My challenge to myself was to map these different adjectives with yes/no questions that have the pronoun “you” as their subject. First, let me make it absolutely clear that I would easily admit that this whole thing is a gross oversimplification if pushed; I even deliberately went for the fun factor in some questions/answers. Secondly, I salute those who see the seriousness in it, and below the image are some explanations for them.

This chart was done with basic ontology and epistemology in mind – with some weight on modern philosophy of mind; it doesn’t include ethics or political philosophy because the adjectives for these areas of philosophy are not mutually exclusive with the ones that are on the chart: one can be a non-reductive physicalist and a Marxist at the same time. I realize that even some of the ones on the chart are not always mutually exclusive, but they at least deal with the same type of questions and therefore can be said to be “in competition” with each other. Maybe the most troubling in this respect are the nihilist/postmodernist categories: a nihilist can be a biological naturalist, but I expect a true nihilist/postmodernist to answer a question like “Can you be duplicated within a computer?” with “I don’t care” or “It doesn’t matter” or “It’s an invalid question” – they would have a unique indifferent stance towards those questions. That’s why I included them in this chart.

My apologies go to those who take this thing seriously enough to feel bad that they are excluded from it; I will do my best to include other adjectives (related to the concept of the chart) if you point them out to me. I know, for instance, that Hindus are missing, but their beliefs are too diverse for me to understand, generalize and transform into one question-answer. It should be obvious that, even though I did my research for the majority of the adjectives, I went deeper in areas I was most familiar with.

A final note: You don’t really get to be non-reducible just because you believe it and consider yourself a non-reductive physicalist. While the questions on this chart are about what you think you are, the answers in fact reveal what you are – the adjective you get in terms of your theories/beliefs.

What do you think if you notice that all the zeros in the book you’re reading have inverted stroke modulation? (The vertical parts are thinner than the horizontal parts.) You may think that there’s been a glitch in the font software. The moment of delight comes when you remember that the book you’re holding is A Universe From Nothing by physicist Lawrence Krauss who argues that the nature of nothing is quite different from what we thought: it is unstable and has to give rise to something. You may then think, as I first did, that the “0″ glyph of the font has been modified for this purpose but the original Stempel Garamond design actually has zeros with inverted strokes. I bet someone was reminded of this fact and chose the typeface with this clever detail in mind, though I wasn’t able to find out who did the typesetting. Even if this is pure coincidence, it’s too good to go unnoticed.

To be honest, I view physics as a much respected distant elder in comparison to biology which is like a lover to me. Ever since I did my first readings on quantum physics and relativity, I’ve always felt the famous barrier of intuitive understanding – the limits of our cognitive machinery evolved to function in “the Middle World”. My approach to contemporary physics and its deep questions as a layperson has been an indifferent one: “Even if we arrive at new answers, I won’t be able to understand them” – in a Searlean sense.

Krauss’s book has somewhat changed that. First, while he surveyed the recent (last century) developments in physics and cosmology, he managed to make me understand many things that I hadn’t quite understood in my previous readings. Moreover, the book regenerated the curiosity in me related to the big questions only physics can answer by making them more accessible and relevant, and convinced me that our flat universe with its total gravitational energy of zero can indeed come from almost nothing. (The last one was probably the easiest since I’m in no position to dispute.) I say “almost” because I can see how Krauss’s version of nothing is not going to satisfy those who ask the age-old metaphysical question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” As for me, I find the question too, well, metaphysical to be taken seriously.

If you’re curious but not enough to read the book, you can watch Krauss’s popular talk after which the book was written.

LEA is the electronic arm of the pioneer art journal, Leonardo – Journal of Art, Science & Technology. It is itself a peer reviewed electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm where art, science and technology converge. The new LEA, with Editor-in-Chief Lanfranco Aceti, is a collaborative effort between The MIT Press; Leonardo/ISAST; Goldsmiths, University of London; FACT; and Sabancı University. In addition to the electronic format on its website, it is now available as print on Amazon.

