The relativity of inner time...

1. Zen and “Now” as time

In his famous book[1], Alan Watts said that time is a hallucination, and there is only today, and there will never be anything except today. In the so-called "awakening to the instant" in Zen, one can see that past and future cannot be infinite but that the reverse is the truth - "it is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real"[2]. 

In the following pages, we will unveil, on a step by step approach, the genuine truth of this Zen intuition with arguments taken from the scientific literature about time perception.

2. Levels of time perception

From a modern science perspective, we can dissociate psychological time as linked but essentially different from physical time.

The psychological time or time perception is “…a field of study within psychology and neuroscience. It refers to the sense of time, which differs from other senses since time cannot be directly perceived but must be reconstructed by the brain. Humans can perceive relatively short periods, in the order of milliseconds, and also durations that are a significant fraction of a lifetime. Human perception of duration is subjective and variable”[3].

The physical time of everyday life or physical science is the clockwork time measured by mechanisms moving in circles or repeating the same regular movements.

Psychological time is linked to physical time but might be disjointed from it in certain situations. There are thresholds where this separation is more important: time perception related to age, time perception in extreme emotions associated with sudden dangers, time perception in inner states (such as dreams), near-death experience, trance, or 'mystical states.'

A) At the first level, the time perception is linked to the lifelong pathway (aging)

A child's day from 09h0 to 15h30 is like a 20-hour day for an adult, according to Steve Taylor, the author of the book Making Time[4]. He developed an idea based on the perceptual theory of the American psychologist William James. The psychological time would relate to how much "information" one is taking from the world around. 

"Children are experiencing everything for the first time. All their experiences are new. They also have an amazingly intense vision of the world, an amazing fresh perception. Children are incredibly awake to the world around us, so time passes slowly for them."[5]

 “One day to an eleven-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This is perhaps why a day would appear much longer to a young child than to an adult. In an experiment comparing a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80 asked to estimate when they thought 3 minutes had passed, it was found that the younger group's estimate was on average 3 minutes and 3 seconds. In comparison, the older group averaged 3 minutes and 40 seconds, indicating a change in the perception of time with age” [6].

B) There is another level where the split between the two realms of time, physical and psychological, is even more apparent. 

One can shift out of ordinary consciousness during accidents, and people who experienced them often say that time slowed down (a slow-motion perception)[7]. This “slow-motion perception”[8] is a feeling of things seen as moving slowly, in some dangerous situations. To a bystander watching the case (an accident, for example), the time is moving at average speed, but for the individual concerned, time seems to slow down, making them able to think and act faster.

I have personal experience of this kind. Some 20 years ago, a friend of mine and I were being followed by a group of hooligans. They have approached us from behind. I turned my head, and I just saw a punch coming to my face. In that fraction of a second, I had time to think about my next reaction. I was wondering whether I should take or eschew the hit. I decided to take it and lessen in this way, the angry mood of the aggressor. I also had time to choose not to lie down and avoid being hit with the feet. Everything happened in less than a second. From that moment on, I become aware of the psychological time dilatation linked to dangerous situations[9].

A traditional model is trying to explain this mechanism of time perception. When there is an accident or an unexpected event, the brain concentrates more on information processing, and the rate at which it works will go up. Since this rate is increased, the brain perceives a longer time due to full information in the interval.

But are we really processing more information in these seconds when time seems to stretch? Is this like a slow-motion camera in sports that can identify more details of high-speed actions?

A recent experiment by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, investigated this by making participants free fall onto a net to mimic a frightening situation. Eagleman wanted to find for how long the subjects thought they were experiencing it. He used a hand-held device to measure the speed of visual perception. He found no evidence of increased temporal resolution, in apparent conflict with the fact that participants retrospectively estimated their own fall to last 36% longer than others' falls. Therefore Eagleman considers that time-slowing is a function of recollection, not perception: a richer encoding of memory may cause a salient event to appear retrospectively as if it lasted longer.[10]

One can criticize this arrangement since the clock was not essential in the falling experimenters[11]. On the other hand, one can question the relevance of the experiment for our investigation. The perception rate did not change in the condition of stress, but the brain activity did, and the inner time also. The internal perception time slowed considerably to allow the subjects to react. 

We will try by the end of the paper to give a hit of our own interpretation.

C) A step further on the investigation: the world of dreaming and the time perception

I remember a significant experience I had during my military service in a night and day shift watch. There were 4 hours watch, 4 hours of pause, and 4 hours of sleep. After some days of following this cycle, I was utterly exhausted. When I was able to reach the bed, I fall asleep instantly. 

I remember that once I was examining my thoughts while I started laying my head on the pillow (for less than a second). There was an incredible kaleidoscope of images flowing through my mind. And then, the dream came like a speed train (with no passing period from the wake-up state to sleep). For me, it was evident that the brain is working 'inside' at an incredible speed.

