Steve Jones’ Scientific Smackdown
June 9, 2011
This is a follow up to the post “Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture”.
It appears that Prof Cox’s increasingly bombastic dismissal of universes beyond his own conception brought attention from Britain’s scientific senior class and a public rebuke (if you know what to look and listen for).
I was listening to Radio Four’s BAFTA award winning Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 4, Part 1). Its an engaging piece of pop-sci co-hosted by the ubiquitous Prof Cox and Robin Ince (a British stand-up comedian). Its usually funny in a nerdy kind of way. But this time the guest, Prof Steve Jones, one of the UK’s scientific grandees shoved Prof Cox’s head down the toilet and flushed repeatedly.
Unlike Cox, Jones recognises the limits to science and science’s role in discovery of knowledge AND truths. His is a mature and humble perspective on humanity’s role in the universe. Based on current scientific knowledge he estimated (or quoted estimates) that ‘we’ understand to a good degree 1/10^120 of the universe. That is the inverse of ten to the power of 120 or 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of all matter in the universe.
Put in that perspective modern physics, though undoubtedly a powerful AND truthful representation of the known universe, actually knows almost none of the universe and therefore remains in its own terms mainly composed of theories and partial evidence.
We only have to look at our understanding of how DNA operates or how a planet forms to see how close to home the unknown resides and in turn to appreciate our personal contexts. I don’t mean for this to suggest that scientific progress is not the most relevant or most successful mechanism that humanity has to better understand its own context, rather that science has a perspective that is per force both limited and directional (with time). In contrast the human mind has the power to reject time as an argument and work outside the historical context of scientific development. One only has to look at science fiction authors such as Verne, Wells or Clarke to see that value in expressing an imagined future, deeply unscientific though it is. If our minds can do away with a fundamental, universal variable with almost no effort and invent limitless and coherent internal universes, how can that be seen as any less powerful that the collective experience of scientific progress.
Anyway, if you get the chance to listen to this radio show listen for the negative space, the things unsaid and watch for the looks exchanged to find a young, brash, star-spangled scientist getting a lesson from the wise old wizard.
Pseudo-Palladium Alloy Dissed by Lazy Journalists
January 15, 2011
Its a remarkable thing that when a scientist, or in this case a group of scientists, announce a genuine basic scientific or engineering breakthrough that opens the door to a new avenue of research and poses all sorts of questions about the nature of matter, journalists and The Daily Telegraph in particular get completely the wrong end of the stick and others then decide that the scientists are worthless freaks.
The piece in the Telegraph is so riddled with inaccuracies and false conflations that it should be used as some sort of example of how not to do it in journalism schools. Lets pick it apart and see what he got wrong.
Japan creates synthetic version of rare earth metal palladium
WRONG
PALLADIUM IS NOT A RARE EARTH METAL THE RARE EARTHS ARE A SPECIAL GROUP OF ELEMENTS THAT HAVE BEEN IN THE NEWS RECENTLY. PALLADIUM IS A METAL THAT IS RARE ON EARTH, ITS A DIFFERENT THING.
AND THE JAPANESE SCIENTISTS DID NOT CLAIM TO CREATE A SYNTHETIC PALLADIUM, THOUGH THEY DO STATE THAT THEIR ACHIEVEMENT IS ‘AKIN TO MODERN ALCHEMY’
IN THEIR CONCLUSIONS THE GROUP SAYS
“we conclude that the Ag50Rh50 solid-solution alloy has an electronic structure similar to that of Pd (palladium)”.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘SYNTHETIC’ BY RYALL IMPLIES A NEW MATERIAL WAS FORMED WHEN IN FACT WHAT WAS BEING CREATED WAS A VERY FINE MISTED MIXTURE THAT OTHER MOLECULES REACTED TO AS IF THAT MIXTURE WAS PURE SOLID PALLADIUM.
Japanese scientists have developed a synthetic version of the rare earth metal palladium, a breakthrough that it is hoped will eventually reduce industry’s reliance on exports from China.
WRONG
JAPANESE INDUSTRY IS NOT RELIANT ON CHINESE EXPORTS FOR SUPPLIES OF PALLADIUM. MOST PALLADIUM COMES FROM THE SAME DEPOSITS AS PLATINUM. RUSSIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN MINES PROVIDE OVER 75% OF THE WORLD’S PALLADIUM. CHINA’S MAIN INTEREST IN PALLADIUM IS THROUGH RECYCLING OF WASTE CATALYTIC CONVERTORS. IT HAS NO MINES OF ITS OWN AND DOES NOT SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE PALLADIUM PRICE OR AVAILABILITY.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 7:00AM GMT 03 Jan 2011
Researchers at Kyoto University achieved the world-first by uniting molecules of rhodium and silver, which do not naturally combine, through the fusion of ultramicroscopic particles of the metals after they had been reduced to a fine solution spray.
