physicsworld.com Blog
July 2, 2009
Science fiction on science journalism
He loves a good metaphor
By James Dacey
Science reporting should make more use of metaphors in order to explain difficult technical concepts. That is the opinion of Geoff Ryman, an award-winning science fiction writer, voiced at the World Conference of Science Journalists in London yesterday.
Ryman, who is also a lecturer at the University of Manchester, subscribes to the “mundane” school of sci-fi - rejecting “sexy” ideas like flying saucers and tentacled aliens in favour of more down-to-Earth, preferably “human” concepts. In 2006 he won the Arthur C. Clarke award for Air, a novel based on the idea of a successor to the internet which connects people’s brains via an invisible substance… known as Air.
Ryman’s line of argument - and it’s a well-trodden one - is that the general public only tend to engage in science and technology writing when it is presented to them in everyday concepts. “The best science writing tells a human story,” he said and, as a science fiction writer, he places himself amongst the “lay readers” drawing inspiration from ideas that touch him on an emotional rather than an abstract level.
According to the author, science journalism need not be any different from his approach, other than the fact that it’s obviously “limited” by scientific truths.
Sitting there yesterday, I thought Ryman did make some good points and he certainly delivered them in an eloquent way. But it also seems to me that he holds a very narrow view of science and scientists, painting them as abstract entities, disconnected from the rest of everyday life, and this is simply not true.
I reckon that the distinction between good science and good fiction is a lot muddier than this because clear communication is absolutely integral to both. Many of the great scientific ideas have been presented with a devastating clarity through striking metaphors. Take Darwin’s Tree of Life, take String Theory, take the Big Bang… I’m sure there’s plenty more. Anyway, the survival of these ideas has - in my opinion - been aided by their ability to reduce the complexity of nature into simpler, everyday concepts.
Let me know what you think…
July 2, 2009
Canada and Japan pose a serious threat to a global climate deal, warns prominent policy-maker
Countdown to Copenhagen
By James Dacey
Canada and Japan pose a serious threat to achieving a planet-saving deal in Copenhagen this December, warned Sir David King, former Chief Science Advisor to the UK government, speaking yesterday at the World Conference of Science Journalists that is taking place in London this week.
He was, of course, referring to the UN Climate Change Conference, which is set to thrash out a successor to the Kyoto protocol when it reaches the end of its first stage in 2012.
The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that global greenhouse-gas emissions will need to be cut by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050 if we are to ensure that global temperatures do not rise more than 2 degrees by the end of the century.
Over the course of two weeks in the Danish capital, officials from 192 nations will gather to address four main objectives:
1) Legally-binding targets - on carbon emissions;
2) Clarity on how developing countries should be expected to act;
3) Financing - how we going to cover the economic cost of maintaining acceptable living standards in low carbon societies; and
4) Governance structure - how the international community will work together to take the deal forward.
Yesterday in the UK capital, Sir David King urged the developed nations to “show their cards” now so we they can begin to formulate mitigation and adaptation plans in the lead up to December. “The debate has moved on - it is no longer a question of whether man-made climate change is happening but what to do about it”.
The former professor of physical chemistry at Cambridge University then went on to warn of a worrying shift in the positions of the Japanese and Canadian governments. King accused these nations of waning interest in tackling climate change, and attributed this to the recent scrapping of the role of chief scientist in both nations.
But when asked about the viability of mitigating climate change through large-scale geoengineering projects, King played his own cards surprisingly close to his chest:
“I am yet to be convinced that any of the existing options would be worth investing in, but I would like to see more research in this area.”
However, when pressed for his course of action in the event of an unsatisfactory result in Copenhagen, King did reveal a couple of back-up plans:
Plan B look for legal avenues that could stall the protocol from being implenented
Plan C lobby for a strong bilateral agreement between China and the US that could have the international clout to bring about a revision of the agreement.
“Obviously, I am a bit reluctant to discuss these options because it will appear that I am losing faith in plan A - which is by far the most desirable option,” he said.
July 1, 2009
Are physicists a bunch of self-plagiarizers?
By Hamish Johnston
Not exactly, but they are near the top of the league table when it comes to publishing the same paper in two different journals — according to a preprint from sociologists Vincent Lariviere and Yves Gingras at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
The pair combed millions of papers published between 1980-2007 looking for articles with the exactly the same title, first author and number of references. They found nearly 5000 papers that had been published twice — or about 0.05%.
