View transcript: The Order of Things: How Poetic is Science?

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Poetics of Progress / H.M. Enzensberger about his book “The Elixirs of Science”

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Rodney Brooks, Headless Robot

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THE BRAIN-RESEARCHER / With Professor Dr. Susan A. Greenfield (Oxford)

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THE NANOSCIENTIST / With Professor Dr. George M. Whitesides (Harvard)

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THE MATHEMATICIAN / Kepler’s sphere packaging and the sausage catastrophe

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THE FLY-RESEARCHER / Why is it so difficult to catch a fly?

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THE ASTRONOMER / Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr: Why is the night sky not brighter than the sun?

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THE GROUNDHOG OF THE MIND / Durs Grünbein about DESCARTES

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et al.

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THE ORDER OF THINGS / How poetic is science?

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s THIRTY-SEVEN BALLADS FROM THE HISTORY OF PROGRESS are legendary / Now Enzensberger has published his new book THE ELIXIRS OF SCIENCE / Enzensberger claims that the function of poetics has shifted from poetry to science / A SIDE GLANCE at the PRACTICES OF THE HUMAN MIND - -

Alexander Kluge

Mr. Enzensberger, “The Elixirs of Science: Side glances into Poetry and Prose” – Side glances, what does that mean?

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POETICS OF PROGRESS / Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s THE ELIXIRS OF SCIENCE

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

It is not the kind of direct approach, where one says: I’m the one who knows everything about the sciences, and teaches in widescreen. I’m just an amateur, so to speak, I’m fascinated by the sciences, but I’m not a professor, I don’t claim to be competent. That’s why I look at things from backstage, in a way, and sometimes you see different things from behind the scenes than you would from the audience or from the stalls. It’s a completely different perspective, even in theater it works like that: when you look at it sideways, it looks very different. And you might be able to decipher certain gestures, certain movements, because they become clearer when looked at that way.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer

Kluge

And you really travel – for example, you write about modern cathedrals, underground cathedrals, and you draw a connection to the underground facilities in Geneva, to things you have seen for yourself.

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CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research / Geneva

Enzensberger

Yes, of course, you have to go and see for yourself. The look from backstage is not an abstract gaze, even the most abstract objects require sensory perception. You see, even if you visit a math institute, which is the most abstract form of science, there is a certain atmosphere that you have to taste, to see what people there are like. For example the complete negligence of physical appearance. It’s very interesting that these people, some of them world-famous, have the dingiest offices, and they don’t care. They don’t care about clothes, because their work provides a different kind of glamor. A different kind of glamor.

Kluge

More substance than appearance…

Enzensberger

There’s that. There is something like high-altitude dizziness in top-level research, and they don’t have time to worry about prestige, for example: they don’t worry about who got the bigger company car, like they do in business or politics, which is really interesting. And the tone of conversation, they take notes on their napkins during lunch …

Kluge

Whatever they discover…

Enzensberger

Yes, you can serve them awful food, they don’t even notice because they are hypnotized by their research questions. Isn’t that fascinating? That’s something: you observe from an outsider perspective, but you can still understand what’s happening.

Kluge

What does a mathematician do differently from other people? Here, you wrote: “Drawbridge out of order.” It’s the drawbridge between society and math which seems to be closed.

Enzensberger

Well, math is an extreme case. There is a certain scientific analphabetism even among so-called educated people who traditionally stick to the humanities, and it continues to spread to other people who might not even have gone to college, who say: “Oh God! That’s what they tortured me with in high school, I don’t want to hear anything about that.” And so on. At least that’s what things were like until recently. But I’m optimistic, because a lot has happened in the last decade. Coming from Anglo-American culture, there is a shift towards scientific education, and I think you can see that here, too: Newspapers are reporting daily on the sciences. 15 years ago, that would have been unthinkable. That didn’t exist.

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MATHEMATICS

Kluge

What is math? In antiquity there is … a mathematician would trump a knight. That’s a real thing.

Enzensberger

Yes, the work “mathesis” means “teaching” in general. The Greek were probably the first to make it their dominant science, which provides the foundation for the understanding of nature. That was probably the motivation behind it. And of course, there was the platonic version of math; that means, Platonism assumes that mathematical objects have an existence independent from us. They exist, preexist, and we only discover them. And then there is another type of mathematical thinking, according to which we don’t discover things but invent them, we build them, we construct them, that’s constructivism. No matter what your philosophical position is, I think it’s not a question that can be answered with “yes” or “no” … it’s kind of like a cathedral. If you build a cathedral of concepts, up to breathtaking heights, you get very far, and the construct itself has a certain kind of beauty as well. There is an aesthetic aspect to math that is very seductive, I think.

Kluge

They are poets, in their own way.

Enzensberger

Yes, you know, people always confuse math with calculus, and calculus is always somewhat boring. Children always say, and rightfully so: a bit of mental arithmetic can’t hurt, but other than that, a calculator can do complicated multiplications better than I do, why should I bother? But that’s not what math is about. It’s something completely different, and many great mathematicians were very bad at mental arithmetic. They weren’t even interested in it, because it’s so trivial.

Kluge

Could you tell us about these people? What you do is: you pick your favorites, if you will, and write poems about them. You choose people from the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, right? But mostly the 17th. For example, you describe Leibniz in a very affectionate way. Like an alien, strangely.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Enzensberger

Yes, there is something monstrous about him, of course, because of the intense focus on his intellectual work.

Kluge

He’s wearing a powdered wig, a man of his times.

Enzensberger

His appearance is actually fairly conformist. A courtier, an advisor, as they said back then, a secret, consistorial – well, not consistorial, but a secret councilor.

Kluge

Who milks the nobility for money.

Enzensberger

Yes, and what’s hard for us to imagine today is that he was incredibly competent in a thousand different fields. I mean, even in practical … he wasn’t merely a theoretician, he was also interested in the application, and that’s why he was so sought after. He studied mining, for example, and finance, and all that on the basis of what he called “mathesis universalis” – that means, he wanted to find one single approach to all areas of life.

Kluge

Because he believes that basically everything is math.

Enzensberger

Yes, and he said: “Math is God’s way of thinking,” or something like that.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer

Enzensberger

And that’s why during the infancy stages of a science, when there is still a lot of visible progress, every science tends to become a bit, not megalomaniac, but something like that. The notion that it’s possible to completely transcend reality appeared relatively early in Western science: the idea that there could be a universal explanation for the entire world. In physics, that was a common idea early on. Interestingly, in biology it happened much later. Compared to physics, biology is a young science. There is … I would need to look at my notes, but it’s interesting: Newton, Galilei, Copernicus, that was a long time ago …

Kluge

1604, 1616…

Enzensberger

Yes. Whereas the big steps in biology were achieved relatively recently. Mendel, 1865; Darwin, mid-19th century.

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Gregor Mendel (1800-1899)

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Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Enzensberger

And the fact that egg and sperm have to meld in order to create life was discovered 1885 by Oskar Hertwig. Mendel’s Laws: 1865. Nuclear division, the multiplication during the growth process: discovered 1880 by Fleming. And the great, but half-forgotten Theodor Boveri developed the chromosome theory exactly a century ago, in 1902.

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Theodor Boveri (1862-1915)

Enzensberger

It’s a very young science, and that’s why it still has got …

Kluge

… something alchemistic about it.

Enzensberger

… yes, and the desire for power, which borders on recklessness, and can turn into hubris. And nowadays, the dominant sciences consider themselves dominant, they are still enveloped in the eggshell of reduction, reductionism. Philosophically speaking, they are in a naïve phase, it is a sort of naïve epistemology – “we’ll get it under control”; fantasies of omnipotence, the manic phase…

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THE HUBRIS OF LIFE SCIENCES / Fantasies of omnipotence among genetic biologists.

Enzensberger

I wrote an essay, which is included in this book, with the title: “Putschists in the lab,” where I talk about how this discipline is in its storm-and-stress phase, so to speak, with the notion that they can solve the problems of the world, that they can condense everything, deduce everything. The idea of the master key shows up here as well: they don’t want to listen to advice, they are annoyed by laws that might restrict their research.

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Putschists of science

Enzensberger

It’s a strange relationship; the way I understand it is that utopian thinking, which in Western history for a long time meant a political utopia, has migrated to the sciences. That means, the great promises to humankind, the kind of promise that for example communism used to make …

Kluge

The socialist man, the changed man, the new man …

Enzensberger

… today, the new man is a biological product. Which is interesting, ideologically speaking. The promises of salvation, all the way up to promises of immortality, are made by scientists. Of course there are scientists who understand that, who don’t … And there is something else: the whole thing is a giant industry. That means, there is an additional motivation, an economic pressure that’s to blame: I have to make promises in order to succeed on the stock market. There is an ideological and a financial side to it, and many scientists have a hard time differentiating between the two. They don’t even realize what’s happening to them.

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Genealogy of Omnipotence / Project Managers in the Sciences

Kluge

You begin with Spalanzani, among others, with the project managers.

