Science

Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned Excalibur out of sight: ‘Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps/ Upon the hidden bases of the hills.’ Then he gave himself a little pat on the back: ‘Not bad that, Fitz, is it?’ The lines are better than not bad, as they imagine an invisible process of creation by incorporating several fragments of earlier writing.

Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from the graze into the deepest tissues, where it dissolved flesh with the ease of battery acid.

What is your p(doom)? This is the pseudo-scientific manner in which some people express the strength of their belief that an artificial superintelligence running on computers will, in the coming decades, kill all humans. If your p(doom) is 0.1, you think it 10 per cent likely. If your p(doom) is 0.9, you’re very confident it will happen. Well, maybe ‘confident’ isn’t the word. Those who have a high p(doom) and seem otherwise intelligent argue that there’s no point in having children or planning much for the future because we are all going to die. One of the most prominent doomers, a combative autodidact and the author of Harry Potter fan-fiction named Eliezer Yudkowsky, was recently asked what advice he would give to young people. He replied: ‘Don’t expect a long life.

Ettore Majorana vanished in March 1938. According to Frank Close in Destroyer of Worlds, the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist ‘probably understood more nuclear physics theory than anyone in the world’, and was hailed by Enrico Fermi as a ‘magician’, in the elevated company of Newton and Galileo. Majorana was also an ardent fascist; yet he was haunted by the destructive potential of his work on mapping the nucleus. His disappearance – perhaps a suicide; more likely a new, incognito life in South America – has been related to an anguished remark he made to a colleague: ‘Physics has taken a bad turn. We have all taken a bad turn.

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global superpower. Before the second world war the US operated just 14 overseas military bases.