Exciting elements are linked to time perception in dreams. When our body sleeps, the time in dreams can last longer than the duration of sleep. That can even create an inner perception of time that lasts weeks or even months.

Some time ago, Schjelderup studied hypnotically induced dreams. He acknowledged in a series of experiences that long spans of real-time may be represented in dreams of a concise duration[12].

Anthony Peake wrote in his book, "Is there life after death?"[13] about "Maury's Dream," where a student entered a 2-hour trance and relived in minute-by-minute detail 20 years of memories from 6 to 26.

The best way to analyze the phenomenon directly is by introspection (which needs the subject's conscious activity). Therefore the time perception in dreams might be accessible within lucid dreams (when the sleeping person is aware that he is dreaming).

A subject tells us about his experience: ”The longest period of time I remember experiencing during a dream occurred within a 30-minute nap wherein the dream state I was consciously aware I was dreaming and just allowed the dream to continue. The passage of time spanned into what felt like two weeks of conscious dreaming. I have had others spanning what seemed like a week and some spanning days”[14].

Another way for investigating time perception in lucid dreaming is by experimental method (external experience).

For example, Stephen LaBerge[15] studied the time differences between the dream and the real world.  Since in REM sleep, the subject's eyes are moving the same way that the dream eyes are moving, he gave the dreamers an eye movement pattern that they had to do once they became lucid. After that, they had to count to 10 and then make the pattern again. 

After reviewing the eye movements, the pattern showed up and then showed up again 10 seconds later, so the dream time was equal to that of the real world. He explained that the dreams seem very long because there are many time skips that we overlook [16].

There is an apparent collision between the interpretation according to the introspection method and the external experiment.

I have a critical position regarding the interpretation provided by LaBerge. He measured a slow lucid dream –a slowing down produced by the experience of moving the eyes in the real world and in the inner dream state (hence the real world was inevitably present). According to our interpretation, when the brain is linked to the outer world, it will slow down to the speed of the processes in the physical world (the inner time is not purely internal, and the brain adapts to constraints and pace of real word).

A rough analogy with computers might be useful. While controlling a natural process, a super-computer must slow down to its external driver (a printer, for example). The brain is doing that regularly because it should be in phase with sensory organs and the world. There is a speed limit of organs, nervous flux, etc. The brain will process with high priority the most important (for survival) process. However, that does not mean that the brain has the same inner ‘speed.’

D) Another threshold: the near-death experiences

A typical near-death experience (NDE) occurs if a person is exposed suddenly to death's threat but then survives. There are reports of four consecutive phases, such as floating out of his/her body, hurrying through dark, empty space, having a life review, and encountering a brilliant white light. Among these phases, the third one, the life review, is the most interesting here[17].

For obvious ethical reasons, the only way to investigate time perception in these situations is by using introspection or 'anamnesis' (remembrance).

3. An interpretation and a tentative explanation

The slowing down, more and more, of inner time in the experiences mentioned above should be linked to brain activity. 
The problem should be contextualized. As a matter of fact, the brain knows much more than it is aware of (its conscious activity is reduced compared to the unconscious one). For example, we memorize without being aware of almost anything that happens in our life. The best proof is the photographic memory of patients who sort out from long comas and remember everything that happened around them during these comas. Also, we know a lot today about the same photographic memory of ‘idiot savants.’

In reality, these phenomena seem to happen under the threshold of conscience. The brain is building-up (based on this exhaustive memory) its own world.

The speed of the biological process is limited, and there is a limitation linked to the pace of happenings in the outer, physical world. When focusing on the external world, the brain functions (at least at the conscious level) at a low speed.

When the brain focuses, more and more, on its own inner world (slow motion, for example-in dangerous situations), there is no (or a reduced) control of the body or motility. Therefore more energy and brainpower are accessible. There is also a reduced connection to the outer world  (which generally would lower its speed).

In the next highest states (dreaming, near-death, and/or mystical states), the brain is in a purely private mode and can function at its full ‘complexity’ and ‘connectivity’ or ‘speed.’

The organisms, the living beings, are part of a ‘middle world’ of infinite complexities [21] in between two other infinities: small infinity-the word of elementary particles and the great infinity-the world of astronomy (galaxies, stars, planets, etc.). In this sense, any life form is an infinity that can reflect both the small and the vast infinity. 

Any living cell is of infinite complexity, and the neuron more than any other living cell. A multi-cellular organism, an organ, and especially the human brain are ‘square infinitely’ complex systems.

The brain is an infinitely complex (hyper-connected) system of infinitely complex cells (the neurons). It acts at the physical level, with inherent biophysical limitations (there are limits for the nervous influx speed, etc.). Still, its infinite complexity and connectivity build upon another complexity (a single neuron can interact with 10.0000 other neurons) make this ‘engine‘ miraculous. The brain's hyper-connectivity allows it to attain something that can be qualified as a gigantic (sometimes nearly infinite) ‘processing speed.’

