Speaker by Various Artists

“Prime Minister, there is a report that an elephant has escaped from the zoo and is sitting in your office,” said the Prime Minister’s first advisor.

“That’s terrible!” said the Prime Minister. “Voters will not like it at all.”

“We have denied it, of course”, said the second advisor.

“That’s a relief,” said the Prime Minister. “So there is no elephant?”

The Prime Minister’s first advisor looked at the Prime Minister’s second advisor, who looked at the Prime Minister’s third advisor. Feet were shuffled.

“Ah, with great respect, Prime Minister,” said the second advisor at last. “It may be doubted whether that is quite the right question. In the circumstances.”

“The real point is, these elephant allegations are all very speculative,” said the third advisor. “There’s no proof.”

“There is no evidence of an elephant then?” asked the Prime Minister.

“No, none” said the first advisor. “Well, some people who work for us say they saw it. But they are afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they give their names, so that hardly counts. And some others are foreigners, so they don’t count either. And there are others too, but they’re dead, and that’s all very sad but at the end of the day you can’t really call them witnesses.”

“There is a little smashed furniture,” admitted the second advisor. “And some peanut shells and elephant droppings have been found. But it’s all very circumstantial. There could be a thousand explanations.”

“Plainly there seems to be something there that’s large and grey and has a trunk,” said the third advisor. “That cannot be denied. But that doesn’t mean we have an elephant. Many things are large and grey and have a trunk. A station wagon, for example. An ash tree. A stout Amish woman going on holiday.”

“At best, we only have indications of something with elephant-like features,” said the first advisor.

“Unsubstantiated talk about something resembling a particular large animal,” suggested the second.

“Politically motivated allegations by elephant conspiracy theorists”, said the third.

“You see? It’s all quite confusing,” said the first advisor. “It hardly counts as reliable evidence of an elephant.”

“Besides, the report has got it all wrong,’ said the third advisor. “It says the elephant is in your office in room 904. But that’s not your office! Your office is 903! We can quite genuinely reassure the public that there is not, and has never been, an elephant in room 904.”

“Phew!” said the Prime Minister. “So we can tell them that the claim that there’s an elephant in the PM’s office is wrong, then.”

“Ah. That’s not quite what I said, Prime Minister.”

“The point is that the allegations are not credible,” interrupted the first advisor. “You can’t expect accusers to be taken seriously if they can’t even get the scene of the crime right!”

The Prime Minister looked confused. “But they did say it was in my office, didn’t they?”

“Well, yes,” the first advisor explained patiently. “But there doesn’t seem to be any need to emphasise that.”

“Anyway, we have the results of an investigation, and it found that there was no elephant in your office,” said the second advisor.

“Great!” said the Prime Minister. “Let’s release that.”

“Yes,” said the second advisor. “That is to say, no. We don’t have it.”

“Can we get it?”

“Quite possibly,” said the first advisor. “And we should most certainly give consideration to the possibility that we might request a copy. Strong, thoughtful consideration. Yes. Though it might be thought that the outcome of the investigation speaks perfectly well for itself, and a copy of the investigation might only muddy the waters.”

“There are nit-pickers out there, and mischievous people determined to take things the wrong way,” agreed the second advisor. “They might go around pointing out that the investigation was carried out by the zookeeper, who might not be perceived as wholly impartial, and who didn’t actually look in your office, and even then, actually concluded that there might be an elephant there.”

“I thought you said the investigation concluded that there was no elephant,” said the Prime Minister.

“Did we?” said the first advisor. “Well let’s not get cute about it. Of course, it’s not absolutely out of the question that there’s an elephant in your office.”

“Okay,” sighed the Prime Minister. “I guess I’d better go and have a look”.

The advisors looked at each other again.

“Oh, we wouldn’t advise that,” they said. “It might call into question the government’s honesty and security.”

Steven Price is a barrister specialising in media law and an adjunct lecturer in media law at Victoria University of Wellington’s law school. He has provided legal advice on several books by Nicky Hager, including 'Hit and Run'.

It’s easy to believe that race relations in New Zealand are in a pretty happy place. Especially when you’re white. My own experience is probably typical of that.

Growing up in the Hutt Valley suburbs of Naenae and Alicetown meant mixing with a pretty diverse bunch of people. My best mate at primary school had a Samoan dad and a Palagi mum. The guys two doors down (and fellow model aeroplane fans) were NZ-born to Indian parents. And if Māori never quite made its way into the curriculum, brown faces certainly figured heavily in my school photos from the imaginatively named Hutt Central, Hutt Intermediate and Hutt Valley High School.

