Bones, Rocks and Stars

Title: Bones, Rocks and Stars – The Science of When Things Happened
Author: Chris Turney
Publisher:Macmillan, 2008 (First published 2006)
ISBN: 978-0-230-55194-7
Pages: 182

When a new archeological find is unearthed, or a paleontologist turns up with a fossil, or a cataclysmic event is said to have occurred in the earth’s early history, the foremost question on our minds is when it has occurred. And science usually comes up with an estimated age of the artifact or event. How do they do it? How can we say with certainty (though many are drastically revised on further evidence or new technology) that an event has occurred this many years ago? Chris Turney’s book is an excellent catalogue of such techniques used by scientists presented with delightfully lucid examples that can be appreciated by any class of readers. In fact, this book may even be recommended as a must-read for any reader of popular science. Turney argues that the past is the key to the future and we must use all the available time to see it with full comprehension. The book also makes scathing criticism about ‘Creation Scientists’ who take the Bible literally and argue that the earth was created only 6000 years ago. Such shortsightedness is perilous for the present society as we are denied the details of past extinctions of life species and to learn the lesson from them, at least to ward off a human-induced catastrophe in future. The most important contribution made by the author is the instructive description of various dating methods such as radiocarbon, argon-argon, electron spin resonance, luminescence and such. The book is superbly structured as to gently move from newer to older events, ending with the dating techniques of the origins of earth and the universe. The author is eminently well suited for the job, as he is a geologist and Chair in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter and has a rich repertoire of practical experience such as dating on the ‘Hobbit’ fossil from Flores, Indonesia. Interested readers may also like to go through Chris Stringer’s The Origin of Our Species, reviewed earlier in this blog, which also dedicates a considerable part to explain dating techniques.

The book begins with a literary exercise of estimating the date on which King Arthur is believed to have lived in England. Even though this does not include any of the phenomenon described by physical sciences, the piecing together of information of historical and literary treatises provides an entertaining idea of the whole operation. At the same time, radiocarbon dating provides a definitive estimate of the antiquity of an organic object. This is best illustrated in the unveiling of the ‘Shroud of Turin’, which was believed to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. However, when tested, it turned out that the linen cloth was made in the Middle Ages, precisely at around the period it was discovered by a French knight. But, here lies the crucial point; the radiocarbon dating can at best be represented only as a possible period in which the event had occurred. The three labs, to which a piece of the shroud was entrusted, came out with periods that are slightly offset from the figures declared by others. This fueled another controversy to breakout, which is still not settled. This argument is put succinctly by the head of the team from Oxford University with a fitting reply that if you employ scientific methods, you have to settle for a probability of dates and if you want absolute certainty, you have to rely on faith! But we should not lose sight of a commendable deed among this flurry of opposing voices – the decision of the Vatican – Pope John Paul II was the pontiff – to submit the shroud to scientific examination. The Church could have happily continued the status quo ante, and none would’ve been the wiser. That’s why the world should spare a congratulatory note to the late Pope, who boldly decided to sweep away the cobweb of superstition in order for scientific enlightenment to pass through. The shroud turned out to be forgery and this may perhaps deter later religious heads from testing their own relics!

Another technique which is sure to intrigue the reader is dating used with tree rings. Trees accumulate growth rings on its trunks, whose width is proportional to its growth in that year, which is more in a warm, moist climate. Each year therefore produces a characteristic ring, which will be similar to other trees growing in that area. Gathering and comparing data on rings, the patterns may be stretched back to antiquity by overlapping information from different pieces of wood that share an overlapping period in their growth stages. The significant advantage of this method is that the year of cutting of the tree could be pinpointed. And this data presents a scenario which would send a chill down our spines. Studies show very dry or cold period occurring uniformly around the planet, lasting five to ten years. These events occurred in 2345 BCE, 1628 BCE, 1159 BCE and 536 CE. Such a long drought is sure to unsettle even today’s technological societies. This thing happened in the past and so, it may recur in the future. The reasons for this strange phenomenon must be assertively found in order for us to brace ourselves and prepare for a disaster that may come somewhere in future. Turney identifies the reason as the appearance of comets, which seems to be a farfetched idea. We have seen so many comets in the historical past and they wreak havoc only when physically impacts the earth. If the author is right, they may also cause drought by cooling the planet through reflection of sunlight back into space by the particles of ice and dust which constitute the comet’s tail. But unfortunately, this also is unconvincing. The earth passed through the tail of Haley’s Comet when it visited us in 1910 without any untoward incident. To cap it all, there may be doubts about the veracity of extending the inference from tree rings on a global scale. We know that climatic conditions vary on a span of a few hundred kilometers and the growth patterns also will be different. So, unless a chronology is built up for a specific area, how can the results be extrapolated on a worldwide scale?

