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.
Is distributed memory a real problem ?
January 29, 2011
I posed several question a week or two back in response to Doc Searle’s post “What if FlickR fails?”. They are;
We all generate so much data these days there is no earthly way that we can hold it all internally and to some extent our external cyborg selves penetrate silicon strata around the world, none of which we own personally. So;
If your memories are held on a piece of hardware owned by another person what ethical duties does that person have with regard to your freedom to function as a human being ? Not legal duties note – ethical duties.
Also what can you actually can legitimately sign away under a reasonable use agreement ?
What are the civil limits to what bits of your being you can sign away without the person gaining the signature having some degree of backward responsibility to stop you from doing so ?
If they have taken on the responsibility to act as a partial mind substitute do they not have a responsibility to act for the benefit of that mind as whole ?
Can I sign away my own memories ? Am I competent to do so ? Or would the conscious act of surrendering mind function be deemed an act of madness ?
Can I actually cease to own parts of my own mind ?
If it is uploaded is that portion of my mind fungible ?
What part international law is that covered by ? International human trafficking, organ harvesting or intellectual property ?
Just going to save them here for a while and have a think about them.
My main problem is on the boundry between the legal and ethical front because there probably isn’t any legal precedent to say that non-coporeal memories i.e. memories not embodied in property or in living body tissue, have any status.
That I think is a possible real problem because there should be a fairly good argument that all memories are ‘created’ by the rememberer and that digital props that evoke or form part of a memory evokation also form part of the performance of that memory even if it is wholly internal. These days we can test whether a digital file is remembered or not by sticking the brain in an fRMI scanner so there shouldn’t be an argument that this is a fakeable experience. In which case with memory as free-form creation and digital files as the instruments played during the improvised performance of memory how do we differentiate the rememberer from the musician ?
How do we treat great improvisational musicians and their instruments ? We allow them some social leeway certainly. They can treat their instruments as friends or lovers. BB King had Lucille and many virtuoso’s have booked airline seats for their treasured possessions and have talked of devastation on their theft or destruction.
Why is the lost family album treated any differently ? It is the one item most people would save from a house fire given a choice.
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.
Developing the argument about arguments
June 14, 2010
I’ve put forward the proposition that different Kuhnian scientific paradigms have associated with them different modes of argument (Newtonian-causal, Einsteinian-relativistic, Quantum/complex-probabilistic). This shouldn’t be a big surprise and is almost a definition for a paradigm shift in itself.
What I would like to suggest is that in order to perform an argument for or against a specific piece of science the rhetorical tools that you employ must be of at least the same level as the science itself. So you cannot employ causal arguments in a debate about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars and hope to win, but you could employ causal arguments of momentum transfer when discussing the science of playing snooker. Likewise the basic chemistry of cooking has no use for relativistic rhetoric, but the evaluation of emotional response only really has meaning in relative terms. You could not hope to argue successfully that a weather system will or will not respond to your building of a new house in simple black and white terms, but you may be successful if you provide a probability factor that you will induce a rain shadow on your new garden by raising the roof-line by a meter.
So if we take this thesis one step further we have a ready made quality of debate-o-meter. All we need to do is look at the paradigmic position of the arguers with respect to the subject matter of the argument to give a gross overview of whether one or other will be able to defend his position. Those who use the correct tools for the subject being more likely to win the argument because the opponent has not understood that in order to argue a scientific position you must first understand where that position fits in the schema of scientific paradigms.
At this point I should just state that we can definitely use a scale of increasing effectiveness (causal-relativistic-probabilistic) because scientific discovery is cumulative and even scientific dead ends like phlogiston taught scientific method by error.
So next time you read or have a real debate about a subject that has science at its heart look at the paradigm that your argument belongs to against the paradigm that the science belongs to.
Thats it. A simple one today.
Fit the argument to the paradigm and you will have more success.
and
Later paradigms are more likely to win than early paradigms.
However this has an potentially vast implication regarding scientific communication, the use of experts, the role of education in democracies, all sorts of things. We may get to those eventually.
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.