Fast forward a few decades. We recently marked Race Relations Day for another year and I’m living in a super-diverse city: no one of our 220 ethnic groups forms an absolute majority in present-day Auckland, and I like that. Our streets are filled with voices, faces, food and fashion our parents might not have seen without traveling overseas. The school across the road offers full immersion learning in English, Te Reo Māori, Samoan and French. It’s pretty easy to feel OK about race in New Zealand.

The other weekend, though, I read a couple of things that jolted me. The first one involved Wellington entrepreneur Deanna Yang. Her Moustache Milk and Cookie business had been featured in an ad for Visa, leading to Deanna being attacked online for having the audacity to look Chinese in New Zealand. Later, she blogged that she had come to accept being called an “Asian cunt” as a normal part of life.

Setting aside the fact she was born in Auckland, her story made me think we have a long way to go on the journey to acceptance, let alone celebration, of our diversity.

Deanna’s story reminded me of another one I’d read recently by Auckland woman Wong Liu Shueng. For her in the 1950s, being called “ching chong Chinaman” was normal, and awful. Then one day, walking home, boys from her school with pockets filled with stones cornered and attacked her. I’d love you to take a moment to read her story.

Two stories from the same city, 50 years apart. In 2017, we mostly attack with Facebook comments rather than stones. The hatred’s the same though. It hasn’t gone away and unless we keep reading stories like Deanna’s and Liu Shueng’s, and acting on hatred when we see it, it’s not going to.

In her blog, Liu Shueng says she hopes her granddaughters will grow up in a kinder New Zealand than she did. I’m not sure they will. And I hope I’m wrong.

Happy Race Relations Day, everyone.  

Dr Brian Greene is known both for a series of revolutionary discoveries in his field of superstring theory – he is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University – and as a skilled communicator of  the wonder of theoretical physics for general readers. He has been called "the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today."

In advance of his talk in Auckland on Sunday I spoke with Dr Greene about his theories on string theory and multiverses, and tried to wrap my head around that elusive character, Father Time.

Thank you for speaking with me today, I really appreciate it. How did you get caught up in string theory, and why is this theory so exciting for physicists?

Well, I became interested in string theory as a graduate student. I was at Oxford and that was in the 1980s, when there was a major breakthrough by the only two people in the world (at that time) working on string theory. It was most exciting because it promised to address a question that we have struggled with for over half a century; how to put together Einstein’s theory of gravity with our understanding of the microworld and quantum mechanics. It had been a puzzle for decades, and string theory at least holds out the promise of finally solving it! That’s where the excitement comes from!

Fantastic! So it’s a ‘theory of everything’, in a way?

That’s right! Gravity is our theory of big things, and quantum mechanics is our theory of small things, and if you put them together you have a unified description of everything.

That is every exciting. Could you give me a brief overview of string theory? 

The basic idea is pretty straightforward. We all learn about molecules and atoms and we learn that atoms are made of even smaller particles; electrons that go around the nucleus, which has neutrons and protons. Many of us learn that inside these neutrons and protons are even smaller particles called quarks. That’s where the conventional description stops; it claims that these particles, these little tiny ‘dots’, have no internal machinery.

String theory challenges this. It raises the prospect that there may be additional structures within these particles. String theory posits that these structures are little tiny vibrating filaments of energy, that kind of look like a piece of string; hence the name ‘string theory’. The idea is that the different vibrations produce different kinds of particles. A string vibrating one way might be a quark! A string that vibrates a different way might be an electron. Everything is kind of unified into the music played by these vibrating filaments.

Like the music of the spheres, or as you’ve described it before, a grand ‘cosmic symphony’? It’s very elegant.

Yes, exactly!

While I was researching string theory, I found that ten dimensions are necessary for this theory to work. Can you explain to me why this is?

I wish I could. The best I can do is to say that when you look at the mathematic theory, the math simply doesn’t work without the extra dimensions. In some metaphorical or vague sense, the universe with only three dimensions doesn’t have enough room for the strings to vibrate to saturate one of the mathematical requirements that’s necessary for the equations. Beyond that, I can’t give you a nice intuitive description for why this is. The maths makes it clear that it does.

