So, I was reading a book review on Undark about Giorgio Parisi’s memoir. I don’t really have much to say about the article other than that it’s pretty good—maybe not earth shattering, but it’s a solid book review. Well, it was solid book review until Mark Harris decided to add the world’s worst bit of writing. (For full disclosure, I haven’t read Parisi’s memoir, so I might be missing a critical bit of context.)

[Giorgio Parisi] is frustratingly silent about what such models might look like, or how they might solve wickedly complex problems like financial inequality or climate change. Instead, he tends to retreat to his ivory tower: “Recently,” he writes, “we have achieved important results while trying to the solve the problem of putting into a box as many different-sized solid spheres as possible.”

I find this to be one of the most bizarre paragraphs I’ve ever read, a point so out of left field it made me pause everything I was doing and just gaze at it—I haven’t been so transfixed on a single paragraph since I attempted scrying while on mushrooms. There is something almost immaculate about the logic here, like a YouTube comment published in a serious magazine: “Tell me, Mr. Science, if you’re so smart, how come you haven’t worked on solving climate change or poverty?”¹

Harris has this sort of underlying assumption that, because Parisi’s work is applicable to a load of different fields, he should talk about it. I don’t think that assumption holds very much ground, and I would rather someone that actually uses spin glass theory for, say, economic or climate modeling to talk about it. No single physicist has all the answers to the world’s problems, and many physicists don’t even know where to begin. Things like climate change and poverty, for all their technical aspects, are rooted far more in social issues, and not technical problems. The world has not mitigated climate change or lifted people out of poverty, not because it has been heretofore impossible, but because of the combined malice and greed of those in power—most politicians in America are disgusted at the idea of children getting free lunch in schools, and petroleum, the world’s economic hemolymph, has not been removed from fuels and materials because it is impossible, but because it is largely unprofitable to do so.

Then, of course, there’s the old Bechdel test—in a book with a chapter called “physics in Rome, around 50 years ago,” Harris is rather annoyed that the book doesn’t feature many women. As a woman, I am disgusted at how we’ve been left out of science—it’s bullshit misogyny at its freshest. At the same time, considering the time this book is talking about, I don’t see why that’s really a drawback; society was, as you may know, far more misogynistic back then—though that’s really not saying too much considering how bad things are now, especially in physics—and women were actively kept out of the sciences.

Of course, I do agree with the interview that the history of science is far less rosy than many scientists like to think. Colonialism, fraud, and the environmental effects of science are not only historical, but ongoing things that need to be discussed—the Mauna Kea observatory is an emblematic example of that, maybe not with regards to fraud, but definitely with colonialism and environmental damage. Scientists are not, as Parisi has apparently written, truth-seekers—mostly because we don’t know if there is a universal “truth”—rather, we’re going where evidence leads us. Science is messy and very human.

That said, I don’t think it’s terribly old-fashioned to urge the public to trust scientists. Even in an era of Twitter, citizen science, and mass-engagement, in 2021 about 15% of American adults wouldn’t get a COVID vaccine, and 42% said they didn’t trust the vaccine. I don’t think that’s the mark of a scientifically literate society. In a time where oil companies have created distrust in climate science, and where they lobby (bribe) governments into subsidizing their toxic products, I don’t think it’s too old-fashioned to ask people to understand at least a little bit about science.

Author’s note – I said that I was working on a review of Tomorrow’s Harvest by Boards of Canada. I decided to stop writing it because it was becoming more of a vehicle for me to write about climate anxiety, rather than an album review.