They then compared the abstracts of the duplicate pairs (when available) and found that more than 52% were identical — and the remaining 48% very similar.
So how did physicists make out?
Nearly 0.08% of papers were duplicates, putting physics in second place after “engineering and technology” with over 0.11%.
Lariviere and Gingras point out that the high number in engineering and technology could be related to the large numbers of conference proceedings published in this field. Interestingly, I had a chat about this with a few journals editors here at IOP Publishing and they told me that publishing a paper in a conference proceedings and then a journal seemed to be a common practice for engineers.
Does this duplication matter?
It does if hiring committees or funding bodies simply tote up a candidate’s publications. However, if it’s quality they are looking for, then duplicate papers appear to be rather poor — Lariviere and Gingras show that the average “impact factor” and number of citations of the duplicates is about 65% of the average value for a physics paper.
Are there legitimate reasons for publishing the same thing twice?
I suppose your could make a case if the research cuts across two different disciplines that rarely read each other’s journals.
But in an age when peer-reviewed publications are the currency of success, it does seem like counterfeiting.
June 30, 2009
Old news under embargo
What did Phoenix see?
By Hamish Johnston
In September 2008, planetary scientists told the world that the Phoenix Mars Lander had made several interesting discoveries on Mars — you can read all about it here on the NASA website.
This was duly reported by the BBC and other popular news outlets.
The scientists also wrote several scientific papers about their findings and submitted them to a prestigious journal — which now has the cheek to “embargo” the story until the papers are published!
That means that if I report on the papers before they are published I could lose my access to the journal’s embargoed preprints. Also, if a scientist had spoken to me about their paper while it was being peer-reviewed — and I had written about it — the paper could have been be dropped by the prestigious journal. Which is bad news for the researchers.
But I won’t be reporting on it because you already know what Phoenix saw on Mars!
So what is the point of the embargo? Is the journal simply going through the motions of its embargo policy — or is this a cynical ploy to get this story back into the news?
I’m not the only one wondering about the point of embargo policies — Julianne over at Cosmic Variance started a good discussion earlier this month — and of course our very own Jon Cartwright looked into the practice last year.
I suppose I’m particularly ticked-off about embargoes because last week I came across two papers on the arXiv preprint server that would have made for a fantastic news story. I spent an hour or so doing background research and then asked a freelance journalist to cover the papers. He invested more time…but guess what, both papers had been submitted to prestigious journals and the authors wouldn’t talk.
So instead of being rewarded with a scoop for my daily scouring of the arXiv, our story will be published at the same time as those who simply waited for the press release.
It’s soul destroying!
So, what do you think?
June 30, 2009
Cancer and scientific risk-taking
By Margaret Harris
How do you dramatize the obscure process of funding scientific research for a public audience? If you’re a general-interest publication like The New York Times, one answer is to use cancer as an example.
A thought-provoking article published at the weekend describes how the tendency to dole out grant monies to projects that are limited in scope — and therefore quite likely to succeed within their allotted few-year period — is hurting cancer research. “Playing It Safe in Cancer Research” cites as examples a study of whether people who really like food have trouble following diets (funded), and research that led to the development of herceptin, a ground-breaking treatment for certain types of breast cancer (rejected by mainstream agencies, funded by a special grant from a cosmetics firm).
It occurred to me while I was reading the article that these issues are far from unique to cancer research. Scientists in all disciplines have long complained about how the process of applying for and receiving grants seems to reward “incrementalist” research, and “You have to say what you’ll find before they’ll pay you to look for it” is a common refrain.
It seems I wasn’t alone in thinking the problem could be relevant to physics. Today’s letters section in the NY Times includes one from Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in which he suggests a “scientific venture capital” fund that would support high-risk, high-reward research using 10 percent of the existing US science budget. Another writer, neurologist Michael Rogawski, suggests funding researchers based on what they’ve already done, not what they’re proposing to do.
What do physicsworld.com readers think of these ideas? Any other suggestions for how we should be rewarding risk-taking research?
June 29, 2009
What is a quantum computer…
By Hamish Johnston
…and how do we build one?
That’s the title of a paper posted by Carlos Perez-Delgado and Pieter Kok on arXiv.