When it is functioning in a straight inner mode, with almost no connection to the outer world (as in the terminal states, in meditation, in deep dreams, in a trance, and 'mystical states'), the brain is in its own realm and may speed up mental processes. In a second of clockwork time, the mind will ‘process’ trillions of images, states, feelings, ideas. Within the real world, what might take a second will take in the inner world (the realm of Spirit)-an Eternity.

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[1] Alan W. Watts The Way of Zen, Vintage, 1989, 256 pages.

[2] Václav Petr has an interesting discussion of the subject at http://www.mprinstitute.org/vaclav/Zen2.htm.

[3] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception.

[4] Cf.  Steve Taylor, Making Time Icon Books Ltd, 256 pages.

[5] news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6926500.stm.

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception.

[7] This shift to this ‘slow motion’ can also be achieved by top sportsmen. “George Best and former basketball player Michael Jordan are among those to have remarked on how time seemed to slow down when they were "in the zone."Cf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Motion_Perception. radically

[8]Idem.

[9]On http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies, the contributor BSTUR1 wrote a plastic description of a similar occurrence: “I had an experience once during a situation of realizing that another vehicle and my car were on a probable collision course, and in a few seconds my mind raced through a learning sequence from drivers education course, better to hit a glancing blow than hit head-on, aim to the right of the oncoming car, better to hit a stationary object than one coming towards you, so I aimed the car towards the shoulder of the road to miss the approaching vehicle.

Then I looked to see a telephone pole on the side of the road and decided that I would instead hit the vehicle causing the accident than hit the telephone pole, so I aimed a little to the left of the pole and to the right of the advancing car, which was crossing the road in front of me.

I threaded that needle, missing the car and the pole by inches, all in the space of a few seconds and a couple of hundred feet of the snow-covered road. If I had even just tapped the brakes, I would have slid straight into the oncoming car.

That experience made me realized that what happens is that your mind races through your life experiences do a data dump, so to speak of your memories, searching for a solution to survive the life-threatening situation. ,

It is your brain's last-ditch effort to save your life. So it isn't necessarily slowing down its perception of time. It is massively speeding up its ability to process memories and make split-milli-second decisions to find a solution to save your life. It is a survival mechanism”. ,

[10] Stetson C, Fiesta MP, Eagleman DM (2007) Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event? PLoS ONE 2(12): e1295. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0001295

[11] See for example shotgun, 04/14/10 at 2:41 pm on the site: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies  who considers the experiment as flawed: “It would seem to me, that if you're falling 15 stories, your brain isn't going to devote that extra processing power to a blinking wristwatch while you're plummeting. I would think it would actually distract from it. It seems to me, a much better test would be to place the lights on the ground”.

[12]Schjelderup, H. K. “Time relations in dreams. A preliminary note” Scand. J. Psychol., 1960, I, 6-64.

[13]Anthony Peake "Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science Of What Happens When We Die” Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2006.

[14] See the story at http://you-are-dreaming.blogspot.kr/2010/07/dreaming-century-of-time-during-one.html.

[15] See description at http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91ld.html.

[16]On a discussion at http://www.dreamviews.com/f12/finding-out-real-time-dreams-115166/, Delwind is quoting from Exploring the world of lucid dreaming of Stephen LaBerge: “One of the earliest experiments conducted by my research team tested the traditional notion that the experience of dream time is somehow different from the time in the waking world. We approached the problem of dream time by asking subjects to make an eye movement signal in their lucid dreams, estimate a ten-second interval (by counting one thousand and one, one thousand and two, etc.), and then make another eye movement signal. In all cases, we found time estimates made in lucid dreams were within a few seconds of estimates made in the waking state and likewise quite close to the actual time between signals. From this, we have concluded that in lucid dreams, estimated dream time is very nearly equal to clock time; that is, it takes just as long to do something in a dream as it does to actually do it.

You may be wondering, then, how you could have a dream that seems to last for years or lifetimes. I believe this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that causes the illusion of the passage of time in the movies or theater. If, on screen, stage, or in a dream, we see someone turning out the light as the clock strikes midnight. After a few moments of darkness, we see him turning off an alarm as the bright morning sun shines through the window. We'll accept (pretend, without being aware that we are acting) that many hours have passed even though we "know" it was only a few seconds.”

[17] “After all this banging and going through this long, dark place, all of my childhood thoughts, my whole entire life was there at the end of this tunnel, just flashing in front of me. It was not exactly in terms of pictures, more in the form of thoughts, I guess. It was just all there at once, I mean, not one thing at a time, blinking on and off, but it was everything, everything at one time...”. Cf.  Moody, R, Life after life, Mockingbird Books, Atlanta, 1975, pp. 69–70.