Enzensberger

Project managers who already predicted future possibilities in a kind of intuitive science, without having the technical means at their disposal. By the way, Diderot wrote something very interesting in that regard, where he says that everything originates from an egg. He had no way of proving it scientifically, because science was not yet advanced enough. It is really interesting, because right around this turn in the 18th century, there was an explosion of premonitions, I want to call it, where theoretical intelligence put its feelers out very far. It is really strange. And Germany is at the center of this phenomenon. You could say that back then a new form of intelligence – a strong word! – came into being. It’s not like …

Kluge

When was that?

Enzensberger

I think during the Enlightenment and up to the era of what is called Romanticism. Well, this concept of epochs …

Kluge

At the interface of …

Enzensberger

This interface, yes. And of course it’s not an exclusively German phenomenon. I mean, France is notorious for what happened there. Anyway, it was an immense – you might actually envy those living during that time, because there was a certain freshness, unbiasedness to it, almost an audacity of thought. An intelligence to break down walls.

Kluge

Could you describe that in more detail? At the same time, there is economic freedom …

Enzensberger

Yes, and that means …

Kluge

… they don’t work in guilds anymore, like the “meistersinger,” they are free: People can do what they want as long as it’s legal. Just like 1989 in the GDR, the order of estates is dissolved.

Enzensberger

But not without a fight, it wasn’t that simple. The economic conditions for many of these scholars were very oppressive, in particular in Germany, due to sectionalism. This is how I understand it: if you put yourself in their shoes – you grow up somewhere in the countryside, you get a stipend, have to pretend to study theology, to be able to escape the misery …

Kluge

You get sponsored …

Enzensberger

You get sponsored, and drop theology, and then you start … It’s, you know, if you cannot move sideways, in regard to social status and mobility, it makes sense to move up. This flight upwards is very typical for the German history of ideas. It means, I don’t have a choice, because in this tiny village …

Kluge

The escape up the career ladder … the flight into self-invention …

Enzensberger

… there is but one way to become world-famous in Weimar, this village where geese walk the streets – and it involves the brain. It’s obvious. And there were a lot of them, and many got stuck, not everyone succeeded; but in regard to productivity it was a pretty unique place.

Kluge

And at the same time, this brand of humanity, of Middle-European humanity, spreads across the world. Alexander von Humboldt in South America …

Enzensberger

And then one step further, when subsequently the entire world is being colonized and the first seeds for a global market are planted, there is … today we live in a global intellectual market. I mean, if someone discovers something in Tokyo today, it can be distributed to the entire world via email in seconds. Communication works differently. Although it’s important to mention that Leibniz was entertaining an extensive correspondence, there already was an established network of communication within Europe where people collaborated and argued with each other: there was competition, arguments over priorities, the famous relationship between Newton and Leibniz who fought over who would come up with differential calculus …

Kluge

Both of them did …

Enzensberger

Both of them figured it out, at the same time. Really interesting.

Enzensberger

The concept of the homo sapiens is a bit of an exaggeration, if you consider the behavior of the species.

Kluge

… they are not particularly wise …

Enzensberger

You really cannot call that wise.

Kluge

Could you say “savant”? Is that not the correct translation? How would you translate that into another language?

Enzensberger

Well, somewhere between wise and knowing. It’s not always about philosophical wisdom. And there is some truth to it, that’s how science developed, because we are a species that practices science, for reasons of, as you say, necessity, under the pressure of reality …

Kluge

And what would be the opposite? Homo barbarus, could that be the opposite?

Enzensberger

I don’t know. I find the concept of the barbarian a bit difficult, because the Greeks called everyone a barbarian who didn’t speak Greek. Which is not exactly a good criterion.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer

Kluge

Those who are easy to steal from.

Enzensberger

Of course, one aspect is the notion of intelligence, even though we don’t really know how to define it. There are all these IQ tests, which are completely ridiculous and absurd. Intelligence is not something you can measure.

Kluge

These people you like so much, in the late 18th century, for example Brentano: they have also been called “homo compensator,” because these people learn something new: they learn to compensate for the flaws of mankind. They are men of compensation.

Enzensberger

Yes, just like the theory of the deficient being, this somewhat helpless …

Kluge

They don’t just produce science, but also establish a balance. That definitely would have been considered innovative.

Enzensberger

You also have to consider the arts in relation to the sciences. It wasn’t a fixed relationship, but there were phases during which art, the arts – that is, literature, music, poetry – were actually more productive!

Kluge

And more cooperative …

Enzensberger

You could say that about the Middle Ages. And there are times when intelligence is distributed differently, and productivity is shifting to the other side … I think – I don’t care about that, I’m a writer myself, but I don’t mind the idea that part of the potential for imaginative production has now migrated towards the sciences. And if you think about where the most brilliant work, the most brilliant kinds of production come from … I would claim, for example, that we live in a golden age of mathematics. People just don’t really notice.

Kluge

There’s this guy, Dirac, who developed an equation in the 1920s, which was based on the assumption of a mirror universe. It’s basically in the same category as “Alice in Wonderland.”

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Paul A. M. Dirac

Enzensberger

Yes, right, and anyway …

Kluge

For a decade, everyone is laughing at him, and then it turns out that this actually happens in nature.

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Matter and Anti-Matter in collision

Enzensberger

Of course, quantum mechanics are not solvable without the tools that this man … came up with, to say it very modestly.

Kluge

For the sake of beauty. He wrote poetry, and you even might call him a colleague. It’s basically a side perspective.

Enzensberger

Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I mean, it’s also interesting: Science is not possible without a kind of narration. I mean, of course, if you see an equation, you think it’s not a narrative. But the meaning of the equation can only be demonstrated in a story.

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The word comes before the sensation

Enzensberger

Was there an age of sentimentalism in Germany, were there sentimentalists? They only existed because Mr. Lessing had come up with the word “sentimental.”

Kluge

And suddenly everyone sees themselves as a sentimentalist.

Enzensberger

Sentimentalism, yes. And that’s why our world view now is characterized by the language of science, which is very imaginative, and very productive. They come up with the craziest things – I actually need to take a look at my notes here. I made a list, it’s insane, in cosmology, in physics, there are “flares,” “solar winds,” “zodiacal light,” “galactic noise;” there are “dark nebulae,” “forbidden lines,” “wormholes,” “black radiation” …

Kluge

…“dark matter”…

Enzensberger

…“curved space,” you really have to taste that on your tongue; “quantum tunnel,” and in math, there’s “cantor dust” and “wild knots.” There are “wild knots” in math!

Kluge

“Degenerate matter” is another expression.

Enzensberger

Yes. And you really have to envy them the impression they make. Some poets can only hope to come up with such wonderful metaphors.

Kluge

Somewhere, you are quoting the currently considered crucial “strong interaction.” There are three forces: “Three Quarks for Muster Mark,” as Joyce calls it – a pun on …

Enzensberger

Yes, he took that directly from “Finnegans Wake.”

Kluge

… three quarters beer, Dublin beer, from Finnegans Wake.

Enzensberger

There are intersections. Today, I would claim that …

Kluge

That’s where the term “quark” is from.

Enzensberger

There are intersections between scientific intelligence and creative intelligence, and there is even, I would like to suggest, there is even a shared aesthetic drive, if you can call it that. Because even mathematicians or scientists want their theory to not only be stringent, but also have an elegant solution. What does that mean? That is, of course, an aesthetic criterion.

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Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Kluge

Could you describe Gauss? A man who had a lot of influence at the Russian court. He had the freedom, so to speak, to elegantly carve geometrical figures into kilometers of Siberian forest, so that alien intelligence watching us through telescopes would be able to see who’s here …

Enzensberger

…so that they would see that someone is thinking; here, on this planet, someone is thinking.

Kluge

Entrepreneurs and thinkers.

Enzensberger

Yes, and of course, that is what’s so fantastic about Gauss. I like that he never stopped. He didn’t give up, it’s kind of strange. I think that this kind of production also has something vitalizing. He did not retire. The brain cannot be sent into retirement.

Kluge

How would you describe the human brain to an alien, a visitor from Sirius?

Enzensberger

Well, it is kind of a mysterious organ. Brain research has become an extremely important science, or discipline, and they have developed all kinds of methods to show what happens in the brain. It’s all very fascinating and exciting. These methods don’t even touch on the real question: What is consciousness? Brain research cannot provide an answer to this question.

Kluge

And it doesn’t seem to be located exclusively in the head, in this protected zone, protected by the skull, but apparently it is everywhere. It’s a polity.

Enzensberger

Yes, the nervous system, the central nervous system, the bone marrow, they are thinking. There is an American scientist – it’s very interesting – who has spoken of a second brain, and that is where it is located. This is the brain that controls …

Kluge

… where the solar plexus sits, above the stomach, so to speak, where the nervous system is. Where we assume the heart is located.

Enzensberger

Yes, they used to call it heart. He located it somewhat further down. But to a certain extent, it is independent from the brain, from the cerebrum. It operates without our knowledge.