P.S. Emre made this amazing opening title for the seminars, don’t miss it.

This is a summary of the history of the universe, life on Earth and humanity, all belonging to the same picture shown in seven different time scales. It is in fact a reminder I made for my own use, like a summary of the course material a student prepares before an exam. (This was something I was particularly good at as a student, and I now realize that most of my personal work too is of that nature. I’ll remember this if I ever need an “artist’s statement”. If I ever become an artist.)

After publishing this, quite a lot of people have said that they want to hang a print of it on their wall. High-quality prints of different sizes and materials of The Big Picture in Seven Scales can be bought here, with worldwide shipping. (The png file you see on the web isn’t good for printing.)

The initial plan was to represent everything on one very lengthy line at one scale and produce a print to hang on some large enough wall so that the viewer can intuitively sense the amounts of time in question. For the screen medium – and for regular walls – this was not very practical so I did this version with seven scales, though I still plan to do the big version, at least 15 meters long.

My main purpose with this thing was to give a sense of how tiny our time scales are compared to the larger scheme of things, in one look. For this reason, the key feature of this visualization to me is the gray gradients relating the different scales to one another. And that’s why I stick with an oldschool flat-out one-image version instead of a fancy interactive one with zooming in and out. (It has nothing to do with my personal dislike for interaction.) By the way, I find the fact that all this immediate visual information is embedded in a 104 kilobyte image file terribly pleasing.

Dates are of course approximate. I first wanted to cite the sources for the information here but after some point of my research they became just too numerous to keep track of as I cross-checked everything in multiple sources. (When different dates were given at different sources, I chose to use something in between. Luckily there isn’t too much controversy; everybody agrees that Mayans came after the dawn of multicellular life.) In any case, I believe the information here is as public domain as can be. I will just hyperlink the sources of the linegraphs I included: the atmosphere oxygenation, the global mean temperature for 160.000 years, the world human population and the global mean temperature anomalies for 150 years.

While researching for the temperature data I had a chance to form a more informed opinion on the issue of global warming but here I won’t go into the discussions of whether it is real, human-induced or dangerous; I tried to stay as neutral as possible by showing temperature graphs at two different time scales, both accepted and used by people on both sides of the argument. If anything my visualization just says “Yes, the global mean temperature is fluctuating in every time scale, and yes, in the scale of the last 100 years we are seeing a warming trend.” – these two statements, I believe, are not debated. (This page by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is by far the most clear, concise and structured one I saw on the basics of global warming, and although it’s on the “warmist” side it could be a good starting point for any curious person no matter his/her inclination on this politically charged issue.)

Some of the information on The Big Picture is less conclusive than the majority and perhaps I should add a few explanations for those.

• The RNA World hypothesis about the origin of life may be impossible to confirm but I observe that it’s the most popular one among scientists, and I was assured enough when I saw it favored in the prestigious Molecular Biology of the Cell (Fifth Edition).
• The dates for the beginning of sexual reproduction are also vague, and I have nothing to say about that. I just wanted to give you a piece of advice based upon my experience: don’t ever google “sex” if you want information on the evolution of sexual reproduction. Just don’t. The world doesn’t work like that.
• There’s some recent findings, published in Nature in 2010, that suggests that multicellular life may have begun as early as 2.1 billion years ago but I chose to stick with the status quo on that because the paper’s too fresh.
• There’s also some new findings (Science, 2005) suggesting, contrary to what we knew, that grasses may have evolved before the end of dinosaurs. (Just a cool way of saying “They found grass in fossilized dinosaur dung”.) Here I was convinced enough to have it their way.
• There are people who claim that the Moon landing was faked. There are also people who claim that everything popped into existence 6000 years ago. Just so you know.