I suppose I’ll have to do a bit more reading to understand the mathematics! Is it possible to imagine more than three dimensions? Can anyone do this? (Here I am a bit cheeky and suggest the psychedelic, hallucinatory effects of LSD as a catalyst):

Well, yes, some people claim that they can. There are certainly some mathematicians that claim they can. They have immersed themselves in the mathematics of extra dimensions for so many decades that they feel they can picture them in their mind’s eye. I think it’s pretty rare, and I certainly can’t. I’ve worked on these ideas myself for decades and when it comes to extra dimensions, I do rely on the equations, on the mathematical imagery.

I know computer graphics do a great job of representing the extra dimensions in three dimensional imageries.

Yes, exactly, they produce the extra dimensions in a three dimensional way. It really is, in some sense, a metaphor. It’s one that gives you a little bit of a mental toe-hold, so you can feel you’re getting the basic picture.

Could you describe to me your theory of the multiverse, or multiple universes? How different are they from our universe?

There are many variations on the theme of the multiverse, so I’ll focus on one to be concrete. The Big Bang, by which our universe came into existence, may not have been a one-time event. There may be many big bangs happening in distant, far-flung locations throughout space, each one giving rise to its own swelling realm, each one giving rise to its own universe. So in a way, you can think about the multiverse as a great cosmic bubble bath, where each bubble is a universe. Our universe is just one bubble in the great bath of existence.

Indeed, each universe can be very different from the next. They may have different kinds of particles and different kinds of interactions. Some might support life, and some won’t support life. There’s quite a range of possibilities.

That’s a thrilling idea. To me, it gives me a sense of my own insignificance.

Of course. I think modern physics is continuing a story of humankind’s demotion that’s been going on since the time of Copernicus, when we thought that the Earth was the centre of everything. Next came the notion that the Sun was the centre of everything, and then we realised that the Sun is one of many stars in the galaxy. Then we believed that the galaxy was the centre of everything, until we realised that our galaxy is just one of many. The final demotion may be that our universe is not the only one. Maybe there are many universes out there, if our theory is correct!

What I love about your field of physics is that it combines the huge, regarding the multiverse, with the infinitesimally small, at the level of quantum mechanics. Just in keeping with this multiverse idea, do you think life might exist in another universe?

My view at the moment, is that you should take the idea of a multiverse with a grain of salt, because we don’t yet know if it’s correct. However, if you take the multiverse seriously, you buy into the possibility that there may be an infinite number of other universes. If so, you can guarantee that in this very broad spread of universes, some certainly would include life like ours.

So potentially in another universe, I might be someone completely different – a grave robber or the queen? 

That’s right.

There are a lot of sceptics out there, regarding string theory.

I count myself one of those.

Many scientists criticise string theory because it hasn’t been experimentally backed up yet. Do you think string theory will be experimentally proven?

I think using the word ‘criticise’ is an unfortunate one. Even those of us who are deep in the field will acknowledge, advertise clearly and articulate to the public more generally that these ideas are not proven; that these ideas are coming from the mathematics that hasn’t yet been confirmed by observation or experimentation. So, I do find it curious when people ‘criticise’ string theory, because they recognise clearly, as we do, that this is a matter of the state of the art. Often in science, you don’t have the progress you want at the moment you want it. You have to have fortitude to keep on working and researching, experimenting and measuring, and hopefully one day come into the adjudication of controversial ideas. That’s what science is.

Indeed. Do you think that experimental evidence, or another major breakthrough will come about in your lifetime?

Nobody can predict with that kind of certainty the timescale of the next breakthrough. I certainly would welcome any insight, even if the insight were to show that string theory is not correct. I would be thrilled, one way or another. My view is not that we’re trying to push string theory forward, but that we’re trying to push our understanding forward. And if string theory happens to be part of that, so be it. And if it happens to not be part of that, so be it too!

It’s still an elegant, amazing theory regardless. Have there been any exciting developments recently? I know the discovery of gravitational waves was a major breakthrough.

That is the biggest one. The discovery of gravitational waves culminated a 50-year search trying to confirm a mathematical idea that came to us from Einstein. It’s just one more stunning example of how maths shines a bright light into the dark corners of reality. Of course we view this as a template and hope that one day, string theory, or some other proposed unifying theory will undergo experimental or observational justification to confirm our description of reality.

If you have time (no pun intended), would you mind describing to me the nature of time? Is it real? Is it an illusion we’ve developed?

