Category Archives: Science-general

I Believe This is a Good Point

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Why I don’t believe in science…and students shouldn’t either

There are plenty of other scientists out there that don’t like the use of the word “believe.” Kevin Padian, of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an open-access article about science and evolution, entitled “Correcting some common misrepresentations of evolution in textbooks and the media.” He states:

“Saying that scientists ‘believe’ their results suggests, falsely, that their acceptance is not based on evidence, but is based somehow on faith.”

It's Not Einstein Against the World

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New York Times Wants to Fight Einstein, Einstein Declines

Short, snarky version: Everyone should be shocked, SHOCKED! that general relativity doesn’t work where quantum theory is needed.

Matthew also rightly points out that framing a relativity experiment as a cult-of-personality exercise is a bad idea.

Newer theories supplant older ones conceptually, but every theory is provisional, constantly tested by experiments and observations. Einstein, important as he was in 20th-century physics, is not the ultimate authority even on his own theories, and refinements to his work should not be framed as proving him right or wrong.

Science Pudding

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Bad Astronomy: Global Warming Denial Is Science-Proof

Antiscience cranks, such as global warming deniers, never seem to pass up an opportunity to equivocate if it helps them look good (to the choir, at least, since the dishonest arguments are transparent to people who know what they’re looking for). If a scientist uses a lay definition, hold him/her to the scientific one, and vice-versa.

Phil is right — science doesn’t deal in proof; that’s the realm of math (or alcohol). Science deals in evidence, and in confirming models to a high degree of confidence. If a scientist says that we’ve proven something to be so, they are using a lay definition, meaning that we have very strong evidence.

Like gravity. You can’t definitively “prove” gravity but you wouldn’t want to bet against it.

I hold [the rock] over my foot. I know that our understanding of gravity is not 100% perfect, that Newton’s laws are an approximation, and that Einstein’s rules are more accurate. I can even argue over proof versus evidence versus reasonable doubt, but in the end, once that rock is falling, the science is good enough to know I should move my foot.

This is Not Leading, So Get Out of the Way

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Mandating Scientific Discovery Never Works

The history of science is replete with unexpected discoveries with profoundly important effects. The World Wide Web was not developed to address a public need but to help physicists communicate at a high-energy physics laboratory engaged in esoteric studies of the fundamental structure of matter. Theoretical studies of the nature of light emitted by hot objects ended up leading to the development of quantum mechanics, which describes the weird behavior of electrons in atoms. In the process, it led to the development of transistors and all the modern electronics on which modern computers and our information economy is based.

IOW, what works best is letting scientists investigate the area(s) of interest to them. Enough of what they find will be useful to us all, somehow.

One is the Loneliest Number

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The Lone Genius Hypothesis

[T]here are times when I sit alone in my office and scribble equations. There are times when I sit outside and stare and think. But, to be honest, those times are usually not especially productive. When I really make progress, when I really have breakthroughs — those are always times when I’m talking to other physicists and astronomers, chewing through new ideas and checking that I’m on the right track. And even more often, the most important work we do is what grows organically from our conversations or e-mails or paper perusals.

I'm Sorry, Did I Break Your Concentration?

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Oh, you were finished? Well, allow me to retort.

OK, not really a confrontation at that level. Or even close.

On the heels of last week’s “Approximately No Science Journalists are Ed Yong” I will point you to two blog posts by Chad Orzel: On Journalists and Scientists Talking at Uncertain Principles and “How Journalists Can Help The Scientists They Interview” at physicsfocus. The two are closely related but not identical observations/suggestions on the subject of scientist-journalist cooperation. It’s not really a rebuttal of anything, just some advice on the subject, presented from the point of view of the scientist.

Copyright and Trivial Efforts

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I am linking to How does copyright work in space? where I read the summary even though the actual article is at The Economist. That’s because while the subject of the complexity of copyright is interesting, or possibly depressing, what got me was this comment

We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part.

I understand the sentiment, but I’m also bothered by the characterization of sending anything into space as trivial (and besides, copyright is hard because we choose to make it so). Too often, “trivial” is a tag placed on an effort when someone else does it. It reminded me of a comment one of my previous commanding officers had made to the research group of which I am a member, which was basically that because of his past experience, he had the appreciation that most of the work that goes on in getting a job done happens behind the scenes. In our case, that building a top-of-the-line atomic clock isn’t easy, and that the uninformed often look at the final product (or result) without the comprehension that 90% or more of the project is invisible, like an iceberg. Making it look easy doesn’t mean it is easy.

