Botany Unit Confidential

This is a continuation of my uncle's diary. The previous installment is here.

Philosopher's club of the Ministry of Everything

The cornerstone idea of our system is that we do not know much about the future, cannot put much trust in the past, and live in a world where nothing lasts forever. The spiral of dialectic development  propels things through an eyelet of self-negation and comrades want to know: where are we in this cycle?
This is an important question that is inspired by a growing sense that we might be a bit lost.   And this is how our club started. We meet twice a week in a drab and dark shed that we call Smolny (after the  Bolshevik headquarters during the October revolution) and we take pains to maintain total secrecy. Still, our meetings would not amount to much if not for a serendipitous event that provided a much needed reference point.

The trip

The comrades from the Botany Unit do not travel much. In the eyes of the Command Center, travel is an unnecessary folly. The theory of the leisure class  is a favorite book  of the senior comrade responsible for approving our travel requests, and consequently no gratuitous luxury will sneak under his watchful gaze. "You do not want to read about yourselves in the Central Committee bulletin" he warns us with a fatherly smile. Younger comrades call him  Frankenstein,  after a mythical creature that was built entirely from Party propaganda.
But a miracle has happened. Whether Frankenstein got sloppy or just wanted us out for a few days,  we were sent on an official delegation to Moscow! Imagine that, a foreign country. We were allowed standing places for the two day train trip, although Frankenstein was genuinely concerned that this luxury would spoil us.
The trip was uneventful and the business part was trivial - visit to Lenin's Tomb, Red Army headquarters and a local elementary school. Our adventure started soon afterwards. We cracked the first bottle on Biblioteka Imieni Lenina station taking the Red line towards Komsomolskaya where our tents were pitched on a large construction site. But we never made it there, on Lubyanka station a bunch of grim looking agents interrupted our revelries and soon we were locked up in a holding room  for transient passengers. Public disturbance and unlawful consumption, they said. We took nervous sips from the last vodka bottle that survived the check-in procedure until we realized that we were not alone. A  foreign-looking young men was lingering in the corner and by the look of him, he must have been there for weeks. In broken Russian he explained that his name is Edmund Slowdown and that he took upon himself to reveal the ugly truth about the capitalist empire. There is little that we do not know about capitalist conspiracies against us but when we mentioned the Ministry of Everything he lit up and pulled out a big roll of perforated tape. "This", he said, "will interest you because it is about your sister organization that the capitalists copied from you. It is  called the Government Science Organization."

Government Science Organization - from beginning to the end

Reading perforated tape is a tall order, but it was worth it. This turned out to be a fascinating story not unlike our own. GSO as it used to be called was started with a great idea.   We have all agreed that sometimes you owe  respect to your adversaries and this was clearly the case. Fortunately for us, after several glorious decades the vision started to fade.  Our comrades found the process strangely familiar. Every day we come across members of the Central Committee who, no matter what the question is, are ready with an answer - "Build another steel mill" or "Dig up more coal". For our comrades at GSO, as we started thinking about them, the pitfall was in the concept of so-called "interdisciplinary research". The documents are never clear what the "interdisciplinary" contributes to other than that it is "pushing", "accelerating" and "transcending" - things that in our system are aptly delegated to the Secret Police in cases  where the workers' willpower to get things done is waning. It looked as if capitalist scientists, not unlike small children, fought bitterly to be narrow, parochial, disciplinary and also slow, systematic and incremental, while their administrators like good parents wanted them to taste the interdisciplinary cake and open their eyes to a wider experience.
Eventually the GSO's  management  got tired of listening to a gaggle of conflicting voices and  started looking for shortcuts. They  forgot the centerpiece of their system, a free market of ideas, and decided to do what they do worst - to lead. Like a battleship in heavy seas GSO was firing broadsides of solicitations aimed at the challenges that nature put in front of them. Eventually our foreign comrades slowly started losing their grip on reality. The so-called Research Proposal Manual was edited every six months, threatening more and more draconian penalties for wrong fonts and margin size and single-minded enforcement of rules addressing mostly irrelevant issues.  We were chuckling that after decades of poking fun at us, our capitalist comrades were getting the taste of the centralized planning of scientific endeavors, a bitter experience that we learned long ago is better swept under the rug.

What went wrong?