The author narrates an interesting anecdote in which the career of a dendrochronologist (one who specializes on tree dating) was cut short by a mistake committed by him. This researcher’s corer got stuck in a very old tree while he was working on a bristle cone pine. Looking like a stunned trunk, the tree was felled by a ranger on his request. But the scientist was amazed to find 4950 rings on the trunk, meaning that the tree was growing for that many years, and that it was in its prime when the Great Pyramid of Khifu was under construction! Turney vouches that this unnamed individual never ever did dendrochronology again. Looks like a wanton misuse of the world’s oldest living organism, just for saving the cost of a common tool, isn’t it? But on second thoughts, is it? The tree provided valuable insights on extending the tree ring chronology for thousands of years in that area, by this accident. We read in Salim Ali’s autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow (reviewed earlierin this blog) that ornithologists shoot down a bird to learn about it. In that light, would killing a stunted tree count much? There may be counter opinion that the unfortunate guy may be rewarded for extending the frontiers of dendrochronology by a few thousand years.

Turney asserts that a primitive homo species called Home floresiensis lived in the Flores Island of Indonesia till a few centuries ago. He cites radiocarbon dates on some finds in that area and also legends from native people in support of his argument. Many of his peers oppose this postulate on the basis that the Wallace Line separates this island from Asia and hence the creatures must have crossed over the ocean in a canoe or something, which is outside the technical capability of the species, when judged by cranial volume. However, the author’s insistence on the veracity of the find runs counter to the thread of rational discussion carried through out the text. We have to suspect that the motive being the author’s personal participation in the dating of the remains. This could’ve been avoided.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating:4 Star

BlackBerry

Title: BlackBerry – The Inside Story of Research in Motion

Author: Rod McQueen

Publisher: Hachette India, 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-55263-940-5

Pages: 320

Mobile communication is a fast paced world of consumer technology where ideas lose sheen overnight and new gadgets take their place. This book tells the story of the company that built the wonder device of the first decade of the 21^st century. It follows the flowering of an idea in the mind of a college dropout and narrates the story of how the company grew into a giant, with half of the market share and 12,000 employees. Curiously, the book was written at the pinnacle of BlackBerry’s growth, in 2009. It suffered continuous reversals of fortune in the next five years, ending in losses. The timing of the book is thus superb, otherwise it might never have been written. Probably this demonstrates the author’s exemplary journalistic sense of making the right note at the right time. Rod McQueen is a business writer and has edited several books.

Mike Lazaridis was the person who thought about a research oriented company and founded one after dropping out of college while pursuing his engineering career. His excellent skills on microprocessors helped the fledgling company to secure good contracts. The company was founded in 1984 and it took 8 years before the co-CEO Jim Balsillie joined. The 1980s threw out a host of opportunities for the microcomputing platform. Ever since Intel came out with a microprocessor in mid 1970s, the field which would revolutionize computing beyond all recognition was born. Lazaridis proved himself in wireless data communication, by designing products for coordinating truck movement through the just introduced Mobitex technology pioneered by Ericsson. As is usually seen, good technicians perform miserably in dealing with finance which prompted him to hire a suitable guy in order to get money, so that he can spend it. Jim Balsillie came in in 1992. The company’s name was hit upon quite accidently. Lazaridis wanted to have the defining word ‘motion’ in its name to imply wireless connectivity on the go, but all combinations he tried at first were already taken. Then he came across the phrase ‘Poetry in Motion’ in a quite unrelated setting and the young founder didn’t hesitate much to use ‘Research in Motion’ or RIM for short.

