Category Archives: Science-general

Let's Talk About Science

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Nice description of science (physics in particular) from the JREF forums.

As it turns out, we know enough to make really incredibly detailed descriptions. So detailed, we can describe things that we can’t actually sense directly with our own senses. We can measure those things, and we can describe them, but we can’t see them. So how do we know they’re right?

The answer is, reality appears to be consistent. In other words, our universe appears to be a place where, although random things can happen, not just anything can happen. Only certain sorts of random things can. For example, if you get out of bed and walk to the store and buy some brewskis and come home and sit on the couch and drink one, you’re still you. You don’t turn into a penguin when you walk around the corner, and you don’t cease to exist when you sit down on the couch. And this implies some things about the nature of our universe- and those things add up to consistency. Rocks don’t just disappear, or appear out of nowhere. The planet beneath our feet is there all the time, and holds us to itself.

The Red Pen Brigade

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Cocktail Party Physics: a few choice words from the red pen brigade

Some more on the topic of targeting your communication, and the utility of editors.

The hardest thing about teaching anybody anything is finding the right level of communication, and the right way to express the concepts. It would seem logical that you don’t go all jargony on a rank beginner, anymore than you have to spend time explaining the basics to an expert. But you’d be surprised how hard it is to put that into practice. How much knowledge do you assume? And how clear an idea do you as an instructor or writer have of what each level of knowledge actually includes? One of the tricks of being a good teacher is to remember what it was like when you were just starting out. What didn’t you know then that you know now? And then you determine the correct order in which to teach it.

But that’s not all that you have to worry about, either. The next problem is expressing that knowledge clearly in a way that will allow the listener or reader to follow your argument and build on what they already know. When you’re teaching, you tend to do this in a number of ways, using various media. You drag in handouts, you assign textbook readings, you draw pictures, you write concepts and key vocabulary on the board, you use PowerPoint, videos, diagrams, whatever you can get your hands on to reinforce what you’re saying in your lecture. But in the end, it all boils down to words, and if you’re not using them effectively and clearly, your students or readers are sunk.

On Top of It, Sort Of

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Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather

It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east, or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather itself was moving.

The telegraph finally made that possible. The Smithsonian Institution in 1849 began supplying weather instruments to telegraph companies. Volunteer observers submitted observations to the Smithsonian, which tracked the movement of storms across the country. Several states soon established their own weather services to gather data.

Knowledge is power, but it doesn’t prevent mother nature from kicking our ass, as Snowmageddapocalypse 2010 has shown. Though we can at least try and prepare for how hard she’s going to kick it.

I didn’t know how many of them it was going to take to kick my ass, but I knew how many they was going to use. Ron White

We Love xkcd

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Last fall, someone animated the xkcd cartoon that celebrated the boom-de-yada song

Now, in a bit of life imitates art – imitates life-imitates art-imitates life, (does surreal come in layers,or are they orthogonal dimensions?) we have a collection of people of varying degrees of celebrity in the science and tech world (I recognized Bruce Schneier and Phil Plait, despite being a bit bleary-eyed) singing it, mostly off-key.

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The Real Skeptics

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We might err, but science is self-correcting

An Oxford colleague, one of the world’s top climate scientists, made the same point last week when he said to me: “It’s odd that people talk about ‘climate sceptics’ as though they are a special category. All of us in the climate science community are climate sceptics. It’s our job to question and challenge everything.” Any scientist will tell you that when you turn up at a conference the audience will do its best to tear your findings to pieces: no one takes anything for granted.

I can vouch for this being true, as I’ve seen it firsthand. There are some very frank exchanges that go on at conferences, either in the Q&A session or after a talk is done. Putting those coffee breaks in the schedule isn’t just for caffeination opportunities — they are also a chance to track someone down and hash out claims made in talks (or pump them for more information, depending on your motivation). I recall a conference a few years back where someone came up to a colleague who had just given a talk and said, “You do realize what you said about X was bullshit, right?” We proceeded to have a spirited conversation on the subject and eventually agreed that what had been said was true under the conditions that had been implied, but was not generally true. And you can be sure we clarified that when it came time to write it up for the conference proceedings.

