What's so wrong with negative fields anyway?

When England set cautious fields they are called tactically naïve; but they win

Ed Smith

July 4, 2012

A month ago, I had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had about sport. It was in a tiny restaurant in Paris with the brilliant football writer Simon Kuper. The subject was how Spain became the world's dominant football culture.

Spain have now won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012. They are also currently world champions at Under-19 and U-17 levels. The Spanish way - high skill, brilliant passing, and little focus on physical size or brutality - has mastered the world. Not only are Spain serial winners, they have also set football's philosophical agenda.

Our conversation in Paris began with football, but I realised afterwards that the question applied to all sports. How do games evolve? Can original thinkers change their sports forever? Is intelligence - or better still, insight - the most underused resource in sport? Can you think your way to success?

Kuper explained to me that the origins of modern football began with a single inspired insight by the superb Dutch player and coach Johan Cruyff. Like many great ideas it sounds obvious but it is actually profound. The pass, that is what really matters in football. The precision, the perfection of the pass. Everything else - the arm-waving, the brave running around, the passionate sweat and tears - is peripheral. Being better at passing is what wins football matches.

Prompted by Cruyff, Barcelona set up La Masia academy to educate players about the pass. When you watch Spain mesmerise opponents, you are watching an idea brought to life. There is a bloodline that runs from Cruyff - via Pep Guardiola - to Xavi, Iniesta and Fàbregas, the champions of Europe, champions of the world. One idea changed the game forever. Spanish dominance is not just based on skill. It is founded on brains.

Yet the most interesting part of the story is the resistance to Spain's success, the refusal to follow the logic that has created it. Throughout Euro 2012, English pundits continued to accuse Spain of being "boring". The English old guard even condemned Spain's selection and tactics. How risk-averse, how stupid of Spain not to play a centre forward at all? Well, Spain won the final 4-0, without playing a centre forward for much of the game. Their first goal was brilliantly set up by Fàbregas, a midfielder picked instead of a regular centre forward. Stupid Spain, boring Spain? Behind the insult, observe the anger. When a pack of conventional thinkers are confused, they lash out at what they don't understand.

We see the same criticisms thrown around in cricket, the same reluctance to accept that new thinking might lead to better results. Here is an example. Pundits often ridicule captains for setting "negative" fields. The assumption is that it is always a "positive" move (i.e. that it will lead to more wickets) to have more slips and fewer fielders saving the single.

But what is positive, what is negative?

When I was a player, I often liked batting against very "positive" fields. Because I liked to bat at a reasonable tempo, feeling that the scoreboard was ticking along. Many players have a natural tempo, a pace of scoring that makes them feel they are in control. In a perfect world, of course, batsmen should be able to defend for hours without worrying about the scoring rate. But most batsmen are human beings.

	I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me

That's why I often found it easier to score runs against flashy, "positive" captains, who were always trying to set eye-catching "aggressive" fields. While they were arranging catchers in apparently original groupings, runs flowed from the bat. I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me.

Now I've retired, I can reveal an effective and underused tactic: stop people scoring (whatever the type of match) and you'll probably get them out. This has become even more relevant to Test cricket during the era of T20 cricket. Batsmen have become increasingly used to hitting boundaries in Test cricket because T20 has changed the way people feel about their natural scoring rate. That's why Andrew Strauss is unafraid to have more fielders saving one and fewer catchers in Test cricket.

When England set cautious fields, they too are called "tactically naïve". And they win. When Spain don't play a centre forward, they are called boring and tactically naïve. And they win.

It is time to revisit some definitions. What are tactics but tools for winning sports matches? And since when was it naïve to play to your strengths?

A case study of thinking and winning is the story of the Oakland Athletics in baseball. Thanks to the book, and now film, Moneyball, it is has become one of the famous stories in sport. As with Cruyff's insight about the pass, the over-performance of the Oakland A's began with a single insight. The best way to approach winning a baseball match is not thinking about scoring runs. It is to focus on getting on base. A run is usually the by-product of getting on base. Runs are hard to predict; getting on base is much easier to assess and calculate. So the Athletics focused on the tractable, controllable parts of the match, ignoring the headline-grabbing end-product.

In 2002 the Athletics unveiled their new strategy. Guess what: the pack of baseball pundits and insiders didn't like it. They accused the Athletics of wrong-headedness, hubris and over-intellectualism. Undeterred, Oakland won a record 103 matches out of 162.