Which is why I want to point out that putting a guitar into space, like many endeavors, isn’t trivial. I would also count some of the efforts of my former shipmates, such as operating a nuclear submarine, or landing an airplane on a tiny postage-stamp of a flight deck bobbing in the ocean. At night, even. A lot of really hard work and discipline go into achieving these things, and that you only rarely hear about failures of such efforts is pretty frikkin’ amazing.

Habits of Highly Successful People

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… do not include studying the habits of highly successful people

Survivorship Bias

The Misconception: You should study the successful if you wish to become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

In general, the lesson that once you’ve applied a filter to your sample, you usually don’t have a normal distribution anymore. Taking those numbers as typical is like gathering anecdotal evidence.

Also, the story about analyzing bomber damage in WWII is one I’d heard before and liked. I’m glad it’s actually be true.

Approximately No Science Journalists are Ed Yong

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Journosplaining 101 (a commentary on Ed Yong’s A Guide for Scientists on Giving Comments to Journalists)

Read this as part Q in the never-ending series of scientists v journalists. I’m a scientist, so I see where Chad’s coming from.

But a comment on Ed’s article first.

There’s a reason you should take some of the advice in Ed Yong’s post with a grain of salt (as I’ve come to realize over several years of hearing or reading advice from Ed): because it comes from Ed Yong. Now, let me explain — this isn’t a dig at Ed. Quite the opposite. He’s an excellent science journalist, and the tips he gives other science journalists about journalism is quite good. But this is a different subject, and given that there are a lot of journalists out there, you probably aren’t going to be asked for commentary from Ed Yong. (To use some physics-y math, if there are N journalists and N >>1, approximately no journalists are Ed Yong)

So when I see advice like

I have read the paper that I sent you and understand it
…
I am not just trying to fill my story with a random cutaway quote to make it look like I did my job and asked around.
…
[W]hat you say will almost certainly end up getting cut and distilled. BUT, I won’t do that in a way that misquotes or misrepresents you.

that only applies to Ed, or some other similarly-talented journalist. You could find yourself in a situation where you follow the advice but with a lesser talent, and be disappointed in the result.

 

Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps!
Well, I’m sorry. I’m not Tony Stark.

 

Which means that Chad’s advice to close the information loop by giving a summary is good. It confirms that everyone is on the same page. You may say you understand the paper, but anyone who has taught knows students who swear they understand, and then bomb the test.

Ultimately, though, what rubs me the wrong way about this is a sense that the ways scientists talk to journalists are wasting the journalists’ time, which they would otherwise be using to do Important Journalism. Which bugs me because, ultimately, each party in one of these conversations is doing the other a favor by having the conversation at all. Yes, journalists are helping to boost the profile of scientists and science in general, but they’re also taking up time that the scientists could be using to do Important Science.

The thing of which I always remind myself in these situations is that Ed is presenting a perspective of a science journalist, and that’s a bias or perspective that needs to be accounted for when absorbing the information. I think that’s what is surfacing here.

Also there’s a bit about “This research is interesting but more work needs to be done” being the most banal quote one can give. That may be true, but we also suffer from way too many stories drawing conclusions from a single experiment that end up being contradicted by further investigation, or end up being anomalies. Again, a good chance that a top science journalist won’t make that error, but it’s worth pointing out that some study isn’t a final result, just to be on the safe side.

Canada, What Were You Thinking?

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Canada Sells Out Science

[T]he National Research Council—the Canadian scientific research and development agency—has now said that they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”.
…
John MacDougal, President of the NRC, literally said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value”.

I’m incredibly sad to read this. I worked at TRIUMF in Vancouver for about 2.5 years as a postdoc, and I did witness some bureaucratic beancounter nonsense, but nothing like this.

Phil’s take on this is spot-on. But beyond saying that research pays off, making this policy short-sighted, is the fact that in basic research, you don’t truly know what you’re going to find! That’s what this research is — an attempt at discovering the unknown. There is no way to guarantee some kind of specific commercial benefit from the undiscovered, but the point of funding discovery is that someone will eventually think of ways to exploit newly-found knowledge! Overall, there will be economic gain as a result — that’s the way it has been for a long time. There’s no reason to think this has suddenly stopped.