David Whitehouse: The Sun

The Sun has always had pride of place in our little corner of the universe, and also an almost indescribably important role in our religions, myths and art. In recent centuries, scientists have discovered much that is fascinating about the Sun but have barely started to understand what makes it behave in the way it does.

The Sun: A Biography is a very ambitious book, in which astronomer David Whitehouse attempts to set down the history of the Sun and our perennial obsession with it. Does he succeed? I think he certainly does; The Sun is not a textbook and is written for the general reader, but Whitehouse brings the subject marvellously to life and in no way dumbs it down for us non-scientists.

Despite the chapters dealing with solid subjects such as radiation, magnetism and optics, it is difficult not to feel, after reading this book, that the gigantic object that dominates the solar system is some sort of gargantuan living creature with its quirks, appetites and mysterious moods.

Whitehouse traces the history of solar astronomy back to its prehistoric origins and places like Sliabh na Caillighe (or the “Hill of the Witch”) at Loughcrew in Ireland, where an eclipse was recorded in 3340 BC. He brings us up to date with the SolarMax and Soho satellites and then takes us into the remote future, when our descendants may one day have to deal with the necessity of moving the Earth’s orbit further out to avoid death by fire as the Sun starts to expand.

Along the way, we meet the people who, over the centuries, have watched the Sun and made records and theories of solar phenomena in manuscripts, books and treatises. And there are some notable figures, from Newton, who made a reasonable estimate of the Sun’s mass, to Galileo, who observed the Sun directly through a telescope at sunset and was lucky not to injure his eyesight, to Sir Arthur Eddington, whose fussy appearance belied a brilliant mind, and whose observations confirmed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

My favourite character is the eccentric Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland, who in 1906 demonstrated that particles from the Sun cause vast electric currents flowing around the Earth and create the aurorae. He was also the inventor of the electromagnetic rail-gun and was partial to wearing a fez and pointy red leather slippers.

But what this book demonstrates is that no one individual ever solves more than a fraction of the Sun’s riddles. It is always a joint effort, with scientists continually building on the knowledge of their peers and of those who went before them. It is as if the Sun is a vast jigsaw puzzle, with an astronomer finding a piece here, a physicist finding a piece there, and gradually a big picture taking shape.

The puzzle is still incomplete, though, especially in the mysterious area of sunspots, first depicted in a drawing from 1128 AD, and studied by men whose names are still associated with sunspot cycles and grand minima (when sunspots have all but vanished from the solar disc) – Schwabe, Sporer, Wolf and Maunder.

We still have a lot to learn about sunspots and are indebted to American solar physicist Jack Eddy, who rediscovered Edward Maunder’s observations which had been neglected and half-forgotten for fifty years. These strange, transient phenomena may well hold the key to the way the Sun affects the Earth’s great climate shifts.

The book covers vast territories of time and space, touching on many diverse and interesting subjects, from solar sails to Stradivarius violins (which may owe some of their uniqueness to the quality of maple and spruce wood during the Little Ice Age.) Social history is here too, for instance in the story of astronomer Annie Jump Cannon who devised the spectral classifications of stars that we still use today, but was not formally recognised by the academic establishment until just two years before her retirement in 1938.

There is just so much here to enjoy – physics, history, astronomy, biography, poetry by Shelley and Tennyson, plus David Whitehouse’s own very accessible prose. If you are a non-scientist but, like me, are greatly interested in science and the universe around us, I think you will find The Sun: A Biography a wonderful, even inspiring read.

And you might just find your attitude towards that great big yellow thing in the sky has subtly and forever changed.

© Alex Cull, 6th June, 2008

(This is a book review I posted on Planet Bookworm early in June 2008.)

On Being an Introvert

Imagine being in a large minority group (roughly 20-30% of the total population) who are physically indistinguishable from the majority. Imagine that you are somehow unaware of this fact but are just conscious that you relate to people and to your surroundings differently, and are worried there may be “something the matter” with you.