Conventional wisdom moves at a glacial pace because people become attached to ideas that are no longer relevant. Military historians say that generals are always preparing to fight the war that has just ended. So it is in sport.

Boring Spain, naïve England, wrong-headed Oakland? I prefer the idea that sport is always evolving, with new ideas driving the pace of change.

Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith's new book, Luck - What It Means and Why It Matters, is out now. His Twitter feed is here

Why Russia locks up so many entrepreneurs

By Rebecca Kesby

BBC World Service

In the last 10 years Russia has imprisoned nearly three million entrepreneurs, many unjustly. This statistic comes from a new ombudsman for business rights, Boris Titov, who says it is "hard to find another social group persecuted on such a large scale". How has this come about?

Businessmen have complained for years that people have been able to frame commercial rivals - by paying corrupt police officers to plant evidence and make arrests to order. But only now are they being taken seriously.

More and more well-heeled entrepreneurs have been joining, even leading street protests in recent months, with reform of the courts one of their main demands.

Perhaps those protests influenced President Putin's decision last month to create a post of "ombudsman for business rights" - but he might also have been persuaded by the $84bn in capital that left Russia last year, a record amount. Russians are investing overseas because they fear for the safety of their businesses at home.

"The economy will be completely destroyed," says entrepreneur Vladimir Perevezin. "Because businessmen are not safe in our country - anyone could be sent to jail."

Perevezin knows what it's like. He was imprisoned for more than seven years after being framed, he says, for money laundering.

His friend Valery Gaiduk was also imprisoned for three years, convicted of fraud. "I'm 100% sure that a rival paid to have me arrested," he says. He had been co-owner of a successful dental practice, but he claims police officers took a $500,000 bribe to frame him.

At the root of the problem is the criminal justice system itself. Statistically, once officially accused of a crime in Russia, there is little chance of proving your innocence. Less than 1% of all criminal cases that make it to court result in a not guilty verdict or acquittal - and that figure comes from Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Critics say that in practice, if not in theory, courts operate on an assumption of guilt. The prosecution takes the word of the police, and the judge takes the word of the prosecution - no matter how unconvincing the evidence may be.

"If a person ends up in a police cell as a suspect - he will find himself in court no matter what, and the court will find him guilty. That's guaranteed," says Marat Khisamutdinov, a former police officer.

It's not surprising then that, off the record, many Muscovites are prepared to admit paying bribes to police officers when arrested - even if they're innocent.

"It's best to solve the problem as soon as possible, at the police station," Khisamutdinov says.

"You only really need to pay the lowest arresting police officers. The rest of the machine works automatically."

It's much more expensive, by all accounts, to buy your release once the wheels of justice have begun to turn. Valery Gaiduk says he was offered freedom for $300,000, but did not pay as he was unsure the deal would be honoured.

One of the few judges prepared to talk openly about the failings of Russian courts is Sergei Zlobin, who resigned as head of the Volgograd regional criminal board four months ago. His portrait of life as a modern Russian judge is extraordinary.

"Often there are huge gaps in the evidence," Zlobin says.

"Investigators make serious mistakes, but the system is such that even these mistakes are used as evidence against the defendant, and the guilty verdict must be issued anyway - otherwise the judge will face problems."

Zlobin says that in the thousands of cases he heard in the 15 years he was a judge, he only ever issued seven not guilty verdicts - and five of them were later overturned. Issuing a not guilty verdict, he says, was not only a "waste of time" it was risky.

Judges come under all kinds of pressure from the Federal Security Services, the prosecutors and the chairman of the court not to acquit defendants, he says, including blackmail. The result? Many innocent people are locked up.

Zlobin and his family have received threats and abusive messages since his resignation. He knows it's risky to speak openly, but says his conscience compels him to do so.

"Sometimes I just had to follow the instructions from above. Now, with hindsight, I understand that what I was doing was wrong, and moreover, it was illegal... and I deeply regret it."

Several judges and lawyers told me that the system acts to protect itself, rather than the letter of the law.

Asked if he had ever accepted a bribe to arrest someone on false charges, former police officer Marat Khisamutdinov refuses to answer.

Would an officer would feel guilty about framing an innocent person? "No" he answered. "You don't know him, you'll never see him again, and you get a financial reward - so why do you care?"

The business community will be watching Boris Titov's next move very closely.

He has hinted at a possible amnesty for prisoners serving time for "economic crimes", if it is their first offence.

This could affect more than 100,000 businessmen.