Trust Me

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There’s a lot of information out there, and no possible way to tell if it’s right or not. Whom do you trust?

It’s not really an easy question to answer, because there are so many willing to deceive us and it’s not that hard to do. Lately there’s been a lot of grumblings about how we can no longer trust science and scientists (not that the two are interchangeable). The real problem, I contend, is not that the trustworthiness of science or scientists has changed — we are no more or less trustworthy today that we were yesterday, or last month, or last century. The process is sound, even if the self-correction takes time. But someone not (or insufficiently) schooled in science might not be willing to accept this.

You probably shouldn’t trust anyone, period. The problem is that from a practical standpoint you have no choice in the matter. You can trust things for which you have a baseline of empirical evidence (i.e. experience), and you will not generally trust sources that contradict this experience, and will lend credence to those that do. But if you do not have the requisite experience, that’s not an option. People will trust sources that have given them good information in the past, but this can be a problem — they could be setting you up (a con game of sorts), or you could be trusting them over too wide of a range of topics: the source may be trustworthy on one issue, but have no expertise on another. And ultimately we really can’t trust ourselves, because we often see what we want to see. Our eyes can be fooled. We have a tendency to lend more credence to sources with whom we agree or who give us the answer we want, and less to those with whom we disagree or give us the answer that doesn’t confirm our bias. We deceive ourselves too easily.

Let me show you how easy it is to cast doubt on science, by playing to ignorance of science terminology and methods. Even without bringing quantum mechanics into the discussion.

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The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news, and scientists for years have been doing similar experiments to “prove” the existence of all of these particles they claim make up the standard model. (Ha, the “standard” model. Like they’d allow anyone to discover something new.) If you look carefully, you’ll find that a whole bunch of these experiments are a sham. The experiments that supposedly show that these particles exist were set up to detect coincidences. And the scientists freely admit this, and even point it out in their discussions! Yet they pretend that this means something significant.

There’s a device in your car — easily accessible to the driver or even a passenger — that will cause the car to accelerate, even if you don’t push down on the gas pedal. The designers know this, and yet they don’t consider it to be a flaw. Despite the fact that misuse has caused countless accidents, they say it’s necessary for the operation of the car for this dangerous “feature” to exist.

Also, did you know that touching the brakes in the right way can cause your car to accelerate? (Even if it’s not a Toyota)

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I really hope the two examples above are transparent, because if you read a physics blog you probably know enough physics to be familiar with its terminology quirks. But there are people out there who exploit this — anyone who denigrates an element of science as “just a theory,” for example, because the lay definition and science definition are different. Or gets all mock-outraged at a scientist using a “trick” (the chain rule and integration by parts are tricks, too. Nothing insidious or conspiratorial about that, other than being part of calculus)

I don’t have any magic bullet to solve this problem. People will lie to advance their personal agendas and ideologies, if lying can happen without serious repercussions. And that’s precisely what I see in political discussions these days – there seems to be no negative repercussion for just making shit up, and this seems to have spilled over into the popular press when dealing with science (Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?), and even more so on the op-ed pages. But at least in science, you have a few things working in your favor: a basic competence in science, scientific literacy and critical thought helps keep the charlatans at bay, and the process of science itself does not lend itself to misrepresentation in the long run. There are other scientists out there who are going to try and reproduce or apply any interesting result, and if they can’t because you made up your data, kiss your career goodbye. (If they can’t because they are an incompetent hack with an agenda, well, that’s another story). So while you may not trust an individual scientist, at least the system is set up to be self-correcting, as opposed to other avenues of information.

Patently Obvious?

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Inventing a New Economy

What patent applications can tell us about America’s economic prospects.

A quick glance suggests several conclusions: First, the view that a worldwide technological and innovative explosion began in the mid-1960s and continues until now is correct. The sheer number of patent applications—which had remained relatively static from the 1880s until the 1950s—suddenly grew dramatically, coinciding with the onset of the computer and telecom revolutions. Second, not surprisingly, the patent offices receiving the vast majority of this explosion have been those in nations with the greatest economic growth during that period—initially the United States and Japan and more recently China, Korea, and Russia.

This ties in with yesterday’s comment about basic research being the raw material of later applications.