And then imagine – but you may not have to, in fact. You may actually be someone like this. I know I am. I’m talking about being an introvert.

Ever since Carl Jung first coined these terms in the early 20th century (and especially since the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed in the 1940s) introversion and extraversion have been used to describe two psychological polarities, which both come with a variety of traits and personal preferences.

We introverts are generally said to be more concerned with our inner world of thoughts and feelings than we are with the external world. We tend to enjoy our own company, feel frazzled after excessive socialising, and need to “recharge” by being alone for a while. We may prefer a few close friendships to a multitude of shallower relationships.

Extraverts, on the other hand, tend to be more attuned to the physical world around them, might dislike being alone, and thrive on plentiful interaction with others.

There is some scientific evidence to support this divide; for instance, a 1999 study found that patterns of blood flow in the brain differed according to whether the person tested was basically an introvert or an extravert. There are also theories (such as the “Big Five”) which suggest that people are scattered along a continuum, with a few people at the absolute extremes and “ambiverts” occupying the centre.

If we introverts are generally in a minority, then, what sort of challenges do we face? Are we less successful than extraverts? Are we poorer? Are we less happy?

I would argue that our main challenge is not directly to do with money, status, success or happiness.

It’s true that an extravert is generally more vocal (for example in classrooms and business meetings) and tends to receive more attention from teachers, when in school, and managers, when at work. But an introvert is generally more patient, methodical and diplomatic – being able to engage your brain before opening your mouth to speak, is also a definite advantage. Career-wise, I’d say it was pretty much a level playing field.

There is a high proportion of introverts who are also gifted, including such people as Albert Einstein and Bill Gates. Being an introvert is clearly no barrier to academic or financial success.

Are we happy? Some studies relate extraversion and a full social calendar to happiness, but I’m wondering whether this has just as much to do with self-awareness (or the lack of it) as it does with actual emotions. “Are you happy?” might elicit different answers from introverts and extraverts, just as the answers to “Are these two boxes green?” might depend on whether that person was colour blind or not. I would generally describe myself both as an introvert and as a very happy person, so perhaps that’s my bias showing.

No, I think the main challenge we have is linked to the fact that since the concepts of introversion and extraversion entered general public usage, these words have gathered meanings and connotations that were originally absent.

Consider the word “introverted”, when used in the media to describe someone. What sort of attributes might that person have? Chances are, the intention is to depict him or her as being a loner, socially awkward, not functioning well in society. Incidentally, there are words relating to extraversion which definitely have a positive bias (especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures), such as “outgoing”, which implies that person is pleasantly sociable and well-adjusted, also “gregarious” and “lively”. Compare these with “quiet”, “shy”, “solitary”.

A “lively” person is surely a happy member of society. But a “quiet” person? Hmm… There might be a problem here.

It seems to me that when a word is generally used, it often reflects the attitude of the majority. Just as a “black” day is a bad one, a “quiet” person sounds like someone who could be troubled, shy or insecure. This is understandable, if you consider that an extravert with deep problems might well be subdued and uncommunicative.

Being “quiet” thus has certain connotations, in most people’s minds. “Not talking? What’s wrong?”

It is clear to me why an introvert growing up in an extravert-oriented world, without being aware of the whole introversion/extraversion issue, would feel like a fish in the wrong pond. He or she might be labelled “shy”, because extraverts sometimes have difficulty understanding the important difference between shyness and introversion (a shy person avoids social contact out of fear, an introvert might do so out of personal preference.)

He or she would be seen, not as a normal introvert but essentially as a failed extravert.

This was basically me as a child. My school reports always labelled me as “quiet” (although I actually did quite well, academically.) I grew to think of myself as shy, self-conscious, rather inadequate socially. It has only been recently, as a middle-aged person, that I have become much more comfortable with who I am, and have accepted the fact that although I often enjoy the company of others, I need time alone to recover and renew myself, and there is nothing “the matter” with me because of that.

