Anthropology.net

Here’s what turned out to be a somewhat prescient article from the June issue of Prospect magazine, which starts off by asking why it is that some of us, especially within group environments, are wont to perpetrate acts of carnage and destruction against our fellow humans, whilst the vast majority of us at an individual level would never even contemplate such actions. Furthermore, there are common perceptions of suicide bombers as being crazed individuals, misfit loners marginalised at the edge of society – but such simplifications are often misguided, if not totally unfounded…

This question troubles many who look into the psychology of extreme acts. One completely unsatisfactory answer is that violent extremists are insane, disturbed or inherently bad. It’s unsatisfactory because the vast majority of suicide bombers, the 7/7 four included, show no sign of mental illness and have no criminal history. They are often better educated than their peers and hold respectable jobs—much has been made of Khan’s work as a youth worker.

As many will be aware, there were several failed bomb attacks in the UK over the weekend, but what has surprised most of us is that all those so far arrested were either doctors or medical students, with one more having worked as a lab technician, all of whom had links with the National Health Service – in other words, these were all intelligent and qualified individuals, working in a profession supposedly dedicated to relieving distress and suffering, and most of all protecting human life – the ultimate irony in this case is that there was the outside possibility that these same individuals could at some stage have been treating and caring for victims of these or other bombings.

Suicide bombing is a classic—though extreme—example. There is virtually no recorded case of a suicide bomber acting alone. The bomber is always recruited and guided by a group with specific political or ideological aims, and the bombers tend to adopt a brotherhood mentality towards each other, encouraged by their common cause, their loyalty to the group and the secrecy of their mission. To use a battlefield metaphor (and the mentality is not so different), they go over the top together. Read the rest of this entry »

The Universe is back in the news again, as it transpires that Big Bounce is the new Big Bang, at least according to Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State. One of the main tenets of comsology these past few decades has been that this Universe is a single event phenomenon, the result of a vast and cataclysmic explosion from a tiny point of virtual nothingness around 13 -15 billion years ago.

Before that, it was popularly assumed that there was no time, no space, no matter, no life – absolutely nothing at all, anywhere – leaving us to wonder how an entire Universe, replete with galaxies, black holes, and at least one solar system capable of supporting life, was created out of what was effectively nothing. For his part, Martin Bojowald contends that there was a Universe before ours, and that we may be one result of that Universe undergoing something like a Big Crunch event, a process that might have spawned our own Universe. As we see…

Now, however, Bojowald and other physicists at Penn State are exploring territory unknown even to Einstein — the time before the Big Bang — using a mathematical time machine called Loop Quantum Gravity. This theory, which combines Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity with equations of quantum physics that did not exist in Einstein’s day, is the first mathematical description to systematically establish the existence of the Big Bounce and to deduce properties of the earlier universe from which our own may have sprung. For scientists, the Big Bounce opens a crack in the barrier that was the Big Bang. Read the rest of this entry »