Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
By 1922, a British mathematician named Lewis Fry Richardson thought he had figured out how to use atmospheric physics, direct observations, and differential equations to calculate the probability of the next day’s weather. His method, described in a book called Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, depended on brute calculation at a scale possible, at the time, only in Richardson’s imagination.
...
It would be nearly thirty years before an actual computer was built that could do the work of those 64,000 people. It took the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) twenty-four hours to spit out a (mostly accurate) twenty-four-hour forecast, but it proved Richardson’s point: mathematics could be used to predict the weather.
Truly forecasting the weather would have to wait for “some day in the dim future [when] it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances.” He became a professor of physics and a college administrator. In 1940, he began to turn his attention to the other phenomenon he’d witnessed in France: war.
Richardson’s twin fascinations were not as far-flung as they may seem. “What has happened often is likely to happen again,” Richardson wrote, “whether we wish it or not.” War visits us frequently and usually against our wishes, and thus, like bad weather, might also be guided by laws that mathematics could reveal. Given the right models, he thought, people could recognize the storms of war as they gathered and head them off before they broke.
He fashioned a scale of the magnitude of deadly quarrels that, like the Richter scale, was logarithmic: each one-point increase corresponded to a tenfold increase in deaths. A single murder rated a 0, a war in which a thousand people died was a 3, and a magnitude-7 war was one in which upwards of 10 million people died.
Richardson gathered statistics on deadly quarrels ranging from barroom murders to world wars but decided to focus on the 315 conflicts occurring between 1820 and 1952 that reached magnitude 2.5 (317 deaths) or greater. Using sociologists’ accounts, he isolated sixty-five factors (“languages different,” “similar degree of personal liberty,” “membership in United Nations”) as potential causes of war. He gave each variable a code letter and ordered the conflicts, first according to their magnitude, and then in matrices charting, for all wars of that magnitude, the interaction among the variables.
The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, the book in which Richardson compiled his results, was not published until 1960, seven years after he died.
But they did show him something about these repeating events: that, like plane crashes, deadly quarrels just happen.
...war may be more like a natural disaster than we would like to think.
Deadly quarrels perhaps turned out to be much more like the weather than Richardson had bargained on, too much to even see.
If that’s the case, you can’t blame Richardson for his inattentional blindness. Underlying his calculations was a deep faith in our ability to use reason to rise above the mess of nature, and a concomitant faith that behind chaos lies mathematical order. He did not abandon his enthusiasm for Esperanto when his data indicated that linguistic differences were not much of a factor in causing or preventing war. Nor did the seemingly eternal penchant of politicians for “bold rhetoric” dissuade him from believing that they could be persuaded to adopt the dispassion of the mathematical mind. “Engineers customarily learn the science of dynamics as a guide to the art of machine design,” he reasoned. “Unless statesmen have studied international dynamics, how can they expect their plans for peace to succeed?” Once they could distinguish “the more fated [from] the less freely choosable forms of international behavior,” he believed, those statesmen would finally be able to make the right choices. Or at least they would have no excuse not to.
It’s hard to say where the war on terror falls on the Richardson scale. As its originator would be the first to point out, much depends on definitions. Are the 9/11 attacks (3.5) their own event? Should the 3,660 people killed by American drones (3.6) be taken as casualties of one war, or separated into their Yemeni and Pakistani components (2.9, 3.5), or combined with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (5, 5.3), and should those figures include only deaths of soldiers or, now that the battlefield has moved to the cities, should they include civilians? Should all the deaths since 9/11 be considered casualties of a single prolonged war? Thinginess fails.
This hasn’t stopped some latter-day Richardsons from crunching their own numbers. Neil F. Johnson, for instance, a physicist at the University of Miami, claims he and his international team of “complexity scientists” have unearthed the “dynamics of insurgent-group formation and attacks, which neatly explains the universal patterns in all modern wars and terrorism.”
Studying insurgent events in Afghanistan, they discovered that knowing the interval between the first two attacks in a series allowed them to forecast the timing and intensity of subsequent attacks.
“You take all of the conflict, all of the chaos, all of the noise” of war, Johnson’s colleague Sean Gourley said during a 2009 TED talk, “and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered.” The math has apparently caught the laws of war at work. Johnson claims that today’s wars and terrorism have
"less to do with the geography or ideology, and more to do with the day-to-day mechanics of human insurgency — in other words, it is simply the way in which insurgent groups of human beings fight when faced with a much stronger, but more rigid opponent."
they looked at wars from the era Richardson studied and determined that it [their formula] does not apply.
Of course, it’s not the mathematicians we turn to for reassurance. It is the politicians and the generals and their patrons in high finance and industry, who can be counted on to comfort us with promises that if we surrender this freedom or that dignity or the other pleasure, if we consent to this drone attack or those boots on the ground, if we let our president build that wall or ban those Muslims, we will once again feel safe. Here some math would be useful — not the math of Poisson distributions but the much simpler math of the Richardson scale, on which the ninety-one people killed by jihadis in the United States since 2001 register a 2, with the fifty-six deaths at the hands of domestic (mostly Christian) terrorists close behind at 1.75, and the 400,000 Americans killed by guns or the half million of us dying in vehicle accidents in that period register around a 5.6, and the millions dying around the world from poverty easily reach a magnitude of at least 7.
We might have to take another lesson from Richardson, although not the one he intended. We might have to learn to live with deadly conflicts as we have learned to live with the weather. Perhaps it is part of our ecological setting, inextricable from the world we have built, its dynamics as invisible to us as they remained to Richardson. Lightning doesn’t care whom it strikes, nor cancer whom it kills, nor the rising sea whom it drowns. So why should deadly quarrels?
Return to The Lounge & Member News
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests