Category Archives: Journalism

Mythological Physics

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Cryptophysicists

One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, honestly can’t tell when someone’s waaay out there.

I think people are more familiar with mythology than physics, and the results of relativity and quantum mechanics being so downright weird, it’s harder to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Which makes cryptophysics and crackpottery harder to discern from each other, and from established science. Credulous media doesn’t help.

I wonder if things like string theory have made this worse. No, I don’t — I’m sure it has.

Spooky Speeding

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A pretty cool experiment that puts a lower bound on a speed of entanglement has been performed. The experimenters entangled photons, separated them, and then made their measurements.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university’s campus through two fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages located 18 kilometers apart. Thinking of the photons like traffic lights, each passed through specially designed detectors that determined what “color” they were when entering the cable and what color they appeared to be when they reached the terminus. The experiments revealed two things: First, the physical properties of the photons changed identically during their journey, just as predicted by quantum theory–when one turned “red,” so did the other. Second, there was no detectable time difference between when those changes occurred in the photons, as though an imaginary traffic controller had signaled them both.

The results show that any information connection between them would have to occur at at least 10,000 times the speed of light, which is interpreted as a pretty good indication that it’s an inherent behavior of quantum mechanics, and this “communication” isn’t actually taking place. (see also Bohm’s Bummed and the summary at Physics and Physicists)

Or not.

nature news has an article entitled Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer. LiveScience’s article is Spooky Physics: Signals Seem to Travel Faster Than Light. Which is really strange, because at least in the nature summary, they discuss how it isn’t evidence of superluminal communication

A second test ensured that the scientists in the two villages weren’t missing some form of communication thanks to Earth’s motion through space. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, observers moving at high speeds can have different ‘reference frames’, so that they can potentially get different measurements of the same event. The Geneva results could possibly be explained if the two photons were communicating through a frame of reference that wasn’t readily apparent to the scientists.”

But theoretical calculations have shown that performing tests over a full spin of the globe would test all possible reference frames. The team did just that, and they got the same result in all cases.

The bottom line, says Gisin is that “there is just no time for these two photons to communicate”.

So why use a headline that says or implies that there is FTL information transfer, when the conclusion is that there isn’t?

Do Not Fear the Banana

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Zapperz has a short post on an article that appeared in the NY Times, chumming the waters of fear about radiation from granite countertops. I see that Chad has promised and delivered a bit of a rant, pointing out that popular media could and should do science. The problem is that they don’t — not in the living section, and sometimes not in the science section, and almost certainly not on the op-ed page.

But that’s not actually what piqued my interest here. It’s mediocre reporting, to be sure; the author makes sure to give “both sides” of the story, even though science boils down there being experimentally verified claims or not, so reporting knee-jerk reactions to the ticking of a geiger counter isn’t particularly responsible. But there was a snippet that reminded me of a conversation I was having last week.

Indeed, health physicists and radiation experts agree that most granite countertops emit radiation and radon at extremely low levels. They say these emissions are insignificant compared with so-called background radiation that is constantly raining down from outer space or seeping up from the earth’s crust, not to mention emanating from manmade sources like X-rays, luminous watches and smoke detectors.

And not to mention — because they don’t — people. That’s right: YOU are radioactive. An adult contains something like 140 g of potassium, of which about 16.5 mg will be K-40, which is radioactive with a 1.26 billion year half-life, yielding about 4400 decays per second. You also have C-14 in you, adding in another 3000 decays per second. The C-14 decay, and 89% of the K decays give betas, which will be deposited in your body. The other 11% of the K-40 decays have a 1.46 MeV gamma, and about half of them will be deposited in your body as well. This ends up being tens of millirem of dose per year.

The rest of the gammas escape, which means that you are a 6.5 nanoCurie gamma source. (Sleep with someone else 8 hours a night, all cuddled up? That’s around a millirem of dose each year. Not a cuddler? Here’s your excuse — your exposure decreases as you move away.) Do you use potassium in your water softener or as an alternative to table salt? What about bananas? That’s a 300 picoCurie source there, and you’re eating it. If you leave it alone, it’s only about 20 picoCuries of gamma.