Two way pager or a portable device that could handle email was the first product of RIM that captured a customer base to the company. But it was the Blackberry, which debuted as a PDA with email facility that lifted its fortunes. Introduced in 1999, Blackberry was a milestone in mobile communications. Voice was added to it only three years later in 2002, but its rock solid data performance was staggering. It was the only communication platform that worked stably and reliably in the aftermath of 9/11, when other devices succumbed to the infrastructural overload. Perhaps this aspect of stability commented itself to the US government to adopt BlackBerry in a big way. This came in handy for RIM in ensuring government support to it to withhold an injunction by a court in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by a little known company more as a means to extort money than for any real violation of its intellectual property rights. BlackBerry grew from strength to strength to grab a market share of 51% in North America. There the story as told by the book ends.

Unfortunately for RIM, the next five years till now proved rocky and most troublesome in its career. Google’s android-based smart phones stole a march on BlackBerry to usurp market share. RIM suffered losses, changed its name to BlackBerry Ltd, but its prospects are still bleak as I write this in August 2014. The book is graced with a forward by the Co-CEOs Lazaridis and Balsillie, which opened a path for the readers to reach the visionaries’ hearts. The distinguishing work that separated these young visionaries from other businessmen of equal rank is their benevolent attitude to academia. RIM always treated students from University of Waterloo, Canada, which was also its neighbour, with utmost respect to their budding ideas. Lazaridis himself was a student there and recruited many of its talented personnel. At one time, RIM’s company sign on its head office was directed at the university, rather than showing it off to the world. The founder’s thrust to the spread of knowledge and support to research with no corporate strings attached, found expression in the setting up of the Perimeter Institute in 2000 with a 100 mn C$ donation from Lazaridis and Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) with 70 mn C$ from Balsillie.

The book is endowed with a simple yet elegant style, but fails to impress as it never rises above the level of a corporate promotional leaflet. All pages are filled with laudatory comments, either from the author, or from the CEOs’ present and former colleagues. The book itself seems to have been a sponsored product of RIM, judging from its content and tone. This brings down its credibility and integrity. What the book sorely lacks is a set of photographic plates of the company’s early offices and early products like Inter@ctive Pager 950 and MobiTalk, which would have provided a measure of comparison to gauge its achievements.   

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Study of History, Vol 5

Title: A Study of History, Vol 5 – The Disintegrations of Civilizations, Part 1

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1939)

ISBN: 978-0-19-215212-1

Pages: 712

Volume 5 is the largest tome in the Toynbee series at 712 pages of fine print and even finer footnotes. Disintegration of civilizations is the theme of this volume and its first part is included here. Toynbee carries his theorization through the disintegration of civilizations till its dissolution in a two-part series covering volumes 5 and 6. The book commands careful study from its readers with its rich repertoire of references, incidents and long chain of sentences which won't let a reader look sideways while embarking on his epic journey through the narrative. But the sense of achievement and fulfillment that awaits him when the last page is turned is worth the effort.