My message to fellow introverts who are still struggling to come to terms with yourselves is this. Know who you are. Listen to your inner nature, and instead of assuming that there is something wrong with you, learn to accept and love yourself unconditionally. Play to your strengths. And change the way you see yourself, not as an ugly duckling – but as a fledgling swan.

Alex Cull, 15th February 2008

(Another article for Helium.com, doing fairly well in the ratings at the moment.)

Money and Depression

Is money (or the lack of it) invariably linked with depression? Well, although money issues can certainly be a factor when a person becomes depressed, I would argue that this is not always the case, and that depression can often have little or nothing to do with money – or its absence.

First, there’s a strong link between major or clinical depression and heredity. Depression runs in families, as does bipolar disorder, so if your parents had a history of clinical depression, chances are that you (whether you are a princess or a pauper) will have inherited a vulnerability to that condition. It’s simply a possibility, not a certainty, and it’s to do with your genes and not the condition of your wallet.

This leaves the range of mild to acute depression that most people experience from time to time but is not devastating enough, normally, to warrant medical attention. You probably know what I’m talking about, feelings ranging from a mild case of the “blues” right up to persistent sadness, muffled anger or a pervasive sense that life has no meaning.

It’s true that difficulties with money can lead to depression. A survey in the UK by the National Depression Campaign found that 88% of people rated money problems as a likely cause, 1% more than the number of people that linked depression to a death or illness in the family. And that was back in 1999. With the credit crunch and spiralling personal debt often in the news in recent times, I would not be surprised to find this percentage even higher now. It’s no wonder that for many people finances seem to be inextricably linked to anxiety and gloom.

And yet… Even without studies and surveys, common sense tells us that money troubles are not the only reason why people get depressed. Despondency often sets in when we feel helpless and unable to avoid the setbacks life sends us. Thus a bullied schoolchild, a harassed employee, a convict in an overcrowded gaol, a bereaved husband or wife and a long-term invalid all may well suffer depression as a result of adverse life conditions.

Each of them might succumb to despair and helplessness, but it would have little or nothing to do with the state of his or her bank balance, and a lot more to do with relationships and physical circumstances.

So much, then, for depression caused by not having enough money. Could it be that having too much of it is also a problem?

The Happy Planet Index, introduced in 2006 by the New Economics Foundation, makes for some interesting (if controversial) reading. Basically, it is a ranking of the world’s nations, based on happiness rather than GDP, and, for what it’s worth, some of the world’s poorer countries have high scores the top three are Vanuatu, Columbia and Costa Rica – while the wealthiest nations such as Japan and the US come in at 95 and 150, respectively. While these scores are not purely measurements of people’s levels of happiness, as they are partly based on environmentalists’ ideas of sustainability, they are nevertheless intriguing.

Is it possible, then, that being rich, or indeed living in a rich country, can tend to make you depressed?

There is some truth in that. Economist Richard Easterlin proposed in 1974 that once people have attained a certain level of financial security, their happiness does not grow in proportion to any future increases in wealth. In other words, if I have one loaf of bread I am a lot happier than if I had none at all, but if I become richer and can afford to buy two, three or four loaves, there is no great gain in happiness with each addition.

The pleasures of the consumer society also seem to be fleeting. “Hedonic adaptation” sets in, which means that the thrill of acquiring a new widescreen TV, iPod or Mercedes-Benz diminishes swiftly, as the object of desire becomes merely another thing to be stored, insured and worried about. It can make us happy only for a brief moment, and after that, we always need to strive for the next acquisition, the next temporary pleasure.

This might be why “retail therapy” only works for a while. The excitement of buying something new gives way to the muted pleasure of ownership, then perhaps to ennui and depression once more, paving the way for another repeat of the cycle.

But is the root cause of this problem money, or is it the absence of something else?

It seems to me that we are happiest when we have a purpose in life, and there are quite a few attributes and activities that can help us keep us engaged and have a meaningful existence. Positive psychologist Martin Seligman has broadly identified some of these, including being sociable, married, self-disciplined and having religious convictions. From personal experience, I have also found that creative tasks, and any absorbing activity be it gardening, writing, playing tennis, doing volunteer work – that generates what is now called “flow”, can add meaning and purpose to my life.