Kluge

But when it’s upset, all the brain’s radiance cannot help.

Enzensberger

Everything gets mixed up. No, it needs to function, and there’s a certain homeostasis. That means, balance is created through complicated processes of compensation. And he wrote an entire book, called “The Second Brain,” that is very interesting.

Kluge

Very interesting.

Enzensberger

Yes, but the question of consciousness is still the hardest nut to crack, and it is debated among philosophers, computer scientists, brain researchers, and physiologists. There are very interesting discussions. But the aliens will only be able to understand if they have developed an organ of similar complexity. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t show up on Earth in the first place. We wouldn’t be able to establish contact.

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POETRY OF SCIENCE

Kluge

In your chapter “Poetry of Science,” you go pretty far when you say that maybe humankind doesn’t even understand right now where poetic quality is developing. They still think that it’s happening in literature, or that it is a thing of the past. But in reality, the sciences are developing a new kind of poetry, a network …

Enzensberger

It’s a strong theory, but there is something to be said for it. For example, and that mostly concerns the most advanced sciences … like I said, biology is a relatively young science, which is not yet at a point …

Kluge

Immature, pubescent.

Enzensberger

Immature, in a way. Whereas physics has reached the point where, to say it in terms of common garden materialism: “We can explain anything.” Like the Laplacian demon, “If I have the exact date, I can predict anything.”

Kluge

Which takes care of the entire thing and varies [inaudible]…

Enzensberger

Physics has long taken its leave from these deterministic ideas. And the stories we are told by cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics, you could also call those myths. They play a similar role, they have a similar function. It’s not the same as the Greek myth, but it has a similar function for our consciousness. That means, they are images that render the world more comprehensible, just like the old mythologies, which served the same purpose. I had orientation in the world, because I knew: Venus represents love, Zeus is thunder, and that helped explain all kinds of things. Or at least explain them in the sense that you think you understand; that you don’t feel alienated from the world anymore, but gain a better understanding. And it’s the same thing today: The universe as it is described by the sciences, by means of narration; the story of the big bang, and the emergence of the universe from this event, the way it is described in detail: the expansion, the redshift, all these things – those are myths, or similar to a myth. It’s an enormous production, because it’s not easy, it’s not simple. It’s not every day that a myth is created. It’s powerful.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer

Kluge

If I may draw your attention to this event – there was a conference in the GDR, at a time when the self-confidence of the republic was still intact. And they said that stars actually waste their matter, because of stellar winds – blue giants, new stars. They are not economical, which is unthinkable for a planned economy, so they need to be reconstructed.

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Blue Giant/Wastage by Stellar Winds

Enzensberger

Strange.

Kluge

But that would be an encounter of two mythical movements, so to speak.

Enzensberger

Yes, but one of them is the more careful, it is a more careful …

Kluge

… economy…

Enzensberger

… economy, yes.

Kluge

And wastefulness …

Enzensberger

… and the wastefulness of the universe …

Kluge

… mainly the universe …

Enzensberger

In biology, too: Think of the process of insemination, where millions of sperms are released. It’s an incredible explosion of energy. And for some cosmologists, this is tied to the question: How finite is the universe?

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WHIRLWIND OF REASON

Kluge

Here, you use the concept of “reason,” which comes up repeatedly in your poetry. And once, you say: “Her hair” – the hair of reason –, “the whirlwind,” the whirlwind of reason. I don’t know what that is, that’s not something that can necessarily be extrapolated from a poem.

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“Her hair is dark as reason”/

Enzensberger

…we cannot say, yes …

Kluge

“She throws dust in your eyes, the whirlwind, her hair is dark as reason.”

Enzensberger

Mhm.

Kluge

“Dark as reason”: don’t people usually call it “light”?

Enzensberger

Yes, but reason is not always transparent to its own eyes. There is something mysterious about that possibility, which has to do with the Gödel Problem. That means, the possibility for self-recognition is always limited. We are always more than what we see in ourselves.

Kluge

What is the Gödel Problem?

Enzensberger

The problem that you can never fully describe a system from within the system.

Kluge

You always have to take on an outside perspective.

Enzensberger

Yes, but there is not a kind of reason from within which we can fully explain reason. There’s always an unresolved rest, which Gödel was able to prove based on mathematical systems. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show – well, to simplify the problem a little, I compared it to the Münchhausen phenomenon, a somewhat far-fetched comparison that doesn’t quite hold up, strictly speaking …

Kluge

The swamp and the hair …

Enzensberger

You can compare it to the problem of pulling yourself out of a swamp by your own hair.

Kluge

But Gödel says it’s possible.

Enzensberger

He says we cannot completely explain mathematics with math. It’s impossible, there is always a part that remains undecidable. Systems are never 100% complete, that’s why it’s called the incompleteness theorem. And he did not just simply make a claim, the way I’m talking about it here right now – he actually proved it, proved mathematically that math cannot be a self-contained, consistent system. And if that is true for math, then how can we even imagine anything different for other systems which are much more vulnerable, much less consistent.

Kluge

The unrest of matter …

Enzensberger

I guess you could say that…

Kluge

… even at the Pole of Cold there is still vivid activity. There is always an exception …

Enzensberger

Yes, it’s always …for example, the linguists have a similar problem. Language cannot be comprehensively described by linguistics.

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Thousand year-old lichen/ The World’s slowest telegram

Kluge

There are a lot of metaphors in your poems, for example, “the study of lichen,” where you keep discovering intelligence, reliability, trustworthiness, connections and so on, just not where people would expect. So you don’t explore the potential for networking by taking recourse to the internet, or telephony, or Marconi’s work, but to an ancient organism, the lichen, about which you say: “They are the world’s slowest telegram.” Lichen.

Enzensberger

Yes, it’s a completely different form of time, of course, because they can … it’s also a question of life span. Lichen can live forever. They can live hundreds of years without changing much. They have a different relationship with time. But evolution still happens, there is still invention, so to speak.

Kluge

… and trustworthiness.

Enzensberger

Yes, of course…

Kluge

“Barbarossa once stepped on a lichen, and did not do any damage. The lichen is still there. Barbarossa is dead.”

Enzensberger

Yes, it’s still there. And it’s also an impressive invention of biology – the symbiosis between algae and fungus is a genius idea. One could say that even inanimate matter – that would be an almost romantic thesis – has a kind of intelligence, that it is an inherently intelligent process. We just don’t know who the acting subject is. Spinoza called that “deus sive natura.”

Kluge

That means …

Enzensberger

“God or nature.” He considered them equal. For him, nature was … and today, there are all these Geia theories, like the anthropic principle and so on. The idea that intelligence did not only enter the world with us humans …

Kluge

We have appropriated it, we have organized it.

Enzensberger

We have organized it, we have made use of it, in ways different from nature. But the processes, the development of complexity, one could say that existed long before we did.

Kluge

There are quite a few sea animals … if we disappeared, the ocean could produce a new kind of intelligence.

Enzensberger

Well, all animals first came from the ocean.

Kluge

Who knows if the mountains don’t contain a very slow form of intelligence.

Enzensberger

Who knows.

Kluge

The oceans could be complex, intelligent life forms.

Enzensberger

Anyway, complex structures exist everywhere, and existed long before humans did. That’s the nicer part of evolutionary theory. It’s a bit simplifying and not very enlightening to say, like the vulgar Darwinists, “our ancestors are the apes.” What does that even mean? It’s a horrible simplification of Darwinian thought. But in this kind of evolution … you don’t need apes, complexity has always been there. In this kind of cosmology, it’s a cosmological principle that complex things develop out of simple ones. We call it self-organization and so on.

Kluge

You use very affectionate, poetic attributes here. For example, you describe the color of a certain type of lichen in Spitzbergen – which you have obviously seen with your own eyes – as: “saffron, coral, orange, persio, scarlett, orseille.” What is orseille, what does that look like?

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“Saffron, coral, orange, persio, scarlett, orseille ”

Enzensberger

“Orseille” is a color, a reddish color with shades of brown. And that’s why, in the old world … they used lichen as dye. It was one of the first known resources for making colors, before they developed synthetic colors. Mankind always wanted colors. Because they are beautiful. Our eyes desire color. They are very sensitive. The differentiability of the eye is a miracle of its own; it’s incredible that we can differentiate between up to fifty thousand shades. Of course color has its own history, its own economy, chemistry … for example, people used to make a type of red, rubia, from squished lice, or from the dyemurex snail, it’s a very old practice. And the art of dyeing, there is an entire history of coloring, up to our contemporary petrochemical methods. Or the liquid crystals that we have now, they are wonderful. So there is an entire history of colors, and maybe it starts with lichen.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer

Kluge

If I understand correctly how you define intelligence, and what excites you so much about it – on the one hand, it’s the generosity and wastefulness, the idea of doing something not just for its value, but because there is a “surplus.”

Enzensberger

Yes, of course.

Kluge

On the other hand, it is the reason I remain curious. That’s an incentive.

