The last great airbender

Adrian Newey, they say, can see the air.

He can see it tying itself in knots at the stagnation points in front of the rotating wheels; he can see the separation points on top of the wheels, and the dense thickets of turbulence behind; he can see the delicate boundary layers clinging to the underside of the wing-sections, ready to detach at the slightest provocation; he can see the rising turbulent wakes above and behind the front and rear wings, the streamlines spiralling around longitudinal axes, larger vortices driving smaller vortices until the energy is dissipated as heat.

In transient pitch and yaw, he can see the streamlines shifting, the boundary layers detaching, the wings stalling; then as dynamic equilibrium returns, he can see the separation points migrating aft until they reach the trailing edges, and downforce is restored. He can see the filigree vortices spinning off the corners of the wings and bargeboards, accelerating the airflow under the leading edge of the floor; he can see the diffuser as an aerodynamic lung, inhaling air beneath the car and creating low pressure like a venturi duct; he can see the exhaust flows keeping the boundary layer of the diffuser attached, and the low pressure areas behind the rear wheels amplifying the capacity of the diffuser.

For Adrian Newey is the last great airbender.

Seb's fractured society

Bound willingly together by electrostatic forces, the society of titanium atoms in conrod number 4 of Sebastian Vettel's engine braced themselves. From the moment they'd started their duty cycle, they knew something was badly wrong. Little more than 10 nanometres away, (the equivalent of half a block in Manhattan terms), they could sense an interloper. The minute perturbations in the stress field of the crystal lattice were unmistakeable, for within the otherwise optimal ordering of the titanium alloy, was a nitride inclusion. It glowered menacingly at its well-bred neighbours, who cowered in fright, and hid their electron families behind them for protection.

This metallic society had been on a long journey. Born in the hellish, claustrophobic confines of a massive star, many millions of years in the past, they'd been blown into space when the star had reached the end of its lifetime. In stoic silence they journeyed across thousands of light-years, until happening upon a small proto-stellar disk, where they found a home in the nascent crust of a small blue planet. After many years of heaving volcanism, and numbing stratification, they'd drawn the lucky straw, and were mined, reduced, alloyed, and then forged into a conrod.

Now they had a purpose which they performed with unalloyed pride, reciprocating in manic cylindrical fury, transforming chemical energy released in the forbidden void above, to mechanical energy submerged in the dark, mysterious, viscous fluids below.

The inclusion, however, was very bad news. Under load, the inclusion elastically deformed at a different modulus to its surrounding matrix, and after numerous cycles, the bonds eventually broke like tethers flailing from an errant Victorian airship. An ominous cavity opened up, and as the stress concentrated at the edge of the void, so the bonds there broke asunder like so much piano wire.

Some of these severed links created dislocations in the lattice, which rippled through the crystal, momentarily relieving the stress. Soon, however, the dislocations began to pile up at the nearest grain boundary, and presently a fissure had opened up from there as well.

The society knew the end was near, and as their electron progeny span in nervous agitation, the dark fissure leapt across the lattice, coalescing with the cavity in a ripping cascade of broken bonds. The conrod disintegrated, and the community was smashed against the roof of its firmament, sucked downwards in a catastrophic descent, and then, with a mighty whoosh, pumped into a whirligig ride, tumbling with unburnt fuel down a dark intestinal tunnel. Suddenly there was light and air! A carbon-fibre pullrod shot past like an orthotropic bullet. Briefly suspended upon a cushion of air, the society was then flung with disdain into a chaotic spiral, mingling indiscriminately with spray and oil, before crashing painfully onto bitumen and aggregate, cold and wet, rolling over and over to a final resting place.

The journey was over for now, the community forlorn, bereft of purpose and belonging. The road, however, swept ever on.

How much information is stored in a lapchart?

If your sleep was somewhat disturbed over the weekend, it may have been a consequence of getting up in the middle of the night to watch the latest round of the Ryanair Formula 1 World Championship, hosted, it appears, at a South Korean fishing village. Equally likely, however, your mind may have been immedicably troubled by the question of how much information is encoded in a typical Grand Prix lapchart.

So, to soothe your passage Lethewards tonight, let us endeavour to address the latter source of vexation, at least.

Begin by supposing that there are 24 cars, and that a Grand Prix consists of 70 laps. For simplicity, let us also suppose that all 24 cars complete all 70 laps. There are 24! (twenty-four factorial) permutations of ('ways of ordering') the 24 cars on each lap. Assuming that the permutations on each lap are independent, (even if the reality is that they are highly correlated), gives us the following number of possible lapcharts:

(24!)⁷⁰ ≈ 10¹⁶⁶⁵ .