The two physicists — based at the University of Sheffield — have proposed an updated version of David Di Vincenzo’s checklist for what makes a system suitable for quantum computing.
According to Di Vincenzo it must:
1. Be a scalable physical system with well-defined qubits
2. Be initializable to a simple fiducial state such as |000…>
3. Have decoherence times much longer than gate operation times
4. Have a universal set of quantum gates
5. Permit high quantum efficiency, qubit-specific measurements
6. Have the ability to interconvert stationary and flying qubits
7. Have the ability to faithfully transmit flying qubits between specific locations
The first five were proposed in 1996 and then updated in 2000 to include the distinction between stationary and “flying” qubits — the latter referring to a photon or other such particle that can transfer quantum information.
In their paper, Perez-Delgado and Kok argue that the above criteria are not general enough to evaluate the various “paradigms” for quantum computing that have emerged since 2000.
They suggest the following criteria that must be met to create a “scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computer”.
1. Any quantum computer must have a quantum memory.
2. Any quantum computer must facilitate a controlled quantum evolution of the quantum memory.
3. Any quantum computer must include a method for cooling the quantum memory.
4. Any quantum computer must provide a readout mechanism for (non-empty) subsets of the quantum memory.
1, 2 and 4 seem reasonable — but what do they mean by “cooling”?
By cooling they mean the removal of entropy (or randomness) in the context of information theory.
Entropy will leak into a quantum memory as the memory interacts in unwanted and uncontrollable ways with its surroundings. Also, entropy is generated when a quantum memory is “erased” so that the next computation can begin.
Although this cooling could be split into “error correction” and “initialization” respectively, they argue that there is a certain “fuzziness” between the two processes. I believe this is because initialization can often be a multi-step process that must involve error correction.
I’m not a quantum-computing expert, but I’m guessing that criterion 3 will be the most difficult to satisfy…
June 27, 2009
Taking strings to the masses
Whether string theory can tell us anything about reality is a moot point. In the last two or three years this purported “theory of everything” - in principle unifying gravity with the three other forces in nature - has been given a kicking by certain scientists who see it as a kind of intellectual play thing that makes no testable predictions. See What Gina says.. for a taste of that debate.
Certainly the names of some of the talks at the world’s leading string-theory conference, Strings 2009, held in Rome this past week, were on the abstract side. “Holography and the S-Matrix”, “Superconducting black holes”, and “Stringy instantons and duality” give some flavour of the discussions held among the roughly 500 participants at the five-day conference. The fact that the meeting was held at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas only seemed to reinforce its other-worldliness.
But help was on hand for outsiders wanting to try and understand what on Earth this all means. Earlier today, particle physicist grandee Nicola Cabibbo introduced the curious of Rome to two of the big names of string theory - Edward Witten and Brian Greene. Witten, widely regarded as the leading figure in string theory, introduced himself with a few words of Italian and then told the audience what physicists hope to discover when they finally, hopefully, switch on the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Geneva this autumn.
In addition to the expected Higgs boson, the endower of all mass, Witten said that within the debris of particle collisions at the LHC might also be evidence of dark matter and of supersymmetry, which says that a whole slew of new fundamental particles must exist for there to be balance in the subatomic world. And one of the intriguing things about supersymmetry is that it could provide some kind of evidence for string theory.
It was at this point that Witten handed the baton to Greene. Greene is well known for his popularization of science, and with good reason. With some snazzy graphics and his flair for performing, he told us why it is so hard to come up with a theory of quantum gravity, explaining that the smooth variation of space-time as described by general relativity “runs headlong” into the turbulent, chaotic world of quantum mechanics. Postulating that the ultimate constituents of matter are tiny lengths of string, whose different modes of vibration correspond to different fundamental particles, is one way of resolving this problem, he went on, because such strings are like spread-out points that smooth the wild undulations at the smallest scale.
This model, however, has some very odd implications. Greene pointed out that string theory requires an extra 6 (or 7) dimensions of space in addition to the three that we are aware of. Helpfully, these dimensions are so small that we can’t see them, but unhelpfully there are rather a lot of ways of curling these extra dimensions up - some 10500 different ways as it turns out. And we would have to study all 10500 if we want to find out whether or not string theory describes the real world.