Just like the mere birth of a civilization does not guarantee its growth, the breakdown of a civilization does not automatically relate to its disintegration and dissolution. While growth is achieved by the successful response to a challenge managed by the creative minority, disintegration sets in when the minority fails to come up with an effective response to a challenge. The minority then loses its creativity and thereby forfeits its privilege to act as the role model for the unthinking majority to mimic its newly managed feat. At this juncture, the creative minority turns into a dominant minority that forces the majority to toe its line through force. This group rides piggyback as an incubus on the society. New minorities may carry the baton at this point and may come up with a stimulating response to the challenge that proved insurmountable to the former. In such a case, the society continues its growth. In short, the growth phase of a civilization consists of several challenges and successful responses, while the disintegration phase is dominated by a single insuperable challenge that taxes the imagination and creativity of the society. It is then amenable to physical as well as spiritual aggression from outsiders and insiders alike. It is also likely that the disintegrating society may turn its arms towards its neighbours to bring about an expanded empire. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, the spread of a society denotes its disintegrative phase. The internal proletariat (the word means only a group of people in, but not out of, the society and its elders) provides a unique spiritual pathway to the beleaguered people in the form of a universal church. Christianity provided such a church to the Hellenic Civilization, exactly like Islam to the Syriac and Hinduism to the Indic.

A schism in the body social creates the toxic seed that develops into disintegration. The society splits up into a dominant minority and internal proletariat. The barbarians on the outer rim now secede from the society to turn into an external proletariat. The internal proletariat accepts alien intellectual sparks and develops a universal church founded on a higher religion, or at least, a different religion than that of the dominant minority. In the case of Hellenic civilization, Christianity donned the mantle of the universal church, in which the internal proletariat borrowed the idea from Syriac civilization, which was an alien one. Similarly, in the Sinic civilization, Mahayana (not of the Tantric variety) obtained that position which was assumed by Christianity in the Hellenic. The internal proletariat is the ideal fraction for assimilating foreign stimulus, since it is composed of an amalgam of groups of diverse origins – that of fallen members of the dominant minority, displaced members of that society, and externally recruited barbarians as a result of that civilization’s interactions with the outside world. The barbarians outside the pale, who are still unsubjugated have another destiny to perform, in the creation of a universal state for the disintegrating society. The Mongols and Manchus did it for the Sinic civilization, Ottomans made it for Orthodox Christendom, Mughals did it for the Hindu and the Aztecs for the Mayan. It need not always be the lot of barbarians to provide a universal state. In the case of the Hellenic, the Romans did it from their unique position of guarding the frontiers of the civilization against barbarian attackers. A curious fact is also identified by the author. When barbarians conquer a civilization to impose its universal state, their subjects acquiesce in when their rulers are unadulterated barbarians, who have not been ‘tainted’ by any alien civilization. In the case of such tainting, the society will be in rebellion against their masters, and may even throw them out, as the Chinese did against the Mongols and the Egyptians to the Hyksos. The external proletariat also gifts the society with heroic poetry of a distinctive kind.

As a sequel to the mention of the birth of astrology as the contribution of the Babylonian dominant minority, Toynbee says that, “in taking over Astrology from its Babylonic fathers in and after the 2^nd century BC, the Hellenes put their own imprint upon it, as is witnessed by the fact that, in India at the present day, some of the current technical terms of the practitioners of this pseudoscience are etymologically of Greek origin” (p.57 footnote). Unfortunately he doesn’t elaborate on the idea, which would have been a scathing indictment of this dubious practice that is wreaking havoc on millions of Indians even today. Continuing on the theme of India, this volume reserves an annex to speculate on the age of the greatest Indian epic, the ‘Mahabharata’. It proposes that the epic is not unitary and several accretions have taken place in its content. This is quite acceptable, and self-evident, but the second postulate challenges some of the established ideas about its origin. The author suggests that Mahabharata was crystallized at a much later date than the arrival of the Aryas at about the middle of second millennium BC. The foundations of heroic poetry depicted in the work corresponds to this period, but it condensed into its present form at the time of Saka rule in Ujjain, about 150-390 CE. The Sakas who came down to Indian in the 1^st century BC, following the same route as Aryas, might have found their predecessors’ heroic poetry impressive and might have added to it, using native bards. The suggestion is very bold and requires further research to be established or refuted.

