The Probability Broach, chapter 13
Win Bear’s appearance in the North American Confederacy has proven that the Probability Broach works. It can establish contact with parallel universes and transport people and things between them. The scientist who built it, Dr. Dora “Deejay” Thorens, rushes off to tell her lab partner—who, it turns out, isn’t human:
Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet first conceived the Probability Broach in 192 A.L., when Deejay Thorens was a mere calf whose present position was occupied by another landling. Unfortunately, she’d been looking for a way to get to Alpha Centauri, and was particularly disappointed since her mathematics had seemed flawless.
We already met talking chimpanzees and gorillas in the NAC, and now Smith adds talking dolphins and porpoises. As with the primates, there’s no mention of humanity genetically modifying them to uplift them to intelligence. In fact, the text says they were intelligent all along, and we just never noticed until we had a society advanced enough for them to want to join it.
This raises some uncomfortable questions about what human-cetacean relations were like before this revelation. How do they feel about being hunted for meat by humans, or trapped and drowned in fishing nets, or fatally beaching themselves while fleeing from our sonar? What about dolphins being abducted from the wild and forced to perform tricks in aquariums—do they consider that slavery?
Do they have any hard feelings about all this? Did humans have to pay reparations? Smith never addresses the issue, although it does remind me of one of the best stories The Onion ever published.
“I’m gratified to meet you, Mr. Bear. You and your counterpart from this continuum are a welcome though scarcely necessary confirmation of my hypotheses.” This Telecom was different, a wheelchair with a table model TV on the seat, a periscope sticking out of the top. Ooloorie guided it remotely, moving her “eyes and ears” around, peering critically over the shoulders of people who were her “hands.” There was no screen at her end, a tank of salt water twelve hundred miles away. The periscope cameras translated what they picked up into an auditory hologram, super-high-fidelity wave fronts that, to her, were “television.”
Cetacean scientists have a mildly condescending attitude toward humans. The text tells us that they consider us hasty and clumsy, always intruding on their pure serene contemplation of the universe by turning it into experiments and machines.
Given that history I alluded to, it would make more sense if they disdained humanity for being a bunch of cruel, violent savages. It could be a realistic issue for the NAC utopia to confront if dolphins only agreed to work with us reluctantly, while retaining a deep suspicion of our motivations. But maybe Smith would have considered that too on-the-nose as a piece of social commentary.
I told my story to the two scientists. Deejay listened with barely suppressed excitement. Ooloorie mostly in absorbed silence. “It grieves me to hear that Dr. Meiss is… is no longer…” struggled the porpoise. “He had an unusual mind for a landling and accomplished, by himself, much of what it took dozens to do here.”
As the text explains, Oolorie’s experiment accidentally established contact with Win’s world. While surveying it, they were able to communicate with Vaughn Meiss (whose murder kicked off the plot of the book). They gave Meiss enough insights that he could begin constructing his own Broach, which was a feat that impressed them.
This section, especially Oolorie praising Meiss as being able to do “by himself” what normally takes “dozens”, is an insight into how libertarians believe that science works. Like everything else, they have an unrealistic view of what a single person can achieve.
In the real world, science is a massively collaborative process, as in the famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants. Great insights and revolutionary discoveries almost never spring from the mind of a single individual. It takes teams of dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working together, each one contributing a part to a greater whole.
This principle holds true even for people who are usually hailed as the rare geniuses who make great strides on their own. For example, Albert Einstein only nailed down the math for general relativity with help from his friend Marcel Grossman.
Thomas Edison, whose mythological status as a self-made man inspires libertarians possibly more than anyone else, had a large research team that worked under him, especially Lewis Latimer, who made critical contributions to the invention of the light bulb.
But libertarians dislike the idea of anything being collaborative. A goal that can only be accomplished by people cooperating makes them philosophically queasy. Instead, their ideology compels them to believe that all progress comes from geniuses working alone.
In Atlas Shrugged, for example, all of Ayn Rand’s protagonists possess a superhuman degree of competence. All they have to do is sit in an armchair and think, and they can come up with a brilliant idea that would never have occurred to anyone else. John Galt, the one ubermensch to rule them all, is so superhumanly competent that he can make devices which violate the laws of thermodynamics.