One terminology note: The dinosaurs – that are extinct – are dubbed “non-avian dinosaurs” today by scientists because we’re sure that birds are technically dinosaurs too. So we mustn’t say that “dinosaurs”, in their entirety, are extinct. However, as Jack Horner reminds us, all the kids in the world know that birds are not really cool enough to be dinosaurs.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me via comments below or email if you think there are corrections to be made, very important things to add, etc. I’m sure it’ll need updating in future, thus the “v1.2″ in the title.

My thanks go to Bilge Kobaş, Amaç Herdağdelen and Eser Aygün for their useful and challenging comments, as always. Eser has suggested that I should also add the future of the universe and at first I loved the idea. However, when I did research for the future scenarios for humanity, the Earth and the universe, I realized that there are too many alternatives – nearly all of them speculative – and it would be misleading if I chose between them and omit the rest. The historical information displayed in this work is obviously much more conclusive compared to our predictions about the future, and adding those predictions here would unfairly diminish the reliability of the former. Maybe I can do another version just for the alternative future scenarios. In future. That’s one scenario.

I dedicate this piece to mom, who has made sure, recently and on many past occasions, that I stayed sane enough to be spending time on these things.

Lewontin is a leftist and he couldn’t be more obvious about it. When he unconvincingly accuses all science of being ideological, it seems like he’s preparing the ground for and justifying the strong ideology behind his own writing. He refuses the extreme idea that genes are the source of all causation in the human sphere, only to replace them with bourgeoisie and capitalism! Yes, he takes particular delight in linking everything from reductionism as a scientific tool to the information-theoretical paradigm in biology back to “the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century”. It’s funny how reductionistic leftists can become when trying to refute reductionism.

It’s one thing to dream of a more egalitarian, more democratic and more fair society; it’s another to filter facts according to that dream. I find this confusion especially troubling for a scientist: everything he writes suggests that if ever science shows beyond dispute that intelligence – or some other “good” human quality – is differentially inherited, he will reject that conclusion just because it’s not in line with his precious ideals of equality and fairness. (He actually has a go at it in the book, and maybe this isn’t much of a problem for him since he admits that scientists are inevitably ideological creatures.)

Speaking of fairness, I actually loved the book (1) because it is nicely designed and (2) because Lewontin certainly has a rare gift of balancing our thinking against the sometimes lazy Dawkins-Dennett line of thought by pointing out neglected perspectives and offering a lot of food for thought. The problem is that – just like his ally Gould – often he’s pushing it too far, to the point that the poor arguments injected at those specific points compromise his otherwise amazing authorship.

Another problem worth noting is that in some of the corrections he proposes for the Dawkinsian reductionism – again, just like Gould – he is actually overlapping with what Dawkins says, only with a different vocabulary: the contructionism (“the environment of organisms is coded in their DNA” – p.112) that he defends against adaptationism is the same as Dawkins’s concept of extended phenotype (1982), and the below passage with which he closes the book (1991) is one step shy of memetics (1976).

(…) the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine the individual and its environment. They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action.

In this respect, he reminds me of Dennett’s metaphor for Gould in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: the boy who cried wolf.

Red blood cells, Homo sapiens (Me) – The cells are the small red things (6–8 μm), the big thing containing them is not a cell, it's a drop of blood.

This is my dear antique microscope; metal body, made by the Soviet Russian company OПTA, model УМ-401П-1 No9206. I remember that my father had bought it at a flea market.

Toilet paper. Yes, it looks disgusting but it's only fair, considering its use. They may make it look nice to the human eye, with hearts and flowers on it but what you see here is much more honest. If there's one thing in the universe that has the right not to be beautiful on the inside, it's toilet paper. You just got to excuse it for that.

Saliva, Homo sapiens (Me again. I don't remember eating something like that though.) – You can see the transparent epithelial cells damaged by the toothpick I used to get them on the slide. Again, I seriously don't know what that thing in the middle is.

Needle tip

White grape skin, Vitis vinifera – Cell membranes and chloroplasts (green little things, 5 μm) are visible.