Now, to find the amount of information, in bits, stored by a particular lapchart one merely has to take the log to the base 2 of the total number of possible lapcharts:

log₂ (10¹⁶⁶⁵) ≈ 5,000 bits .

Dividing by the number of bits in a byte (eight), gives the number of bytes as approximately 625. In other words, there is, at most, about half a kilo-byte of information in a typical Grand Prix lapchart. Taking into account the average degree of correlation between the order on successive laps in modern Grand Prix racing would reduce this quantity quite considerably.

Sleep well.

Many Worlds and quantum fungibility

This image, by Joakim Berglund, graces the cover of Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory, & Reality. The photo, taken by Berglund from a Cessna, depicts the damage wrought to a section of Swedish pine-forest by hurricane Gudrun in January 2005. The dendritic pattern is created by logging trucks, employed to remove the fallen dendritic growths...

The book itself contains a decent collection of papers, based upon the contributions delivered by various philosophers and physicists at a pair of conferences hosted in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hugh Everett's famously dendritic Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum theory.

Whilst most of the papers are highly technical, David Deutsch expounds a manifesto for the MWI which is more accessible to the non-specialist. Deutsch, it should be emphasised, is something of an extremist when it comes to the MWI. As explained previously on this blog, there are various strains of the MWI. One version of the MWI claims that a measurement conducted on a particle in a superposed state, literally causes the universe to split into different branches, so that each possible measurement outcome is recorded in at least one branch. In this version, there is one copy of the particle prior to the measurement, but multiple copies afterwards of both the particle, and its associated space-time.

A different version of the MWI claims that quantum theory is a theory of interfering classical universes, and that a particle in a superposed state is composed of numerous interfering branches even before it is subjected to a measurement. On this account, the measurement does not create any more branches than were already present. Rather, it is claimed that the measurement causes two things to happen: (i) the state of the measurement device becomes correlated with the respective state of the particle in each of the branches; and (ii) because the measurement device is macroscopic, a decoherence process subsequently suppresses the interference between the different branches, thereby ensuring the absence of macroscopically-detectable superpositions.

This latter version of the MWI provides not only an interpretation of the dynamics of quantum theory, but a radical compositional metaphysics, and one might imagine the wave-function splitting into decohered branches in the same way that a prism splits white light into the colours of which it is composed.

The radical formulation of the MWI is the version which I take David Deutsch to be the principal exponent of. This much is clear from the following excerpt, (where Deutsch refers to the branches as 'universes', and the interfering collection of branches as the 'multiverse'):

"Consider a single, free particle in empty space. It's described by a wave-packet...Which means that, as far as universes go, it's at different positions in different universes. You might think that a non-interacting particle, at least, is something that happens in each universe independently of the others, so that we can forget about the multiverse when describing it. But no. Again because of the uncertainty principle, and because of the linearity of quantum mechanics, there is no region of the multiverse in which both the position and velocity are behaving independently of what's happening elsewhere in the multiverse. That means that there are no autonomous information flows that would be universes. So in fine detail, even a free particle is an irreducibly multiversal object, not just a parallel-universes' one.

Furthermore, at a later time, the shape of the wavepacket will have changed. The instances of the particle in the multiverse will be at different positions. But none of them, individually, will have moved to where it is - because there is no such thing as one of them individually. When the universe approximation breaks down, the autonomy of the instances of a single particle in the multiverse breaks down too. They are then fungible," (p546).

In other words, the branches of a quantum state possess an identity consisting entirely of their interference relationships to the other branches, rather than any self-sufficient existence.

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III

Investigative reporter Peter Byrne has written a fabulous book which traces the life and career of Hugh Everett III, the inventor of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory.

Everett devised the Many-Worlds Interpretation for his 1957 PhD thesis, but the interpretation was neglected and derided at the time, and Everett himself never returned to academia. Charting Everett's intellectual and personal adventure, Byrne has uncovered some priceless material. Historians and sociologists of science will be particularly interested to note the pressure exerted by John Wheeler, Everett's thesis supervisor, for Everett to retract and rewrite much of the thesis, so that it would avoid antagonising Wheeler's scientific hero and mentor, Niels Bohr.

Byrne's account of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum theory is amongst the best to be found outside of the professional literature. The author has made a massive effort to understand and explain the concepts involved, and, crucially, has extensively consulted philosophers of physics such as Jeffrey Barrett, Simon Saunders and David Wallace. This level of scholarship is reflected in the final product, which puts most popular science accounts of quantum theory to shame. Byrne should receive huge plaudits for the diligence of his work here.