L. Neil Smith takes up the torch of this idea, depicting all progress—both in his anarcho-capitalist utopia and in “our” world—as owing to a few rare and exceptional geniuses. The only way TPB differs from Atlas is that it makes its everyman character, Win Bear, the point-of-view character, rather than one of the ubermenschen.
It’s no coincidence that libertarians keep doing this, and it’s not just because they’re allergic to the idea of cooperation. It feeds into their belief that these exceptional individuals aren’t just smarter than the rest of us, they’re better than the rest of us—and therefore should be allowed to do anything they please, without any pesky laws or other restrictions holding them back.
Image credit: Erik Drost, released under CC BY 2.0 license
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This goes a long way to explaining why those types lost their ever-lovin’ minds when Obama suggested (I don’t remember the exact words–I’m paraphrasing ahead:) that people benefit from communally-funded supports. You know (still paraphrasing), like safe food and water, paved roads, a good education, public libraries and parks, police and fire and emergency health services.
Nope, they imagine that any successes they did all on their own with no help from anyone. Because they are all uniquely smart and talented and hard-working.
“Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
which was deliberately and deceitfully quote-mined to “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” (which is also true of many of the techbros – who didn’t build ‘their’ businesses, but simply bought them)
Or hostilely took them over by underhanded means, a là Thiel and Musk.
This book was written in the 1970s, right? I think Smith thought that apes and cetaceans are sapient in our world too, because he believed the sensationalized reports of interspecies communication. So it’s a “Science Marches On” thing, except that the science was never as unequivocal as what he thought it was.
I too am disappointed that he leaves out the consequences of whaling in a world where whales are sapient exactly how humans are. Was having the NAC do evil even out of ignorance too much for Smith? Even without the questionable politics, this book is boring. The writer refused any possible source of conflict, despite the possibility of society messing up and taking responsibility would be an improvement on our own.
It’s ironic that you point out that propertarians hate cooperation, because I was recently reading “The Possibility of Cooperation” by Michael Taylor, which argues that cooperation is good and that stateless societies are indeed theoretically capable of solving collective action problems. (I didn’t know of this book months ago; it would have helped my argument. I failed to properly argue my case before because I wasn’t knowledgeable about sources like these.) This just demonstrates that “libertarians” don’t care about improving society, because if they did they would cite sources like these instead of complaining about regulation and taxes. It goes to show that L. Neil Smith is to anti-statism what Phil Mason is to atheism. Without the state, we would need more cooperation and community, not less. Otherwise you’d get the situation that Neil DeGrasse Tyson warned about in which a mind with the potential of a Fraunhofer is extinguished in an industrial accident because its body lives in poverty. This whole worldbuilding project is a disappointment.
Yes, I remember from back then attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and gorillas. That was necessary because their vocal tracts are very limited compared to ours. It turns out that the animals can learn lots of individual signs, but that they have very limited ability to string them together in meaningful ways. Watermelon as “drink fruit”, for instance.
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/speech-and-language – https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-toddler-health/expert-answers/toddler-speech-development/faq-20057847 – human children get to two-word phrases at around age 2, and by age 3 or 4, get to full-scale sentences.
Yes, I remember from back then attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and gorillas. That was necessary because their vocal tracts are very limited compared to ours. It turns out that the animals can learn lots of individual signs, but that they have very limited ability to string them together in meaningful ways. Watermelon as “drink fruit”, for instance.
Human children get to two-word phrases at around age 2, and get to full-scale sentences at around ages 3 to 4.
In fairness, speculative fiction is littered with examples of this. Just the last few days I introduced my seven year old to the X Men movies. We got to the bit in “First Class” where they’re admiring the X-jet – a thing that combines the look and speed of an SR-71 spyplane, the carrying capacity of a decent sized bomber (unlike the SR-71, which had just the two, cramped, seats), and for an encore has vectored-thrust VTOL capability like a Harrier, several years before even the Kestrel (the predecessor of the Harrier) even flew. And when he’s asked whether he can fly the thing, Beast’s response is “I designed it.”