According to Toynbee’s principles, an internal proletariat supplies a disintegrating society with a universal church and he examines carefully whether communism as exemplified in Soviet Union of that time, fits the bill. Marxian philosophy had all the trappings of a religion. It envisages a clash of competing demographic groups, resulting in dictatorship of the proletariat for a brief period and the whole merging into a stateless society. The author ascribes this part of Marx to be a borrowal from Jewish scriptures. In those books, the fight between the good and the evil results in the rule of a Messiah for a millennium and then God’s will prevails over the world. Marx’s appellation for comparable acts of God in Jewish scriptures is ‘Historical Necessity’. Marxism’s appeal is to the whole of mankind and not to a regional state. Toynbee identifies debt to Christian ecumenicalism here. However, when Lenin and Stalin established a socialist regime in Russia in 1917, it faced a dilemma. A faction led by Trotsky argued that revolution is a continuous affair and the resources of the Soviet state were to be earmarked for exporting revolution worldwide. Stalin’s official faction opposed this, arguing that the new state’s assets should be used for its own upliftment first. The degeneracy of communism as a parochial, national philosophy is to be observed here. He further equates this with the Maccabeus Jewish state in the first century and to Aristonicus’ failed City of the Sun in 2^nd century BC. Toynbee then predicts that communism will continue to exist as a state with degradation in its ideals. However, he is obviously way off the mark, when we look back with hindsight. Marxism exactly shared the fate of his own examples, in suffering a collapse in those countries where it ruled.

The author sets apart ample space a searing criticism of Marxism and its personification in the form of a communist state in the USSR. However, Toynbee’s accusations cross the limits of rational propriety on at least one occasion. He sings the praise of a primitive socialism that is said to have existed in primitive Christianity and argues that Marx borrowed his concepts from this ideal exemplified in the New Testament. This reasoning appears to be labored and tenuous to an impartial observer.

The book assigns a larger than life role for religion in the formation and growth of civilizations. Writing before the Second World War, this is not astonishing in a historian of that era, but such a gross accounting error is unpardonable in a post-bellum author if he intends to be taken seriously. More than that, Toynbee's ideal religion rises among the masses and grows to encircle the dominant minority. Such bottom-up progress is essential for the religion to grown, as he gives many examples in which the top-down approach, in which a monarch favors a religious persuasion of his choosing to be imposed on the proletariat. Roman emperor Julian's Neo-Platonism, Egyptian monarch Iknaton's solar worship, and Mughal emperor Akbar's din-elahi are examples of such religions that could not live much after their founder's own death. However, Christianity in Hellenic and Hinduism in Indic civilizations sprouted from its seed among the ordinary people and rose to the status of a universal church. The author identifies a major exception here - Islam, which grew with political backing of the monarch in the person of a caliph, but escaped the ill fate of its sister religions that were similarly imposed from above. But the author is quick to propose a mitigating factor. The Umayyad caliphate, under whose aegis a primitive Islam gained ground in the Middle East in 7th century CE, was lukewarm in their conformity to Islam, themselves being on the side of oppressors of the Prophet in Mecca and instrumental in making him flee to Medina. The Umayyads were usurped of their throne in 750 CE by the Abbasids, who continued the practice of noble toleration towards people of the book, (Christians and Jews, but extended to Zoroastrians as well). But this 'nobility' is of course derived from an economic motive. People of other faiths were tolerated in Islamic societies only on the two conditions of being loyal to the political regime and paying a super tax for practicing their own religion. If such a person converted to Islam, the administration stood to lose the tax. This unique arrangement might have provided Islam with an exceptional fate vis-à-vis other religions that were sponsored by the ruling party.

Exemplary research has gone into the making of this book, but some of Toynbee’s examples look a bit odd and even in bad taste! As an example, he says about the impact of Hellenism split the Syriac internal proletariat into fragments as “like the stones of a cathedral are splintered by the explosion of a shell” (p.126). A strange example indeed! Also, when commenting on the religion of black slaves transported to America, the author spurts out “The African negro slave’s religion was no more fit than any other element in their hereditary culture to hold its own against the overwhelmingly superior civilization of their European white masters” (p.192). Another drawback is the utter lack of maps which is really frustrating for uninitiated readers as the author refers to geographic parameters on literally every page.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star