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The Sin of Curiosity/Catilinarian Virtue

Enzensberger

Yes, and very hedonistic.

Kluge

And Catilinarian.

Enzensberger

Yes, of course. It’s reckless, too. Curiosity is reckless. And then there are all the sins of curiosity, of course.

Kluge

… to appropriate something…

Enzensberger

It’s also very interesting that, for example, physics had its fall from grace with the nuclear bomb, whereas biology still has to experience its fall from grace. That’s still in the future, something we should be prepared for. What’s happening there cannot end well; there will be monsters and catastrophes, I’m fairly certain.

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Human rights for clones?

Kluge

Imagine a rich man, someone like the sultan of Brunei, who grows clones in order to provide a reservoir for when he might be ill, when his kidneys …

Enzensberger

Yes, spare parts…

Kluge

…spare parts, yes …

Enzensberger

… a spare parts depot.

Kluge

So he keeps a depot of spare parts in form of slaves. An appropriate idea for Goethe’s Faust.

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Homunculus in Goethe’s FAUST, part 2

Enzensberger

Yes, of course. But I mean, there is a reason why Faust is a tragedy. We will find out, sooner or later. And the basic tests these days show already … the smarter ones among the biologists have already voiced their concerns. Even the Dolly guy who cloned the sheep now speaks up against cloning. He says …

Kluge

… he says, you can’t really stop the ageing process.

Enzensberger

… can’t stop it. Uncontrollable pathogens will develop …

Kluge

I created an eighty-nine year old baby, for example. That would be possible, right?

Enzensberger

Okay, there are obviously rather scary things going on. And no one knows what kind of political consequences these developments could have.

Kluge

“A rabbit at the computer center”: that’s the title of one of your poems, in which you speak of these creatures with admiration. “From the Eocene, he hops past us into a future, full of enemies, but nutritious and lustful as the dandelion.” That is a crucial part of what you are saying here.

Enzensberger

Yes, of course. You also need to take precariousness into account. Of course, ants are probably more disaster-resistant than we are. That means, we are soft and sensitive. Ants, on the other hand, are very resilient. They are also much older than humans, and I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that they are going to survive us.

Kluge

Their brains are the size of a grain of salt.

Enzensberger

Amazing. And yet, their level of organization …

Kluge

Their capability of precise differentiation …

Enzensberger

Yes, but their organization – what they achieve with their not even pin-sized brains is mainly due to connectivity. That is also used as a metaphor, “the ant colony.” Entomologists have very interesting things to say about that; the respective mechanisms have been studied extensively. The processes of communication, the mutual coordination, the ways in which an ant hill functions – it’s really interesting to see how complex processes can develop out of very basic components. That is related to the theory of cellular automata.

Kluge

You have always been fascinated by automata. That leads us back to Leibniz, who was a great scholar of automata.

Enzensberger

Of course, that’s where it starts. In Antiquity, they already had very primitive automata. Interesting is also their connection to the deceit of the priests. Even in Ancient Egypt they had “Simulacra,” that’s what they called it. The believers were faced with a mystery, with a miracle. It’s one of the oldest phenomena in the history of the so-called “deceit of the priests.” There is a connection between religious propaganda and automata.

Kluge

When a stick turns into a snake, for example, that would be …

Enzensberger

Yes, yes. This origin of automata is not at all practical, they actually have an ideological function.

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Ancestor Lucretius (95 - 55 BC)

Kluge

Lucretius is someone you mention regularly. What did he do?

Enzensberger

Well, he was still a proper poet. Back then, poets and scientists were still closely connected. That was commen in Antiquity, and then again during the Renaissance. A poet who didn’t know anything about science did not have anything to show for. And vice versa, a scientist had to hide if he wasn’t …

Kluge

… if he wasn’t capable of expressing himself …

Enzensberger

… if he wasn’t capable of expressing himself, if he wasn’t up to the standards of artistic production. It was all closely connected. And Lucretius was the guy who had the idea to represent the entire scientific knowledge of his time in a long didactic poem. “On the Nature of Things” is his great poem, and it discusses the comprehensive theory of atoms at the time, and so on. And with an incredible expressive prowess … I’m actually suspicious of the idea of originality in art. It was only two or three centuries ago that the cult of the genius emerged, and everyone was suffering from the illusion that they were starting from the very beginning. “Here I am,” and everyone else is forgotten, I’m starting over …

Kluge

The world did not exist until I made it …

Enzensberger

Yes, but of course, that’s nonsense. Up to the avantgardes of the 20th century, they promoted this illusion of the original genius. But of course that’s nonsense, we are all merely working on an already existing text.

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POETICS OF PROGRESS / Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s THE ELIXIRS OF SCIENCE

Enzensberger

The text has existed for thousands of years, and we keep writing it. We are revising it retrospectively. Tradition keeps being invented, it’s not a fixed repository that we keep raiding, it is continuously reconstructed by our work. But the idea that it’s all mine, and only mine, is so far-fetched …

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Panorama Robot Eye

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Rodney Brooks is an entrepreneur and director of the ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAB at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) / He asks: How can we avoid building artificial intelligent beings that reproduce our prejudices? / How can we prevent humans from becoming DIGITAL CHAUVINISTS - - ?

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HEADLESS ROBOT/ Rodney Brooks about ROBOT GENGHIS

Rodney Brooks

Our initial thought was that in the 1980s, NASA was trying to send one big robot to Mars, and the cost would have been 12 billion dollars.

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NASA Mars Robot

Brooks

So we decided to build a robot with six legs called “Genghis,” which only weighed one kilogram and had the same abilities as the one big robot that NASA wanted to make.

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GENGHIS

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Professor Rodney Brooks, Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT

Brooks

That is, we thought that if you would send out, say, a hundred of these one kilogram robots instead of one giant 1000 kilogram robot, the mission would be much cheaper. Because the mass to be sent into orbit would be much smaller, which would lower the cost. We also thought that if we built a small robot – and we did finish the first prototype in only 12 weeks –, we would be able to develop the robots much faster. That means, it would be a much faster way to travel to other planets. And we thought, if we can get this robot to move around independently on the surface of the planet Mars, without having to remote-control it, the whole enterprise would be cheaper. Instead of autonomous, we simply said “out of control,” that’s why it’s called “fast, cheap, and out of control.” That may sound a little weird, but at some point NASA actually accepted the slogan, even if they changed it a little. They said: “faster, cheaper, better,” because “out of control” was too radical for them.

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How did GENGHIS get its name?

Kluge

“Genghis” – where does that name come from?

Brooks

It was a six-legged robot that could climb over everything in its way. It did not need to take a detour around the obstacles, but could climb across things. We came up with a number of names, and then one of my students said: “It’s like Genghis Khan!”

Kluge

The interesting thing about Ghenghis is … and that’s basically your invention … the removal of the cognition box. Until then, they assumed that a robot needed a control center. And then you came along and said, it doesn’t need a control center.

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Genghis, the “headless” robot

Brooks

Yes, that was in the seventies, early eighties, when the first people started to build mobile robots. They were still pretty slow, and these robots were looking at the world through two inbuilt TV cameras – a sort of depth map is generated which is used to develop an internal model of the world. And then they asked themselves: “How can we get this model to move?”, and then later, with closed eyes, so to speak, “Oh, simply walk a meter this way.” And then the robot had to run 15 more minutes of calculations about the structure of the world in order to take another step. But let’s take a look at insects, for example mosquitoes. They can travel a meter per second, they can find prey like me, or chase after others, and they consist of only about 10-20'000 neurons. The people who build robots needed the biggest computer in the world in order to make the robot walk one meter in 15 minutes. A mosquito made of 10-20'000 neurons can travel a meter per second. Something about the organization did not sit right with me. I said, we are using the wrong structure for the robots, and that’s because initially, people always used our behavior as model and concluded that we need recognition, cognition. And I said, actually, that’s what we have to eliminate. We only need sensors that are closely connected to the actuators; that means, the neuron sensor does not have to be structured in a linear row. Then we tried to create an interactive system that reacts to the world, that does not have a built-in model of the world, but leaves the world as it is. The world itself is the best model. That means, the mosquito always relates to the external world and reacts to it. On the most basic level, this is how Genghis works: the connection between what the legs are sensing and how they are moving – for example, here we have the robot leg walking toward an obstacle, and when it notices the obstacle, it automatically lifts off the floor and climbs across. And so here we have the basic ability to move forward and climb across obstacles. Then, there is an infrared sensor that says, wait, there might be someone up there to the right. That means, the behavioral patterns of the leg are modulated, the right leg will take shorter steps, and then the robot takes a right turn toward the person it senses to its right. The robot does not have representation, in the sense of “here is a human being that I’m going to chase now,” but there is a direct connection. There are infrared sensors, and the leg movement slightly changes accordingly, a bit shorter on the right, where the infrared sensors have discovered something. If you watch the robot, it will be very still, and if someone suddenly moves, the robot is going to follow them. To the observer, it will look like the robot moves with intention, but it’s not like that. It’s simply built that way. There is no explicit intention, and I think, we humans are the same way. We always say that someone, or we ourselves, acts intentionally, but quite often these intentions don’t actually explicitly exist within us or the other person.

