New Scientist - 09.11.2019

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31

Don’t miss

Visit

Manual Override opens

on 13 November at

The Shed in New York.

It is a group exhibition of

collaborations between

artists, geneticists,

engineers and AI

specialists, built around

the visionary art of Lynn

Hershman Leeson.

Watch

The Atom: A love affair

takes no sides, and pulls

no punches, in its witty

and admirably objective

archival account of the

West’s relationship with

nuclear power, directed

by Vicki Lesley. At Leeds

International Film Festival

from 16 November.

Read

Change Is the Only

Constant: The wisdom

of calculus in a madcap

world (Black Dog &

Leventhal) is the latest

cartoon triumph from

Ben Orlin, creator of the

underground bestseller

Math With Bad Drawings.

Learn to think in curves!

LYNN HERSHMAN NEESON, FIRST PERSON PLURAL, THE ELECTRONIC DIARIES

OF LYNN HERSHMAN, 1984-96, EXHIBITION VIEW, KW INSTITUTE FOR

CONTEMPORARY ARTS BERLIN, 2018. FOUR-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND BRIDGET DONAHUE, NYC. PHOTO: FRANK SPERLING.

Succeeding to fail

From Silly Putty to an abandoned universal

language, Simon Ings stares failure in the face

Exhibition

Flop: 13 stories of failure

The Octagon

University College London

Until 10 April 2020

QUITTING your job? Then do

remember to clear out your

locker. One former employee

of University College London

left a bottle of home-made

plum brandy in a drawer. The

macerated plum was eventually

discovered, mulled over (sorry),

misidentified as a testicle

(species unknown) and added

to the university’s collection.

It is this selection of paintings,

prints, objects and medical

exhibits that provides the items

for Flop, taking place in UCL’s

tiny Octagon gallery. This isn’t

so much an exhibition as a series

of provocations. A notice by the

last case asks us to share our

failures on a postcard “so we

can all start learning from

each other’s mistakes”.

What is a failure? Do they

exist outside human judgement?

A favourite undergraduate

philosophy question is “can

animals have accidents?”.

People certainly can: one of

the more gruesome exhibits is

a human heart, fatally punctured

by a sword swallower’s blade.

How we define failure

depends on changing needs

and circumstances.

There was a time, not very

long ago, when the plethora

of human languages seemed

indicative of some deep,

historical failure to establish

amity across our species. There

is a fascinating page on display

from an essay by the 17th-

century clergyman John Wilkins,

whose Royal Society project

attempted to establish an

analytical language that would

let people communicate despite

not sharing the same spoken

language. It foundered because

the Royal Society couldn’t agree

how many essential concepts

existed in the world.

Now that we have developed

artificially intelligent agents

capable of translating spoken

speech in real time, we find

failure in the reduction of

linguistic diversity. We bemoan

lost languages (3000 have

perished since 1900) and

mourn the cultural deficit left.

Can objects fail? Only in the

sense that they fail to perform

an expected action. Silly Putty,

a perennially popular toy, was

the result of a failed attempt to

produce synthetic rubber during

the second world war.

If these examples of failure

feel a bit tenuous, well, that is

the point Flop wants to make:

what is interesting is how we

deal with failures, not how we

define them. As the introductory

material explains: “Perhaps

contrasting failure with success

is the real problem. If every

activity has to end in either

one or the other, it denies

the nuanced and messy

complexities of life.”  ❚

The failure to make synthetic

rubber created one of the world’s

MATT CLAYTON most enduring toys, Silly Putty

tenure as mechanisms to establish
trust. The trouble is, insiders are
keeping a dirty secret: peer review
is far from perfect, and tenure
isn’t “the academic version of
licensing” that Oreskes suggests.
The vast majority of working
scientists don’t have tenure. Surely
most of these are as knowledgeable
and trustworthy as the tenured?
Whatever paths we take, to
make progress, we have to start
by acknowledging that things look
different outside science. If you
haven’t studied science beyond
what was compulsory in school,
have no ongoing connections
with scientists and have trusting
relationships with those who
doubt science’s claims, then you
may be sceptical about scientists
who claim to have a handle on
what is true or real. Especially if
those scientists suggest we take a
path that looks dauntingly painful.
In fact, trust may not be the
central issue anyway. Maybe, for
climate change at least, it amounts
to this: why do today what you can
put off until tomorrow, especially
if it then becomes somebody else’s
problem? That “somebody else”
is, of course, the next generation.
Thunberg’s, to be precise.
If it is a bold move to focus a
book on a question with no clear
answer, it is even bolder to publish
the critiques of your answer in the
same book. The second half of
Why Trust Science?^ is a back-and-
forth between Oreskes and some
academics. But in a field with few
reasons to be cheerful, it is both
enlightening and encouraging.
Once we begin to understand the
size of the chasm that separates
science’s outsiders and insiders,
as Oreskes clearly does, we can
at least start to design a bridge.  ❚

Michael Brooks is a consultant for
New Scientist. He wrote The Quantum
Astrologer’s Handbook