It would not, however, have any implications for the most famous jailed businessmen - Mikhail Khodorkovsky (once Russia's richest man) and his partner Platon Lebedev - as both have been convicted more than once.

Rebecca Kesby's Assignment, Russia: Waiting for Justice, will be broadcast on the BBC World Service on Thursday 5 July. Download a podcast or browse the Assignment archive.

Is Marxism on the rise again?

Why Marxism is on the rise again

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

• 
• • Stuart Jeffries
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012 20.00 BST

A public sector worker striking in east London last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuitable" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

 Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the newcommunism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

Abolish the LBW - it has no place in the modern world

by Girish Menon

The cricket world appears to be at war between technophiles who argue that technology (DRS) can be used to solve some of its most vexatious decisions while others claim that technology may solve questions about fact  but is inadequate to solve questions based on conjecture and opinion. In continuance with my earlier piece, 'Would the BCCI act like Mandela' (original draft), this article will argue that LBW is an archaic form of dismissing a batsman, it calls for repealing the LBW laws and will suggest alternative measures to prevent a batsman illegitimately impeding the progress of the cricket ball.

Imagine the following two scenarios:

1. Person X is caught on camera unsheathing his knife and plunging it into the body of person Z who is asleep in his bed. As a result Z is dead.

2. Person Y is caught on camera unsheathing his knife, however, unlike X, Y was unable to plunge his knife into the body of person Z. As a result Z is still alive today.

What do you think will be the punishment meted out to persons X and Y in a court of law? If this is a country still practising the death penalty, will person Y be awarded the highest form of punishment like person X? This writer believes that person Y will not be given the same punishment as person X since person Y has not committed the crime of murder.

This analogy to a murder trial resembles the judgement involved in an LBW decision. In an LBW appeal the bowler claims that if the ball had not been illegitimately impeded then it would have definitely hit the stumps. Hence the batsman who impeded the ball must be given the batsman's equivalent of the death penalty. The technophiles, who are in favour of using DRS to adjudicate on LBW decisions, argue that technology can definitely be used to prove that the ball would have hit the stumps if it had not been impeded. To technophiles I would ask a question that is the favourite of detectives, 'Where is the body?' Since the body, i.e. the stumps are undisturbed, is alive no murder has yet been committed and therefore there is no case for the prosecution.

Hence I would like to make a suggestion which may unite the technophiles and those opposed to using the DRS for an LBW decision. I suggest that the LBW as a method of dismissing a batsman should be struck off from the laws of cricket. Instead, a run penalty should be imposed on the batsman every time the ball comes in contact with his 'illegitimate' body parts. The DRS could be used to ascertain such decisions as well. The penalty could be similar to the one imposed on a fielding team when the ball hits its helmet parked on the field.

The LBW decision is an opinion and the law courts have increasingly realised the inadequacies of expert opinions to convicting defendants. Similarly, cricket should evolve into modernity by getting rid of decisions based on opinions and try to be governed only by facts. I look forward to this debate. 

Higgs Boson - The Indian connection

The gods of the particles

The Higgs bit we know. But the boson? Western science is overlooking India's contribution to the discovery

• 
• • Amit Chaudhuri
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 July 2012 21.15 BST

Satyendra Nath Bose (‘bosun') realised in 1924 the method used to analyse work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate'. Photo: National Geographic/Alamy

With tomorrow's announcement of the latest findings in the search for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle is on everyone's mind. This kind of fame is relatively rare, even for important scientific discoveries; but the Higgs boson has been called, or miscalled, the God particle, enabling it to pass into the realm of popular scientific lore, like the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, the structure of DNA, or the theory of relativity.

It would be difficult for most people to understand its significance, just as it would be to comprehend the notion of relativity, but such problems are overcome by locating science in personalities as well as cultural and national traditions. The first thing that you and I know about the Higgs boson is that it's named after Peter Higgs, a physicist at Edinburgh University who made the discovery – although the original insight, in one of those recurrent back stories of science, was Philip Anderson's.

Still, we have Higgs, and Edinburgh, and western civilisation to fall back on. The rest – "the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons ..." – we needn't worry too much about. But maybe we should worry just enough to ask, "What is a boson?", since the word tends to come up as soon as Higgs does. Is it, an ignoramus such myself would ask, akin to an atom or a molecule? It is, in fact, along with the fermion (named after Enrico Fermi), one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles.