Everett is a particularly fascinating individual because after completing his PhD thesis, he disappeared into the world of US military research, initially working on the optimisation problems surrounding nuclear warfare. However, the reader seeking an informative, sober, impartial analysis of Cold War politics and strategy will be sorely disappointed here. What we get instead is an unbalanced, sub-Michael Moore, caricature of the era. As just one illustration of this, consider the following claims made by Byrne:

"During much of the 1950s, the de facto strategy of the Strategic Air Command under General Curtis LeMay was to 'preventatively' launch everything in its nuclear arsenal," (p74). "During the 1950s, the operating nuclear war plan of the United States was all or nothing. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, told a Gaither commissioner that a surprise attack by Soviet bombers would destroy the bulk of his B-52 bombers on the ground. He said that the official doctrine of deterrence by threatening a 'second-strike', or 'massive retaliation', was an improbable dream. He announced that SAC airplanes flew over the Soviet Union 24 hours a day picking up radio transmissions, and, 'If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.' And he intended to do this under his own recognizance, regardless of the opinions of civilian leaders, such as the president. Deterrence, for LeMay meant striking first and without warning," (p195).

Other historical analyses suggest, however, that US Strategy in the early stages of the Cold War was one of preemption rather than prevention, and there is a crucial distinction here which Byrne fails to emphasise:

"A first strike can take three forms. A preemptive attack is one made in immediate anticipation of enemy attack. A surprise attack against an enemy who is not yet preparing his own attack is either simply aggressive, or if undertaken from fear of an eventual threat posed by the enemy, preventive...the difference between the preemptive and preventive variants has often been confused, even by professional strategists." (Nuclear blackmail and nuclear balance, Richard K.Betts, p161). "NSC 68 [a 1950 document which formed the basis of US Cold War strategy for twenty years] rejected preventive war but tentatively embraced preemption," (ibid., p162).

Whether General Curtis LeMay privately endorsed a preventive strategy at various times is a moot point. The quote used by Byrne, however, is merely evidence that he supported a strategy of preemption, not one of prevention. Moreover, in a briefing given by SAC in March 1954 concerning its war plans, General LeMay explicitly stated: "I want to make it clear that I am not advocating a preventive war; however, I believe that if the US is pushed in a corner far enough, we would not hesitate to strike first." (Preventive attack and weapons of mass destruction, A comparative historical analysis, Lyle J.Goldstein, p43)

To claim, as Byrne does, that the US Strategic Air Command had a de facto strategy of preventive nuclear war, is therefore quite misleading. On recognising this, one might begin to doubt the veracity of other claims made by Byrne, and that would be unfortunate, because this is otherwise a great book.

As an investigative reporter, Byrne "specializes in uncovering government and corporate corruption." This is an important duty to society, but it is also crucial not to begin with the assumption that all government activity is corrupt. Byrne, sadly, lapses into a simplistic worldview in which most US Cold War politicians, scientists and generals are portrayed as self-serving, war-mongering maniacs. This is a serious flaw in any work which seeks to provide a definitive historical record, rather than mere propaganda.

It also has to be said that the book is peppered with typographical errors, which include frequent misuse of the apostrophe. In a £25 book, this is unacceptable, and it is time for publishers to recognise that a book suffuse with typographical errors is quite literally a defective product.

Nevertheless, despite these reservations, on balance Byrne has written a fantastic account of the life of Hugh Everett, and the philosophical conundra posed by quantum theory.

Return to planet Earth

With astral buoyancy, I float through interstellar space, tanning my diffuse, malefic psyche in the pleasant flow of cosmic rays. I swim upwards through delicate veils of pink and purple nebulae, then zig-zag among golden star-clusters, until I ascend above the galactic plane. There, I watch the spiral arms slowly rotating beneath me, my cold, iron will equilibrating with the solitude of space.

Off in a far corner, a red supergiant goes supernova, flaring like a nuclear match, a shockwave immediately billowing through the surrounding gas cloud. A billion stars lie beneath me, some of them providing the conditions for life and civilisation to flourish on nearby rocks. I can sense the souls on all these planets, feel their exhilaration and desperation, their love and hatred. I can hear the screams of the murdered, and detect the insatiable lust of the murderers. In time, I will harvest all these souls, good and bad; drain them of their life-force to feed my own.

I like coming up here. I can clear my head, and plot my triumph over geological and astrophysical time-scales, like an irresistible fourth law of thermodynamics. Glitches and momentary set-backs, of course, are inevitable: a necessary evil, incapable of stemming my necessary evil. All I need is a small opportunity, a platform from which I can re-insert myself into popular consciousness...

