Science and Society

What’s wrong with this list?

• Paleontological Society
• Parapsychological Association
• Pattern Recognition Society
• Phi Beta Kappa Society
• Phi Sigma Biological Sciences Honor Society
• Phycological Society of America

Seems at first glance like a list of scientific professional organizations, or at least the subset of such a list beginning with the letter “P.” And indeed it is — it’s an excerpt from the list of Affiliates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But take a look at that second entry — the Parapsychological Association? Is that what it sounds like? Indeed it is — “the international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of ‘psi’’ (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition (“parapsychology”).”

The only problem is, parapsychology is not science. It’s pseudoscience. From a completely blank-slate perspective, one can certainly pose scientific questions about whether the human mind can tell the future or read minds or move objects around without touching them. The thing is, we know the answer: no. The possibilities have been investigated and found wanting; more straightforwardly, they would violate the known laws of physics. Alchemy was science once, but it’s not any more. Not all hypotheses are equally worthy of our respect and attention; sometimes we learn that a particular idea doesn’t work, and move on with our lives.

So what in the world is the Parapsychological Association doing as part of the AAAS? Benefiting from the implication of respectability, is the obvious answer. Note that “Affiliate of the AAAS” is displayed prominently on the PA homepage — an endorsement that, say, the Paleontological Society or the Phycological Society of America (not misspelled, I swear) didn’t deem worth of such prominent display.

Apparently the PA was founded by J.B. Rhine in 1957, and became affiliated with the AAAS in 1969 thanks to the advocacy of then-AAAS-president Margaret Mead. In 1979 John Wheeler campaigned to have it kicked out, but his effort failed.

The AAAS is a useful organization, and it’s a shame to see them associate their good name with pseudoscience. Their annual meeting begins to day in Boston, and it’s always a fun event, a great way to catch up with some of the major themes in all areas of science. None of those themes should involve reading people’s thoughts or bending spoons with one’s mind. I hope the AAAS can gently extract itself from this relationship.

Old Media, in the form of the New York Times, catches on to the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon that Mark and I have blogged about before. Under a variety of different monikers, the idea of gathering people in a bar to learn about science and have an engaging conversation is apparently catching on all over.

The spirit of “Mr. Wizard’s World” has now reached an audience that can legally drink. The same late-night revelers who spent their high school and college years plodding through mandatory science classes are now gathering voluntarily to listen to presentations on principles of string theory or how orbitofrontal cortexes work — as long as it takes place far from the fluorescent lights of classroom.

Science groups for young professionals who don’t wear white coats, like the year-old Secret Science Club at Union Hall, are cropping up in bars and bookstores all over the country, from Massachusetts to Montana.

“If you have a certain type of job, after a while that part of your brain starts to deteriorate,” said Amy Lee, 25, who works at an Internet startup and was attending her second Secret Science Club meeting. “You want to use it again. Plus, there’s alcohol.”

About 50 groups, with names like Science on Tap and Ask a Scientist, have formed in the last four years. There are three in New York City alone. Each month, they invite scientists, usually professors at nearby universities, to lecture on topics as varied as mass extinctions and frog mating calls. Anywhere from 50 to 100 people, none of whom wear pocket protectors, show up for an evening of imbibing hard science along with hard liquor.

The article exhibits a sense of bemusement that people could find all this sciencey talk interesting, and chooses to play up the less lofty angles.

Some science club attendees come more for the social benefits than for academic pursuits.

“I figure it’s a great way to meet like-minded singles,” said Lisa Dorenfest, 45, a project manager at an investment bank who was at Café Scientifique at Rialto, a restaurant and bar in downtown Manhattan. “If I do meet someone, lucky me. If not, I’m still entertained.” At the meeting, she offered to share her handout with a nice-looking actuary.

That’s okay; the great thing about science is that we can be lofty and earthy at the same time. The important thing is a shared passion for learning about the world.