WRONG
THE USE OF ‘UNITING’ AND ‘FUSION’ IMPLIES THAT THERE WAS A FORCED BONDING BETWEEN THE METALS. IF YOU READ THE PAPER IT IS APPARENT THAT THE NANO-PARTICULATE SPRAY IS A SIMPLE MIX WITH A FEW ADDED CHEMICALS TO ALLOW THE NANO-PARTICULATE TO FLOAT TOGETHER WITHOUT STICKING TO THE CONTAINER. THE WIERD EFFECTS WERE SEEN WHERE NANO-PARTICLES HAPPENED TO SETTLE ADJACENT TO EACH OTHER. A TEMPERATURE OF 170C IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH FOR NORMAL METALLIC ALLOYING TO TAKE PLACE, EVEN IF THE METALS USED WERE MISCIBLE, SO SOME SORT OF QUANTUM STATE DIFFUSION LOOKS A GOOD BET (NOT BEING A QUANTUM METALLURGIST THAT’S AS FAR AS I’M STRETCHING).
THE WORD ‘ULTRAMICROSCOPIC’ IS A TRANSLATION THAT HAS NO MEANING IN TODAY’S SCIENCE AND THE SCALE AT WHICH THIS WORK WAS BEING CARRIED OUT COMMONLY USES THE TERM ‘NANO’ TO DENOTE THE SMALL SCALE.
Each particle is a mere 10 nanometers in diameter, Professor Hiroshi Kitagawa told the Yomiuri newspaper, but the new alloy has the same properties as palladium.
WRONG – SEE ABOVE.
ALSO THE PAPER MAKES IT PLAIN THAT PROPERTIES SUCH AS HYDROGEN STORAGE ARE VERY DIFFERENT.
Exports from China of palladium – which is a crucial part of next-generation engines and serves to clean exhaust gases and absorb high levels of hydrogen – were abruptly halted in the wake of a territorial dispute between Beijing and China.
WRONG
THE DISPUTE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH PALLADIUM AND THERE WAS NO CONFIRMATION FROM CHINA THAT ANY DISRUPTION OF MINERALS SUPPLY TOOK PLACE. JAPANESE OFFICIALS WERE PRE-EMPTING ANY SUCH MOVE BY CHINA BY LODGING A FORMAL DIPLOMATIC PROTEST AT THE RHETORIC BEING USED OVER THE BORDER DISPUTE AND THREATENED TO APPROACH THE WTO REGARDING ANY FUTURE DISRUPTION OF SUPPLY OF RARE EARTH ELEMENTS, NOT PALLADIUM. WHICH AS WE HAVE STATED IS NOT IMPORTED INTO JAPAN FROM CHINA IN ANY VOLUME.
In September, a Chinese fishing vessel operating within Japan’s exclusive economic zone around the Senkaku Islands, the very southernmost tip of Okinawa Prefecture, rammed a Japanese Coast Guard patrol vessel.
The captain of the trawler was arrested, causing an outcry in Beijing, which claims the uninhabited islands as sovereign Chinese territory.
The Chinese fisherman was eventually released without being charged, but not before Beijing imposed a ban on shipments to Japanese firms.
MOSTLY OK BUT A LITTLE WRONG
NO BAN WAS ISSUED. THE CHINESE WERE MORE SUBTLE AND SIMPLY DELAYED SHIPMENTS IN PORT AND CUSTOMS CLEARANCE.
As well as Japan’s automobile industry, rare earth materials such as yttrium, praseodymium and thulium are important for companies here producing everything from infrared lasers to alloys for aerospace components, batteries, ceramic capacitors and parts for computer memory chips.
OK – BUT PALLADIUM IS NOT A RARE EARTH ELEMENT. THE ERROR IS MADE THREE TIMES IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY THE STORY WITHOUT IT THE SCIENCE IS PROBABLY TOO ESOTERIC FOR TELEGRAPH READERS TO BE INTERESTED IN. LAZY AND GREEDY.
The scientists said the new alloy will be difficult to produce commercially at this point but the production process is expected to lead to the development of more synthetic alloys that can be used as alternatives to rare earth metals.
AND THIS IS THE WHILE POINT OF THE SCIENCE (SO LONG AS THE RARE EARTH THING IS IGNORED YET AGAIN) – IT IS A BREAKTHROUGH IN NANO-PROCESSING AND WAS NEVER INTENDED TO REPLACE NATURAL PALLADIUM. SCIENTISTS OFTEN PICK THE OPTIMAL COMBINATION OF VARIABLES TO TEST A NEW CONCEPT BEFORE THEY GET ON TO APPLYING THAT CONCEPT. IF YOU READ THE PAPER THE WORKERS STATE THAT THEIR HOPE IS THAT THE TECHNIQUE CAN BE USED TO MIX OTHER CURRENTLY UNMIXABLE METALS;
OR IN THEIR WORDS “Following on from the discovery of the Ag-Rh solid solution alloy, we envisage the development of new solid-solution alloys of immiscible Ag-Ni, Au-Rh, Cu-Ru, and others that exhibit phase-segregated structures, even in the high-temperature liquid phase.”
