Most of the people running this world, including Britain, are too innumerate to understand what is going on, and therefore too ignorant to put it right. And what is worse they don’t care. Yes I know that sounds improbable but I discovered it to be all too true when I got involved in the Sea Empress disaster back in 1996.
She had run into the rocks at the entrance to Milford Haven on the West coast of Pembrokeshire. Even 7 tugs combined couldn’t pull her off. Her bottom was partially ripped out and much of the 140,000 tons of crude oil inside her spilled out into one of our most beautiful national parks putting at risk the lives of innumerable birds, fish , crustaceans and sea-mammals, not to mention the livelihoods of all those employed in the tourist industry of West Wales. She wasn’t insured because, like all big oil tankers, she was far too dangerous to insure. Nor was she regulated because she was registered in a banana republic in Africa .Nor was her construction regulated because she had been built as cheaply as possible in South Korea in order to save oil companies about a penny a litre on a gallon of petrol. The naval architects, if you can call them that, had allowed them to grow in size from 16,500 tons to 600,000 without understanding the dire consequences – or perhaps they didn’t care. The largest weighed 5 times as much as the Empire State skyscraper. Yet they had no effective brakes or anchors, took 10 minutes to turn and 20 kilometres to stop. No wonder no sane insurance company would take such ships, or their poisonous cargos onto their books.
I only looked into all this because my little sailing boat happened to be moored close to the Sea Empress disaster. Using skills acquired as a Space Scientist I was able to analyse oil-tanker safety in a matter of days. I found , to my horror, that none of the “experts”, including marine architects, port authorities or legislators had any idea of the risks involved.. And what was far worse they couldn’t be persuaded to learn. Yes Official Government Inquiries were set up following major specific disasters but they were (deliberate?) white washes either because of their restricted Terms of Reference (US), or composed of the wrong people (UK). It is tragic. Just wait for the next crash. For instance it could end Pembrokeshire or Cornwall as a holiday destination for decades, and perhaps forever. And as for sea life……….
It must be obvious that for any dynamic system to be controllable by humans the reaction-time T(react) must be significantly less than the dynamic time T(dynamic) in which the dynamic system could go seriously wrong. If T(react) is say 2 times shorter than T(dynamic) then the human controller can make 2 attempts to put things right; if 3 times shorter then 3 attempts, and so on. As the consequences of loss of control become more serious one clearly needs a larger margin for error. Drunken driving is so dangerous because alcohol increases T(react) until it exceeds T(dynamic).
As ships grow in size and weight so their reaction times to the pilot’s decisions grows ever longer until they cannot be turned or stopped in time to avert disasters, sometimes with catastrophic consequences for man and/or Nature : example the Amoco Cadiz (1978) piling into Brittany with the release off 270.000 tons of crude oil, or the Sea Empress (1996) with 146,000 tons in Pembrokeshire. A Very Large Crude Carrier or VLCC (above 300,000 tons) takes at least 20 minutes to stop and 15 minutes to turn through 90 degrees, during which time winds, tides and the ship’s own momentum could take it miles. It is madness to allow such massive oil-cans anywhere close to our shores . And little can be done about it (double-bottoms are a sick joke) short of radical down-sizing.. If you want to know how dangerous a large tanker is, drink half a bottle of neat whisky, get into your car and drive it at 80 miles an hour in a built-up area.
We managed eventually to persuade the government to hold a full public Inquiry into the Sea Empress disaster with a High Court judge in charge. What transpired was a sick joke. The ‘Expert’ from the official Marine Investigation Board proclaimed that “The vessel was in in no way to blame because its seaworthiness certificate was up to date at the time of the accident.” Can you imagine such inanity? “It’s safe because someone has issued a paper in advance saying it’s safe.” And yet the High Court Judge accepted it. The wreck was patched up, renamed in case anyone recognised how dangerous it was, and sent back to sea threatening another ghastly tragedy. But what are wild creatures and human lives when there are profits, even very small profits, to be made ?