And, hullo, what's this? An invitation to appear on BBC's Question Time? Why, of course! Perfect. Now, all I need to do is re-assume corporeal form for a period of time. Let me see...this always hurts a trifle...bipedal form required rather than serpentine, remember...damn, that hurts a lot! Ah, there we go.

Planet Earth was always a favourite of mine: so much wonderful raw material to play with...

Tilke to the Max

F1 circuit designer Hermann Tilke has revealed that, with Bernie Ecclestone's blessing, his future designs will be "much more to the edge." Coming from Tilke, this has all the credibility of a pledge from Kim Jong-il to introduce a North Korean Freedom of Information Act.

Hermann continues to claim that his insipid portfolio of track designs are a consequence of the financial, geographical and safety constraints placed upon him. Whilst such constraints undoubtedly exist, people of genuine creativity always find ways to express their imagination, irrespective of the restrictions placed upon them. Yet, with the exception of Turn 8 at Istanbul, Tilke's work has been nothing but the output of a sterile, mechanistic, and utterly unoriginal mind.

So, for anyone such as Hermann, wishing to design a classic track for the very first time, here are some guidelines:

1) Don't design the circuit on a computer. Use your imagination, rather than selecting curves from the palette of geometrical arcs available in a piece of software.

2) Get involved with the selection of the land. Do not allow this to be presented to you as a fait accompli.

3) Select a piece of rolling countryside, with good drainage, good access, and some degree of forestation.

4) Allow the circuit design to be determined by the topography of the land rather than vice versa.

5) Use the natural contour, gradient and elevation of the land.

6) Introduce successive corners which swerve in alternating directions, i.e. esses. Make these esses tighten up or open out. For full effect, combine these esses with uphill or downhill gradients.

7) Introduce blind crests and blind apexes. Don't cut down trees.

8) Introduce corners with positive and negative cambers.

9) Don't use constant radius corners.

10) Introduce fast corners which can't quite be taken flat-out with the level of downforce prescribed by the current F1 Technical Working Group.

11) Introduce at least one point on the circuit where an F1 car will briefly take-off unless the driver has a confidence lift.

12) Don't try to pastiche corners from other classic circuits.

Proustian memory

I remark that Barry Sheene recently told me how much he admires Alain Prost, that, as well as being a wonderful driver in his day, Prost is also a thoroughly decent chap. "That's bullshit," snaps Brundle. "I was never a Prost fan. I didn't rate Prost as a person." (The Independent, 2nd August 2000).

Involuntary memory is a conception of human memory in which cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort...The term was coined by French author Marcel Proust. (Wikipedia, Involuntary Memory).

Why did you leave the Renault team at the end of 1983? "I knew that if the team lost the title that year, there'd be a witch-hunt in an attempt to find the people responsible. I was the ideal culprit, so I protected myself by getting in touch with McLaren. The team had just signed a contract with Porsche, and I had the opportunity to learn alongside a world champion [Niki Lauda]. I didn't hesitate for very long; it was just the right moment to try something new." (Alain Prost, Autosport, August 26th 2010).

Persistent rumours linked [Prost] with the pretty and charming wife of one of his superiors in Renault; the gossip columnists of France (with no more mercy than the tabloid press in England) pursued him to beyond and back. Alain denied the rumours, but to no effect; to me, he admitted he had been indiscreet. At the same time, John Watson, who had had a satisfactory but not earth-shaking season with Lauda at McLaren, was pushed by his agent to ask for a gigantic sum...and got the sack. That left a vacant seat at McLaren, a scandal at Renault (Alain said he walked out of his own accord, Renault said he had been 'dropped', and the truth is that Renault did a deal with McLaren) and Prost signed with Ron Dennis. (Keith Botsford, The Champions of Formula 1, p165).

My Monza babe

My gorgeous, blonde Monza babe,
We met betwixt leafy wooden colonnade,
And forbidden, ran hand-in-hand, 'long secret path and russet glade.

Passing from howl and bark of modern V8 song,
'Cross ancient banking, suffuse with heroic, ghostly throng,
Into secluded, Sun-dappled, perfumed bower,
Far beyond sight of start-finish tower.

There, limbed 'tween stocking-top and shameless hem,
Inviting arc of Parabolica unveiled,
Golden locks dancing on ivory skin,
Unzipped Curva Grande exposed, replete with sin.

Locked together, one hundred nights elapse,
Across Europe we passionately plunder,
'til one fateful day by Clapham market stall,
Beneath cruel wheels of omnibus did she fall.

And now I lay sombre flowers by marble headstone grave
And shed silent tears for my gorgeous, blonde Monza babe.

Hawking and God

"There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I read that book by that wheelchair guy." (Homer Simpson).