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We humans have freed ourselves from the RULE OF THE GENES, over the course of our evolution / That’s what distinguishes us from the goldfish / And it opens up an unforeseen future for the human BRAIN / It’s not defective genes, but a stereotypical environment that endangers our personality, says brain researcher Susan A. Greenfield - -

Stimme

The signal is clear. It’s time to develop.

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THE BRAIN-RESEARCHER

Kluge

Is it possible to store a brain outside the body, and how would that work?

Susan A. Greenfield

I think it gives some people hope to think that they can be put on ice after their death.

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Professor Susan A. Greenfield, Oxford University

Greenfield

The problem is, if you freeze a brain, it’s like freezing strawberries: when you defrost them, they’ll be mush. You can deep-freeze muscles, like for example when you freeze lamb or beef, but it’s not recommended for brain. Temperatures below freezing are a problem.

You can cool down the brain, and you can stop certain processes that way. You use a cooling liquid, and the liquid percolates – it depends on how deep you want to go, how cold you make it, how long it should be cooled down for.

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Freezing of dead bodies in the USA

Greenfield

Physiologists have shown that it takes a very long movement from a whispering in the forest to falling trees. Everything we do, every smile, every word, depends on muscle contraction, except for tears and drooling.

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Animus / Meaning; Anima / Soul; Animation / = Movement

Greenfield

There is an interesting connection between movement and the brain. When we imagine “animus”, for example, the consciousness, and the word “animated,” meaning that something is moving, an animal – animals move, plants don’t. Animals move from one place to the other. If something is animated, what is its connection to a consciousness, “animus”? There is a small ocean creature. In early stages, it has a very simple brain, it swims around, interacts with the world. When it grows older, it attaches to a rock and can live off the digestion of filtered sea water. It swallows its own brain, it eats its own brain. That means, you only need a brain if you move. If you are stuck to a rock, you don’t need a brain.

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Professor Susan A. Greenfield, Oxford University

Kluge

The human mind has the ability to remain in one place; the body remains in one place, like the Ascidians, I think, and the mind wanders.

Greenfield

One of the most interesting aspects of our brain functions is the fact that we can dissociate from our immediate environment. As adults, we can read a novel, and something very fascinating happens: suddenly we are someplace else. The experience of being somewhere else is so vivid, so real, that it seems more alive than the reality around us. It’s an astonishing ability to turn off everything else, to turn off our senses, to use our imagination. It’s an ability we have to learn. When we are little, we have picture books, and gradually, there are fewer and fewer pictures. I think this is why we say that the book is better than the film. I’ve never heard anyone say, I prefer the film to the book. And I think it has to do with the fact that our imagination is so powerful; more powerful and stronger than someone else’s imagination. It’s really exciting, the process that happens in a brain to conjure up this inner world that seems so real. The world can move us to a different time, a different place.

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Translation: Barbara Behrens

Greenfield

The world inside us, our mind, is the place that allows us to escape. That worries me about people who are like children; people who are trapped in the present; people who don’t have the ability to read anymore, to read books; people who have always had access to computers, who use other people’s imagination. Those people might become junkies, addicts. They succumb to strong sensations that are only tied to the present. And when you are entangled in the present, you get bored easily, because you cannot escape into the inner world, the fantasy world, as opposed to those people who can still read, who can read books, who can relate to the past, who can undertake an inner journey.

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George M. Whitesides at Harvard is the prototype of a scientist between the frontlines / He is among the top ten scientists most cited in scientific journals / He argues that from the perspective of a future digital intelligence, flesh-and-blood intelligence would seem implausible –

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THE NANOSCIENTIST

George M. Whitesides

When one turns to systems that are twenty, ten nanometers in size, you work with objects that are as tiny as a small number of atoms. And in those dimensions there are quantum phenomena, and it basically looks like we don’t have any real-life experience with those.

Kluge

No intuition.

Whitesides

No. I don’t have any intuition in this field. I’ve gotten used to not think anymore about these problems. My intuition is rather inadequate.

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George M. Whitesides, Harvard University

Whitesides

One of the fields that will be interesting for the future is research dealing with very, very small things. One of the most interesting developments in technology that basically influences everything is the idea that we move on from things we can hold and see to things that are basically invisible but still functioning.

Kluge

And there is still intelligence hidden in these invisible things?

Whitesides

Absolutely. That’s what science is about, to try and find out how things function, how they move.

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Disappearance of the border between life and death

Kluge

The interesting thing is that, if we think of atoms, molecules, in atomar and molecular dimensions, the border between the living and the non-living disappears.

Whitesides

Yes, that’s correct. And one should always remember, if you really go to the deepest end, the lowest level, on the molecular level, that is the discipline of chemistry. Chemistry connects atoms with incredible precision. We’ve done this for hundreds of years. And of course, we all know chemistry, in regard to car paint … Or we know it as wrapping foil, or fabric. But something that might become possible soon, a completely new development, is to transfer this particular ability, to try and connect it to concepts of optics and electronics, so that new systems with new abilities can be invented and created.

Whitesides

It’s obvious that we cannot unhinge the sun, but we can do that to an atom. One of the achievements of nanotechnology is to create structures that make it possible to move atoms to a place where we can move them separately. Basically, we could build a cathedral that’s only a few atoms high. An amusing idea …

Kluge

An invisible cathedral …

Whitesides

It would not be visible for a normal person. Or even an extraordinary person. But the idea is that these systems can still manipulate information, they can still store information, and at the same time, they can penetrate the inside of living cells and see what’s going on there. That could be interesting for a lot of things that we cannot even imagine right now, and for some that we can.

Kluge

Could you give me an example?

Whitesides

Something that we …

Kluge

For both sides.

Whitesides

I have listed examples of things that we can imagine. Imagine that we can invent computers so small that they are basically invisible. If I look at my watch and think about the fact that it has a data storage, and this storage space is based on the equivalent of a CD – but the information stored there is nanometer technology, not micro technology – that means that this watch could store the equivalent of 1000 CDs. I don’t know how much I really know. But it’s not actually knowledge that corresponds to 1000 CDs. We face the interesting prospect of possibly being able to store all the information we would ever need on this small watch. So that basically the moment a child is born, a;; the knowledge it requires could be stored somewhere immediately.

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The Savannas of Information

Whitesides

But the point is that we don’t even need to know anything; we just need to be able to find things. As someone else has said before, it goes back to the idea of hunter and gatherer.

Kluge

Yes, we go back to the jungle, or the prairie, the savanna …

Whitesides

Yes, it’s like a savanna, the savanna of information. What we try to hunt and to gather is not nourishment, but information. If you want an example of something that we cannot really grasp right now, something that might happen in 50 years maybe, or maybe 100 years, take the following question: Are we ever going to be able to connect our computer to our brain? That would radically change human nature, if we were able to build machines that are hybrids of biological and information systems. At the moment, we are not capable of doing that, of course. But the first steps, where we are trying to figure out how such an interface might work, an interface between a biological system and a man-made system, that is now in the realm of possibility.

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Up to 56 balls can be packed optimally in the shape of a tube or a sausage / With the 56th ball, the ideal form changes into a cluster, a heap / In mathematics, we call this THE SAUSAGE CATASTROPHE / Professor Dr. Jörg Wills about Johannes Kepler and the MAGICAL TURNING POINTS of numbers - -

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DER MATHEMATICIAN

Kluge

The interesting thing is that Kepler demonstrated this problem, if I understand it correctly, in the margins of a manuscript that he dedicated to a friend. It was about snow crystals …

Jörg Wills

Exactly …

Kluge

Which has nothing to do with balls …

Wills

It was his employer, but in a way also his friend, as far as that was possible. Mister Wacker von Wackerfels to whom he dedicated this manuscript on occasion of New Year 1611. It was in fact about the hexagonal shape of snowflakes, and Kepler developed visionary and admirable ideas. No strict form of proof – not what we may imagine from a mathematician or physicist. He already had the idea that the hexagonal shape was connected to the structure of the atom, which is perhaps not that surprising. Be he also assumed that matter consists of small bullets, and that’s exactly the concept that is still considered valid today – if we don’t delve into the subatomic sphere, where the atom is dissected into electrons, neutrons, protons, we can think of atoms as bullets. Experimentally, this theory wasn’t proven until the early 20th century, by Max von Laue in 1911. But Kepler had seen it already three centuries earlier.

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Professor Dr. Jörg Wills, mathematician

Kluge

That means, Kepler saw a snow crystal like we all can see it, and based on the symmetry visible in a single snow crystal, he deducted that the original shape, the smallest element of this shape, has to be symmetrical as well.

