Blogger: Jennifer Ouellette
URL: twistedphysics.typepad.com
First post: February 2006

Who is the blog written by?

Jennifer Ouellette studied English at university and says she “stumbled into writing about physics”, eventually becoming a full-time science writer for popular-science and trade magazines. She has written two books: Black Holes and Quantum Cats and The Physics of the Buffyverse, the latter of which attempts to use the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer to illustrate concepts in physics.

What topics does the blog cover?

Ouellette says the title of the blog comes from a description of her first book, which was a series of short essays mixing concepts in physics with art, literature, history and pop culture. In a more literal sense, the blog contains several recipes for physics-themed cocktails, from the “Laser Beam” to the “Black Hole” (which is so-called because “after one of these, you have already passed the event horizon of inebriation”).

Who is it aimed at?

As an outsider coming into physics herself, Ouellette writes accessibly for non-specialists. But her blog is obviously read by physicists too – she met her fiancé Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, after they read each other’s blogs. Naturally, the engagement was announced via both Cocktail Party Physics and Carroll’s blog Cosmic Variance.

Why should I read it?

As you would expect of a professional writer, Ouellette’s entries are polished and humorous. Her enthusiasm for science and scientists is obvious; and as she is not confined to one research area, she is free to hop around fields, frequently visiting conferences in search of good stories.

How often is it updated?

Entries are less frequent than on other physics blogs – only one or two per week – but they are also much longer, reading more like fully fledged magazine columns than the usual rattled-off blog posting.

Can you give me a sample quote?

“I must confess to finding it easier to write about applications of physics rather than the basic science. But when I started covering the quantumdots area, I learned some useful things about the ‘electrons and holes’ effect that is critical not just to quantum dots, but also lasers and other semiconductor physics. This is not an easy thing for a layperson to visualize, although physicists toss those terms around like high-school slang.”

Expertise, argue Cardiff University sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans, is “the pressing intellectual problem of the age”.

Can this really be true? Surely everyone knows what an expert is: an authority to whom a layperson can comfortably defer for advice. Scientists, who are usually regarded as experts par excellence, could be forgiven for not seeing expertise as a problem, for they are routinely involved in dispensing and using expertise. It seems odd to claim that expertise might be more of an intellectual problem than, say, creating a unified theory of gravity, decoding the genome or understanding the early universe.

But expertise – what it is and what role it plays – is surprisingly difficult to describe when looked at carefully. The difficulties appear both inside science and out, but they are revealed most dramatically in the use of scientific expertise in law and politics. At a trial, each side digs up its own expert witnesses, all of whom say that they represent the scientific community and that the experts on the other side are untrustworthy hired guns – intellectual mercenaries if you like – with the jury left to guess which side to believe. In politics, controversies such as the existence of global warming and the safety of nuclear power generate conflicts over who selects experts, whose advice is tainted by ideology, and what the scope and limits of testimony should be.

Recently the subject of expertise has attracted much scholarly attention. A book entitled Rethinking Expertise, by Collins and Evans, is due out this autumn (University of Chicago Press), while their perspectives, along with others, are included in an anthology entitled The Philosophy of Expertise, a book co-edited by Evan Selinger and me (Columbia University Press). And Collins, who has edited a forthcoming issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science on the subject, is hosting a workshop in Cardiff this month to discuss the role of expertise in everything from interdisciplinary physics projects to the implementation of technical advice about how to prevent dolphins from being snared in fishing nets.

A periodic table of expertise

Collins grew interested in expertise during his 30-year sociological study of the hunt for gravitational waves (Physics World December 2004 pp10–11, print edition only). One day while he was having lunch with some gravitational-wave physicists, Collins noticed that, although he had never studied physics beyond A-level, he was engaged in a seamless conversation with them. “They are never going to give me a job,” he told me recently, “but from the conversation it would have been hard to spot who was the physicist and who the outsider.”