I don’t think we need to worry about Global Warming because, by then, Nature will be over anyway. We could do something about it but we probably won’t. If you don’t believe me you should read Dave Goulson’s quite wonderful book “SILENT EARTH, avoiding the Insect Apocalypse” (Jonathon Cape, 2021); it’s the best £20 you’ll ever spend. Then buy a copy for your children and grandchildren, and for as many of your friends as you can afford. You’ve got to be old like me( 84 next week) to remember what the world was like when we were young: wild flowers everywhere, butterflies bees and grasshoppers, the summer skies full of swifts and skylarks, cuckoos calling through the summer woods, ponds full of cockchafers, sticklebacks and newts……. Forty years ago I was lucky enough to spend 3 weeks in the Serengeti, and I wondered why such a magic spot of wildness was still left. The answer turned out to be a couple of insects, the tsetse fly and the mosquito. They kept the herdsmen and the farmers out. One good spraying, and it will all be over. In Britain our farmers spray their fields about fifteen times every year with insecticides, herbicides and fungicides thousands of times more lethal than the DDT we were wise enough to ban after Rachel Carson warned us just in time. Yes fifteen times! I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read Goulson . We’ve all got to read it before it’s too late. But it may be already. As Jane Goodall has said : “We inherited the Earth from our Parents, but we’ve stolen it from our children”.
The invention of the phonetic script about three and a half thousand years ago enabled humans to suddenly think about a million times better, and they took off. Likewise the invention of a script for thinking quantitatively, that is to say Mathematics , could lead to thinking of a different kind that is just as powerful. In fact it has already: Maxwell’s Equations (ME).
Some arguments are of a purely quantitative nature. For instance in our post “Civilization and Moonpower” we demonstrated that large cities not dependent on slavery only became feasible once tidal energy was harnessed, as was possible in North Western Europe, where it is far more abundant than elsewhere. Here I talk about the most momentous piece of Mathematics ever done, Maxwell’s Equations.
Maxwell’s Equations describe the interaction between Electricity, Magnetism, Space and Time. They were an attempt to write down the experimental findings of the ‘electricians’ Hans-Christian Oersted (1820) and Michael Faraday (1831) but they led to a totally unexpected insight, and thus to the modern world: “Electromagnetic waves can propagate across empty space at the speed of light”.
Out of that insight (1864) there was to come Radio (1887), Transatlantic wireless (1901), Relativity (1904), Electronics (1912), Broadcasting (1920), Television (1930), Code-breaking (1930’s onward), Radar (1935), Microwaves (1940), The Electronic Computer (1943), Communication Satellites (1960), Space Travel (1969), The Internet (1980), Mobile Phones (2000). … while the Second World War could as aptly be called ‘The Radio War’ because it was started by Radio ( broadcast hate propaganda), controlled by radio (e.g. Churchill and Roosevelt talking to their peoples), won by radar in its many guises both in defence and attack, and lost by code-breaking ( e.g. : the battles of Midway and Kursk). A huge operation like the D-Day landing would have been unthinkable without the command and control made possible by radio.
Einstein is rightly famous for his E=mc2 equation (1905) but in a sense he and others (for he was only one of several) were only adding footnotes to Maxwel’s Equations which in themselves prove that Space and TIme cannot be at all as we had thought them to be.