Wills

He had all these fundamental genius ideas, the snow crystals, as different as they may seem … not two snow crystals are the same, but they are all based on a hexagonal shape. And I would say, before Kepler, before the Renaissance, they would have said it’s because God made it so, and not thought about it further. A typical religious attitude, and if you want, also a convenient attitude. But as a Renaissance Man – late Renaissance –, Kepler didn’t stop there, and he thought about the reason why. He ended up with those bullet-shaped elements, which others before him had thought about in a very vague way, but Kepler took it further, without being able to prove anything, and based on the notion of the sphere, he developed a problem set, the so-called Kepler Problem.

Kluge

What I don’t quite understand, if you examine a snow crystal and you see this hexagonal shape, if you look at a single crystal, and it’s always a hexagon, no matter what …

Wills

… the basic shape.

Kluge

… the basic shape is a hexagon. How do you get from a hexagon to a bullet?

Wills

Well, you have to take it further. The hexagon shape has to be somewhere in the smallest element. And then … the idea of infinity plays into this, which has always fascinated us humans, of course, but especially mathematicians and physicists. The infinite in two ways: the infinitively big, which leads us to the cosmos, where Kepler also made significant contributions, and the infinitively small. That is a train of thought so modern – it will always be modern. It is still important today, in the age of the computer, I don’t need to go on. And Kepler took things further, and he realized that the smallest particles, the smallest units, could be built from the most perfect of bodies, the sphere. This perfection in the absolutely spherical also allowed for the idea of an infinite number of shapes. And in regard to snow, we’d have to go a bit deeper into that, but with certain equations you get the hexagonal shape. Because – to put it simply, or it would get too complicated – a circle can be connected to exactly six other circles of the same size. Anyone can try that at a bar with beer coasters, it fits perfectly. And there you have your six circles, a hexagon.

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Snow

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P(B2,C3), Packing density 75 %

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P(B2,C3), Packing density 73,6 %

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Keplerian Sphere Packing

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Johannes Kepler, mathematician and astronomer

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The sphere packing problem in higher dimensions / sphere packing as code

Wills

Coding plays a role for questions like how to achieve a decent television signal, for example via satellite for transoceanic distances, without the cracking and humming they used to get. The same with phone calls, those of us who have used phones in the past all notice that transatlantic phone calls are absolutely clear now. Or think of CDs, why are CDs high fidelity? It’s because of the so-called coding theory. And one of the basics of coding theory is sphere packing. The center of the spheres are the code words, so to speak. It’s difficult to explain, but extremely interesting, and actually far more interesting than the Kepler question. The center of a sphere is defined, let’s say, in an eight-dimensional space, by eight coordinates. And these eight numbers – let’s say, zero-one, zero-one, sequences like that – form, for example, a word, and geometrically, mathematically speaking, that’s the center of a sphere. And several centers are several different words, and with eight dimensions, I have lots of space, so I can introduce a lot of different words.

And the idea is that words have to be sufficiently different, that means, they have to be different in several points. Because if, for example, the letter A only consists of ones, and the letter B only of zeros, they are different in eight points, and I could for instance replace a few zeros with ones, that would be the disturbances happening during the travel to the satellite and back, or across the ocean; but I can still identify the correct letter. On the other hand, the words should be close together, because the further they are apart, the more expensive it is. It’s a question of energy and cost. And the minimization and simultaneous maximization, that’s a sphere packing problem. The fact that every center is enclosed by a sphere keeps the words apart, and that the spheres are packed densely brings them closer together and thus minimizes energy. These are coding problems, and generations of mathematicians have been busy optimizing these things since the mid-19th century.

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Professor Dr. Jörg Wills, mathematician

Kluge

You spoke of eight dimensions – that was just an example, it could also be more …

Wills

… more. My research is not dealing with the Keplerian range, but with higher dimensions, 24 dimensions and more. Certain dimensions are particularly gratifying. I didn’t pick 8 and 24 without reason, 48 is another number like that. It has to do with pure math, but the important thing is that this pure math actually brings in the big money. A few years ago, I visited what I would call the capital of these questions – at AT&T, the American telephone company, the labs, laboratories, and there – near New York, in New Jersey – the crème de la crème of coding theory is at work, so to speak. They make sphere packings. They start like this, search for them, and they are paid fantastic money by AT&T. Back when the Soviet Union was still strong, the other big center was in the Soviet Union, and they also had fantastic, world-class coders. In any case, they were significantly better than the Germans or the French or the Italians.

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Sausage conjecture & catastrophe theory

Wills

We know that table tennis and tennis balls, the regular ones, are sold in six-packs, and they are packaged in a linear order in a plastic cover. And the packaging is optimal insofar as the additional air that is always in a package with more than one ball, is minimized, optimized. In three-dimensional spaces, this works well with small numbers up to 55 spheres, that has been proven through a computer. At 56, something changes. And in higher dimensions, beginning with the fifth dimension, it is assumed that this linear order is always the best possible. That’s a theory of famous Hungarian mathematician, László Fejes Tóth, who developed this problem 25, 26 years ago: it’s the famous “sausage conjecture.”

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Professor Dr. Jörg Wills, mathematician

Wills

And in the third and fourth dimension, the following happens: if you line up the spheres, like we can imagine it for example with tennis balls in three dimensions, it works fine up to 55 spheres, and if you add another one, there’s a jump and it becomes a cluster. That’s a jump, so to speak, where the term catastrophe would still be an exaggeration. But in the fourth dimension, something happens at around, just short of half a million. That means, you can line up almost half a million spheres, and occupy the least possible empty space up to almost half a million, and then you add one single sphere and the best-case scenario is a sudden – “boom” – a cluster. And then it jumps from one-dimensional to full-dimensional. We can prove that, too: we don’t know the exact number where it happens, but it’s about half a million, and then it jumps. And back when they discovered that about 15, 17 years ago, catastrophe theory was fashionable in math, and with a certain sense of math humor, if you want, and as a marketing strategy – it’s a purely mathematical phenomenon after all –, they called it “the sausage catastrophe.”

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Why are experienced June flies so hard to catch? / Flies have nerve cells as large as human ones / Their compound eyes have an astonishing capacity when it comes to navigation and the quick perception of movement / Professor Dr. Alexander Borst, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, reports –

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THE FLY-RESEARCHER

Alexander Borst

First of all, contrary to general belief, the nerve cells of a fly are not smaller than ours, they simply have fewer. That is an immense advantage for analysis, because we don’t have to understand a network of hundreds of millions of cells, but the part of the brain we are interested in, which processes the moving images, only consists of 60 nerve cells, on each side of the brain. 60, six-zero. An easily manageable number.

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Professor Dr. Alexander Borst, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology

Kluge

That means, that is the number of nerve cells behind the individual facets of the fly eye?

Borst

This center for processing movement connects the information from all the facets, and it’s already specifically pre-processed for perception of movement.

Kluge

The eye of a fly is built differently from a human eye.

Borst

Correct …

Kluge

…There are significant differences …

Borst

Exactly. The development of an image in the eye of a fly works completely different than ours. We have one single lens which projects onto the retina, and an image of the environment appears on our retina. In the eye of a fly, the image is first screened and reproduced on many small individual lenses. But the information in the nerve cells is exactly like it is in ours. You get the projection of the environment on an array of nerve cells, like receptors. And there are large differences in quantity. For a fly, the resolution is much lower than ours. They can differentiate about one or two angular degrees, whereas our fovea is better by factor 100.

Kluge

That means, the vision of a fly does not have this faceted effect like in movies from the 1950s …

Borst

Well, there are two widespread misconceptions. The first is that the fly sees a complete image on each facet, that means, the lady with the fly swatter approaches the fly a thousand times. That’s incorrect. The second is a kind of screen, and that’s not true either, because our image, what we see, is basically screened as well, just so subtly – because we have the receptors – that we don’t perceive it as a screen. That means, all the fly sees is an image with a lower resolution.

Kluge

Why is it so difficult to catch a fly?

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Why is it so difficult to catch a FLY?

Borst

That’s a good question. Because the fly has shorter conduction paths, so to speak. From the eye to the executing muscles in the fly’s thorax, where leg muscles are activated and so on … it’s only half a centimeter for a large fly. That means, this signal only has to travel a short distance, whereas when we decide to catch a fly, it has to travel all the way down the arm muscles, it has to cross a distance of about a meter. That’s the fly’s advantage. We have a faster conduction than the fly, because our nerve cells are enveloped in a myelin sheath, which results in a 50 times faster conduction. But since for the fly, it’s only this short a distance, the fly has an advantage and wins.

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EVOLUTION of flies

Kluge

In regard to evolution, the fly is an arthropod, which makes us related, so to speak. How old is this system, if you want?

Borst

About 300 million years.

Kluge

And humankind?

Borst

Humans, as we know them, have only developed in the last two million years.

Kluge

But this 300 million-year old system still lives on within us, in regard to this specific point. Could you say that, or does that simplify things too much?

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Males and Females

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Screen-eyes

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Fly brain

Borst

Well, I don’t know if they go back to a common ancestor, or if they developed individually because selection pushed them into the same direction, that is: if it was an adaptive evolutionary process, I don’t know. But I think there is a need for the processing of movement, plain and simple, and as long as that exists, evolution will find similar solutions, even independently from each other. That’s what I think.