I suggest that it is not so much that affluence is the causeof depression, but that we have a need for meaning in our lives that money simply cannot, by its very nature, fulfil entirely. Like the man in the story, who searched for his keys under the bright streetlamp, rather than in his dark house where he had lost them, we are simply looking in the wrong place.

(I would add that being an entrepreneur and building a business are meaningful activities in themselves, which can bestow an authentic sense of purpose. The hunger to fill an inner void by acquiring money and material possessions is not the same thing, in my opinion.)

So, back to the question as to whether money and depression are invariably linked, I would answer that they are not. Our genes may give us (just) a tendency to clinical depression, no matter if we are rich or poor. Lack of money might help to make us depressed, but then so might a lot of other things, such as bad relationships or failing health.

Lastly, those of us who live in affluent societies have a choice, either to remain on the hedonic treadmill and become disappointed and depressed when money and consumer goods do not deliver all they promised or to look within ourselves, find out what fires us up and fills us with purpose, and forge a meaningful life for ourselves.

That’s the thought I would like to leave you with. When we are depressed, life seems hopeless and without meaning, but once we make a decision to find a purpose, a reason to go on living, things change. Something shifts within us, and the grey hand of depression begins to loosen its hold.

And that would seem to be true, whether we are rich, poor, or somewhere in between.

Alex Cull, 5th March 2008

(This was another article I submitted to Helium.com, adding my two cents to the debate: “Is money invariably linked with depression?” Obviously these two things are not invariably linked but there we are.)

In Praise of Laziness

Laziness has had a bad press. How many times did your parents or teachers ever encourage you to be lazy? I’m guessing – not even once. Hard-working, diligent, obedient, alert, beady-eyed and bushy-tailed – yes. But lazy? I don’t think so. “Lazy” is in the same class as “idle”, “negligent”, “shiftless” and generally “useless”. Laziness is not even close to godliness, but in perilous proximity to the other place. Lazy is bad.

But is it really? Annoying contrarian that I often am, I beg to differ. You see, lazy is good. Lazy can be constructive. In fact, laziness is one of the principles upon which our great Western civilisation is founded.

Let me explain.

We used to be hunter-gatherers, organised in small troupes or tribes, roaming the savannah in our search for edible roots and any wildlife slow enough to be skewered by a well-thrown spear. Life was harsh, on the whole, but we had quite a bit of time left over for the fun stuff – cave art, story-telling, myth-making, that sort of thing.

But then came agriculture, and the rise of great kingdoms and empires. And with these came a lot of hard work and some seriously repetitive chores. Planting and sowing, hewing wood, smelting iron, butchering and baking. Things of beauty were created too – cathedrals, sailing ships, illuminated manuscripts, suits of armour – but these were relatively few and far between, slow to produce and still involved lots of hard, repetitive work; it was unavoidable.

But then came the Industrial Revolution, which started sometime in the 18th century and has never really ended. There are plenty of inventions, such as the movable-type printing press, which pre-date this period, but with the innovations of steam-power, electricity, radio and the internal combustion engine, everything suddenly became better, faster, more widely available and multiplied a thousandfold.

Which takes us to where we are now, in the early twenty-first century. Our technological civilisation is a colossus. It spans oceans and continents, and has sent messages and machines hurtling across the gulf of space. And these are still the early days – barring a giant meteorite impact or a supervolcano explosion, it is set to expand ever further. Who knows what it – and we – will become, as the third millennium unfolds?

And all this has been achieved largely through – laziness? You probably don’t believe me, at this point. But read on.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Laziness is hardly a virtue, surely. Idle people loafing around, achieving nothing, allowing dirt and decay to flourish. How can that be good? I would answer that by saying that laziness is different from idleness, sloth and neglect. Idleness is goofing off, kicking back, taking a break – important in its own right, but not what I’m writing about. Sloth is slowness and sluggishness, the sort of thing I experience on a Sunday morning before my first cup of strong filter coffee. Neglect is abandoning a task altogether, like letting a teenager’s bedroom deteriorate into a slough of despond. They’re not the same.