So what are Maxwell’s Equations? There are 4 of them actually and you can write them out in different ways using rather different vocabularies. Textbooks on Electromagnetism can make them look both galumphing and arbitrary, when, as I believe, they are inevitable; the world couldn’t have been constructed in any other way. I find that both beautiful and totally unexpected. They, and the many stories behind them, are certainly worth having a look at even if you have no ambitions to use them yourself. You can regard them like The Rosetta Stone, as a wonder to behold, though they are far far more remarkable and momentous than that iconic stone. If you don’t believe me look at:
Yes they do look unfamiliar, even frightening, but that’s probably because you’ve been put off Mathematics by bad teaching.The world is full of Baducation and bad ideas . And one of the most debilitating , which goes back to the Ancient Greeks, is the notion that “Mathematics is Deductive in Nature”, and therefore quite different from our normal everyday Common Sense Thinking , which is Inductive. But that is a complete misconception. It’s as if the Maths teaching profession have mistaken the grocery- bill for the groceries. Don’t take my word for it: Morris Kline, that most eminent Historian of Mathematics wrote: ” “Mathematics is a human activity and is subject to all the foibles and frailties of humans. Any formal, logical account is pseudo-mathematics, a fiction, even a legend, despite the element of reason.” [‘Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty, ‘ OUP, 1986]
So many of us have been put off maths because we’ve been taught it back to front by the maths- teaching profession: deduction first, intuition afterwards. No wonder so many of us rebel. If you look at the following url you can see the Theorem that “The angles in any triangle add up to two right angles‘ being taught in the two alternative ways so that you can judge which is best for yourself:
The consequence of all this innumeracy are fairly tragic. Most of us are innumerate and, in my opinion, innumerate people can never become wise, not any more, not in the modern world( see all the current confusion over Covid vaccination statistics). The great news is that innumeracy is by no means irreversible. Maths is a subject peculiarly suited to self-instruction over the Internet. I suggest that everyone who earns a certificate of numeracy receives an immediate grant of £15,000 while many prestige professions and jobs be reserved entirely for the numerate. Thus a large fraction of a population could become numerate at a trivial cost by comparison with many infrastructure projects. And surely widespread wisdom is more desirable than say more runways. It’s probably no accident that the most numerate people on Earth (the Japanese) are also the wealthiest (UN figures).
The consequences of all this innumeracy are fairly tragic. Most of us are innumerate, and in my opinion innumerate people can never become wise, not any more, not in the modern world ( see all the current confusion over Covid. vaccination Statistics). The good news is that innumeracy is by no means irreversible. Maths is a subject especially suited to self instruction over the internet. I suggest that everyone who can earn a certificate of numeracy receive an immediate cash award of £15,000, while many prestige jobs and professions should be reserved for the numerate. Thus much of a population could become numerate at a trivial cost: Widespread wisdom is surely more desirable than say more runways. It is probably no accident that the most numerate people on Earth (the Japanese) are also the wealthiest (UN figures).http://Baducation
If you would like to see a wide-ranging discussion of numeracy and innumeracy in the British context, taken from my book ‘History of the Brits’ (Amazon 2020) you might like to click on:
If you want to see a wide-ranging discussion of Numeracy in the British context you might like to click on:
Anyway , for those who can appreciate them, Maxwell’s Equations are every bit as beautiful as great music, prose or poetry . They enable us to hear , in Tennyson’s words “…the horns of elfland faintly blowing….” On the other hand the consequences of innumeracy can. be tragic. The Sea Empress disaster which drowned Pembrokeshire in oil back in 1996 was the outcome of innumeracy pure and simple, It’s. in the above url too.
Imagine a liquid which, if left out in the sun, absorbs energy from it and goes into its ‘Charged’ state. Later when it passes through the engine of your vehicle it is induced to release that solar energy without burning Oxygen, but reverts to its inert “Discharged’ state and is stored in the vehicle’s waste tank. Afterwards, at the refuelling station the inert liquid is exchanged for fresh ‘Charged’ liquid which goes into your fuel tank, and off you go again. The discharged liquids are collected, re-energised in the sun, and then recycled through the whole process; again and again and again. And because no Oxygen is is burned, no Carbon Dioxide is produced to pollute the atmosphere and warm the globe. In other words humankind would be getting all the energy it needs in a convenient form from the Sun , without damaging the planet. We’d have harnessed endlessly Recyclable Oil, or ‘RO’ for short. And why not? If cabbages can turn sunlight into chemical energy why can’t kings? Eating cabbages, burning the Oxygen which the cabbages have produced as a by-product, and then breathing out CO2 doesn’t have to be the only way we can survive. Sunlight is abundant and free. Surely, by taking thought, we can make use of it without preying on cabbages — or their fossils — and mucking up the atmosphere into the bargain? Grudges will say it can’t be done; but then they always do. As Francis Bacon wrote 400 years ago: ” But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible.”. Anyway I believe there’s evidence that someone succeeded long long ago:
Mind you one could reasonably argue that if RO were feasible then some creature in all the aeons of past Evolution would surely have exploited it already. The fact that none has is pretty convincing evidence against its practicality. Anyway if you do a simple sum you can show there isn’t enough sunlight out there to power a normal animal. Such a solar powered creature would have to be spread out like a blanket to catch enough of it. Surely that rules the idea out?