For Greene, all is not lost, however. He pointed out that 10500 is somewhat bigger than 10120, and that’s a measure of how much we don’t understand dark energy. In a nutshell he argued that if we happen to live in one of the few of the 10500 universes where conditions are just right for us to exist then there’s a damn good chance that we could have such an apparently statistically unlikely dark energy. For Greene, this suggests we might be on the right lines with string theory. Others may be less convinced.
June 26, 2009
‘No Laughing Antimatter’
By Hamish Johnston
When the film Angels and Demons was released last month, physicists around the world were inspired to give lectures about the “science” behind the film.
Now, someone has gathered a selection of videos and slides of these lectures in one place for your viewing pleasure.
My favourite title is The Science Behind ‘Angels and Demons’ is No Laughing Antimatter by Rolf Heuer, Boris Kayser and Leon Lederman.
Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
June 25, 2009
What Gina says about the String Wars
By Hamish Johnston
“Gina is very curious about science blogs”, writes Gil Kalai in his book Gina Says: Adventures in the Blogsphere String War .
“Can they be useful for learning about, or discussing science? What happens in these blogs and who participates in them?
Kalai, who is a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tried to answer these questions by entering the fray of the “String Wars” — a sometimes heated online debate about the scientific merits of string theory that kicked off in 2006.
His first post as the fictional “Gina” was on Not Even Wrong — the blog of Peter Woit, an outspoken critic of string theory who has written a book with the same title.
“Peter, is it possible to state the main points for the case against string theory — with 4-5 sentences on each? This will be very helpful. Please consider doing it…”
50 days and many postings later, Gina was “expelled” from the discussion for apparently contributing to the “noise” on Woit’s blog. Fair dues, you might think, because she wasn’t exactly up front about her intentions. However, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Gina as she tried to ingratiate herself back into the conversation.
Gina also conversed online with Lee Smolin — who, like Woit, had just published a book highly critical of string theory. She asked Smolin to address 16 specific objections to his book The Trouble With Physics and the ensuing discussion accounts for a large chunk of the book.
String theorists Clifford Johnson (Gina’s favourite blogger) and Jacques Distler also put in appearances via their respective blogs
So what did Kalai learn from his undercover adventure? He told me that he was disappointed by what he thought was the low scientific content of the debate — he believes that it quickly turned into a political argument. “90% of the issues discussed had nothing to do with string theory”, he said.
And what about the bloggers — are they upset to discover the real identity of Gina? Peter Woit seemed rather pleased, you can read his comments here.
June 23, 2009
Benford’s law and the Iranian election
By Michael Banks
What do street house numbers, death rates and election results have in common?
They all follow a law, devised by physicist Frank Benford in 1938, which states that in a list of numbers from real-life data there are more entries that start with the digit “1” than any other number.
According to Benford’s law, numbers that begin with “1” occur almost 30% of the time in a list of numbers that are distributed logarithmically, such as house numbers. The higher the number the less it occurs, to the point where numbers that begin with “9” occur less than 5% of the time.
This law also turns out to be useful for checking fraudulent behaviour, for example, finding out if people have made up number on their tax return forms.
Now, however, cosmologist Boudewijn Roukema, from the Nicolas Copernicus University in Poland, has used this law to test the results from the recent Iranian election.
On 12 June it was announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current Iranian president, had won the election beating main rival Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Protests then broke out in Iran disputing the results.
Then on 14 June the Iranian Ministry of the Interior released the results of the 2009 Iranian election for 366 voting areas giving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over 24 million votes and Mir-Hossein Mousavi around 13 million votes.
Roukema noticed a strange anomaly in the votes for Mehdi Karroubi from the National Trust Party, who came in third place. He found that the number seven occurs as a first digit more often than would be expected by Benford’s law.
He found that this anomaly occurs in three of the six largest voting areas and, moreover, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a greater proportion of votes in these three areas than the others.
Roukema concludes that this could suggest an error in the official count of around one million votes.
However, he says that applying Benford’s law may not be able to find every “anomaly” in the election results - meaning the difference could be more significant.
“The fact that use of the first digit detected a significant anomaly in this particular case only indicates that this anomaly somehow failed to be hidden,” says Roukema. “It certainly doesn’t guarantee it’s the only anomaly.”
Meanwhile, Elham Kashefi and Vincent Danos from Edinburgh University have started collecting signatures for an appeal to call for fresh elections and to oppose violence against protesters.
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