Leaving aside that designing an aircraft and actually being able to fly the thing are very, very different skills and the overlap is miniscule, the very idea that one person could design something like that is, speaking as an engineer, laugh-out-loud hilarious.
This is far from the only example, though. Star Wars – Galen Erso was apparently “the” designer of the Death Star, a space station the size of a moon. Dr Who – Davros was “the” designer of the Daleks. Star Trek – so many examples, but the obvious ones include Zefram Cochrane, designing AND BUILDING, apparently pretty much single-handed, a warp-capable starship in a post-apocalyptic forest while struggling with alcoholism, and Noonian Soong, a man who single-handedly built not one but AT LEAST four sentient humanoid androids, one of them so intelligent it was able to get into Starfleet, one of the even more intelligent than that because it was able to outwit the first one, and one of them so good it fooled everyone INCLUDING ITSELF into believing itself to be human for DECADES.
The individual hyper-competent super-genius is the wish-fulfillment/power fantasy of the nerd as sure as Conan or John Wick are such for the… less intellectually focused, shall we say. This is independent of politics.
Meh. Old trope.
Take, for example, Richard Seaton or Martin Crane or Marc C. DuQuesne from *Skylark* series.
Here, a bottic summary:
(Doc savage was another)
At least Doc’s grueling training gave a rationale for why he was such a world-class polymath. In one book he gives all the credit to his training and says anyone who’d been through it could do the same.
Still not realistic, but as I don’t read pulp superheroes for the realism, that doesn’t bother me.
…Zefram Cochrane, designing AND BUILDING, apparently pretty much single-handed, a warp-capable starship in a post-apocalyptic forest while struggling with alcoholism…
IIRC, he built that warp-capable starship in a sort-of-abandoned US ICBM silo, out of parts found in said silo. Which makes that bit even more ridiculous. One person thinking up a basic principle of a new technology, like “maybe we can go faster than light if we manage to do X, Y and Z”, is a far cry from one person actually designing the thing(s) that do X, Y and Z the right way.
You gotta read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Smashers_of_the_Galaxy_Rangers
Wow, that parody is right on the nose for the first two Skylark books. It burlesques the plot nearly point for point.
(Yes, they do discover faster-than-light travel entirely by accident in Skylark.)
Geniuses in comic books (and comics-based movies) are in a different category, though. They’re no more bound by the laws of science than Superman or the Flash are limited in their physical actions. That’s why Silver/Bronze Age Luthor was the perfect opponent for Superman — his scientific achievements are as insanely over the top as Superman’s powers (physical law is treated as “best practices, not mandatory.”).
Still shape popular perception, but.
cf. https://opentools.ai/news/debunking-the-genius-myth-how-helen-lewis-challenges-our-notions-of-success
Another incorrect take on genius is that genius = polymath (comics are very prone to this). If you can build one kind of tech, you can build any kind of device. Hank Pym knows biochemistry, robotics, how to build true artificial intelligence …
I’m reminded of the movie The Band Wagon in which Fred Astaire asks if his director has ever staged a musical before. The response is “No, but he’s a genius!” Turns out that doesn’t compensate for his lack of experience.
I’ve seen modern fantasy takes which are basically that mad scientists, mad doctors, mad inventors, supergeniuses, and the like literally have supernatural powers. They make/do things which could not possibly work, but somehow do anyway – at least for themselves, it might not work for anyone who tries to make use of their devices, and it definitely won’t work if someone else tries to copy their devices or practices (though another mad whichever might be able to do/make something similar). They may or may not be flavored as low-level reality warpers who deeply believe their own nonsense. Wackier versions of this might not even be very smart, as they make lots of dumb or nonsensical decisions which (usually) work out anyway, because reality warper. Or just rule of funny / cartoon logic.
The premise of the Girl Genius series is that being an inventor is like a mutant ability — if you have the “spark” you can build all kinds of steampunk stuff beyond anyone else. Which explains the simultaneous existence of really advanced tech and a world that’s otherwise pre-industrial revolution.
L. Sprague deCamp made the point in The Ancient Engineers that while a number of ancient inventors came up with advanced-for-the-time ideas, they lived in an age where you didn’t mass market that stuff, you found a rich patron and let them enjoy it. Which made a big difference to the ideas spreading.