The experience motivated him to draw a distinction between contributory expertise, possessed by active practitioners of a field, and interactional expertise, whereby someone can speak knowledgeably about a subject without being able to contribute new ideas to it. “It’s more than talking the talk but less than walking the walk,” he told me. “It’s like ‘walking the talk’.”

Collins first noticed interactional expertise in his own field, where sociologists often acquire it when they study how people in other fields behave. But he found that interactional expertise is also widespread inside science. It is essential, for instance, in projects where people have to interact across disciplinary borders, and where managers and peer-reviewers must make decisions in areas in which they are not trained. “There would be no science without interactional expertise,” Collins says. “It is impossible for every expert to possess every technical skill they need to work in a big collaboration.”

The concept proved so valuable that Collins and Evans set out to develop a systematic theory of forms of expertise, and compiled what they ambitiously named a “periodic table of expertises” – an attempt “to classify all the kinds of expertise that might be brought to bear on a technological problem”. It includes about a dozen types of expertise that range from categories such as language speaking that everyone must have to live in a society, to more specific, higher-level and domain-restricted categories such as contributory and interactional expertise.

But the pair’s most ambitious and controversial aim is ultimately to help facilitate the resolution of public controversies with a scientific dimension. When politicians try to resolve such controversies, two simple and tempting choices present themselves: let the public decide; or take the matter out of the public’s hands and assign it to specialists. “The first choice risks technological paralysis” Collins and Evans write in their article in the expertise anthology, while “the second invites popular opposition”. They hope that their analysis of expertise can help define better the kinds of people who should be allowed to participate in decision making about the technical aspects of controversies.

The critical point

Would an improved understanding of expertise be sufficient to resolve debates about global warming and nuclear power? No, for technical aspects are generally not what drives such controversies: perception and prejudice; self-interest; and utopian visions are vitally important in framing them.

Collins and Evans know this. They mean only to lay the groundwork for better institutional tools to handle controversies. At first glance their position appears drearily commonsensical: experts are likely to make better technical judgments than the rest of us; and governments should defer technical issues to experts even though experts are sometimes wrong. Still, some sociologists have severely criticized Collins and Evans for this view, which they see as undemocratic, elitist and a throwback to the days when the word of experts was unquestioned.

But the importance of starting on the right foot for solving the controversies that surround issues like global warming and nuclear power is what leads Collins and Evans to claim that expertise is “the pressing intellectual problem of the age”.

• The Studies of Expertise and Experience workshop is on 16–18 August in Cardiff, UK: www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise

Did you know that when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online at CERN next spring, it could end up creating mini black holes that destroy the Earth? This is not something from a Dan Brown novel, but from a TV documentary broadcast as part of the BBC’s Horizon series in the UK on 1 May – a programme that has been running for 40 years and is supposedly the flagship of TV science in the country. Although the documentary itself was fairly measured, the producers began the programme with the black-hole claim and used it in their publicity for the show.

Physicists who recall superb Horizon documentaries of the past – for example, on the discovery of the W and Z bosons – will have been disappointed that such a marvellous project as the LHC should have been sensationalized in this way. It was disheartening that the programme makers felt the need to rehash these unnecessary concerns over black holes being produced in particle accelerators, which physicists had already dismissed before the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) came online at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000 (Physics World July 2000 pp19–20, print edition only).

Meanwhile, another Horizon documentary, broadcast on 10 April, claimed that one reason for sending humans to the Moon is so that we can mine it for helium-3 as a fuel for fusion power back on Earth. The need to bring helium-3 back from the Moon has even been briefly referred to in Physics World (May 2007 pp12–13, print edition only) and, more worryingly, has been presented to US congressional committees, including the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Representatives in 2004.

As a particle physicist, I am of course interested in the LHC; and as the chair of a working group set up by the British National Space Centre to look into the future of UK space science – including the possibility of humans returning to the Moon – I am also intrigued by the helium-3 story. Both of the claims bother me and, on investigation, each is revealed as an example of what I call “factoid science” – myths of dubious provenance that propagate, become received wisdom and could even influence policy. So what is the reality and what can physicists do to correct such mis-information?