The point here isn’t to make anyone afraid of bananas. You need potassium, and K-40 is along for the ride. But reporting like this gives no context, and paints a very simplistic “all radiation is bad” picture, when some dose is simply inescapable. It accentuates and panders to our inability to properly assess risk for unusual circumstances, especially with the mention of radon testing kits at the close of the article.

Science is Inductive: Film at 11

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Dealing with Uncertainty at Backreaction, in the context of “science is never 100% certain” and how this plays out with public perception.

There are times when this seems to be a no-win scenario: if you fail to address the uncertainty and have to make any changes to your conclusions, you lose credibility, but if you point out the uncertainty, someone will run with it, exaggerating it. One need go no further than discussions of global warming to see this in action.

One of my least favorite phrases in this area of discussion is “for all we know.” Statements that sound like “For all we know, the phenomenon could be caused by blargh” should be taken with a huge grain of salt, because one of the things science does is to widen the scope of what “all we know” entails, and correspondingly narrow the possible undiscovered explanations for the phenomenon. We rule things out, and attempt to do so in a quantifiable way — we limit the uncertainty. If you are doing an experiment and see something unusual in your data, you start systematically testing to see what could possibly be causing it. So if someone were to claim, “For all we know, that glitch is caused by a spurious magnetic field,” you can respond with “No, we tested the effect of a magnetic field, and eliminated that as a cause.” You do this all the time in setting up an experiment, and you continue to do it when running the experiment — doing everything you can to confirm that the correlation you see is actually causal. But I don’t think that this gets portrayed very well. There’s always someone out there trying to leverage science not being 100% certain, and instead portray uncertainty as being 0% certain, which is far from the truth.

Bee notes that

As I have previously said (eg in my post Fact or Fiction?) uncertainties are part of science. Especially if reports are about very recent research, uncertainties can be high.

And I recall that Feynman touches on this in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Someone drew a conclusion based on the last data point in some experiment, and he realized that the last data point isn’t so trustworthy — if you weren’t pushing the limit of the apparatus, you’d have obtained more data, so this is certainly a valid point. And here one starts fighting the tendencies of the media, because if the result isn’t novel, it isn’t newsworthy. What ends up happening is that that the least reliable results, the ones most likely to be mistaken, are often the ones making the headlines. The study that challenges a long line of other research (which, being “as expected,” was ignored) gets notice, even though one expects, statistically, the occasional contradictory study. Such is the essence of random noise. This is made worse by the journalistic desire to show both sides of a story, even if there really aren’t two sides, as they have massively different amount of evidentiary support. This, too, misleads the general public about what is know, what is unknown and what level of confidence exists in science.

Did I Read That Right?

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This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a setup.

Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment

It starts off OK, giving some history, but then there was

Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch.

Force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers (universal affirmatives can only be partially converted, quoth the logician) — you can construct bosonic systems from an even number of fermions. Bosons have integral spin angular momentum, and fermions have half-integral spin, and the statistics that describe their behavior is different. An attempt to bridge the gap between science and a lay explanation that fails because it’s scientifically incorrect.

[helium is] produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Here’s a journalistic archaeologism (it’s certainly not neo-) dangerous radiation. Nuclear radiation in invariably dangerous. Actually alpha radiation is pretty much harmless as an external dose, as it deposits its energy in a very short distance, so it doesn’t tend to penetrate even a layer of dead skin. The source is dangerous when ingested or inhaled. But the Helium nucleus is already stable (it doesn’t decay) even before it picks up the electrons — that makes it electrically neutral, not stable.

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Dueling Blogjos

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So, Blake wrote a post on What Science Blogs Can’t Do

Deedle dee dee-dee

Brian at Lealaps weighed in

If you know absolutely nothing about evolutionary biology, physics, ecology, or any other discipline you care to name you are not going to find the equivalent of a college course here on the science blogosphere. That doesn’t mean that it is not possible to gain some science education from the continuing efforts of so many writers, however.

Doddle da da-dum

So did I

Deedle dee dee-dee

Chad at Uncertain Principles responded

The mistake Blake is making is the flip side of the mistake in the most recent Ask a ScienceBlogger. The questioner in that case erred by thinking of blogs as a research tool, while Blake is erring in the opposite direction, by thinking of blogs as a teaching tool. In reality, they’re neither primarily about research, nor about teaching.