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Observation in fly brain

Kluge

In what sense might this model, the fly model, be useful for the development of – in quotation marks – intelligent machines, or what could we learn from it?

Borst

Okay, there are a few groups, one at CalTech and one at ETH Zurich, that create chips based on the insights we and other groups have gained regarding the perception of movement in flies. And they install them in their robots and try to build autonomous robots that can see, that can navigate independently without remote control.

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VLSI Chips / Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits

Borst

These are so-called VLSI Chips, that means “Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits,” which can be produced relatively cheaply. And it is pretty satisfying to watch, because on the one hand, it’s a good feeling that it is “good for something” – in quotation marks – and on the other hand, those robots, once they are ready, can serve as test objects for us. Because we are always interested – why does the interconnection work like that in the fly? Is it really so that the fly can fly straighter? A lot of that is speculation. We can set up computer simulations to support our claims, but in order to do that, we have to construct certain visual environments, and of course they are not natural conditions. And when we put a robot into a room and let him loose, we can see – and if he suddenly takes a right turn and runs into the table, that’s an indication that we don’t really get it yet, I would say.

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Professor Dr. Alexander Borst, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology

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A star is born, lives and dies / Whether it is surrounded by life and planets depends on the kind of dust from which it rose / Part of the matter in the Milky Way consists of stellar winds and dust / Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr, astrophysicist, reports –

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THE STAR-RESEARCHER

Kluge

The proximity to life is fairly obvious with these polyaromatic hydrocarbons …

Erwin Sedlmayr

Very obvious. And if you look at the interstages of the acetylene chains – you start with acetylene, diacetylene, tracetylene –, these chains are not the only thing that is produced, but in this moment, with a little bit of oxygen, alcohols develop as well, methanol, ethanol; formaldehyde is produced, and acetic acid; and even – now we know this without doubt – glycine, when NH2 attaches to acetic acid. And glycine is the most basic amino acid. They have found it in space. It’s still not clear whether that is really a pre-stage of biological material, but it’s certainly interesting.

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Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr, astrophysicist

Sedlmayr

Well, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it curves and provides a kind of onion-peel structure, like these onion-like structures or flat things like graphite structures, or technically speaking sp2 bonds.

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Onion-peel structure

Sedlmayr

And if there is a bit of energy, an energy-laden photon, you can show that this bond, sp2, the graphite bond, can be transformed into a sp3 bond, which is diamond. That’s how you can make small diamonds.

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Factories of the Universe

Kluge

And these factories that exist in space, so to speak, where the polyaromatic hydrocarbons are produced: how can I … are they star-like formations?

Sedlmayr

They are stars.

Kluge

They are stars. How big are they? Do they have a …

Sedlmayr

Well, when the sun evolves, it becomes a Red Giant, and then an Uber-Giant or something, and it’s exactly those worn-out stars whose surface is unstable …

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Beteigeuze, Red Giant

Kluge

How big are they?

Sedlmayr

They are, let’s say, a thousand times or a hundred times as big as the sun, at the center. The sheaths are another thousand times as big, of course.

Sedlmayr

And anyway, astronomy is, generally speaking, always a look into the past. You never see an object as it is now, but as it used to be, when the light was sent out that reaches us today.

Sedlmayr

Olbers’ Paradox, it’s actually older than that. Even Kepler already asked that question. When you look up at the night sky, you can see – in the darkest night, with clear view, let’s say you are in Bavaria on a mountain – you can see 5-6,000 stars, if there are no other lights and no light pollution or clouds. According to the laws of optics, you could take the sun and split it in 6,000 pieces and organize them according to the pattern of the stars. According to the laws of physics, that should result in the exact same amount of light. So Kepler wondered why the night sky isn’t bright. The day is bright because of the sun; and at night, according to Kelpler’s calculations, one would only need about 3,000 stars to achieve the same brightness. And this phenomenon, which Olbers later formulated a bit more precisely in a different context, is Olbers’ Paradox. Why is the night sky dark? Surprisingly, the reason is that many stars’ light hasn’t reached us yet. Or you could also say, because cosmos exists, the energetic density of the electromagnetic field of light has decreased and shifted toward red – you are familiar with the 3-degree Kelvin radiation – that’s why the night sky is dark. If you compressed 3-degree Kelvin radiation, it would be incredibly bright.

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Olbers’ Paradox

Sedlmayr

In hindsight, the first to solve this problem was Edgar Allan Poe.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Kluge

The American writer …

Sedlmayr

Yes, the writer. He writes that the night sky is dark because the light of many stars has not actually reached us yet. Which is the correct answer. And because the age of the world might not be eternal, therefore the light has not reached us yet. But then he continues, unfortunately, that no sane person could make that assumption. Of course, today we know – thanks to Einstein and cosmology – that a star only has a certain life span, and that is the solution to Olbers’ Paradox.

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Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr, astrophysicist

Kluge

And Edgar Allan Poe is considered fantasy fiction …

Sedlmayr

Fantasy, yes, in “Eureka”. In his treatise “Eureka”.

Kluge

But is that about astronomy?

Sedlmayr

It is about astronomy. I think, if I remember correctly, there are almost 200 pages about stars and such things. But he was really an amateur, and that may be why he developed these grand ideas, where everyone before him had failed. Around 1850, people were completely helpless in the face of this question, and so they basically ignored it.

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Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr, astrophysicist

Kluge

When was it solved scientifically?

Sedlmayr

Scientifically, it was basically solved with Einstein’s cosmological models and Hubble‘s discovery of the expansion of the cosmos.

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René Descartes, originator of MODERN THOUGHT / Durs Grünbein, Büchner Award winner, works on a new poem dedicated to the development of Descartes’ most important work, DISCOURS DE LA METHODE / Poetry about the winter and reason coming in from the cold / Durs Grünbein on the passionate rationalist Descartes –

Kluge

A poem about Cartesius, Descartes. How does that work? In hexameter, in iambs? What is an appropriate meter?

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THE GROUNDHOG OF REASON / Durs Grünbein’s new poem about DESCARTES

Durs Grünbein

I have been told – since you mention “Cartesius” – that Descartes did not like the Latin version of his name. His main work he already wrote in French, but others in Latin, like “prima philosophia.” What gave me the inspiration for this poem was an episode from his life. Around 1619, young Descartes is stuck in Germany, in a small village at the Danube near Ulm. It’s winter, the beginning of the Thirty Year War, he is on his way to the Netherlands, but he is stuck because of the harsh winter. And during this time, he keeps writing, he has the first visions that lead him to write his most famous work, “Discours de la méthode.”

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Durs Grünbein, writer

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Discours de la méthode

Kluge

What is the title of his famous work?

Grünbein

“Discourse on the Method.” That’s where the crucial insight “cogito ergo sum” is from.

Kluge

“Cogito ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am,” that’s what it means?

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“Cogito ergo sum”

Grünbein

Yes.

Kluge

Or “I think that I am”?

Grünbein

Or rather, he tries to isolate his mind from all eventualities, to find out what ultimately thinks within us.

Kluge

It’s like gardening. He draws a line, he works on a plot of land. An estate of communication.

Grünbein

In particular, he sets himself apart from outdated philosophy, that’s important; from Aristotle, Plato, and so on. He turns into a kind of positivist who only accepts things that are directly accessible by reflection.

Kluge

What does that include? Differentiation…

Grünbein

Well, first he takes everything that has been preserved only in writing: the writings of the Fathers of the Church, scholastic texts, but also big parts of traditional logic are useless to him.

Kluge

Why?

Grünbein

He rejects it all because it leads him off the path of pure thought, of immediate reflection. And then he tries, and that’s his second major insight … for him, the basic structure of the order of things lies in “mathesis,” in mathematics. Everything can be turned into math, ultimately even the mind. And that’s what makes him one of the founders of modern science. Just before him, there was Francis Bacon, and among his contemporaries are people like Kepler; new astronomy, new physics, the diopter, those tare all things he is working on.

Kluge

Galilei detects four Jupiter moons… That era …

Grünbein

Exactly. That’s exactly the era.

Kluge

Leeuwenhoek examines saliva under the microscope. Suddenly there is life in the smallest things. Generally, mankind works expansively. Mankind builds estates, estates of love, estates of relationships, they organize the structure of their own interior being, their connections, and that’s the beginning of philosophy.

Grünbein

Modern philosophy, if you will.

Kluge

Mental landscape architecture …

Grünbein

Yes, yes.

Kluge

What does that look like when he sits there, in Ulm in the middle of winter … a Frenchman in the Swabian province.