Strangelet statistics

The story of the LHC as an Armageddon machine would be laughable were it not so serious. Aficionados of Dan Brown – whose novel Angels and Demons was set partly at CERN – might believe that the Geneva lab produces antimatter capable of making weapons of mass destruction. But I did not expect to find similarly outlandish statements used to promote Horizon. As the programme’s website puts it: “Some scientists argue that during a 10-year spell of operation there is a 1 in 50 million chance that experiments like the LHC could cause a catastrophe of epic proportions.” The site then invites the public to take part in a poll on whether the LHC should be turned on or not, based on this “probability”.

While the LHC will create the most energetic collisions ever seen on Earth, cosmic rays at these and even higher energies have been bombarding our and other planets for billions of years without mishap. When I asked the producers of Horizon where they had obtained the 1-in-50-million statistic, I was told it had been taken from a “reliable source”: Our Final Century by Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees. But when I read his book, it became clear that the programme’s research had sadly been incomplete. On page 124, Rees discusses a paper published in 1999 by CERN theorists Arnon Dar, Alvaro de Rújula and Ulrich Heinz that uses the fact that the Earth and the cosmos have survived for several billion years to estimate the probability of colliders producing hypothetical particles called “strangelets” that might destroy our planet (1999 Phys. Lett. B 470 142).

Rees fairly describes their conclusions as follows: “If the experiment were run for 10 years, the risk of catastrophe was no more than 1 in 50 million.” In other words, the chance of disaster is one in at least 50 million (as no disaster has occurred); this is rather different from saying, as Horizon does, that there is a “1 in 50 million” probability of a catastrophe happening from the moment the LHC switches on.

Moreover, when Dar and colleagues wrote their 1999 paper, a committee of eminent physicists appointed by the Brookhaven lab was also investigating if RHIC could produce strangelets (arXiv:hep-ph/ 9910333v3). That study used not just information from cosmology but also data from collisions between heavy ions (albeit at lower energies than RHIC would obtain) to show that the chances of catastrophe are at least one part in 10¹⁹.

Furthermore, these figures refer specifically to strangelets being produced at RHIC, as Rees makes clear, and have nothing to do with the question of whether we should risk creating black holes. Indeed, why does Horizon talk about black holes at all? The only reason can be that a theory does exist that posits that mini black holes could be produced in a collider. But if one mentions this theory, then one must include the whole of it, which clearly states that mini black holes pose no hazard whatsoever because they do not grow but evaporate and die.

As if any more evidence was needed that colliders are safe, CERN also set up an “LHC safety-study group” to see if its new collider could create black holes or strangelets. It concluded – in an official CERN report published in 2003 (CERN-2003-001) – that there is “no basis for any conceivable threat” of either eventuality, which is as near as science can get to saying zero. Unfortunately, the Horizon programme made no mention of these serious and time-consuming enquiries even though CERN’s press office gave the programme’s researchers a copy of the lab’s 2003 report. Instead, the public has been led to believe that scientists are prepared to embark on experiments that could spell the end of the planet.

Helium errors

Let me now turn to the helium-3 factoid. At most fusion experiments, such as the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK, a fuel of deuterium and tritium nuclei is converted in a tokomak into helium-4 and a neutron, thereby releasing energy in the process. No helium-3 is involved, so where does the myth come from? Enter “helium-3 fusion” into Google and you will find numerous websites pointing out that the neutron produced in deuterium–tritium fusion makes the walls of the tokomak radioactive, but that fusion could be “clean” if only we reacted deuterium with helium-3 to produce helium-4 and a proton.

Given that the amount of helium-3 available on Earth is trifling, it has been proposed that we should go to the Moon to mine the isotope, which is produced in the Sun and might be blown onto the lunar surface via the solar wind. Apart from not even knowing for certain if there is any helium-3 on the Moon, there are two main problems with this idea – one obvious and one intriguingly subtle. The first problem is that, in a tokomak, deuterium reacts up to 100 times more slowly with helium-3 than it does with tritium. This is because fusion has to overcome the electrical repulsion between the protons in the fuel, which is much higher for deuterium– helium-3 reactions (the nuclei have one and two protons, respectively) than it is for deuterium– tritium reactions (one proton each).