[18] See Metod Saniga. The geometry of the psychological time, pp 6. This paper may be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/6458438/GEOMETRY-OF-PSYCHOLOGICAL-TIME. I highly recommend its reading as the best description of time perception in high states.

[19] Coomaraswamy, A.K. Time and Eternity, Atribus Asiae Publishers, Ascona, 1947, p. 110.

[20]http://www.mindreality.com/rapid-perception-slowing-time-down, Rapid Perception - Slowing Time Down, posted by Enoch Tan.

 [21] Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, Brighton: Sussex Academic, 1999.

For a printable version of the above article, one can try to access:

https://www.academia.edu/44368294/The_Zen_and_the_relativity_of_inner_time_hints_for_a_scientific_interpretation

A comprehensive review of my book in RTDE ("Revue Trimestrielle de Droit Européen") no. 2, 2012

Recently, Mr. Professor Jean-Sylvestre BERGÉ wrote a comprehensive review of my book, "La comparaison, technique essentielle du juge européen" in RTDE ("Revue Trimestrielle de Droit Européen") no. 2, 2012.
His evaluation is visible at: http://pvevent1.immanens.com/fr/pvPage2.asp?nu=8&skin=dlz_knd&puc=002471&pa=6

The nature of European Union; some hints for a debate

European Union seems nowadays in a deep crisis. The solutions may be a new effort around Eurozone, based on integrating fiscal and budgetary national politics, with a Fiscal Union being added to the existing Monetary Union.

May Europe, at last,  became a federal entity? 
I am very skeptical. Europe will always lack the ‘competence of its own competences’ (which belongs to the federal level in any federation). The European Union is, and might still be a ‘sui generis’ International Organization. That also explains why the European judge is attentive to Member States' legal systems. 
In this respect, the last part of my book may provide some exciting hints: http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=YpuVobkQENYC&dq=editions%3AISBN2296562264& source=gbs_book_other_versions. 
It analyzes the European judge's use of comparison - borrowing legal solutions inspired by national laws to solve specific points of European Union Law. The research is organized on three levels: a formal analysis of comparison as technique followed by its functional analysis, and finally, an examination of its inner justification. 
This last issue, the fundamental reason for using the comparison, correlates with the Court and European Union legal system's nature. This lack of sovereign powers (‘competence of competences’) of the European Union – fundamentally different from a Federal State - ultimately justifies the use of comparison as a technique. Member States of EU have the upper hand as owners of this 'competence of competences.' That awareness of the European Court for States' legal solutions (by comparison) tells us something about the European Union's true nature. 

As long the Member States have sovereign powers (and this may be the case for a long time or forever), the European Union will not become a Federal State. 
However, one should not forget that Europe also invented the national state and the modern idea of sovereignty (by the end of the 30 Years War with the Peace of Westphalia). 
Maybe in our own time, Europe will invent something different once again.

 

Social transparency (or hyper transparency): why privacy is not the (complete ) answer…

We are not far from the ‘transparent society’ described by David Brin in his excellent book with the same title.
He warned of dangers to freedoms from surveillance technologies being used by a few people rather than by many. The privacy will be lost in the ‘transparent society’ of tomorrow. 
Hence it would be better for society as a whole that surveillance is equal for all and for the public to have the same information access as those in power (everybody should watch everybody regardless of social or political status). With the ubiquitous camera surveillance of today, we are very close to fulfilling Brin's prophecy.
But new developments within the cyber world create a more insidious 'transparency' (a sort of ‘hyper-transparency’).
In advertising, new technical instruments (the recommendation engines) try to connect potential consumers with products they are interested in buying. One has to gather the buyer with unique items he would be interested in. Therefore, it is needed to understand, ‘personalize’, or ‘profile’ individuals' buying behavior. 
ICT profiling tools are the best solution to the problem. This ‘automatic profiling' is different from the forensic activity seen in popular culture. It represents much more, since it is made on a large scale, all over and all the time’. It is also less since this profiling focuses (yet) only aspects of ‘homo oeconomicus,’ the individual is seen as a consumer with his tastes, habits, etc.
The most interesting variety is the ‘recommendation engines' based on collaborative filtering’ - making automatic predictions (filtering) about users’ interests by collecting taste's information from many other users (collaborating).
An individual asks his friends for advice about how to choose newspapers, records, books, movies, or other items in everyday life. He can figure out which of his friends has tastes similar to his own and which are different. 
The ‘collaborative filtering’ automates the process based on the idea that there are probably several other items they would also find interesting whenever two similar people like an article. These systems try to discover connections between people's interests in a very labor-intensive approach based on data mining, pattern recognition, or other sophisticated techniques.
There are some distinct advantages to these techniques since ‘profiling’ ensures the adaptation of our technological environment to the user through a sort of intimate ‘personal experience.’ But there are equally some trade-offs since profiling technologies make possible a far-reaching monitoring of an individual's behavior and preferences.
Individuals needed some sort of protection.
-The first step was to adopt rules regarding privacy and data protection. According to these rules, the data can be processed freely as soon as they are not personal data (from the origin or 'anonymization'). Therefore, many profiling systems are built, taking into account that processing personal data after anonymization techniques would be free from the incidence of data protection legislation.
However, with new knowledge inference techniques, the frontier between anonymous data and identifying data tends to blur and evolve. Data can be considered anonymous at a given time and context. But later on, because new, seemingly unrelated data has been released, generated, or forwarded to a third party, they may allow the “re-identification.”