“Network effects” are important for invention – there’s a reason that we have places like “Silicon Valley” and “Detroit” (and “Nashville”) – when there’s a lot of people involved with a particular industry in one area, for whatever reason, a person with a new idea can find a lot of people with the skills to implement it, and people with skills can bump into each other and spark ideas from that interaction. Hermits rarely invent things, and have difficulty finding other people to implement their ideas, too (Farnsworth was living out in the country when he had his idea for TV, but even he got benefit from interactions with teachers and others).
One of the big mistakes in libertarian thinking is attributing the whole project to the leader, head designer, public spokesman or finance person behind it. This is often encouraged in both fiction and the real world. In fiction the importance of the head designer/inventor is over emphasized. Often to the point that the project couldn’t happen without them. In the real world there is often a executive figure or finance person who acts as spokesperson for the project and tries to take as much credit as they can. In many cases these people had little to do with running/implementing the project at all.
The other mistake is thinking that if the lead designer/inventor is removed the whole thing would fail. That if Issac Newton had not discovered his theory of gravity it would never happen or would be vastly delayed. This is almost never as true as it appears in simple condensed versions of history. Usually the science and/or engineering problems are well known and there are multiple people trying to find a solution. The one we celebrate was just the first to come up with the best solution at the time.
Wrong.
Libertarianism is structurally anti‑hierarchical; the ideas are built on decentralisation, spontaneous order, and minimal or absent central authority.
Minarchism, anarcho-capitalismm, those fit.
It is the *very opposite* of a cult of personality like MAGA.
Let’s very carefully distinguish between libertarianism and anarchism. I have been trying to point out the distinction for months here. Minarchism keeps about as much authority as social democracy, since it explicitly supports the existence of military and police. As for anarcho-capitalism, which Smith believed, its problem is that capitalism is hierarchical by nature, from the very fact that there are bosses and board members who get paid much, much more than the workers, and don’t have to do any work they don’t want to do, since they can always afford life’s necessities even if they were to retire immediately. While I believe that libertarians are sincere, their need to defend capitalism at all costs results in them defending techbros and other billionaires no matter what awful things they do, in the same way that Marxists, though undoubtedly sincere about wanting the end of exploitation, can’t go five seconds without excusing the human rights violations of the Soviet Union and Red China. The way out is to oppose all authority whether state or corporate.
To be clear, I know that in an ideal world libertarians wouldn’t fall for authoritarian bullshit, but there is a very practical reason why I explained the chasm between anarcho-capitalism and anarchism.
Oh my gods, John, do you actually believe any of that rubbish? I’ve been hearing libertarian bullshit since 1978, and their “ideas” barely even pretend to be “built on” any of those ideals. That entire party, movement and ideology have been bought and paid for by rich dirtballs and expansionist hierarchical corporations who don’t want no stinkin’ big gummint telling them they can’t do whatever they want. The only hierarchies or central authorities they consistently oppose are the ones the rest of us NEED to enforce our rights; and to resist, or at least moderate or counter-balance, their own unchecked power over the rest of us.
And libertarians admit this when they insist that government should have NO ROLE WHATSOEVER in any society except for cops to police the streets and an army to resist invasion. No public schools, no diplomatic or economic aid, no regulation of business, no public assistance, healthcare or even significant disaster relief, no form of “soft(ish) power” to help people accomplish anything that can’t be accomplished by police or military force.
I’m not endorsing it. I do not subscribe to it.
I am being factual and descriptive.
Look at primary or academic sources for yourself, if you doubt me.
(Maybe read Brendan’s comment above)
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Also, this blog is threaded.
You just opened a first-level comment in response to me earlier.
(You can, of course, but it’s suboptimal)
um. I am truly idiotic, sometimes.
Sorry about the threading thingy. I am clearly in my dotage.
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But the rest stands.
Yes, you are factually describing what libertarians claim/pretend to believe, and I’m factually stating that all such claims and pretensions are bullshit. I’m sure there’s various factions of anarchists who really do believe all that (rightly or not), as Brendan describes; but libertarians are not among them.
SC [Salty Current] was an anarchist.