Good news for Anglican priests! Generally regarded as a metaphysically deluded collection of harmless buffoons, these men of God have today been press-ganged into various TV and radio studios across the country, and invited by unimaginative news editors to step through the familiar rhetorical choreography of the science vs. religion debate, in tango with an equally surprised, but delighted, collection of media-savvy physicists.

And the cause of this unholy ecclesiastical flood? Stephen Hawking's latest contribution to the philosophically ill-informed interpretation of science, and in particular his headline pronouncement in The Times that God did not create the universe. Coming in the same week as Tony Blair's revelation that he didn't like Gordon Brown, it seems that we are to be disabused of all our delusions in one fell swoop.

The Times are serialising Hawking's new book, The Grand Design (co-written presumably with Kevin McCloud), and in this momentous tome Hawking argues that the existence of the universe can be explained as a spontaneous creation from nothing, in accordance with known physics, and that this is why there is something rather than nothing. This claim is based upon an interpretation of some speculative quantum cosmology, and the interested reader is referred to a paper published a few years ago in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, which critically analysed such theories and interpretations in detail.

The other 'news' is that Hawking appears to have abandoned the notion that there will actually be a theory of everything, yet at the same time he waxes lyrical about M-theory. This is slightly odd, because M-theory, the theory which was supposed to unify the various superstring theories, has still to be defined, fifteen years after it was first hypothesised. The philosopher of physics Craig Callendar picks up on this:

"I was surprised when the authors began to advocate M-theory. But it turns out they were unconventionally referring to the patchwork set of string theories as 'M-theory' too, in addition to the hypothetical unified theory about which they remain agnostic."

And herein lies the fundamental philosophical contradiction in Hawking's position. He seems to advocate what might be called an instrumentalistic approach to the philosophy of science. In other words, he thinks science is no more than a tool for generating reliable predictions, controlling the world, and organising observational and measurement data. Hawking doesn't believe that science actually represents the objective structure of the world; as such, this is an anti-realist position in the philosophy of science. Thus, we have Hawking's acceptance of a patchwork of different theories, in lieu of a single theory of everything.

However, if Hawking is arguing that science can solve fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the question of why there is something rather than nothing, then he needs to adopt a realist philosophy of science. Under an instrumentalistic approach, there's no reason to believe what any particular cosmological theory happens to say about the ontology of the early universe, for such theories are, ex hypothesi, merely tools for organising measurement data and making reliable predictions. If physics cannot capture the objective ontology of the world, then physics cannot derive metaphysical conclusions about the world.

Yom Kippur and the Cosworth brigade

Many Formula 1 histories make the critical error of treating motorsport as if it is an activity hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. A far more interesting approach is to understand the coupled-evolution of Formula 1 with more general economic, technological, political, environmental, sociological and cultural trends.

As a case in point, consider Formula 1 in the 1970s (and early 1980s). This was an era in which the major manufacturers were largely absent from the sport, and consequently it was an era in which a small group of people could design a chassis, lease some Cosworth engines, and go racing. Ferrari were knocking about to disturb the Cosworth hegemony, but the racing was extremely competitive, with nine different drivers winning in the 1975 season, and four different drivers from four different teams winning the championship between 1978 and 1981.

But why were the manufacturers so manifestly absent from the sport during this decade? Why did the 1960s not culminate with the influx of manufacturer investment and television coverage ultimately seen in the early 1980s?

The one factor which dominates the explanation of all seventies phenomena was the economic stagnation. This clearly deterred manufacturers from involvement in glamorous forms of expenditure, and the slow rate of economic growth retarded the progress of all technology, including the telecommunications technology which Formula 1 would ultimately depend upon.

To be specific, one can attribute the competitiveness of Formula 1 in the late 1970s to the Yom Kippur war of 1973. This commenced on 6th October 1973, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, when Syria and Egypt jointly attacked Israel. It was only the support of the United States, which sent $2 billion of arms, that enabled Israel to repel its assailants. However, the support that the United States provided to Israel triggered OPEC, the Arab oil-production cartel, into raising oil prices and cutting oil production, and this caused the worldwide oil crisis of 1973-1974.

Prior to the crisis, the average rate of economic growth in the West had been around 5 percent; after the crisis, growth reduced to zero, and inflation rose to around 10 percent. The late 1970s, then, was an era of stagflation, and without this period of stagflation, the influx of major manufacturers, eventually seen from about 1982 onwards, may well have commenced circa 1976.

As a postscript, one might ask whether four different drivers from four different teams have won the World Championship over four consecutive years any time since. They have indeed, the years in question being 2006-2009...