-And much more seems to be at stake. There is an information imbalance among the parties involved—where the firms “know” the consumers better than the consumers know themselves. This is what one might call ‘hyper-transparency.’
The profiling process is mostly unknown for the individual, who might never imagine the logic behind the decision taken towards him. Therefore it becomes hard, if not impossible, to contest the application of a particular group profile.
The information could also be used to discriminate among the users while relying on a variety of factors and strategies.
-Finally, such knowledge could potentially allow the targeting firms to use their insights into the individuals’ preferences and previous actions to unfairly manipulate them (with a subsequent loss of personhood and autonomy). 
Should we search for new, eventually, legal remedies? Or should we think about a new social paradigm where 'social transparency' or 'hyper-transparency' through profiling becomes general and accessible to everybody?

Interesting questions…

Cyberwar? ... attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence. ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The  war is a violent continuation of interstates politics (according to von Clausewitz). The cyber war should enter the same paradigm.

From a legal perspective the international doctrine examined whether a cyber attack could be qualified as use of force (under article 2.5 of UNO charter) or as an armed attack (under article 51 of UNO charter). The criteria for considering a cyber attack as covered by above notions was the degree of physical destructiveness. A small degree of physical destruction will qualify a cyber attack under non military, international concepts like economic force, reprisals, international responsibility, etc.

This analysis seemed pertinent. It try to see the cyber warfare (form of interstate cyber attack) as an analogical extension of classical warfare. As such the cyber warfare would be another step within an unchanged framework.But the real evolution of cyber attacks by state actors shows the limits of this vision. No state is willing to escalate a cyber attack and produce the huge destruction that may trigger the classical forms of war or armed conflict. They will prefer to act unnoticed but pursuing their political aims with the new tool.

We can figure out even a more challenging. The question of destructiveness seems to be the core issue.  As such the main concept is ‘information (virtual) destructiveness’ that may relate to physical destructiveness in the same way that the 'intellectual property rights' relates to ordinary 'property rights'. Without dead and wounded, without casualties, this concept of ‘virtualized’ (invisible but not least severe) destruction might be an essential aspect of a cyber warfare undermining the base of a knowledge economy,  knowledge society or knowledge state. Finally we get a hint of cyber attacks as a cyber warfare (or cyber war) on itself , as a new genus,  and not as part of classical armed conflict paradigm.

The hidden collapse : Lucio Russo’s scientific fall down of the first century BC

NB. A downloadable version of this post may be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1804297.

The decline and collapse of human societies is nowadays a popular subject. The environmental questions, the resource shortage, the nuclear menace, the demographic explosion, and other “apocalyptic” dangers taught us that our civilization might have a limited life.

From Gibbon[1] to Tainter[2] and, more recently, to Jarred Diamond[3], the decline and collapse of societies like Roman or Maya empires were primarily studied. Nobody ever mentioned a similar breakdown of the Hellenistic cultures. However, Lucio Russo[4] discovered a different kind of collapse, almost invisible and maybe even more important: a scientific fall down.

Russo's main idea is that a scientific revolution took place during Hellenistic times, and it was forgotten while science, as a systematic inquiry,  has been abandoned in Antiquity.

The recovery of science has been accomplished only 17 centuries later.

Russo’s contributions cover in detail the birth, the place, the decline and fall of  Hellenistic science and technology in the domains like mathematics, mechanics of solids and fluids, topography and geodesy, optics, astronomy, anatomy. He obtained impressive results, among which the inverse square law of gravitation was discovered by some Hellenistic authors. Such statements might be challenged. This is not the point here since we would like to inquire about Russo’s supporting hypothesis and researching methodology. Only the results of this inquiry might offer materials for deep reflections or futures studies[5].

1. The timing of the first scientific revolution and the Hellenism

It is now generally accepted that the Hellenis­tic age started in 323 B.C., with the death of Alexander the Great and finished by 30 BC with the death of Cleopatra and the annexation of Egypt by Rome.

Russo agrees with the starting point of the Hellenistic times. For him, the end of that age was linked to the end of a scientific revolution. And it happened from the second century B.C. when scientific studies declined rapidly.