All this reading was convincing us that we too might be nearing the end of the cycle, but a clear picture  was eluding us. Many things went wrong but not so much as to explain why the Ministry of Everything is still alive and kicking  while poor GSO is biting the dust.
In the end, we came up with a simple explanation that still needs to be verified. It has to do with our comrades scientists, a community whose basic features are the same regardless of the time and environment. Many of our best scientists are arrogant, full of themselves, narrow-minded when confronted with issues outside their expertise, and just plain jerks. Through trial and error we discovered that they work best when stationed in isolated little hamlets in Siberia, free of distractions and temptations to torment weaker minds. However, our capitalist comrades have taken a different path and tried to ingratiate their scientists with the rest of the society. Needless to say, it did not quite work and one of the last ideas coming from GSO to address the issues was the "Second Best" program. Rather than constantly fighting to get the best scientist, talented manager, or most qualified employee, and so on, the idea was to aim for the second best. These would be more mellow people, with a big smile replacing acerbic wit, and good rapport with the general population. It appears that "Second Best" program unleashed powerful forces of mediocrity and started the race to the grave which ended several years later.

We were sipping warm beer in a dark shed, patting each other on the back, commiserating with capitalist scientists, and wandering what the future of the Botany Unit might be.

Aftermath

The sad end of our capitalist comrades  was immortalized in art. The monument to commemorate efforts of the scientific workforce to earn societal support was build in San Francisco a few years after GSO was shut down  (you can see the famous Golden Gate bridge in the background).

It shows a throng of distinguished capitalist scientists pleading for grants and, like poor lemmings, being pushed off the fiscal cliff.   But I suspect the sculpture allows an alternative interpretation as well.  When brave and talented people set out for a journey of discovery, success and failure may superficially look just about the same.  In hindsight, this is not so surprising, given that the people responsible for the outcome, sponsors and administrators, usually prefer to stay out of the picture.

Continued here.

The Fall of the Roman Empire finally explained

Nobody knows how long the documents were lying in a dumpy basement of the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.  In a crowded room, sharing space with John Paul II wetsuits, Benedict XVI hockey sticks, and  Francis I baseball bats, boxes of ancient parchments  were patiently waiting for their  time to be seen again. Evidence suggests that  the first occupant of the residence - Pope Urban VIII - passionate enemy of science and the last Pope to expand Christendom by military means, brought them there to study.

When our team found them many papers were partially destroyed, and a year later only a small fraction has been translated. But a few that we studied in depth illuminate a path that connects events separated by two millennia.

Below is is one of the first documents that we came across. It is a medical case history unearthed from what appears to be a 20,000-bed Mathematics Trauma Center (MTC) that the Roman Imperial Army was operating at the time of Caligula.

Math fiasco in Bayern

Name: Gluteus Maximus
Rank: Centurion
Legion: Legio XXII Primigenia
Coverage: Kaligula Care (pending final Senate legislation)
Case worker: Galla Placidia

Interview transcript:

Gluteus Maximus: Ave Caesar!

Galla Placidia: (confused) Fine, thank you. How big is your legion?

Gluteus Maximus: We had MMMMMCMXCI legionaries including auxiliaries.

Galla Placidia: Tell me about your last campaign.

Gluteus Maximus: We were operating in lower Bavaria. The place was swarming with hostiles. The Emperor's circular stipulated that every member of the legion must capture or kill at least IV Vandals and Goths per day.

Galla Placidia: So how many did you have to get daily?

Gluteus Maximus: (with some anxiety and clearly reciting from memory) MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMCMLXIV.

Galla Placidia: Does your legion have a math support unit?

Gluteus Maximus: Yes, we had about LIX warfighters with additional large number training. Unfortunately we have lost them early on in the campaign. They were not meeting the quota  of captured Vandals and I had to put them on the rack - routine punishment for cowardice. I wanted my officer to put the rack on a low setting and (with growing agitation) I tried explain how to do it. It is a simple trick with numbers but I used X for the unknown quantity that I was looking for. He took X for the rack setting, maximal as it happens, and the entire math unit was put out of commission and had to be sent back to Rome to recuperate.

Galla Placidia: Did you start training another math unit?

Gluteus Maximus: Of course. I had LXXXVIII volunteers, but they seemed to be cursed. Soon after we started abacus workouts many lost digits to some freak accidents, others developed an unusual taste for fighting and were too tired to learn anything, and the rest did not have what it takes to deal with numbers.

Galla Placidia: How did you manage without a math unit?

Gluteus Maximus: It was horrible. Goths and Vandals were down in the valley. They arranged their forces in a large rectangle. We had two warfighters, one was putting a pebble in the jar for each row and the other for each column of the enemy infantry. The first jar had MMMMMMMMMDCCCXCIX pebbles and the other MMMMMMDCCXCVIII. But without the math unit we were unable to to proceed. The War Manual stipulates that we should not engage the enemy when there are more then two of them for every one of us, and (with desperation in his voice) we could not make this determination (he starts sobbing quietly).
So their forces were growing day by day, and we were digging in and requesting a new math unit from Rome.