Grünbein

Like I said, he was still pretty young. In the classic portraits we all know, for example in the famous portrait by Frans Hals, you see a man with curls to his shoulders, a short beard, later a slightly bloated face, but during those years, he still was – I can tell you how old he was exactly – I think he was in his mid-twenties. And there is a portrait of him as a young man from around that time. Shortly after, he enlisted in the German army, under Frederick Elector Palatine, he was there for the coronation right before he enlisted, but he left the army again after a short time. It was just a way to make a living …

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René Descartes (1596-1650)

Kluge

As Officer Adlatus, or what kind of position did he have? It’s not clear. Maybe also as mathematician?

Grünbein

I could not find any information about his rank. But of course, enlisting was … there were all kinds of reasons, it was a way to make a living, but also a way of life during that time. You kept getting to work with all kinds of technology … A big part of the intelligence was military intelligence, even though Descartes himself was more of a … he steered clear of war, to put it delicately. He did not like war.

Grünbein

His main work, which is pretty short, is structured like a tiny bildungsroman. He talks about the different turning points in his life and that is what remains. Ultimately, those are his achievements. And that is the foundation on which he can now build. From there, he can go into the different scientific disciplines. It’s noticeable– and insofar, he is really one of these multi-thinkers of that time – that he does not simply practice philosophy, but also proper physics, math. He did algebra. As far as I know, Descartes was, for example, the one who introduced the letters that are still used for equations, so “a, b, c” and “x, y, z” and so on. He formalizes equations in a new way. He discovers things. He managed to prove the law of refraction.

Kluge

Here is this young man, this wunderkind, so to speak, who is called a dualist. He invented philosophical dualism. What does that mean?

Grünbein

Well, body and mind. He is the one who assumes that there are two big separate substances: “res cogitans” and “res extensa.” A thinking substance and the pure, expanded substance we are confronted with.

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Durs Grünbein, writer

Kluge

A stone, for example.

Grünbein

Yes, or the world as such, still without thought. It is like a mirror, so to speak. A strictly dualist world view. Descartes distinguishes between our brain and the Himalaya. Yes, indeed. He goes as far as to – for me, this is where his dualism shows, and in my long poem, I refer to it a number of times – for him, animals are kind of a problem. He thinks of animals as automata. He finds them fascinating, they are like little machines that run incredibly well, but in a way, they don’t have a soul like we do. They don’t have self-control. They are lacking a soul, in particular the res cogitans.

Kluge

They don’t have feelings, so I can cut off their legs for research purposes, dig around in their brains, take out an eye to study it.

Grünbein

Something like that. People have done a lot of bad things, yes.

Kluge

It’s an extremely tough position that establishes these boundaries.

Grünbein

He represents this kind of hardcore classic rationalism. Although he is often treated unfairly. First, he is one of the most multi-faceted characters of his time that we know of. We know his correspondence, we know him as a lover, as a friend and so on. In a way, his rationalism is only a strict methodology. But it is behind the mentality that is still used to justify research on animals.

Kluge

He is a surgeon of reason, could you say that? He is also something like a property manager, a land registry of thought. If it’s not documented in the registry, it’s not thought.

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Surgeon of REASON

Grünbein

Even though for him, there is not a strict ethic in that sense. His thinking is goal-oriented.

Kluge

No, but architecture. A thought has windows, doors, rectangles, a roof ….

Grünbein

Yes, exactly. And he already physiologizes thinking. There is a text about the soul, the affects, where he first summarizes the assumptions of the ancient philosophers, but then it suddenly turns into something radically modern. And the first experimental insights infiltrate philosophy.

Kluge

Who is his nemesis, his opponent in contemporary philosophy? Who represents the opposition?

Grünbein

His opponents are the hardcore Aristotelians. The scholastics, the school of Thomas Aquinas, and the entire traditional logic. Everything that isn’t empirical, that is purely idealistic thinking and has been passed on for 1,500 years. That’s his enemy. But since that is also the church, the official position of the church, he has to be very careful. He seems very upset when he hears about Galilei’s sentence, and from that moment on he is extremely careful. It’s very characteristic that he is in correspondence with several Parisian clerics and uses them to test the waters, to see how far he can go.

Kluge

According to more recent research, Galilei was not forced to recant because of the rotation of Earth around the sun, but because he started to dissect a wafer, before and after the transfiguration, and said that physically speaking, nothing changes. They did not take kindly to that. However, the church was smart enough not to force him to recant that idea, but instead something else, because whatever he was going to revoke would become a popular idea. That’s why they did not care when he later exclaimed: “And yet it moves.”

Grünbein

Yes, one thing they did not like at all was telescopes directed at space, the moon, and the other planets. That alone was a scandal for the church. You are not supposed to look that closely into God’s backyard.

Kluge

And what does a poet do with that kind of thing? What kind of verses do you forge?

Grünbein

Forging is a great word! It started a few years ago, when I experienced this primal scene, when I imagined him being snowed in, in this tiny house in a small town in the middle of winter, and it started with one single line: “Monsieur, wake up. It snowed all night.“ We don’t know who is speaking. It’s still not clear if he was all by himself, or if he had at least a valet with him. Then a conversation begins, over several chapters. An inner dialogue, but also a conversation with the valet, so that there are a lot of passages with dialogue. They deal with the big topics of that era. They discuss vision, certainty, then – that’s another of his phrases – “reading the book of the world.” He says that one day, he opened the big book of the world. Then there is a longer passage about dream analysis, as I called it. The truth is that Descartes – very strange for a rationalist – has three visions during that year, if you will. In one vision, he dreams of a melon. Once awake, he asks himself: What does that mean? For him, the melon is a sign that he is going to be very lonely, but that there is a completeness to his solitude, that you have to follow your lonely path. And from that moment, he knew exactly what to do, he says. From then on, he was able to “make use” of his life. Up to that point, he had done research on this or that …

Kluge

What does the melon have to do with loneliness and thought?

Grünbein

I have no idea, we’d have to ask Freud.

Kluge

The melon of thought?

Grünbein

I don’t know either …

Kluge

A Mediterranean fruit, in the Nordic winter of Ulm …

Grünbein

I only know that Beckett once made a reference to this incident later, and that, as far as I know, the figure of Malone is based on this. It’s a pun on “alone” and “melon.” But that only works in English …

Grünbein

Under the ice:

December night. The starry sky shines, polished

By fresh winter wind, who with his rough file

Has ground the snow to brittle ice cracknel.

Harshens the fields where mouse and badger hurry

On bleeding paws, fleeing from a shadow.

Frozen in the mud, puddles guard the deserted meadows

With grey eagle-eyes. The North Star shines

Like the uncovered heart in the Theatrum Anatomicum.

As if inflated, the universe expands, enormous and brutal,

While Earth shrinks like a planet observed through a telescope.

A cheroot smolders. The oven grill is squeaky clean

Like the roasted ox’s ribcage after the meal.

Winter cold gathers in the scholar’s coat.

Crawls into the buckled shoe, the white lace collar,

And paints rosettes on the bottle-glass panes.

The freezing air sharpens the outlines in the dark,

Makes chin and nose pointier, and in the morning turns lips blue.

In winter, a man resembles his own corpse.

He lies there, stiffly, as if laid out – his bed a coffin.

He is woken by a shiver. Outside, it’s snowing. A new day!

Descartes lies awake. Cold sweat collects on his forehead.

He dreamt of Amsterdam, where he sat at night

Naked on the pavement near the frozen canal,

Surrounded by beggars, laughing stock for the rich.

One of them called

See the sly fox from Paris.

He fishes for lenses in ice and mirrors. He believes

That man is transparent. And a dwarf with glasses

Approached in gallop on a bone saw.

He sprinkled salt in his eyes

Doesn’t that bite?

Then he let go, and the ice turned the color of piss.

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Chapter 7: UNDER THE ICE

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Excerpt from Durs Grünbein’s new poem about Descartes

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Model of 17th century Enlightenment

Kluge

It’s really interesting that you are so interested in the 17th century. If I had command over time, I would try to hitch our early 21st century like a railroad wagon to the 16th century, when thinking had the power to create property, the power to find orientation in life, to conquer the world, to take over, when Europe was still young … cold and young …

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Descartes’ lens grinding machine

Grünbein

And everything in between you would want to erase?

Kluge

The 18th century is simply too rhetorical for me. And the 19th century is a waste of time, a century of misery in preparation of World War I. And I would like to say good riddance and uncouple those wagons and start over. Back when the world was still young - -

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Poetics of Progress/ H.M. Enzensberger about his book “The Elixirs of Science”

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Rodney Brooks, Headless Robot

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THE BRAIN-RESEARCHER / With Professor Dr. Susan A. Greenfield (Oxford)

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THE NANOSCIENTIST / With Professor Dr. George M. Whitesides (Harvard)

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THE MATHEMATICIAN / Kepler’s sphere packing and the sausage catastrophe

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THE FLY-RESEARCHER / Why is it so difficult to catch a fly?

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THE ASTRONOMER / Professor Dr. Erwin Sedlmayr: Why is the night sky not brighter than the sun?

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THE GROUNDHOG OF THE MIND / Durs Grünbein about DESCARTES

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et al.

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THE ORDER OF THINGS / How poetic is science?