Why do it?
I got an email from superfan Caden this morning, asking if I’d read the latest Dennis Overbye column on the premature announcement of earth-like planets from the Kepler Mission. The background, if you missed it, is that one of the project scientists, Dimitar Sasselov, gave a talk at Ted in which he showed a slide and referred to approximately 140 earth-like planets that had thus far been discovered by Kepler.
He mispoke, but in many ways, it was a forgivable error. Yes, the planets are merely candidates, though for my part, I have little doubt that the approximate distribution of masses will prove to be correct. Yes, the planets are earth-mass, not earth-like (since at this point in the survey discovered planets will be too close to their host stars to support liquid water), but this is not any less remarkable. And, of course, his announcement was premature, but this is where I find Overbye’s criticism laughable.
Experimental and observational results are usually confirmed or disappear pretty quickly, which means that somebody announcing a 2-sigma planetary, Dark Matter, or Higgs detection should be prepared to eat their words in short order. But the importance of those discoveries is also what makes them news, and it is the responsibility of science reporters to temper the potential import of the discoveries with the possibility that they may not pan out. It is remarkable that Overbye can be so cavalierly critical of jumping the gun on reporting experimental results, while at the same time so casually report every left-field theory put forth, regardless of how few (if any) of them ever pan out.
But Caden wrote to me not about science by press-release — about which I’ve babbled on many times — but rather about a quote near the end of the piece:
I can’t say what the discovery of dark matter or the final hunting down of the Higgs boson would do for the average person, except to paraphrase Michael Faraday, the 19th-century English chemist who discovered the basic laws of electromagnetism. When asked the same question about electricity, he said that someday it would be taxable.
This got her thinking:
I had an interesting conversation on my last trip abroad regarding how to explain why we do what we do, as scientists. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked, “So why should we care about neutrinos?”… How do you explain why basic science research matters?
This is a very good question, and one that we often lose sight of. We often justify basic science to the public (as Faraday did) on the pretext that someday it will lead to technology, and thus to revenue. And there is a truth to that. Quantum mechanics is vital to our electronics. General relativity (as Overbye points out) is crucial to GPS systems. Special relativity is central to all nuclear reactions.
But that’s not why we do it.
Technology is a laudable goal, which is why we have entire colleges of engineering. It’s also why I feel quite at home in a college of arts and sciences. We want to understand why the universe is the way it is, how it will change over time, and how everything fits together. You want to understand neutrinos because there are more of them out there than any other particle in the universe, and it would be ridiculously provincial to ignore that fact. It may seem old-fashioned, but I see what we do as being akin to the work done by philosophers, artists, and writers. Our goal is to try to put some order into the universe. With that comes the responsibility to tell the public about what we’ve learned, and most importantly to try to convey what we really know, rather than try to dazzle with the absurdly speculative.
There may come a time that basic science (and the arts) are seen as some as a luxury, and that the only research worth doing is applied science. To some, that day may already be here. I think this is a foolish position since you never know what basic science will ultimately tell us. But my basic point is that even if all we get out of a particular endeavor is knowledge, that’s more than enough.
-Dave
Black holes…
My latest “Ask a Physicist” is up at io9:
How long does it take for you to fall into a black hole?
Enjoy!
-Dave
Why is your tuition so high? Part 2
Some time ago, I wrote an entry on the high cost of college. This isn’t exactly news, but the further I delve into the problem the stranger it seems. I’m not all that concerned about the demand side, at least right now. Clearly colleges charge as much as they do because they can, but they have to spend that extra revenue on something. The extra revenue certainly isn’t going into exploding endowments.
A colleague of mine and I are trying to figure out where, exactly, all of the money goes. After all, presumably during the last 40 years, certain aspects of education should have gotten more efficient. We make our own photocopies now. We have computers and do our own typing. But presumably these effects are minimal. So far, the best collected set of data we’ve found is at the Delta Project, which collects an ostensibly uniform dataset for every college in the country.
A couple of facts:
- In the last 30 years, the cost of a year of college, as a fraction of the median US household income has approximately doubled.
- By the same standard, the average faculty salary has stayed remarkably constant.
- Looking at the line items: academic expenses, administrative expenses, student support, etc., all of them seem to have grown at more or less the same rate, since they make up a fairly constant fraction of the total academic budget.
This last point suggests a tuition increase of a thousand cuts. Everything is slowly getting more and more expensive. And while some of it results in better education (e.g. slightly lower student/faculty ratios today than 30 years ago), for the most part, it’s not clear what the students get out of the increased tuition.
But we have a theory: What if the increase ultimately comes from a proliferation of undergraduate majors and programs? Students take smaller classes (which are more intensive and expensive to teach and require more classrooms overall). There would be more academic advisers, support offices, and recruitment officers, each of which add to the bottom line. Put simply, in an effort to make every school all things to all people we’re quickly getting away from any economy of scale.