For Russo, the most severe adverse effect on the scientific activity lay in the longs wars between Rome and the Hellenistic states, from Syracuse's plunder and the death of Archimedes in 212 B.C to 146 B.C. when Carthage and Corinth were razed to the ground. Russo considers that the Roman world from the third and second centuries B.C. was much more brutal than Virgil and Horace's world. As a matter of fact, the refined culture later acquired by Roman intellectuals was the result of continuing contact with the Hellenistic civilization, mainly through Greeks taken as slaves and by the plundering of Greek works of art.

According to him, “Alexandria's scientific activity, in particular, stopped in 145-144 B.C. when the king Ptolemy VIII initiated a policy of brutal persecution against the Greek ruling class. For example, Polybius acknowledged that the Greek population of Alex­andria was almost entirely destroyed at that time”[6].

2. Arguments for a scientific discontinuity followed by an unstoppable decline

The feeling of decay was generally shared in Antiquity. As an example, Seneca[7] thought that "... far from advance being made toward the discovery of what the older generations left insufficiently investigated, many of their discoveries are being lost".

The interruption of the oral transmission made ancient works incomprehensible. For example, Russo mentions Epictetus's case, regarded, at the beginning of the second century A.D. as the “greatest luminary of Stoicism.” Epictetus confessed to being unable to understand Chrysippus, his Hellenistic predecessor.

Russo also challenges the common opinion that the Almagest rendered earlier astronomical treaties obsolete. To him, such a vision is incompatible with the overlooked reality that  “whereas astronomy enjoyed an uninterrupted tradition down to Hipparchus (and especially in the period since Eudoxus), the subsequent period, lasting almost until Ptolemy's generation, witnessed no scientific activity.” There was, in that period, a profound cultural discontinuity. This break, attested in different ways, is clearly illustrated, especially by the astronomical observations mentioned in the Almagest. “They are spread over a few centuries, from 720 B.C. to 150 A.D., but leaving a major gap of 218 years: from 126 B.C., the date of the last observation attributed to Hipparchus, to 92 A.D., corresponding to a lunar observation made by Agrippa”[8].

The author mentions the relationship between the Almagest's star catalog and the star coordinates of Hipparchus, citing the works of Grasshoff, according to whom, although Ptolemy included some coordinates measured by himself, he also widely used the Hipparchian data from three centuries before.

3. A partial recovery based on reproduction and selection of some scientific results (drawback: the simplest and not the best results have been preserved)

Hellenistic culture ‘survived’ during the Imperial Roman age. The former Hellenistic kingdoms were not assimilated linguistically or culturally, and from a technological or economic point of view, there was absolute continuity with the preceding period.

After the interruption produced by the wars with Rome, the ‘Pax Romana’ allowed partial recovery of scientific research during the first and second centuries A.D. (in the time of Heron, Ptolemy, and Galen).

However, after that moment, the decline was inexorable. For some centuries, “Alexandria re­mained the center of any scientific activity to be. The last scientist worthy of mention may have been Diophantus if he really lived in the third century A.D. The activity documented in the fourth century A.D. is limited to com­pilations, commentaries, and rehashing of older works; among the com­mentators and editors of that time, we will be particularly interested in Pappus, whose Collection brings together many mathematical results”[9].

The extent of the destruction of Hellenistic works has been usually underestimated in the past due to the assumption that it was the best material that survived. Russo considers the optimistic view that ‘classical civilization’ handed over specific major works that included the lost writings' knowledge as groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, ''it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of selection”[10].
According to Russo, even among real scien­tific works preserved by Byzantines and Arabs, two selection criteria seem to have been in use. “The first was to give preference to authors of the imperial period, whose writings are, in general, methodologically inferior but easier to use: we have, for example, Heron's work on mirrors, but not the treatise that, according to some testimonies, Archimedes wrote on the same subject. Next, among the works of an au­thor, the ones selected are generally the more accessible, and of these often only the initial chapters. We have the Greek text of the first four, more elementary, books of Apollonius' Conics, but not the next four (of which three survived in Arabic); we have Latin and Arabic translations of the work of Philo of Byzantium on experiments in pneumatics, but none of his works on theoretical principles”.

Is this vision of Russo confirmed by other research? We might say yes since there are similar discontinuities and decays in technologies closely related to scientific activities.

In this respect, Derek de Solla Price[11] considered that “The existence of [...] Antikythera mecha­nism necessarily changes all our ideas about the nature of Greek high technology. [...] Hero and Vitruvius should be looked upon as chance survivors that may not by any mean be as representative as hitherto assumed”.

Price[12] also stated that “Judging from the texts of Heron, Philon, and Ctesibius…from the tradition of automatic globes and planetarium made by Archimedes and from the few extant objects (...)  we may say that the technology of astronom­ical automata underwent a period of intense development. The first major advances seem to have been made by Ctesi­bius and Archimedes, and the subsequent improvement must have been prodigious indeed. In the first century B.C., those facts made possible the building of Antikythera mecha­nism with its extraordinary complex astronomical gear­ing. From this, we must suppose that the writings of Heron and Vitruvius preserve for us only a small and incidental portion of the corpus of mechanical skill that existed in Hellenistic and Roman times”.