Well, I don’t know. One of the big questions – and it’s a fruitful question – is whether time is something the human mind has conjured up and uses to organise one’s experience and perception, or whether time is something fundamentally woven into the fabric of reality. This will be one of the questions talked about, as we explore the time-mind, from the beginning of the universe to the end. We’ll explore how humankind fits into this grand cosmic evolution.

In relativity theory, the past, present and future concurrently exist in four dimensional space-time. Can you explain this to me? What implications does this have?

Well, Einstein taught us a long time ago that there’s no universal notion of time. Every individual has their own perception of time. And what might be ‘now’ for me might be ‘past’ for you. The ‘future’ for you might be ‘present’ for me. When you take into account all these different perspectives, you find that every moment in time is the ‘now’ for somebody. And if believe that ‘now’ is what exists, then all moments exist, because for any given moment, even though it might be your ‘future’ or ‘past’, somebody is in the present. In this sense everything exists through time, much as every location in space exists as well.

Wow, that’s such a strange idea – it’s like Sci-fi! I’ve heard you speak before on time travel. Could you give me a brief overview of how we might travel forward in time?

Again, time-travel comes out of relativity and Einstein, where we learn that if you go on a round trip journey in a rocket ship at the speed of light, when you return to Earth, your clock will show that less time has elapsed than has with the clocks on earth. This means that when you step out of your ship, you step into Earth’s future. This could be millions of years in the future, depending on how close to the speed of light you travelled.

Another method is to hang out at the edge of a black hole. Again, time slows down. Everything – your watch, biology, your thinking and heartbeat – it all slows down. So when you come back to planet Earth, Earth’s clocks will have been ticking off time in the usual sense and much more time will have elapsed on Earth. You will be in the future.

That’s amazing. I never seriously considered the idea of time travel, and it’s incredible that science backs up this. Do you think that time travel back to the past is possible?

Most physicists believe that time travel back to the past is not possible, but it hasn’t been ruled out completely. It’s still within the realm of remote possibility.

I think I’ve got to go catch a plane. I hope that was enough to get you going!

It was amazing! Thank you so much, safe travels, and enjoy your time in New Zealand!

That’s my pleasure, thank you. 

–––

This interview is re-published from SciBlogs.

Brian Greene expands on his work in the presentation Brian Greene: A Time Traveller's Tale, this Sunday at the Bruce Mason Centre, Auckland. Tickets are available from Ticketmaster.

But guess what!? We have two double passes to give away to Public Address readers. Just email us via the email link at the bottom of this post, with "Brian Greene" as the subject line, by 7pm today.

Like others, I spent a fair bit of time on February  23 reacting to the decision by the Commerce Commission to deny clearance to the plans of Sky and Vodafone to merge their businesses in New Zealand. It had been a long-running process under the Commerce Act, and our instincts suggested that clearance was becoming a line call.

In the end, the Commission went against the clearance, and seeing their detailed reasons for the decision in the coming weeks is going to make for interesting reading. On the day, Commission Chair Mark Berry made it clear that the key issue was the tying up of high-value premium sports broadcasting rights.

So why did we at InternetNZ care about this?

There were three main fears we had about the impact of a merger. We never said “no merger please, ComCom!” – but we did ask the Commission and the players to think about issues that often live under the heading ‘network neutrality’. It’s an uncomfortable term in New Zealand, but I won’t spend your time or mine trying to define it. Instead, let’s talk specifics.

One fear was that the merger would tilt the playing field of the market for broadband access. Vodafone tied up with Sky would have the ability and incentive to create “bundles” – think broadband access + Sky content + voice (landline and/or mobile) – that other providers wouldn’t be able to match.

They could do this because they would have the ability to supply themselves with content on terms they didn’t offer to other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) other than at high wholesale prices. This could have made Vodafone broadband bundles more desirable in ways other ISPs couldn’t match (premium sport to the fore). We believe in fair open competition in markets for Internet services, and this would push things in a less competitive direction.

A second and related fear was that the merger would reduce the likelihood of the new entity offering reasonably priced wholesale offers for other ISPs to use in offering access to Sky content. If Sky up and Vodafone were tied together, it seemed that it would be even less likely that a compelling wholesale offer would be forthcoming. There has been little take-up of wholesale content from Sky by ISPs so far, other than by Vodafone. That would be even less likely post-merger.

ISPs report that the prices are currently too high to take most if not all Sky wholesale services. With the merger, Sky would have a very real incentive to work with the rest of the merged business, rather than to try and sell its content on reasonable terms. It would have strong incentives not to drop the those high wholesale prices for content, as that would take away the main benefit of the merger.

