost without noticing”, not into superstition and darkness but into a false sense of security, self-importance and connectivity. In that sense it would very much resemble the situation in “The Matrix”. Politicians have used the strategy for ages, but ceding it to all-powerful machines enveloping us in their byte-lined embrace will be the ultimate capitulation. Giving people the illusion of freedom works better than any actual efforts at curbing freedom. Perfect control works when those who are controlled keep on believing the opposite. We can be ruled by demons when they come disguised as Gods.

On the primacy of doubt in an age of illusory certainty

This is my second monthly column for the website 3 Quarks Daily.

We live in a fractured age when many seem to be convinced that their beliefs are right, and that they can never agree with the other side on anything to any degree. Science has always been the best antidote against this bias, because while political truths are highly subjective and subject to the whims of the majority, most scientific truths are starkly objective. You may try to pass a law by majority vote in Congress saying that two and two equals five, or that DNA is not a double helix, but these falsehoods are not going to stay hidden for too long because the bare facts say otherwise. You may keep on denying global warming, but that will not make the warming stop. What makes science different is that its facts are true irrespective of whether you believe they are true.

But combined with this undeniable nature of scientific facts exists a way of doing things that almost seems paradoxical to proclamations about hard scientific truth. That is the essential, never-ending role of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty in the practice of science. Yes, DNA is a double helix, and yes, it almost seems impossible that this fact will someday be overturned, but even then we should not hold the fact as sacrosanct. "Truth" in science, no matter how convincing, is always regarded as provisional and subject to change. Some scientific facts are now so well documented that they approach the status of "truth", and yet considering them so literally would mean abandoning the scientific method. Seen this way, truth in science can be considered to be an asymptotic limit, one which we can always get closer to but can never definitively reach.

It's this seemingly paradoxical and yet crucial yin-and-yang aspect of science that I believe is still quite hard to grasp for non-scientists. Niels Bohr would have appreciated the tension. Bohr bequeathed to the world the concept of complementarity. Complementarity means the existence of seemingly opposite ideas that are still required together to explain the world. In the physical world, complementarity was first glimpsed in the behavior of subatomic particles which can sometimes behave as waves and sometime as particles, depending on the experiment. Waves and particles may seem to be contradictory concepts, and yet as the pioneers of quantum mechanics showed us, you cannot explain reality without assuming that electrons or photons are both. In his later life, Bohr extended the idea of complementarity to many aspects of the human world; good and evil, freedom and restraint, war and peace. He realized that all of these seemingly paradoxical aspects of the human and physical world have to essentially co-exist, not just if we want to understand reality as it is but if we want to develop tolerance for opposing ideas. Niels Bohr played a very significant role in making us comfortable with paradox and uncertainty.

In some sense the twentieth century was the age when science once and for all destroyed Platonic notions of certainty. The one idea from that time that really struck at the heart of certainty was Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Gödel showed us that we can never know everything even in the supposedly pristine and completely precise world of pure mathematics; even in this world we could keep on finding facts that are unprovable, and so mathematics will always be inexhaustible. At about the same time, Max Born and Werner Heisenberg demonstrated the fundamental probabilistic nature of the subatomic world. In one way, neither of these ideas destroyed certainty as much as they redefined it, but they did tell us that certainty is a very slippery concept, and one that needs us at the very least to recalibrate our expectations from both the physical and the abstract universe. At the same time, neither development portended the end of science in any shape or form; mathematicians went on proving important theorems in spite of Gödel, and physicists went on discovering important facts about the material world in spite of Heisenberg.

Some people are confused about how certainty and uncertainty can both co-exist at the same time in science, while too many opportunists (creationists and climate change deniers for instance) are ready to pounce on shreds of uncertain knowledge in the peripherals to declare the entire edifice uncertain and hollow. As science communicators, I think that we still fail to convey this co-existence of hard facts and room for doubt to non-specialists, and this failure is a significant reason for so many of our troubles in establishing a dialogue about science with the public.

One of those few who did a remarkably accessible job communicating the role of uncertainty in science was Richard Feynman. In "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", he made the point that many people look for certainty as an emotional aid; hence the rise of systems like religion. But as Feynman says, the only way we can make scientific progress is if we remain skeptical, if we expose even the best-known facts of science to the glare of doubt. To do this requires fearlessness, the courage to abandon even your most cherished beliefs in the face of evidence. But the scientists of lore understood well this need for courage. There is a reason why the Royal Society, when it was founded in 1660, chose at its motto the Latin phrase "Nullius in verba": Nobody's word is final. At the time, this way of looking at the world, of not regarding any authority including the King's as the final word, was a novel and revolutionary way of doing things. It marked a great transition from the age of kings to the age of reason. 