4. The ‘fossilization of knowledge’ as a mean for reconstructing ancient scientific achievements

Russo considers that Latin or Greek authors of the imperial period are citing the Hellenistic authors without understanding the ancient scientific methodology. The science became ‘fossilized’[13], crystallized, a dead fragment from an ancient living organism. 

Is this vision of a ‘fossilized science’ consistent? We might think, yes. One can give just an example of such a ‘fossilized astronomical knowledge’ transmitted using oral communication. 

In this respect, Neugebauer[14] cites the book Kâla San­kalita published in Madras in 1825 by Warren. Warren had traveled extensively in South­ern India and recorded the Tamil natives' astronomical teachings for the lunar motion computation. “His informants no longer had any idea about the reasons for the single steps which they performed according to their rules. The numbers themselves were not written down but were represented by groups of shells placed on the ground. (...)

Nevertheless, they carried out long computations to determine the magnitude, duration, beginning, and end of an eclipse with numbers that run into the billions in their integral part and with several hexadecimal places for their fractions. Simultaneously, they used memorized tables for the sun and moon's daily motion involving many thousands of numbers”.

For Neugebauer, it is “evident that the methods found by Warren still in existence in the 19th century are the last witness of procedures which go back through the medium of Hellenistic astronomy…”.

This kind of Hellenistic ‘fossilized knowledge‘ is, for Russo, the starting point for the recovery of science in the XVIth century. And the ‘fossilized science‘ is also the ground on which he realized a spectacular and highly controversial reconstruction of some scientific Hellenistic theories. To accomplish it, Russo opens a methodological novelty in the interpretation of the original sources. He focuses on the second-hand information (‘fossilized knowledge’) spread throughout the literary sources, not just scientific references. This close examination of more resources than the traditional ones allows him to deepen the historical perspective and makes possible his spectacular discoveries.

5. Conclusions and implications

A. The actuality of Russo’s study 

Such research seems, at first, without practical significance. However, the final interrogation of Russo concerns us all. 

The author asks if the decrease of a general and unified scientific theory to some fragmented and ‘fossilized knowledge’ unable to produce new results may occur in the coming future or is just a matter of the ancient past. His answer to the question is definitely affirmative. Russo thinks that the vital substance of knowledge is now reserved for smaller and smaller groups of specialists, which may endanger science's future survival. Knowing what produced ancient decay may allow us to avoid the same fate in the future.

B. The testing of some primary hypotheses 

In our description of Russo’s results, we have seen that his theory and conclusions were agreed upon by other savants. In this way, one can accept that such phenomena were possible without knowing anything about their probability.

However, some of Russo’s hypotheses may be tested. We might verify, for example, if the transmission of scientific knowledge from the more advanced society (Hellenistic) versus, the less advanced one (Rome) was, in fact, based on reproducing the most accessible and not the most advanced works. Therefore one can imagine an actual sociological test, finely tuned to meet the real conditions from Hellenistic and Roman times.

C. The opening up of other research (some questions and tentative answers) 

We may underline several other issues raised by the Russo’s constructions such as:

-How can one measure an ancient society's scientific and technological creativity, lacking today's patent systems?

-What made the Greek Hellenistic world the first (and the last) scientifically developed culture before the modern one? Is it linked to the plurality of science centers in the competing Hellenistic kingdoms? What other issues were still relevant?

-Why this advanced Hellenistic culture was so fragile? Is it because of the reduced number of Scientific, the lack of printing facilities, the spreading of illiterate, the inexistence of institutions like modern scientific academies? 

-What kind of sociology of science characterized the Hellenistic time? What makes the transfer of ancient scientific knowledge different from the transmission of old technology?

-Has Hellenistic science played an inevitable role in the emergence of modern science? Could the developments of science have followed a different pathway?

-Finally, what role has played this scientific decay in the fall of the Western Roman Empire? If the Romans, as successors of the Hellenistic states, lived in a scientifically impoverished society, was the path to the ‘Decline and Fall of the Empire’ unavoidable? Was the disappearance of the scientific method the mortal illness of the Roman Empire? Anyway, we may assume that a society without real technological and scientific creativity has a very dark future. 

All these questions open up a new domain for future research. This sort of inquiry makes the history of science and technology on Russo's pathway such a captivating subject. 

---

[1] The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88).

[2]Tainter, Joseph (1990), The Collapse of Complex Societies (1st paperback Ed.), Cambridge University Press.