Expert economists in this area, some of whom provided evidence to the Commission on behalf of parties opposing the merger, were clear that if the merger did not go ahead, Sky would need to, and have incentives to, wholesale its content to ISPs at prices that would encourage ISPs to resell Sky services. That points towards reduced wholesale pricing. 

As things stand, Sky’s subscriber numbers are falling – and prices for rights to content are increasing. So much so that Sky’s net profit after tax has dropped nearly a third over 12 months. This is part of an overall trend.

By encouraging wholesaling via having reasonable wholesale pricing, Sky can expand its footprint and revenues via its wholesale and retail business. That’s what’s happened for example to Sky’s equivalent in the UK, BSkyB. If the merger had been cleared, the trend would have been the other way.

A third fear is a little more distant. Sky still uses satellite to deliver most of its content, though that is slowly changing. If Sky, with that legacy technology, was to tie up with one telco in particular, that could reduce the incentives for them to make new products and options that are friendly to the ultra-fast broadband networks that are rolling out across New Zealand. We’d rather see those networks well used, than to see further incentives to buttress legacy technologies like satellite.  We think it is important that the settings are such that fibre uptake is encouraged and this merger would slow down uptake.

Those fears were ones we and others raised in submissions to the Commission and from what we can tell of their process, including the “letter of unresolved issues” from 2016, the Commission did take them seriously.

What none of us know yet is precisely how the Commission concluded it couldn’t clear the merger. We don’t know whether Vodafone or Sky will appeal the Commission’s decision once the reasons become public.

So: what’s next?

The Internet is – usually – great at disaggregating things that used to be vertically integrated. While I can see why Sky would have wanted access to Vodafone’s greater tech savvy in developing more Internet-friendly products,  and Vodafone wanted that “must have” content, that’s off the table at least in a merger context. The merger would have slowed or halted for some time that disaggregation, to the detriment of consumers and Internet users.

The value in Sky seems to be in (a) acquiring rights to content and in putting together packages that people want to buy, including “must have” content such as premium sports, and (b) its legacy distribution channel over satellite with locked-in rights for some years to come, and low incremental cost of adding extra customers.

The Internet seems like the perfect method to solve the future of Sky’s distribution side. It's more flexible than on-demand from a set-top box and Sky could use its expertise to keep refining and building the sorts of bundles people want, and finding the best value for the most people, agnostic about the distribution channels.  That would let Sky let (c), the satellite infrastructure, fall away over time.

In the medium and long run, the big squeeze on companies like Sky is that ongoing disaggregation trend. It cannot be long before we see major New Zealand premium sports organisations trying their hand at offering content direct to the public, as is happening overseas. Sky (and Vodafone if it merged) have major premium sports rights locked in for 3 to 5 years, depending on the sport. They have some time to adjust. After that, though, life will get much tougher.

The Internet and modern technology make disaggregation of distribution channels trivially easy these days. Getting best-of-breed tech as the long tail of satellite contracts slowly falls away seems like it should be a priority. Even then, it’s not clear whether companies like Sky – in their current satellite based form – will be around in five or ten years.

The expert economists’ reports on behalf of those opposing the merger were strong in their view that, just as has happened in the UK, Sky – absent the merger with Vodafone – will move to expand its footprint and encourage wholesaling by ISPs, with services provided over the internet, by lowering its wholesale prices. It will move away from shoring up its direct customer footprint, by encouraging wholesaling, and viewers getting content via other retailers. That seems to be good for consumers and good for Internet users.

How about Vodafone? They’re a mixed bag: mobile and fixed networks, some content offerings, broadband packages, and an ongoing challenge in integrating and pulling together providers they have bought over the past few years.   

Vodafone NZ can benefit from the trend towards content disaggregation, as it does what Vodafone Group is doing internationally: expand its offerings to include content. It will be easier for Vodafone to obtain a wider array of content to the extent that rights aren’t locked up in large pay-TV broadcasters. So while this particular effort hasn’t worked out as Vodafone may have hoped, it does not spell universal doom and gloom.

In the end, the Internet is changing everything. February saw Vodafone and Sky in the headlines. NZME/Fairfax will be later this month. That's a different challenge – the uncoupling of advertising revenue from content production. But it's still all about the Internet.

Jordan Carter is the chief executive of InternetNZ.