Doddle da da-dum

(End banjo/guitar parallel before the squealing starts)

I agreed with a lot of what Blake said. And I think that both Brian and Chad make some good points. And it’s a good thing I’m not running for office, lest someone call me a flip-flopper, but I think the real issue is everyone is arguing somewhat different points and there is not so much disagreement as all that.

It occurs to me I should also say that I’m not insisting that agreement be required here. Agreement is boring. Everybody is entitled to their opinion — and this is largely a discussion of opinion — and there’s a lot to be learned from looking at things from another perspective. So while I enjoy the saying “Opinions are like assholes: I don’t want to hear yours,” it’s not an actual maxim I apply.

Here’s more of what I would have written had I had more time the other evening, and what I have in response to the other posts. There are some closely-related but still distinct issues being addressed here: what roles do science bloggers play, what roles should they play, what role can they play and what roles do they want to play. And the answers will be different, depending on which question you are asking.
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On the Non-Omnipotence of Blogs

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Some more great discussion over at Science after Sunclipse: What Science Blogs Can’t Do

My thesis is that it’s not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don’t have the incentive to write the kinds of posts which are necessary. Furthermore, when we think in terms of incentive and motivation, the limitations upon the effects of online science writing become disquietingly clear. The problem, phrased without too much exaggeration, is that science blogs cannot teach science, nor can they change the world.

And one of these reasons is the level at which science blogs are written

Why is introductory material so poorly represented?

Well, what do we science bloggers write about, anyway? This is how I caricature what I see:

0. Fun posts about random non-science stuff — entertaining, humanizing, but not the subject I’m focusing on right now.

1. Reactions to creationists and other pseudo-scientists.

2. Reactions to stories in the mainstream media, often in the “My God, how did they screw up so badly” genre.

3. Reports on peer-reviewed research.

Pretty much spot-on. That’s what I tend to blog about — entertaining crap, science-y or not, take-downs of bad science and science reporting, and “real” science, whether these are posts of my own making or it’s me acting as curator to direct a reader elsewhere. But all of the science-y stuff assumes a background, at some level, in physics, without which you probably can’t appreciate what’s going on.

Blogs aren’t the only source of information, of course, but something that’s closely related, discussion forums, suffer a similar scarcity of this information, but it’s not a completely bare cupboard. The host of this blog is a science discussion forum, scienceforums.net (SFN), and there’s been a push for some discussions of basic topics, from the ground up, but I think paucity of these posts suffers from the same basic problems that Blake discusses. So yeah, I might be able to point out and perhaps explain some really neat things about physics, but it’s not going to make much sense unless you already know a little bit about the subject; you’re probably not going to learn F=ma here, and it’s questionable I could make that level of material accessible and sexy enough in this format.

Update: I’ve made another post on the topic

It's Not Gnu, But it's as Good as Gnu

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Plastics unite to make unexpected ‘metal’

Both TTF and TCNQ are electrical insulators. But Morpurgo’s team found that a 2-nanometre-thick strip along the interface between the two crystals conducts electricity as well as a metal.

So it’s “metal” in the sense that it’s plastic, but conducts very well along the interface. Apparently using “conductor” in the title would have broken some journalistic creed. Why go for accuracy when you can have imagery?

Neat result, though.

Wisdom From Inigo

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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Newly born identical twin stars show surprising differences

The identical twins were discovered in the Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery, that is 1,500 light years away. The newly formed stars are about 1 million years old. With a full lifespan of about 50 billion years, that makes them equivalent to one-day-old human babies.
[…]
By measuring the difference in the amount that the light dipped during the eclipses, the astronomers were able to determine that one of the stars is two times brighter than the other and calculate that the brighter star has a surface temperature about 300 degrees higher than its twin. An additional analysis of the light spectrum coming from the pair also suggests that one of the stars is about 10 percent larger than the other, but additional observations are needed to confirm it.
“The easiest way to explain these differences is if one star was formed about 500,000 years before its twin,” says Stassun. “That is equivalent to a human birth-order difference of about half of a day.”

So they have different brightness, surface temperature and possibly size. Maybe we shouldn’t be using the baby analogy (it’s not like they share DNA) and should stop calling them identical twins.

Update: Scientific Blogging does a better job, calling them fraternal twins, but the link has an auto-starting video with no means (that I can find) to turn it off!