The word must surely have some European, perhaps German, genealogy? In fact, "boson" is derived from Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata who, in 1924, realised that the statistical method used to analyse most 19th-century work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate. He first sent off a paper on the quantum statistics that he perfected in Dhaka to a British journal, which turned it down. He then sent it to Albert Einstein, who immediately grasped its immense importance, translated the paper, and published it in a German journal. (And so our invented German provenance turns out to be not wholly inappropriate.) Bose's innovation came to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics, and became a basis of quantum mechanics. Einstein saw that it had profound implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, "boson". Few physicists would disagree with the suggestion that the Bose-Einstein statistics have had much wider consequences for physics than the Higgs boson has had.

Still, science and the west are largely synonymous and coeval: they are two words that have the same far-reaching meaning. Just as Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings consume and digest the Japanese prints they were responding to so that we don't need to be aware of Japanese prints when viewing the post-impressionists, western science is pristine, and bears no mark of what's outside itself.

The last Indian scientific discovery that is fairly universally acknowledged is the zero. As Carol Vorderman has pointed out, Indians are very strong at maths, and the only modern Indian who's remotely part of the popular western mythology of science isSrinivasa Ramanujan, equally well known for his Hindu idiosyncrasies and his agonised stay in Cambridge as he is for his mathematical genius.

Indians can be excellent geeks, as demonstrated by the tongue-tied astrophysicist Raj Koothrappalli in the US sitcom Big Bang Theory; but the Nobel prize can only be aspired to by Sheldon Cooper, the super-geek and genius in the series, for whom Raj's country of origin is a diverting enigma, and miles away from the popular myth of science on which – along with solid scientific background research – Big Bang Theory is dependent.

Bose didn't get the Nobel prize; nor did his contemporary and namesake, J C Bose, whose contribution to radio waves and the fashioning of the wireless predates Marconi's. The only Indian scientist to get a Nobel prize is the physicist C V Raman, for his work on light at Kolkata University, called the Raman effect. Other Indians have had to become Americans to get the award.

Conditions have always been inimical to science in India, from colonial times to the present day; and despite that, its contributions have occasionally been huge. Yet non-western science (an ugly label engendered by the exclusive nature of western popular imagination) is yet to find its Rosalind Franklin, its symbol of paradoxical success. Unlike Franklin, however, these scientists were never in a race that they lost; they simply came from another planet.

What if Britain left the EU?

Eurosceptics want a vote on the ultimate question – and the PM does not seem entirely opposed. Ben Chu in The Independent examines the consequences of saying bye bye to Brussels

Exports

The European Union is easily Britain's biggest single export market, with 53 per cent of our goods purchased by our fellow European nations in 2011. This sector of our economy, directly and indirectly, supports three million jobs, according to Sir Iain Begg, a professorial research fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. Without export growth last year, we would have fallen back into recession much earlier. If we were to leave the EU, we would almost certainly still be allowed to sell goods into the single market. Norway, Iceland and Switzerland already do so through a free-trade agreement. The difference would be that the UK would not be able to set the rules that govern the European single market. It would, of course, have to implement those rules to keep selling into those markets though. The argument sometimes deployed by those who want out of the EU is that leaving would, somehow, encourage British manufacturers to concentrate on exporting to the likes of China, Brazil and India.

Imports

Britain also imports a great deal from other nations in the EU – more than it exports, in fact. In 2011, we exported £159bn of goods to the EU and imported goods worth £202bn – an annual trade deficit of £42bn. Some argue that this deficit gives us leverage to demand more opt-outs and budget rebates from our European partners. The argument is: "They need us more than we need them." The problem is that we import a lot of European goods, not because we are doing the Europeans a favour, but because our people want to buy things that cannot be produced at home – think of all those German cars and French luxury goods. If Britain were to leave the EU, the Government might decide to impose large tariffs on European imports, but this probably wouldn't prove very popular. The likelihood is we would still run a trade deficit with the EU, but, as with imports, we would have no say over the rules governing the single market.

Growth

Would foreign capital still want to invest in the UK if it were not part of the EU bloc? Some economists say overseas investors would be put off. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, for example, estimates that foreign direct investment would fall. And, mainly for this reason, it argues that our GDP would permanently be 2.25 per cent lower if we left the EU. However, Capital Economics argued last month that, because of the eurozone crisis, levels of foreign investment in the UK could actually go up if we left the EU, because we would seem like a safe haven.