Anyway. Think about the way you live your life. Do you own or use a motor vehicle? Four centuries ago, a person like you would have probably walked everywhere. Rich folks had horses, farmers had oxen, maybe a few super-wealthy people had carriages or palanquins. But most used Shanks’s pony.

Do you have a washing machine or vacuum cleaner? Over a century ago you would have had to wash all your clothes by hand, then wring them out or drag them through a mangle. You would have swept your home with a broom. Before electric-power, gas-power and steam-power, most processes would have been carried out using hand-power, foot-power, elbow-power and shoulder-power.

Walking to the market and back, scrubbing the dirt out of your britches with a tub of water and a block of soap, writing a book with a goose quill and a roll of parchment all take a lot of hard work. There are few short cuts. Life in the old days would have been tough and labour-intensive, definitely not for the lazy.

The innovations that make our lives relatively effortless today, came about because someone at some point set out to find a way to do something in a more efficient way, achieving better results in a fraction of the time. In other words, working smarter rather than harder. A mechanical typewriter is a good example of this – you can produce a document much faster than someone writing longhand, and be effortlessly neat as well.

An electric typewriter is better, as you don’t have to spend much energy pounding the keys. And a computer is better still, as you can copy and paste, proof-read and check the spelling without having to commit anything to paper. Pure laziness! The machine does most of the donkey-work, granting you hours of precious freedom to use as you wish.

Now do you see what I mean? That our wonderful technological civilisation is built upon laziness – creative, innovative, revolutionary, brilliant laziness?

Of course it doesn’t mean that our lives are perfect. Automation is generally good, but it has also led to fast food, junk mail, spam and computer viruses. And while we have, on the whole, more free time, it doesn’t follow that we use that free time wisely. But we have the choice. I can spend tonight enriching my mind and attending an evening class – or I can slump like an amoeba on my living room sofa and watch dreadful reality TV. It’s all up to me. Laziness gives me the freedom to make such choices.

And there are still plenty of things done the good old-fashioned way. Hand-made clothes, bespoke shoes, home-cooked meals, all the things that are lovingly crafted, rather than churned out from an assembly line. But the point is: we are able to appreciate all the special hand-made, home-cooked stuff precisely because we don’t have to make it or do it all the time.

Now there are some who say that our laziness in the West is leading inevitably to over-consumption, waste and a disdainful attitude to our world. I would say: don’t under-estimate our adaptability and problem-solving skills. Our ability to reach smart solutions to the setbacks we always encounter is legendary and probably limitless. Today we are burning gasoline in our cars. Tomorrow we may be burning clean hydrogen. The day after tomorrow? Atomic fusion, or zero-point energy from the quantum vacuum, perhaps. Our civilisation never stands still. Whatever appears to be a problem today can be turned into a marvellous opportunity for progress tomorrow.

And there are also some who say we should go back to the old ways. Forgo powered flight and motor transport. Walk everywhere or use bicycles. Become subsistence farmers. I would say: riding bicycles and growing your own vegetables are good things to do! But don’t forget – we generally enjoy doing them because we don’t have to do them all the time. If we were totally dependent on our own leg-power and on the spinach harvest in our back gardens, it would be a different story indeed.

There are millions of people in the world who still have to walk miles down dirt roads every day to collect firewood and drinking water, then return to their village to light cooking fires, pound millet for hours and generally struggle against poverty and disease to feed themselves and their children. Are they happy with their lot? Perhaps many of them are, but I cannot help feeling that most would rather have a little less toil and a little (or maybe much more!) creative Western laziness in their lives.

Alex Cull, 4th June 2008

(This is an article I had originally planned to submit to Helium.com but it completely outgrew the title I had wanted to match it with – “How you know if you’re a lazy person” or something similar.)