Category Archives: Science-general

We Must Not Have a Mind-Shaft Gap!

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The Real Science Gap

Sorta-long article which argues that the current research framework in the US is untenable. It suffers from the misconception that the only career path of a scientist is to become a university professor, and only occasionally acknowledges this isn’t the case. What it does point out, though, is that we have a glut of post-docs, about half of whom are foreign students here on H-1B visas, and (paradoxically?) argues that we have plenty of home-grown scientists. The result of this is that there is no financial incentive to enter the field, which is why domestic students are shunning science. Color me skeptical. This completely ignores the effect of simply loving science, and going on to get a degree might have something to with liking your work, rather than the cold pursuit of money.

By focusing on the labor aspect it also completely misses one of the supporting arguments for improving science education. Not all people studying science need to become scientists, and it is not a tragedy if you take science classes, or major in a science field, and don’t become a scientist. There is value in being scientifically literate, and it’s painfully clear that we have a large chunk of scientifically illiterate people in the US. I think we’re better off having a population that can call bullshit on some of the howlers our politicians try to pass off as the truth; I’d like to set the bar a little higher than recognizing Reagan’s trees cause more pollution than automobiles do as baloney. If you aren’t savvy enough to know that antibiotics don’t affect viruses, or reject evolution in favor of creation, can you make effective decisions about biological research like stem cells? Can you be informed enough not to cower in fear when the subject of radiation or nanotechnology comes up?

If it Disagrees with Experiment, it's Wrong

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Feynman sums up science

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What he doesn’t explain here, however, is that there are varying degrees of wrong. Some kinds of wrong mean you abandon the theory. Other kinds of wrong mean you adjust the theory. Once can look at the scrap heap of discarded theories for examples of the former — phlogiston, for example, predicted that mass had to decrease in the process of combustion, because it was a substance released during the process. After that was shown to be wrong, the theory was discarded. There was no way to fix the problems, since it wasn’t a matter of refinement.

An example of refining a theory is found in laser cooling. When it was first proposed, the mechanism was Doppler cooling, stemming from a simple model of photon recoil in a two-level system, and was experimentally confirmed. But eventually experimenters discovered conditions where their laser-cooled atoms were colder than the Doppler limit. Atoms are not two-level systems, and there are conditions in which their structure can be exploited to cool the atoms further: polarization gradients in the laser light, giving rise to “Sisyphus” cooling, in which the energy levels of the atoms are shifted depending on their position, and it is possible to have some atoms continuing to lose energy as they scatter photons, somewhat like the mythological Sisyphus, who was cursed to continually push a rock uphill. It was this discovery and explanation that won the 1997 Nobel prize for Bill Phillips, Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.

There are more of these examples, with the hallmark being that the original theory is seen to no longer have universal applicability, but is still used under the conditions in which it applies. Relativity comes immediately to mind; we still use Newton’s law of gravitation, still use the classical equations for e.g. kinetic energy and do Galilean transforms when using them doesn’t introduce appreciable error.

We're All Idiots, or Worse

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Over at Physics and Physicists, I saw the post entitled Graduation Speaker Perpetuates Myth, in which the old “science says bumblebees can’t fly” canard is reported, yet again. What gets me is about such stores is the willingness to accept that scientists are imbeciles — embracing the idea that we would advance models as truth, despite the fact that they are so trivially falsified. In science, if the theory does not match the experiment, you know something is wrong with the theory, so you change the theory. (in this case, a combination of the assumption about the rigidity of the wing and the nascent state of aerodynamic modeling limited a back-of-the-envelope calculation at a dinner party)

Worse, in addition to (or perhaps a subset of) the willfully ignorant, we have the conspiracy theorists. Not only is the science wrong, but we’re all actively covering up the flaws. Never mind that if any technology based on the science actually works, it’s a bit troublesome for their position. My favorite is the anti-relativity crowd scrambling to explain how GPS actually can work.