[3]Diamond, Jared (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

[4]Lucio Russo, an Italian physicist, mathematician, and historian of science, is a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He reconstructed some contributions of the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus ([1]"The Astronomy of Hipparchus and his Time: a Study Based on Pre-Ptolemaic Sources," Vistas in Astronomy, 1994, Vol. 38, p. 207-248), reconstructed the proof of heliocentric attributed by Plutarch to Seleucus of Seleucia ([2]The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had To Be Reborn, Berlin, Springer, 2004, ISBN 978-3-540-20396-4) and studied later the history of theories of tides, from the Hellenistic to modern age ([3] Flussi e riflussi: indagine sull'origine di una teoria scientifica, Feltrinelli, 2003).

[5]Such a glimpse is developed by the end of this presentation.

[6] Russo, [2], p 11.

[7]Seneca: “Quaestiones naturals.”, VII, xxix, 4.apud THE ANCIENT ENGINEERS by L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP, The MIT Press Paperback Edition, March 1970.

[8] Russo, [2], p. 282.

[9]Russo, [2], p. 240.

[10]Russo, [2], p 8.

[11]Derek de Solla Price, Science since Babylon, Enlarged Edition, New Haven and London Yale University Press, Third printing, 1978. pp44.

[12] Idem. Pp 56, 57.

[13] Russo[3], p 13.

[14]O. NEUGEBAUER Chapter VI, “Origin and Transmission of Hellenistic Science,” pp 165 in THE EXACT SCIENCES IN ANTIQUITY Second Edition, DOVER PUBLICATIONS.

  

Reviewing “What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World” by Jeff Jarvis

This is a fantastic analysis...     

Its author, Jeff Jarvis, is a trained journalist who covered New Media stories in business and is now a graduate school professor at NYU and practices equally as a consultant and business speaker.
" What Would Google Do" is a book about seeing the world through Google's glasses. The book is organized into two parts.

In the first part, Jarvis translates Google's way of doing business into a set of rules (about 30 in total). Some of the most critical include:

- Give the people trust, and we will use it. Don't, and you will lose it. The dominant (companies, institutions, and governments) used to be in charge because of their control, but the world has changed. They can get it back by simply being more transparent and listening to their customers.

- Your customer is your advertising agency: Google spends almost nothing on advertising; people spread the word for them (the buzz effect). Let your customers do that for you.

- Join the Open Source, Gift Economy: Your customers will help you if you ask them. People like to be generous (look at Wikipedia, for example).

The masses are dead, long live the niches: Aggregation of the long tail replaces the mass (Andersen's ideas about the long-tail). For example, no online video may hit the ratings of "Terminator," but together, they will capture a vast audience.

Free is a business model: Google will find ways to make money by offering free services. Charging money costs money.

- Make mistakes well: It can be a good thing to make mistakes, but it depends on how you handle them. Corrections enhance credibility. You don't need to launch the perfect product. Your customers can (and will) help you to improve it. Google is always working with beta versions of its applications.

In the second part of the book, Jarvis describes these aggregate rules (Google business model) over many different industries.

These industries will be forced to change and become winners by changing faster than the competition - or lose everything if they believe that their current business model will survive.

Here become essential the rule of the first part, "the middlemen are doomed." The middleman should disappear because we don't need them anymore (an Internet effect).

For example, Jarvis examines the way Google would run a newspaper. You should keep in mind that Jarvis wrote these things well before large American newspapers fall into severe financial distress.

The same applies to real estate agents who are now challenged in the US by Craiglist's advertisements.

From media to advertising, from retail to manufacturing, from the service industry to banking, health, and school, and so on, Google's model would have a huge impact.

The final part of the book, Generation G, is about Google's impact on anyone's personal life. Google will keep people connected: young people will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. Past mistakes will be visible forever, but if you made mistakes, it not a big issue because everybody makes them.

This age of transparency will be an age of forgiveness (in Life is a beta). Privacy is not anymore an issue. The new generations are putting their lives online because sharing information is the basis of connections. And the sharing brings social benefits that outweigh risks.

This book confirms some of my intuitions.

Google is a media company, enormous, excellent, providing highly demanded assets (information). Its business model is based on revenue streams from advertising.

This can apply only to newspapers, magazines, professional sports teams, film producers, and TV stations. The `Google way' will refer to them, and only a few will survive the next `transformation'). It will also apply to the middlemen who will disappear (eventually surviving around another kind of service).

Therefore the model applies to companies processing the information as to their core business model. It generally concerns tertiary companies and not just all of them. The business needing "atoms being displaced or transformed," or real processing of matter (and not only information) are not touched. The industrial market or primary sector business is not concerned either. In the future knowledge economy, they (these industries) will still exist.

Equally, the advertisement model for Google has its limits. Can this advertising model be transposed everywhere in the information processing field? Merely speaking, can it overpass 500 billion (the amount of today's world advertising market)? The answer is, clearly, negative.

But besides these limits, Jarvis' prediction will be materialized sooner than we think. Jarvis makes us aware that we are living in exciting times...

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