Immigration

If Britain left the EU, the Government would not be required to permit the free movement of all citizens of the 27 nations of the union into Britain, nor their right to work here. About EU 165,000 citizens migrated to the UK in the year to September 2011, after 182,000 arrived in the 12 months to September 2010. Proponents of withdrawal argue that stopping such flows would improve quality of life because there would be less strain on public services and infrastructure. Opponents argue that immigrants are an economic benefit for Britain, filling holes in our labour market and boosting overall productivity. But the free movement of people is two-way. An estimated 748,010 Britons live or work in the European Union. Many have holiday homes in France and Spain. If we decided to restrict inflows of EU citizens to Britain, the European Union would be likely to respond in kind.

Budget

The UK makes an annual gross contribution to the EU budget of £15bn and it gets a rebate of €6bn in various subsidies – mainly agricultural. This makes an annual net contribution of €9bn. Ending those payments by leaving the EU would help to reduce the UK deficit, but these are not transformative sums. Our EU contributions are equivalent to 0.6 cent of GDP. We presently have a deficit of 8.3 per cent of GDP. Plus, one has to consider the benefits of those contributions. Structural funds – as payments into the common EU budget are known – are used to develop post-Soviet bloc countries in Europe, building up their infrastructure and making them bigger potential markets for British goods and services.

Business

A study by the British Chambers of Commerce has estimated that the annual cost to the UK of EU regulation is £7.4bn, but costs must be set against benefits. The EU has forced the mobile phone networks to stop ripping of customers when they use their handsets abroad. It has tackled Microsoft and airlines about over-charging. Britain outside the EU would have to rely on British competition authorities alone to protect customers from the malfeasance of corporations.

Banking

This is a complex relationship. The UK actually wants to impose higher capital requirements on its domestic banks than the rest of Europe does. Yet Britain is also fighting a Financial Taxation Tax, something that much of the rest of Europe

supports. British bankers, for their part, are generally in favour of staying in the EU. They fear that their access to lucrative European capital markets could be impeded if Britain left the bloc. And both banks and businesses calculate that Britain's EU membership is in their interests because the EU can help to open foreign markets such as China up to them more effectively than the UK acting alone.

Agriculture

The EU's Common Agricultural Policy is almost universally considered a wasteful mechanism that encourages over-production and undermines African farmers. Between 2007 and 2013, the UK will contribute £33.7bn to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and get back £26.6bn, according to the Open Europe think-tank. That works out as a net contribution of £7.1bn. If the UK left the EU, our Government could scrap these subsidies at home and save the money. But it already has discretion at home about what to do with the payments – enabling ministers to channel the money to conservation, rather than production. And, within the EU, it can push for badly-needed reform of the CAP. Outside the EU, it would have no influence.

Politics

Europe is more social democratic than the UK. Even countries with centre-right governments tend to tax more, spend more on welfare and are less laissez-faire when it comes to markets. Those on the left in Britain tend to be in favour of the UK's continued membership because they feel it will help to move the country in this direction. Those on the right tend to be opposed for similar reasons; they feel Europe is helping to undermine Britain's social and economic freedoms. Yet there are global politics to consider, too. The right wants to rely on Britain's "special relationship" with the US, but Washington prefers Britain to work in closer partnership with the EU. Rising Asian giants such as India and China also seem to regard Britain's membership of the EU as a good reason to build economic and diplomatic ties with us.

We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 July 2012 20.30 BST

'The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

Maugeri's analysis of projects in 23 countries suggests that global oil supplies are likely to rise by a net 17m barrels per day (to 110m) by 2020. This, he says, is "the largest potential addition to the world's oil supply capacity since the 1980s". The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel – the current cost of Brent crude is $95. Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars has been spent in the past two years; a record $600bn is lined up for 2012.

The country in which production is likely to rise most is Iraq, into which multinational companies are now sinking their money, and their claws. But the bigger surprise is that the other great boom is likely to happen in the US. Hubbert's peak, the famous bell-shaped graph depicting the rise and fall of American oil, is set to become Hubbert's Rollercoaster.

Investment there will concentrate on unconventional oil, especially shale oil (which, confusingly, is not the same as oil shale). Shale oil is high-quality crude trapped in rocks through which it doesn't flow naturally.

There are, we now know, monstrous deposits in the United States: one estimate suggests that the Bakken shales in North Dakota contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia (though less of it is extractable). And this is one of 20 such formations in the US. Extracting shale oil requires horizontal drilling and fracking: a combination of high prices and technological refinements has made them economically viable. Already production in North Dakota has risen from 100,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 550,000 in January.

So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.

We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilisation. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world's most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don't like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I'm not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.