IN OTHER WORDS FORGET SILVER AND RHODIUM AND FORGET DELICATE MISTED SPRAYS, WHAT THESE GUYS ARE LOOKING FOR IS A QUENCHED SOLID THAT HAS THE SAME PROPERTIES BUT CAN WITHSTAND THE RIGOURS OF REAL-WORLD USE WHILST COMBINING RELATIVELY COMMON ELEMENTS. BASIC SCIENCE INVESTIGATING NEW IDEAS BUT WITH AN EYE TO THE FUTURE.
Joint research has already begun with car companies and Japanese electronics manufacturers, Prof Kitagawa said.
AT LAST SOMETHING THAT WE KNOW IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TRUE ! THE JAPANESE, THROUGH THEIR NATIONAL NATURAL RESOURCES STOCKPILER, JOGMEC, HAVE BEEN INVESTING IN ALL SORTS OF NATURAL RESOURCE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AND ALTERNATIVE MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT AS HAVE ALL THE MAJOR ECONOMIES.
(END)
If the journalist had actually read the original article (here translated from the original Japanese), clocked that some of the translation had some ambiguity, and then gone to the original scientific paper to address that ambiguity you wouldn’t have inane comment from all and sundry around the world aimed at a perfectly good piece of basic scientific research.
OK, some of the most inane comment has come from vested interest groups, but you also have long-time metals commentators such as Martin Creamer in South Africa taking time to do a 5 minute piece to camera when it would have taken less time just to chase the story down and see that it is no immediate threat to South African mining. In his follow up written piece he follows Ryall’s lead and wrongly conflates this research with rare earth elements. Martin, if you are listening – Prof Kitagawa uses the term ‘Rare Metals’ not ‘Rare Earth Metals’ or ‘Rare Earths’. This is not a story about current metals supply it is a story about nano-fabrication and basic science as your quotes from Peter Duncan from JohnssonMatthey would seem to confirm. You have all the information, you’ve obviously chased down the article from Japan, you even have the right interpretation by an expert who has seen and read the paper, but you still conflate this with the rare earth story from last year.
Where the Telegraph journo is lazy and greedy, Creamer is not (and for the record he is one of the best resources journalists around), but he is still mistaken in the face of expert opinion and appears follow a poor conflation blindly to add spice to the story.
Science isn’t always sexy or fun. Sometimes its just process and of interest to relatively few people. We’ve all seen the kind of trouble that happens when non-specialists ‘sex up’ detailed work by others. Just don’t do it if you don’t understand it.
Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture
December 31, 2010
I like Brian Cox’s programs. He has an engaging style and an obvious passion for cosmology but he was inconsistent with his own arguments within his own recent Huw Weldon lecture and did nothing to enhance is reputation as a commentator outside his own area of expertise.
As someone who is investigating aspects of the philosophy of science his blanket dismissal of the academic understanding of scientific understanding was disappointing. Yes, the Sokolian viewpoint that the scientific worldview has proven to be a superior worldview over others in explaining our physical universe is undoubtedly true, but to then go on to say that it should never be challenged is not a valid position for an academic to take. It doesn’t matter if post-modern interpretations of science have any real-world meaning or not because science and the scientific method themselves are human inventions.
If we take the ultimate argument of Godel’s incompleteness theorem as applied by po-mo researchers – that full knowledge about the pursuit of an area of understanding can never be attained from within that area of understanding. There is no part of Godel’s theorem that allows or even suggests that it can be applied outside an oblique area of mathematical proof, but it rings true in human experience. The people we know with the deepest subject knowledge are also the blindest to the consequences of that knowledge. The deep passion that Prof Cox has for starlight is not the same deep passion for starlight that the lover has for the light that cast across the face of the loved. There is no better or worse, but there is different. In dismissing different ways of understanding we reduce the imagined to the possible and the possible to the probable and so down to the actual.
Now the actual may in fact be perfectly wonderful in its own right, and I might suggest that in choosing cosmology and sub-atomic physics as his subject area Prof Cox has chosen well, but what about more mundane pursuits. The fluid dynamics of sewerage systems for example (sorry Spenser) will never attract ex-pop stars and yet is one of the basics of modern urban existence. It could be every bit as complex to comprehend with chaotic flows of different fluids interacting on both a physical and a chemical basis to bring good or harm to millions of people every day. But you would have to be heartless in the extreme not to allow the workers in that sector to imagine the smell away or that chunkiness in one stream is just chunkiness. And yet that is what Prof Cox is asking for when he wishes to dismiss a super-position of alternate understanding on science and scientific progress.