“There’s a reason kids are into this stuff,” Ms. Mittelbach said. “A guy told me that when one of the speakers started talking about life on Mars, he started crying. They can shake us to our core. I like being a little scared. I like hearing that we may be hit by an asteroid.”

I should say, “Everything bad about the Shuttle was entirely predictable, even by people who later turned out to be not very smart.” Which I know, because it was, by Gregg Easterbrook of all people. Easterbrook is well-known to science bloggers as the ESPN football columnist with a special knack for inserting his opinions about science into his columns, and getting it wildly wrong every single time. It’s an intimidating resume of wrongness, on a wide swath of topics: global warming, anti-hydrogen, extra dimensions, evolution, cosmology, atheism, and consciousness. But at least he tends to recycle the same claptrap in multiple venues, thus saving us from different varieties of his craziness.

Which leaves me honestly astonished at stumbling across this 1980 Washington Monthly story on the space shuttle program. The shuttle program had been running at NASA since the early Seventies, when the agency was looking to take the next step after the Apollo missions. They explored an ambitious list of possibilities, before budgets and technology forced them to narrow it down to a partly-renewable shuttle vehicle and (to give it something to do) a modular space station. The burden imposed by these bad decisions is crippling NASA’s science program to this day. The first shuttle launch wasn’t until 1981, and in 1980 almost everyone was in cheerleader mode — this was going to be a momentous step in humanity’s move into space, a cheap and reliable way to bring low-Earth orbit to the masses.

It didn’t quite work out that way, but very few people bothered to poke around in what was going on to read the tea leaves effectively. But this 1980 article did — and it was written by none other than Gregg Easterbrook! Or somebody with his name, anyway. It’s an extraordinary piece, extremely well-researched and detailed, and it lays out with unblinking specificity everything that will proceed to go wrong with the shuttle program in the years to come. The shuttle can’t reach past low-Earth orbit, so conventional rockets will still need to be used. It’s vastly more expensive and complicated than would be necessary to make frequent flights feasible. It was bloated in size in response to Defense Department demands. It will be subject to continual delays. It didn’t have anything specifically to do that couldn’t be done better by other means. It was rickety and fragile and would undoubtedly blow up or crash. Easterbrook examines individual problematic issues in detail, from the infamous refractory tiles to the engineering challenges of building engines that have to operate in unprecedented extremes of heat and cold, pressure and vacuum — and then be used again.

In retrospect, parts of the article are tragically prescient:

Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia’s difficulties. “I don’t think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems,” Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as “safe life.” That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can’t be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)

And this was in 1980! By Gregg Easterbrook! Did something happen to him in the interim?

I get all my best technology news from football blogs.

There’s a scene in Six Degrees of Separation, where the Donald Sutherland character tells some friends at a party:

I remembered asking my kids’ second-grade teacher:

“Why are all your students geniuses?”

Look at the first grade – blotches of green and black. The third grade – camouflage.

But your grade, the second grade…

Matisses, every one.

Like art, science relies on a combination of understanding and curiosity. As we gain wisdom and experience over time, we should be better able to understand what is going on; but with time can also come cynicism and boredom, especially if one’s exposure to the subject fails to convey the underlying mystery behind the essential grunt work. So there can be a point of diminishing returns.

In art, if John Guare’s judgment is to be trusted, that point often comes between second grade and third grade. What about science, you are no doubt wondering? Eli Lansey has done the research, and has the answer to your question: between fifth and sixth grade. The same set of cool physics demos, presented to each class, was met with dramatically different responses; excitement and independent investigation from the fifth graders, blase indifference from the sixth graders.

Like any good scientist, Eli also has a theory about why this is the case. What is more, he has data to back it up! I won’t give away the theory, but it was inspired by classroom poster presentations that looked like this:

Pretty good penmanship. Nothing to do with science. In fact, a pretty good approximation of horrid, soul-sucking antiscience. No wonder kids get turned off.

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber notes with approval that more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus. (Of which, nearly three-quarters understood that it took a year for this process to unfold.) So, you take what you can get.

I hope our blog didn’t confuse them.