But how do we prove it?
-Dave
Fun with networks
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about social networks, and in particular, have been thinking about the fact that among a certain demographic (liberal, educated, obsessed with pop culture from a particular era) there’s a pantheon of geeky idols. When you see (below) the sort of people, bands, movies and shows that I’m talking about, my bet is that you’d be able to fill in the rest of the table nearly identically. I was most curious about who connects to who, and how we all seem obsessed with many of the same people.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good, simple-to-install and free network visualization software out there, so I decided to write my own. A few notes:
- You need to have visual python installed on your computer
- To run the program, simply use: python tree.py [inputfile]
where the inputfile has an ordered list of people, the coordinates on which they are to appear, and their “weight” as geek celebs. It also lists the interconnects. - While running, you can execute the following commands:
- ‘+’ – Allows you to make a new node (if you which to cancel, press tab)
- Click and Drag from one node to another makes a connection
- ‘-’ – Destroys a connection
- Click on a connection or a node allows you to edit the name (press enter when done)
- Rightarrow increases the weight of a node or the strength of a connection
- Leftarrow decreases the weight of a node or the strength of a connection
- ‘p’ – prints the current configuration of your network to standard out. You can use this to make an input file, or if you simply pipe the code to a file, it will be made automatically.
It’s pretty cool. It will dynamically re-adjust itself to space the nodes such that their geometric separation is related to the number of degrees (and strength of those degrees) separating them.
And now, on to the pantheon! (link takes you to the input file for my current list):
This is also good for making other networks. For example, I made a very nice network of how I know my close friends, but I’m quite disinclined to post it here.
Have fun! And if there’s someone you think should be in the pantheon, let me know.
-Dave
I was chatting with my friend, Steve, yesterday on the way to Inception, and was started talking about the long tail of sales. In particular, he made the contention that far more books are sold in the long tail (i.e bad ranks) cumulatively than up above. I started to think about it, and by gum if he isn’t right!
I’ve been thinking about amazon ranks for some time now, and my latest estimate is:
daily sales = (average rank / 130,000)-0.7
This seems to hold at least from rank=1,000 (and possibly much higher) up to a few million. In fact, I wouldn’t trust this up to much higher ranks than about 2 million, because at that point you’re looking at less than 1 amazon sale/week.
Does this hold up to the top? Probably not, but if it does, the #1 bestseller is selling about 3,800/day. Actually, I can believe that with Harry Potter-esque exceptions (on opening day), this is fairly reasonable. Stay #1 for a year, and we’re talking well over a million sales on amazon alone.
But it’s a simple matter of calculus to figure out the relations of things. For example. Approximately 25 times as many books are sold from book #101-2,000,000 as are sold from book #1-100.
Interesting… I wonder how well this actually holds up.
-Dave
Does science news make us dumber?
Some while ago, I wrote a post criticizing the New York Times’s Dennis Overbye for being far too quick to write science stories reporting on 1-sigma detections or groundbreaking theories which purport to completely overturn our understanding of the universe. I’ve started to realize that these sorts of stories are the rule rather than the exception.
As a case in point, I’ve collected three of Overbye’s most recent stories:
- 7/13/2010: For a Proton, a Little Off the Top (or Side) Could Be Big Trouble — A subatomic particle that anchors atoms and is the building block of all ordinary matter is 4 percent smaller, an experiment shows.
- 7/13/2010: A Scientist Takes On Gravity — A string theorist is not tethered to the notion of gravity, saying the force is a consequence of thermodynamics.
- 5/18/2010: From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence? — New evidence could help clear up why the universe is composed of matter and not its opposite, antimatter.
I pick on Overybye for a couple of reasons. First, he is a very good, very well-informed, and very well-read writer. For many people, his may be the only column they read about the goings-on in physics. The other reason is that he deserves it.
Consider the implications of the three articles. The first is arguably the most important, and is the one of greatest ultimate value, although the article itself is fairly confused. It claims, for example, that the Rydberg constant has to be seriously adjusted. The Rydberg constant is (for all intents and purposes) the number governing the spectral energy lines of hydrogen (and the electron orbital radius), a number measured to far greater accuracy than the 4% difference in proton radius found by the experiment. The experimenters themselves point out that the QED calculation against which they are comparing might simply be misapplied. But Overbye focuses, instead, on the possibility that QED itself might be wrong.
The second article focuses on gravity. Despite the stunning successes of general relativity, the article focuses on what is really a fringe theory. Overbye handles it well, including caveats like the following:
Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.
“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.
“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”
but to my mind he shouldn’t have done the story at all.
As for the third, the science is solid, and the story is important, but the headline writer should be fired. We have no more a clue now why there is matter rather than anti-matter, and the fact that matter and antimatter behave differently than one another has been known for almost 50 years.