The thing is though, later in his lecture he performs a complete about-face with no apparent recognition that he is contradicting himself. He yearns for the leaps in imagination and the deeper levels of understanding that he, as a professional scientist, feels through his hard fought understanding of science without recognising that what he is eulogising is a philosophy of science, and without acknowledging that the recognition of the polemic as a valid form implies admission that debate is possible. To be fair he did recognise the difficulty of his own position with regard to absolutism and autocrasy, but that only made things worse and made his own status as ‘talking head’ less tennable.
I agreed with 95% of what he said in the body of the lecture, especially regarding shifting objectivity to consensus and the journalistic tendancy to see reporting the controversy as balance, but his bookends showed that his own understanding of what philosophy of science is and does is every bit as skewed as poor reporting of MMR or climate change.
No-one is an authority on anyone else’s views but their own and no-one should be forced into a certain viewpoint irrespective of factual correctness. Evidence is just evidence. Interpretation is carried out by humans with human flaws. If you take your own argument a step or two further Prof Cox you will see the tyranny of your logic and recognise that we must be allowed to make mistakes irrespective of the quality of communication available.
Its all coming together Part Two
May 13, 2010
So in Part One I tried to persuade you that we are living in the transition between two scientific and technological epochs or to use Kuhn’s terms ‘scientific paradigms’. Epoch One lasted until 1930s when Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in reply to Godels work on his incompleteness theorem and set in train the start of formal exploration of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and its counter-point; the examination of the human mind using physical and mathematical means.
At that point in time (well, that generation) there was also a crux in mathematics and physics as the mathematics of complexity and quantum physics started to come to the fore. A new paradigm was born either side of WWII and it had nothing to do with steam power or communication networks. It was a change in the fundamental endeavour of science from automating and enhancing things that our bodies do (higher, faster, more accurately, stronger, bigger, further) towards doing things that our minds do (smarter, with more empathy, more responsibly, more beautifully, happier).
In understanding this we can start to understand how the current changes in communication networks, democratic engagement and the changing role of journalism fit together with wider technical and societal changes.
For example, if we accept that the internet represents a vast and near universally accessible library of all fact and opinion (which is questionable right now, but we’re closer now than ever before) then the role of the journalist is equatable to the role of the academic librarian or research assistant. Send them to seek and sooner or later they will find. Sounds like something to automate, yes ? Absolutely ! In fact lets start a company, call it Google and make cash off the back of advertising through it as millions of folk send out their own librarians to find the information that they want. Dead easy. Also at its most basic its a simple piece of maths in the ‘causal’ vein, but Google is a bit smarter and uses users to provide relativistic data in its performance so that the next search is incrementally more probable to meet the next users requirements. Up the ladder of sophistication we go.
What Google can’t do is generate opinion to kick its performance up the ladder. That is a function of mind. That is you telling the librarian “No, that’s not quite the sort of data I want. Bring me books with more blue on the cover”. Google’s vast size allows it to ape mind function, but it still us that dictate page rank in the end.
So there are different approaches towards this automation of mind.
There is the world of computation, where patterns are sought in vast data sets and those patterns linked to probability functions which relate to success or failure. Computation assumes that all answers are available somewhere in the information universe and that calculations are maps to find the answers. Where uncertainty exists a set of the most likely answers can be gathered and presented a la Wolfram Alpha.
There is the Google way of hiding behind stolen opinions and making believe that intelligence exists.
And there is the human way of just having more minds available operating with access to data that has a higher level of sophistication (its called education).
We don’t yet have a functional model of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for 70 years give or take, but we’re not there yet and there are doubts whether we yet have the tools to get there. My own suspicion is that just as the electronic age required a new physics and maths to advance, the age of the mind will too. We need to really understand quantum computing and strange effects like entanglement to get anywhere close to having the brute computing power of the human brain.
So again how does this affect journalism and democracy. Well for all the cost efficiencies of news aggregators, the multiplicity of voices in the ether means that journalism has two very different routes.
The first is as computer engineer designing search algorithms to seek out the juiciest data and re-present it a la carte. Quite frankly that role will not last long as available compute power rises. It is also the least sophisticated solution. Its cause and effect. ‘The data is now there, so lets go and get it’.
The second route is to abandon objectivity as core to definition of journalism. This is the more sophisticated route to take. Actually take the time and make the effort to have a valid opinion. Use the mind to its greatest advantage. Embrace plurality as a mode of expression. BUT you have to educate everyone to make sure that they too may have access to the same raw data and be able to understand it, in order to be able to critically assess your opinion.
So bloggers are a potential future, so are twitterers or whatever comes next, but only if we are smart enough to understand what is being said and why.
That’s all for now. I’m having a break from thinking in order to earn some money.
Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