A slide from a Powerpoint presentation produced by my son Mathias for a talk he gave on our joint behalf at his own university, University College London back in 2005. It more than hints at what is coming next.
Almost, but not quite. I want to convince you that once upon a time there was a solar creature that ruled our skies for over a hundred million years, only to be wiped out in the great meteorite extinction which ended the age of dinosaurs.
Look at the next photo which I took in the Natural History Museum in New York in 2000:
The fossil wing of a gigantic dinosaur excavated in Texas, with behind it the complete skeleton of a much smaller specimen. The shoulder bones in particular look more like those of an ox than a bird. I was flabbergasted when I saw it because the laws of physics simply rule out such a monster from flying. But what else did it do if not fly? Bigger specimens up to 11 meters in span have been excavated since, though none is complete.
When alive the creature would have had a total wingspan of twenty feet or more and weighed around a hundred kilos. When I saw it first my hair literally stood on end. Why? Because a long term interest of mine had been the science of animal flight (principally birds) and I knew at once that the creature hanging from that ceiling could never have flown — not using normal metabolic processes; never, never, never! To stay aloft it could only have used solar power directly (and didn’t its giant wingspread resemble a blanket?).
Science is hard, mainly because there is so much to learn. We overcome that by specialising early, then specialising further again and again, learning more and more about less and less. That is all very well but it does have crippling limitations. To tackle any really ambitious project we have to form teams in order to broaden our individually narrow specialities. But what if nobody on the team is aware that fact X, from an entirely different field, will be the indispensable key to solving our problem? That happens all the time, and as we become increasingly specialised, may become the greatest brake to further progress in research.
Let’s take a famous example. Hans Christian Oersted was an undistinguished Danish scientist employed by his government to look into the hazards of storms at sea. Reading through the logbooks of ships that had survived, he could hardly ignore the frequent reports that during electrical storms the compasses on board went haywire. At the time (1820) nobody knew that Electricity and Magnetism were in any way related — but Oersted could hardly avoid that inference. So he went out and bought a battery (they’d just come on the market) and sure enough he found that modest currents would cause any compass nearby to swing dramatically. He published a brief note ( in Latin) which set laboratories across the world on fire. In particular Faraday and Ampere worked out the details of Electromagnetism, as it came to be called, and the modern world began: motors, dynamos, telegraphy, radio, Relativity, broadcasting, television, the computer — they were all waiting in the wings of history. But to set off that frenzy of invention it took Oersted’s almost accidental recognition that two previously unrelated phenomena were in fact intimately connected.
In my case the the accident was a warbler that landed on our ship during a storm in mid-Atlantic. To me it seemed like a miracle that such a tiny ball of feathers had made it out so far with no opportunity to either feed or rest. Not believing in miracles I set out to find its secret for myself, with no help from the existing literature. It took me ten years to crack the Range problem and a further two to prove that no bird weighing more than 12 kilo’s would ever fly. It could never generate the requisite power. So what was this monster doing hanging above my head in New York? It must have weighed at least a hundred kilograms,. What was more it could never have taken off, or landed safely. So how could it stay forever up in the sky? Solar power seemed to be the only possibility.