Foot, Musca domestica – I was on the lookout for houseflies once I found the microscope. I got lucky the day after. At least I thought so, until I saw this. Definitely not the prettiest foot I've seen. I mean, it has ugly feet even for a fly. I bet there are decent flies out there with much nicer feet than this. In fact I declare this to be my research agenda for the next three years.

Now that I’ve recollected the old joy of playing the biologist, I started looking for a new professional (compound) microscope to buy – not for research, obviously, but to see/photograph things like these. I’ll be happy to listen if you have any suggestions.

I had worked with scientists Cleva Ow Yang and Ayşe Turak on creating better visual communication of their research in the second Image of Science workshop in July 2011 but have been holding off sharing the outputs, waiting for them to publish their research. This is their manuscript in Nano Letters (one of the highest ranked journals in materials science), including more visuals that we produced together, and below is a piece that I’m quite proud of.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

I know we’re supposed to be terrified by this but I actually see the beauty of that. It is true that you cannot (and shouldn’t, politically speaking) impose a designed language on the public but the idea of a modernistic, minimalistic reduction towards a less redundant and more modular language is appealing to me at least as a theoretical exercise. Apparently Orwell was also ambivalent about it: in a series of broadcasts to India that he produced from 1942 to 1944, he chose to use Basic English, an English-based controlled language (a simplified subset of English) created by Charles Kay Ogden in 1930, which would later be his inspiration for Newspeak in 1984. [There are in fact many constructed languages, Volapük being the cutest in my opinion.] I can feel that when he wrote the above passage for the lexicographer Syme, some part of him was still strongly empathizing with the character and seeing “the beauty of that”.

I would argue that Orwell’s ambivalence manifests itself throughout the book: even though he depicts with Oceania an extreme and horrible form of modernity, he actually takes the side of rational modernist thinking versus what could be called postmodernism – interestingly, represented also by the Party – on important crossroads, through the protagonist Winston’s thoughts:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. (…) Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. (…) His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the Earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If you’re not convinced that this passage relates to the modernism-postmodernism duality, here are O’Brien’s (a member of the Inner Party) words to Winston:

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. (…) You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature. (…) Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

The resemblance of these sentences to postmodernist-poststructuralist thinking is striking, especially because these schools of thought weren’t around when the book was written; O’Brien dubs it “collective solipsism” in his dialogue with Winston. (The word postmodern was in use at that time, albeit only within the context of art/architecture in a much narrower sense.) Of course these ideas have their ancestors in the history of philosophy, but it is Orwell’s genius that he presented a staggering discussion of them with a novel written in 1948 in such a way that it nearly encapsulates the intellectual climate of the second half of the century. What is more intriguing to me is that he has managed to describe in a convincing way an oppressive regime that is both modernist and postmodernist to the core at the same time.

When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the Earth goes round the Sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

The concept of doublethink itself (the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct), by the way, is one of the key features of postmodernist literature, both as a characteristic of it and as a cherished quality in other things.

So, on one hand Orwell criticizes modernism through a caricature (a full-scale minimalization and modularization of language, strict standardization of the living spaces and of people, total disconnection from the past, etc.) while on the other he defends, through Winston, modernist thinking against the postmodernist ideas of the Party. Was he exercising doublethink himself when he wrote the book? Maybe he was just lucky enough to live in a period when thinking outside the modern-postmodern paradigm was still the natural thing to do. Or maybe he was deliberately rejecting modernism and postmodernism, hoping for a third alternative – or indeed having no hope for humanity whatsoever.

In any case, I do believe that Orwell was expressing his own thoughts when he wrote these lines for Winston:

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

For the first four reasons, don’t tell me that I have the option not to be doing these things (not checking emails continuously, etc.) while having the smartphone – I know, from observing my own internet behavior and people around me who have smartphones (i.e. people around me), that these habits will become second nature in just a few days. The only way of resistance is to avoid buying it in the first place.

Join the resistance, my friends! (Literally.) Because I don’t want to wait while you check Facebook under the table every five minutes.