Check out these pictures of a dog that, apparently, has been present at each and every anarchists’ and socialists’ riot in Greece since 2008. Or maybe Athens just has an overpopulation of dogs and this type is proliferating. Anyway…
As documented yesterday, in this historic British election the most interesting part has started now. With a hung Parliament and several options to form a government, there really seems to be a constitutional impasse: while on the one hand Gordon Brown seems to have the constitutional right to stay on and try and form a government, David Cameron according to some has the moral right as the election winner to demand the keys to Downing Street 10.
A political historian can tell you that in times of constitutional fluidity, political structures are being created by actors as they go along. And in politics, this all amounts to theatre. Let’s put it like this: in an environment in which the rules are uncertain (as we have now in the UK), the rules are being created by political actors, but whose rules are accepted depends on the amount of legitimacy an actor has. And since legitimacy only exists in the eyes of others (in this case, the public, being informed by the press), actors have to make public acts, create public theatre, to gain leverage. It is about whose story, whose spin is being accepted.
This is what happens now. As David Cameron announces that he will make a statement at 2.30pm, presumably in order to demand the keys to Downing Street 10, Gordon Brown immediately moves forward, acts as a Prime Minister, lets the other parties free to engage talks, openly promises electoral reform to the LibDems and stresses the grave economic problems of today. You have to admire Labour for being so candid, for making moves so openly.
• Brown is adopting the “give them enough rope” strategy. He said he accepted Nick Clegg’s view that David Cameron should be allowed to form a government first. But he suggested that it was all going to end in tears. He said he would let Clegg talk to Cameron, but he implied that the talks would fail – and that Labour would then be in a position to open more substantive talks with the Lib Dems.
• He indicated that he has moved his position on electoral reform. Before the election Brown said that he was converted to the alternative vote (AV), a system that is not fully proportional. The Lib Dems want to go much further. Brown has just said that the public should decide in a referendum what system they want. I took that as a hint that he is open to full PR.
• Brown stressed the need for the government to respond to the economic crisis facing Europe. He has always argued that he has more economic expertise than any other leader and he seemed to be talking up the crisis to reinforce his claim to stay in office.
So now all eyes are on Cameron, whose speech is due in twenty minutes time. He will undoubtedly claim legitimacy and have a spin of his own; and the great question is whose story will be accepted. This, in turn, will create precedent and shape the political system for years to come.
- Update: In a, in my view, pretty weak speech, David Cameron first comes up with the option to form a minority Conservative government, and then talks a great deal about a “comprehensive offer” to the LibDems. This offer includes all kinds of things, except electoral reform. In this area, Cameron proposes an “all-party inquiry committee”. Well, if I was Nick Clegg, I’d be thinking twice. This is pretty meager. What’s up next is, I think, Tory-LibDem talks, which will probably not lead to an agreement, vindicating Gordon Brown’s predictions.
The New Scientist lists seven wonders of the quantum world – very readible and accessible.
This article, for example, about the mysterious habit of quantum particles at long distances to influence each other:
It is entanglement: the idea that particles can be linked in such a way that changing the quantum state of one instantaneously affects the other, even if they are light years apart.
This “spooky action at a distance”, in Einstein’s words, is a serious blow to our conception of how the world works. In 1964, physicist John Bell of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, showed just how serious. He calculated a mathematical inequality that encapsulated the maximum correlation between the states of remote particles in experiments in which three “reasonable” conditions hold: that experimenters have free will in setting things up as they want; that the particle properties being measured are real and pre-existing, not just popping up at the time of measurement; and that no influence travels faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit.
As many experiments since have shown, quantum mechanics regularly violates Bell’s inequality, yielding levels of correlation way above those possible if his conditions hold. That pitches us into a philosophical dilemma. Do we not have free will, meaning something, somehow predetermines what measurements we take? That is not anyone’s first choice. Are the properties of quantum particles not real – implying that nothing is real at all, but exists merely as a result of our perception? That’s a more popular position, but it hardly leaves us any the wiser.
Or this one, about the difference between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory:
The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.With its uncertainty principles and measurement paradoxes, the Copenhagen interpretation amounts to an admission that, as classical beasts, we are ill-equipped to see underlying quantum reality. Any attempt we make to engage with it reduces it to a shallow classical projection of its full quantum richness.
Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University, Israel, like many other physicists, touts an alternative explanation. “I don’t feel that I don’t understand quantum mechanics,” he says. But there is a high price to be paid for that understanding – admitting the existence of parallel universes.
In this picture, wave functions do not “collapse” to classical certainty every time you measure them; reality merely splits into as many parallel worlds as there are measurement possibilities. One of these carries you and the reality you live in away with it. “If you don’t admit many-worlds, there is no way to have a coherent picture,” says Vaidman.