Clearly, deuterium–helium-3 is a poor fusion process, but the irony is much greater as I shall now reveal. A tokomak is not like a particle accelerator where counter-rotating beams of deuterium and helium-3 collide and fuse. Instead, all of the nuclei in the fuel mingle together, which means that two deuterium nuclei can rapidly fuse to give a tritium nucleus and proton. The tritium can now fuse with the deuterium – again much faster than the deuterium can with helium-3 – to yield helium-4 and a neutron.

So by bringing helium-3 from the Moon, all we will end up doing is create a deuterium– tritium fusion machine, which is the very thing the helium aficionados wanted to avoid! Undeterred, some of these people even suggest that two helium-3 nuclei could be made to fuse with each other to produce deuterium, an alpha particle and energy. Unfortunately, this reaction occurs even more slowly than deuterium–tritium fusion and the fuel would have to be heated to impractically high temperatures that would be beyond the reach of a tokomak. And as not even the upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be able to generate electricity from the latter reaction, the lunar-helium-3 story – like the LHC as an Armageddon machine – is, to my mind, moonshine.

Rising pressure

Does any of this matter beyond raising the blood pressure of some physicists? All publicity is good publicity, some might say. But I believe we should all be concerned. The LHC factoid has now been repeated in the New Yorker and in various reviews of the Horizon documentary. Even some nonphysics colleagues are asking me to explain what it is all about. If Horizon claims to be the flagship TV science series on which the public rely to form their opinions, I would hope that their researchers do their research, and that the editors then take due account of it.

The factoids about mining the Moon for fusion fuel and of the LHC Armageddon make a cautionary tale. A decade from now it is possible that committees of well-informed scientists and rather less-well-informed politicians, with public opinion weighing on their minds, will be deciding on our involvement in mega-projects such as the next huge accelerator, human space exploration, or even a post-ITER commercial fusion plant.

Decision making driven by public opinion that is influenced by factoids already has a dire history in the bio-medical arena: the controversy over whether to give children a combined immunization against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) being the most recent example. My advice is that if you see an error in the media, speak out, write to the editors and try to get corrections made. It is an opportunity to get good science in the news.

Most physicists, particularly those in western nations, probably do not give religion a great deal of thought. A minority of physicists do, however, have firmly held religious beliefs and think long and hard about reconciling those beliefs with their scientific knowledge, as our report on a recent meeting on “God and physics” in Cambridge makes clear (p10, print edition only). There is much to admire in their deep thinking, which has been recognized by physicists being awarded the Templeton prize for progress in religion six times in the last eight years.

But in Muslim nations, religion plays a far bigger role in everyday life than it does in the West. Indeed, today Islam is actually holding back scientific progress by placing too great an emphasis on studying and interpreting the pages of the Koran, as the leading Iranian physicist Reza Mansouri points out (see “A way forward for Islamic science”). Those students in his country who do study science at university tend to learn a very narrow curriculum by rote, rather than being encouraged to think for themselves. Low investment in science – even in oil-rich Gulf states – and restrictions on freedom of expression compound the problem.

It was not always thus. Muslim scholars made huge contributions in areas like astronomy, optics and mathematics between the 8th and the 13th centuries, with Islam encouraging rigorous intellectual enquiry. Why science in the Islamic world fell from grace is a topic of considerable debate among historians, with the advances made in Renaissance Europe certainly playing a part in halting progress.

But whatever the reasons, the key for Muslim nations now is to rebuild their scientific strengths through increased public funding – no mean feat when their governments fail to see the merits of such investment – and by encouraging links between scientists in those countries and in the West. Placing a greater focus on a few, world-class labs rather than spreading money thinly around will help too. These solutions are essentially no different to what is needed in other parts of the developing world. But given the great untapped potential in the 1.3 billion or so people who live in the Islamic world, that rebuilding – long though it may take – is a worthwhile task.