Social anarchism; the tradition of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.
Here is a bot:
1. Core definition
Classical anarchism = anti‑statist, anti‑capitalist, collectivist or communist, grounded in material analysis of power, not individualist metaphysics.
The essential components:
• Abolition of the state as a coercive hierarchy
• Abolition of capitalism as a system of private accumulation
• Collective ownership of the means of production
• Federated, bottom‑up organisation
• Mutual aid as a principle of social coordination
• Voluntary association and free agreement
This is the “proper” lineage.
Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Sheba.
Libertarianism is the religion of those too stupid to realise they’d be the slaves if their envisaged utopia ever happens.
Here is a nice bit about how scientific research is essentially collective, that even the greatest researchers do not work alone.
Albert Einstein did not invent relativity from scratch. He worked from the work of others who tried to reconcile Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. A consequence of the latter is that an electromagnetic wave in a vacuum always moves at constant speed c. That’s contrary to Newtonian mechanics, where it ought to be possible to catch up to anything. A common reconciliation was the ether theory, that Maxwell’s equations are strictly true only for being stationary relative to some medium, the “ether”. Moving relative to it would introduce some correction terms from that motion.
The Michelson-Morley experiment was for testing the ether theory with the Earth’s motion around the Sun, and it failed to find the expected size of the effect. That only added to the Newton-Maxwell discrepancy, and some physicists proposed that the ether distorts space and time, with Henrik Antoon Lorentz showing how to get Maxwell’s equations back by appropriately transforming space and time.
Albert Einstein’s big contribution was to build on Lorentz’s work, showing from it that this ether was totally superfluous, and that one had to change the definitions of momentum and kinetic energy from their Newtonian values.
Enter one of his physics teachers, Hermann Minkowski. He showed that from Einstein’s work, one can define a distance between space-time points that will remain the same. But in that definition, time must be multiplied by c and that combination’s square contributes with a sign opposite from the square of the space contribution. More broadly, space and time are parts of one entity, space-time.
Einstein responded that that was “superfluous learnedness” (überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit).
But Minkowski’s formulation of special relativity was necessary for going further and incorporating gravity. He had the help of an expert on the necessary mathematics, Marcel Grossmann.
I will try to give a super quick introduction to the mathematics of general relativity, an introduction that won’t use very much math.
Let’s start with the distance DS between two points in two dimensions, in rectangular coordinates x and y, using shorthand notation D for a difference.
(DS)^2 = (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 = (Dx)^2 + (Dy)^2
Now go to polar coordnates: x = r*cos(a), y = r*sin(a). Its distance is (DS)^2 = r1^2 + r2^2 – 2*r1*r2*cos(a2-a1)
Use small differences in r and a, and one finds (DS)^2 = (Dr)^2 + r^2(Da)^2.
So we end up with a generalization of the close-points distance formula: (DS)^2 = gxx*(Dx)^2 + 2*gxy*Dx*Dy + gyy*(Dy)^2, where gxx, gxy, and gyy are functions of x and y.
That’s how one works with curved space-time in GR, as distortions of a flat space-time. For example, the close-points distance on a sphere is (DS)^2 = (rad)^2 * ( (D(lat))^2 + (cos(lat))^2 * (D(lng))^2 )
Bots are good for unicode translations.
(DS)^2 = (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 = (Dx)^2 + (Dy)^2
↓
(ΔS)² = (x₂ − x₁)² + (y₂ − y₁)² = (Δx)² + (Δy)²
How does one get curvature out of such distorted-space-time expressions? How does one tell whether it’s a real distortion or just a coordinate distortion?
It’s by parallel transport of a vector around a loop, and the vector’s new direction compared to its original one gives the space’s curvature. Here is a thought experiment to illustrate parallel transport.
You start by wearing a cap with a visor, and you point the visor forward. You then move 90d in center angle and turn right by 90d. You want the cap’s visor to stay parallel, so that visor now points leftward. Another 90d angle, another 90d right turning, and you rotate the visor again. This time it points backward. Another 90d angle and you are back where you started from. You turn 90d rightward yet again, and the visor now points rightward, 90d from its original direction.
But on a flat surface, your cap will point the same direction when you finish your trip.