My point in all of this is that to read the news, one would get the (false) impression that the major paradigms in physics are constantly being overturned. They’re not. But it causes people to think that they are. Take this comment in response to my latest article on io9:
I do not know of a single scientific fact or principal that has not been misproven or altered throughout the years. With our current understanding of the world an ansible is impossible, but I would be surprised if that did not change a few decades from now.
In other words, because people see a constant barrage of articles suggesting that we have been wrong for decades (and retractions and corrections are almost never prominently printed, if they’re printed at all), the idea that a physicist can say something about how the universe works is seen as almost laughably naive.
The conventional scientist is put on essentially the same footing as the crackpot.
-Dave
Ansibles
A lot of people have written me about the question of whether ansibles (or something like it) can exploit quantum entanglement to send signals at faster than light. Well, I’ve finally decided to tackle it in this week’s “Ask a Physicist.”
For those of you visiting for the first time, be sure to check out previous entries, Jeff’s cartoons, and the rest of the site. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
-Dave
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the interplay between popular science writing and crackpotism. And in this case, by popular science I don’t mean reviews of quantum mechanics and the like. I mean reviews or introductions to emerging ideas presented to the public. I think there’s a connection between people (generally established scientists) trying to argue their new theories in popular book form (rather than settling it within their journals first) by appealing to common sense and crackpot theories in general.
I was thinking about this yesterday, when listening to the Savage Love Podcast, during which Dan was interviewing one of the authors of Sex at Dawn. Christopher Ryan was arguing some very controversial points about the evolution of human sexuality. Dan was particularly taken with Ryan’s argument against tendencies toward monogamy. The book sounds fascinating, but also, based on everything I’ve read by, say, Jared Diamond (in particular in “The Third Chimpanzee”), completely at odds with physiological evidence.
In case you’re wondering, Ryan argues that during pre-agricultural times there was no property and thus no advantage to an individual child to claiming a particular parentage. Thus, within a tribe virtually all men could be the father of any child (if you catch my drift), and it was only with the advent of agriculture and property that this changed. Diamond, on the other hand, claims that, because of the relative size of human men and women (compared to the differences in other primates — think giant male gorillas compared to the females) as well as our proportions, um, downtown, we have all the biological hallmarks of a species that is only mildly non-monogamous.
I’m not in a position to weigh the evidence myself. This is way outside my area of expertise. What I will say is that when you read a book which appeals to your common sense and it accords with your pre-existing notions (as “Sex at Dawn” did with Dan Savage) you’re going to adopt that position, and feel that you were justified in holding it all along. You are also going to believe that this is how science is done, by making reasonable arguments to the uninitiated, rather than by making a case to others in the field who have virtually all of the pre-existing data at their disposal.
Whenever I get manuscripts from people trying to disprove special relativity, they always begin as though their arguments were being made in a vacuum, rather than in a world in which we’ve seen atomic bombs and have made models of stars, both of which require Einstein to be right. You simply can’t do that.
What’s the solution? A blanket ban on laymen accounts of non-settled science? That’s a bit too Big Brother for my taste. And it often takes generations before new ideas are accepted entirely (and until the proponents of the conflicting position have died out). Besides, these ideas are fascinating to read about. I’m almost certainly going to read Ryan’s book. But somehow I think there’s a responsibility to temper the more controversial ideas out there with the caveat that these are not settled issues. But whose responsibility? I’m not foolish enough to think that the authors themselves will do it, and who does that leave?
-Dave
What the bleep
Last night I decided to do some research for the “Crackpots” book, and at the suggestion of one of the commentators from a previous post I watched the better part of What the Bleep do we know?, perhaps one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I’ll leave off the acting (which was surprisingly awful considering the presence of Marlee Matlin) and simply focus on the science.
Much of the movie focused on the intersection of quantum mechanics and the brain, with constant claims by scientists (some in white coats!) that it is our consciousness that shapes reality. They conflated interpretation of events and sensory data with “deciding” which state a quantum system would collapse into. Because I’m 6 years late in commenting on this, I won’t do anything like a detailed review or deconstruction of the individual points. It is simply far too painful. It is, however, emboldening. It’s a reminder of how much crackpottery can be fed to the public simply because concepts like quantum mechanics sound weird. And QM is weird. But the theory also makes real (if probabilistic) predictions. That is a far cry from claiming that your brain is part of a superstring field theory (as was, in fact, claimed).
-Dave
Amazon down? Better switch to plan B.
Several people have pointed out that amazon is apparently down for a while. If so, please visit another vendor of quality books:
Update 7:17pm: Okay. Crisis over. You may now return to your shopping at amazon. (Or B&N or your local indie bookstore or anywhere else you like.)
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