And it was a message that Feynman emphasized throughout his career:

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about some things, but I am not absolutely sure about many things, and there are some things which I don’t know anything about…such as whether it means anything to ask why we are here, and what the question might mean.

But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing. By feeling lost in this mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”

Skepticism engendered by fearlessness is an integral aspect of science; not only as some formal, abstract protocol, but as a necessary tool without which progress would be impossible. I would say the same attitude applies to the conduct of our social and political affairs, although as current events demonstrate, it's been exceedingly difficult to profess doubt and uncertainty in the political arena.

Today I find myself troubled by what I see as the misplaced conviction and lack of skepticism on both the left and the right in this country and in other lands. The real problem of course is not lack of skepticism in the beliefs of others but skepticism regarding one's own beliefs: as Feynman again memorably put it, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

The bedrock of presumed certainty in what one sees as hard, incontrovertible facts not only roots one's beliefs in certain sacred values, but it often simply precludes one from understanding subtleties and rationally responding to arguments on the other side. The concept of sacred values was popularized by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people sometimes become irrationally wedded to their viewpoints. The central reason is that humans tend to infuse scientific facts and findings with their own preconceived moral meanings. Once that happens it becomes quite difficult to accept or agree with facts that seem to collide with those values.

This knee-jerk disapproval manifests itself on both sides of the political aisle. The right is too skeptical even of the basic facts of global warming, while the left holds the science of global warming perfect and sacrosanct and believes that the science is largely settled. The right believes that genetics and race play a disproportionate role in mental qualities like IQ and creativity, while the left believes that environment can almost completely compensate for any such differences. In fact the left fears the right’s viewpoint so much that it gropes for support for the equality of all human beings in science, even when science and human value systems should really be kept separate from each other. The right looks into science for the contention held by some of its members that one gender may be inferior to the other. The left is so fearful of this contention that it is quick to interpret any studies demonstrating even subtle or uncontroversial gender differences as evidence of discrimination against one gender or another. 

Generally speaking, the right is quick to point out differences rather than similarities while the left is quick to assume that pointing out differences is tantamount to pointing out inferiority or superiority. The left's sacred values are purportedly equality and justice; the right's are purportedly freedom and God. Each side is frightened to give even a little ground for fear that the other side may declare victory. This fear is causing both sides to closet themselves into bubbles and echo chambers, into rejecting - as is being done on college campuses for example - even the possibility of exposing themselves to the other side's viewpoints and engaging with them. And the profligacy of social media, because of its ability to quickly surround yourself with like-minded people, creates an enduring illusion of your convictions being absolutely right.

Part of the solution to reconciling our sacred beliefs with each other is to again go back to that notion of complementarity extolled by Niels Bohr and to realize that many of our beliefs simply may not be completely compatible with each other, but that they still have to co-exist in order for us to form a complete picture of the world and to live in harmony. This point was made very clearly by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a 1996 commencement address at the University of Toronto; the talk was appropriately titled "A Message to the 21st Century". Throughout his life Berlin emphasized the plurality of human thoughts and values, and this theme was what he expounded upon:

"The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on."

It is the inability to grasp this fundamental tussle between different values that in part leads people to believe in holy truths. Human beings are uncomfortable with multiple answers, especially if they seem contradictory; but multiple, contradictory, complementary answers comprise the very essence of the world. Berlin however is honest and reflective enough to admit that he sees no straightforward solution to the dilemma. This is perhaps because the only solution is to admit the dilemma and live with it, to respect a plurality of opinion and abide by the views of multitudes, to recognize that the contradictions that man presents are the contradictions that man contains. In fact this reconciliation with differing views lies at the heart of both liberal democracy and scientific exploration.

Many decades before Feynman, another famous scientist had eloquently advocated for openness in both science and politics:

"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress."

More than almost anyone at the time, Robert Oppenheimer knew how crucial open inquiry was, again not as a formal, pedagogic aspect of science but as an error-correcting tool. Error correction is an important part of both pure and applied science. It can allow you to discover fundamental particles and mathematical theorems, but it can equally allow you to build a better integrated circuit and invent new drugs for cancer. As Oppenheimer realized, the atomic bomb had made this need for correcting error literally a matter of life and death. Even the politicians - deeply susceptible as they are to the effects of integrated circuits, cancer and atomic bombs - should be able to get on board with that urgency.

But perhaps we should leave the last word on the many virtues of doubt, uncertainty, self-skepticism and openness to a man who told us a cautionary tale about the horrific ends that result from the acts of men and women who throw all these values out of the window, convinced as they are of the indelible truth of their own beliefs. As he bent down to pick up mud from a pond at Auschwitz, Jacob Bronowski issued a plea to question our beliefs that is as ominous and heartfelt as it is relevant to our modern times.

“It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken...we have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power."

You may be mistaken. Think it possible.