So if I am right Recyclable Oil once did exist upon this Earth — Pterodactyl’s Blood — and if it existed once surely we could synthesize it again — and save our planet?
You might suppose that everyone would be excited by such a possibility. Not a bit of it. On the contrary. Why not? It’s that bloody Specialisation once again. Palaentologists know all about pterosaur bones but don’t understand aerodynamics or physiology sufficiently well to convince themselves that pterosaurs couldn’t fly by normal means, while aerodynamicists knew how to design airliners but are not all that interested in dusty old pterosaur bones. Worst of all no one has that combination of knowledge in paleantology, aerodynamics, mathematics, physiology and energy- generation to convince themselves, or anyone else, that RO could be waiting just round the corner, to save us all. I know, because I’ve tried, and so has my son, to convince different audiences both in print and in person. Nobody has so far been able to find anything wrong with our arguments , but then nobody has so far been sufficiently convinced to publish them either
So then I grew desperate and tried to put the truth, as I see it, in a novel called Pterodactyl’s Blood, which is described elsewhere on this site, but which almost nobody has read so far. The facts are:
No animal weighing more than 11 kilograms could ever fly because Oxygen powered physiology is too weak to sustain the required power. Period.
Yet pterosaur fossils with wingspans of up to 30 feet testify that they indubitably did.
But creatures of that size could never have taken off ( running speeds of over 50 mph required) nor landed without crippling themselves. So they must have remained airborne, day and night, throughout their lives.
With Oxygen metabolism ruled out the only means of sustaining themselves in perpetual flight was direct solar power. And such was their wing area in proportion to their likely weight that this looks entirely feasible — even with moderate solar efficiencies ( less than 10%).
But such a departure from normal zoology would surely leave tell-tale marks in the fossil record. For instance solar powered pterosaurs could not have had feathers. And so on and so on……
What distinguishes honest science from mere speculation is vigorous Hypothesis-Testing. So we subjected the Solar Power Hypothesis to every test we could think of, and it passed. With no reasonable alternative it therefore deserves very serious consideration, especially so since it could , in principle, solve the Global Warming problem.
If you want to find out more about Recyclable Oil there are three possibilities:
Read my novel Pterodactyl’s Blood — its all in there bar the technical calculations. (described under ‘My books’ Category)
Look at the Power Point Presentation my son prepared for a seminar at his university — University College London. You should be able to see it at:
PS There are several more posts on this site about Flight, particularly bird flight, even a simple primer on aerodynamics which should enable one to understand where the Range and Power Equations come from. There’s nothing genius about it, but the consequences are dramatic. That warbler for instance. Click on my Tags and Categories.
PSS We were not the first to worry about pterosaurs with such vestigial legs taking off ( see references in our Science paper) but nobody before us realised the Power-problem, which is quite definitive.
Around 2000, after I had been working in Australia for 6 months, several friends came to Sydney airport to see me off back to Britain. They all commiserated with me , having to return to such a dreadful place where it rained all the time and the sun never came out (to say nothing of the awful food). ‘Wait a moment’ I thought to myself ‘I love living there’.
That would have been the end of it, but then the flight was delayed for 9 bloody hours. So I sat in the lounge and pondered the question : “Which is the best location on Earth to live — geographically speaking?”
I tried to be objective and to list the most desirable features one by one. Six weeks later I had a very clear and surprising answer — Britain. What delayed me most was the matter of climate — which led to a fascinating detour into the subject of ‘Human Thermodynamics’ which I had to more or less invent for myself.
I was shocked by the answer. I had suspected that the final choice would alight on somewhere close to the Mediterranean, in Southern France perhaps, or Tuscany. Not so; it was clearly and unequivocally Britain, not even Ireland, and I have never had cause to change my mind since.
Of course we are talking entirely about geography here, not history, politics or culture — which are all far too subjective.
If you want to see why Britain is so preferred, and unique, take a look at:
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