Galla Placidia: What happened next?

Gluteus Maximus: (defiantly) In the end, a courier came from Rome and I was put on the rack!


Interview analysis and diagnosis: Gluteus Maximus suffers from an advanced form of math phobia and fear of numbers masquerading as letters. The simple act of counting gives him the sweats, and advanced operations such as combining two numbers as length or area result in a partial shutdown of major organs. Diarrhea, fingernail sensitivity, chest pains, shallow breathing, and aggression frequently occur in a context of even small numerical challenges. When faced with inverse mathematical operations such as getting length out of area and another length, massive panic attacks ensue.


Recommendation: Keep in the Mathematics Trauma Center  for as long he has the insurance coverage. Release afterward. The affliction is not treatable at the moment.

Collapse explained

For the last 250 years the Gibbon book, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire has been a definite source on the history of the Roman Empire. Beautiful and engaging writing, if a tad old fashioned, and a mountain of historical data.  Yet these newly found documents reveal the fatal weakness of the Roman Empire that gets barely mentioned in Gibbon's treatise - the Roman numerals!  We may quarrel  over whether the economy can be based on central planning, the invisible hand of the market or something else entirely, but there is no doubt whatsoever that it cannot be based on the Roman numbering system. With Roman numerals addition is hard, multiplication awful (even today people do not know how to do it correctly ), division nearly impossible, and did I mention that there is no zero?  The discovery of the logarithm, a gateway drug to higher mathematics, is out of the question.  Everyday Roman life created multiple venues for mathematical exploits. Think of the military practice of decimation as a gentle entry into modular arithmetic, or reality shows of Christians and lions  as a path towards the study of two-player games. But in every case, the flawed numbering system stands in the way, not only hindering the development of mathematics, but also compromising banking, record-keeping, and business. With this kind of system you could not send a kid to buy a loaf of bread or a ticket for a gladiator show because they would need two decades to learn how to figure out the proper change!

Roman Empire is a  case of "one aqueduct too many". Excessive investment in public utilities, military and entertainment that left science in the dust.  It is hard to speculate, but with minor capital outlay Romans could have had decimal system, and with it made inroads into analysis and calculus, Fourier analysis, number theory and the rest of mathematical gems.  Sustained scientific effort  would put us on a path of having steam engine around V century, and  electricity and nuclear energy by the end of IX century. As always, nay-sayers point out that Vandals armed with the nuclear-tipped spears would have been a much tougher enemy, and having a Second World War thousand years earlier is also a dubious benefit.
Our team avoided these idle speculations and pushed forward!


Why so slow?

Discovery of the  true reasons for the fall of Rome, a tour de force of modern historical research and a shining example of investigative spirit for the next generations to follow, forced our team to  instantly refocus on a new task. Without science paving the way for welfare and progress, and mathematics that keeps science honest,  the Empire was doomed and this fact is profoundly obvious in the hindsight. So what stymied our less successful predecessors from making this discovery decades ago?
We may never know, but one possible explanation is that the fall and decline was so unbelievably slow. Rome lasted for over a millennium; first five hundred years as a republic, and then another five centuries as a crumbling Empire.

With this in mind we started searching for  factors that could counterbalance the  lack of strong science and education, and provide exoskeleton that keeps the society going even when the rational thought is in retreat. This work is still in progress and several competing theories emerged.  One of them is a "Theory of good life." Aqueducts, good roads, daily reality shows at the local colosseum, and heated towel racks and bathroom floors should not be altogether written off.  These are important and pleasant things; despite the fact that they represent spiraling consumption, and, if  government is involved, a source of endless deficits. Others argue that a millennium back then is roughly equivalent to twenty years today, short enough to burn through a scientific surplus if you've got it. Supporting data comes from analyzing  military salaries. In Roman times military pay while generous would stay fixed for two and half centuries at a time without much grumbling from the rank and file. Today numerous examples indicate that government morale drops considerably after barely a half a decade of a pay freeze. That is a 50:1 ratio that leads to our time scale adjustment. But the leading theory is that of an Endless War. It has to do with campaigns  in far away places and against insignificant enemies.  It requires that through conquest, resource-grabbing, or simple arrogance, one continuously produces armies of low-grade adversaries.   These enemies can do only an occasional harm, but they represent enough of a threat to suspend the common sense of  general population for a long time.
Whichever theory is true remains to be seen, but suddenly the problems of our toga wearing predecessors seem no different that what our republic is grappling with today.