In light of that, it was interesting to read about what has been termed scientific impotence: When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent

What Munro examines here is an alternative approach: the decision that, regardless of the methodological details, a topic is just not accessible to scientific analysis. This approach also has a prominent place among those who disregard scientific information, ranging from the very narrow—people who argue that the climate is simply too complicated to understand—to the extremely broad, such as those among the creationist movement who argue that the only valid science takes place in the controlled environs of a lab, and thereby dismiss not only evolution, but geology, astronomy, etc.

So now we have the addition of science isn’t equipped to answer that question.

Screwball Spotting

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Hermits and Cranks: Lessons from Martin Gardner on Recognizing Pseudoscientists

Martin Gardner died Saturday. I’ve read some of his books, and I think also a few of his columns when I would read Scientific American in the science library in college. His description of crackpot characteristics is still spot-on.

(1) “First and most important of these traits is that cranks work in almost total isolation from their colleagues.” Cranks typically do not understand how the scientific process operates—that they need to try out their ideas on colleagues, attend conferences and publish their hypotheses in peer-reviewed journals before announcing to the world their startling discovery. Of course, when you explain this to them they say that their ideas are too radical for the conservative scientific establishment to accept. (2) “A second characteristic of the pseudo-scientist, which greatly strengthens his isolation, is a tendency toward paranoia,” which manifests itself in several ways:

(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads….(3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. The recognized societies refuse to let him lecture. The journals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to “enemies” for review. It is all part of a dastardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this opposition may be due to error in his work….(4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein….(5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.

Cheat Sheet

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How Scientific Papers Get Retracted

The peer-review process, where editors and scientists vet the research and conclusions of scientific papers, is an important one. But even bastions of good science can be duped by an ethically impaired scientist. Studies suggest that the pressure to publish, especially in support of a hypothesis, can motivate even the most brilliant researchers to plagiarize, fudge data and play lose[sic] with their methods. And on the rare occasions that they do, it’s a quick trip to retraction and banishment from the science community.

In principle, cheating should be at a minimum. If you falsify data and the result is unimportant, there will be little effect but little notice paid. If the result is important, then other researchers will attempt to duplicate the result and/or build on them, and those experiments will fail. That will be important news, and eventually you will have to explain the anomaly.

Theory, Theory, Who's Got the Theory

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Built on Facts: The Theory of Theory

Matt’s commentary on the idea of “just a theory” at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (to which I linked recently) along with a quick example.

I put “theory” in scare quotes not because amateurs can’t make contributions to physics – they can and do – but because there’s a heck of a lot of cranks out there with theories that aren’t actually theories. In physics, if you want to come up with a theory at minimum it has to:

1. Generate numbers.
2. Match those numbers consistently with observation.

If there’s one widespread trait among cranks, crackpots and other related species, it’s not understanding or accepting the concept of falsifiability, and why if one is wrong, one must be verifiably wrong. I suspect that they simply don’t accept the possibility that they could be wrong.

A Peek in the Closet

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Instruments for Natural Philosophy

In February 1975, Deborah Jean Warner, a Curator of Physical Science at the National Museum of American History, called me to ask if Kenyon had any historical physics teaching apparatus. I looked around my office, and reeled off the names of four or five good pieces of apparatus that I was using in my lectures. The next month I was at the Smithsonian, exploring the collection and photographing some of it in black and white and in color. Since then, I have visited and photographed nearly seventy collections of early physics apparatus. This web site displays pictures of about 1850 pieces of apparatus, along with text and references.

Nitrogen Sulphur Fluorine Tungsten

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What’s that spell? N-S-F-W ! (NSFW if you have the sound on, that is, but since it’s a song you sort of lose the effect if you mute it)

The Casual Mafia: MoFo Scientist

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He’s a MoFo chemist or biologist. Not a lot of MoFo physics. (And no MoFo snakes on the MoFo plane.)