Pop Culture Cred
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Science and the Media
Just a Frog on the Dissection Table
We’ve been studied. Bora points to a new paper by Inna Kouper in the Journal of Science Communication. The title is “Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities,” which pretty much explains what it’s about. The author picks out a collection of eleven blogs — Pure Pedantry, Synthesis, MicrobiologyBytes, Bioethics, Wired Science, DrugMonkey, Scientific Activist, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, and our own humble offering — and analyzes posts and comments to judge how effective these sites are at promoting science communication.
The list of blogs chosen is — okay, I guess. I have no idea how it was constructed, and the paper doesn’t seem to provide much guidance. Bora has a critique of the methodology that wonders about that, and about exactly how objective the study is. It’s very hard to assign numbers to things like “ratio of informative posts vs. rants,” or “degree to which the cause of collegial communication was harmed by use of intemperate language.” The paper reads like someone read a bunch of blogs and typed up their personal impressions.
For the most part I don’t disagree too strongly with the impressions, with the obvious caveat that it’s almost completely useless to study “science blogs” as a group. People don’t read randomly chosen collections of blogs; they read very intentionally chosen subsets that appeal to their own interests, and different reading lists will lead to wildly divergent impressions about what blogs are really like.
More significantly, though, I can’t really agree with the moral that the author draws from these experiences. Here is the telling quote from the paper:
The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation.
It’s hard to disagree with that, but I think it’s a good thing, and the author clearly does not. Blogs differ in many ways, and happily avoid the encroachment of stabilizing genre conventions. That’s one of the biggest benefits of opening up communication channels to a tremendous variety of content providers, rather than restricting things to just a few mainstream outlets; writers can have their voices, and readers can choose who to read, and everyone is happy.
It’s clear that a lot of people want blogs to be just like some pre-existing communication medium, just with comments and occasional expertise. And there are blogs like that, if that’s what you’re into. And there are blogs that aren’t, likewise. I hope it stays that way.
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Delayed But Not Denied
First a programming notice: turns out I will not be on the Colbert Report tonight. Never fear — I was just bumped back to next week, Wednesday March 10 (11:30 p.m., 10:30 Central). Business as usual in TV land, no big deal. I was hoping that I was nudged in favor of a newly medaled Olympic hero, or at least minor royalty, but it looks like tonight’s guest will be Garry Wills. He’s one of my favorite writers, but still. Obviously some Catholic favoritism going on here.
Small scheduling glitches aside, the Colbert Report and the Daily Show remain two of the best places to hear interviews with interesting academics on TV, especially with scientists. In USA Today, Dan Vergano writes about this curious state of affairs. Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point, that Johnny Carson’s version of the Tonight Show used to feature interviews with heavyweights such as Carl Sagan and Margaret Mead. These days, not many non-satirical network news shows bring on scientists (or anthropologists, or for that matter philosophers or English professors) as a regular event.
When Conan O’Brian took over the Tonight Show, the Science and Entertainment Exchange received a request from the producers to suggest some entertaining (and hopefully enlightening) scientists they could consider bringing on as guests. I don’t know if they ever followed up on that idea, and now I guess we’ll never know. Hopefully the success of Stewart and Colbert will convince the networks that Americans don’t necessarily turn the channel when faced with people who think carefully about the universe.
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Colbert Nation
Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.
So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.
The precedents are pretty formidable — below the fold I’ve put some of Colbert’s recent interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types. Two things seem immediately obvious: (1) for scientists, these folks are very good at doing entertaining interviews, and (2) Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer, managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge. I think this is going to take some preparation.
Anyone want to venture some guesses as to what questions he might ask? Every little bit of anticipation helps.
(Note on above link to the Onion: “Punkin Chunkin,” “Manhunter,” and “Heavy Metal Taskforce” are all real Science Channel shows. “Extreme Gravity” is, as far as I can tell, not.)
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Galaxies So Near, Yet So Far
You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.
But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.
Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. MageeAbstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]
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Defending Science Isn’t Always Pretty
This month’s issue of WIRED features a great story by Amy Wallace: “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.” It’s an overview of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States, a topic that should be very familiar to anyone who reads Discover‘s baddest astronomer. At ScienceBlogs, Orac and Abel Pharmboy gives big thumbs-up to the article.
The anti-vaccination movement is a little weird — they claim that vaccines, which are universally credited with wiping out smallpox and polio and other bad things, are responsible for causing autism and diabetes and other also-bad things, all just to make a buck for pharmaceutical companies. The underlying motivation seems to be a combination of the conviction that things must happen for a reason — if a child develops autism, there must be an enemy to blame — and a general distrust of science and technology. Certainly the pro-science point of view is fairly unequivocal; like any medicine, vaccines should be used properly, but they have done great good for the world and there are very real dangers of increased risk for epidemics if enough children stop receiving them. Good for WIRED for taking on the issue and publishing an uncompromisingly pro-science piece on it.
But the anti-vax movement is more than just committed; they’re pretty darn virulent. And since the article came out, author Amy Wallace has been subject to all sorts of attacks. She’s been documenting them on her Twitter feed, which I encourage you to check out. Some lowlights:
- I’ve been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a “fking lib.” I’ve been called the author of “heinous tripe.”
- J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay titled “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.” In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug.
- Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can’t paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word. And a reference to dead fish.
- In his book, Autism’s False Prophets, Dr. Offit writes about scientists who have been intimidated into staying silent about autism/vaccines. If scientists – who are armed with facts and trained to interpret them – are afraid, can it be any surprise that a lot of parents are, too?
It’s pretty horrifying stuff. But there is good news: Wallace also reports that the large majority of emails she has received were actually in favor of the piece, and expressed gratitude that she had written it. There are strong forces arrayed against science, but the truth is on our side, and a lot of people recognize it. It gives one a bit of hope.
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The Big Blog Theory
Recent years have seen a notable increase in the number of successful TV shows with some sort of scientific component — Numbers, CSI, House, Bones, Lie to Me, Fringe, and so on. But there’s no doubt which network show has the most accurate science on TV; that would be the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory.
And it’s not because the writers are all physics Ph.D.’s who have traded in equations and laboratories for a glamorous life in Hollywood. It’s because the Big Bang Theory is one of the very few shows to have a full-time science advisor: David Saltzberg, a particle physicist at UCLA. David confers with the writers, reads every script, provides complicated-looking equations for the white boards in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, and suggests the occasional physics joke.
And now David, encouraged by some of his well-meaning friends, is going to be explaining the science behind the show in his new blog:
The show is a comedy, but the science here is completely serious — read about dark matter, quantum mechanics, monopoles, and all sorts of good stuff. I’m sure much of this was explained carefully in the original scripts, but landed on the cutting-room floor in interests of time.
The Big Bang Theory, of course, raises strong feelings among scientists. Right here at Discover, you can read both pro and anti feelings about the show. The complaints are mostly about the cheerful reliance on various stereotypes that we would just as soon see stamped out. All four of the main scientist characters are socially maladjusted guys; the one main non-scientist is a blonde woman with severe science-phobia.
I think the critique of sexism is mostly fair. In the real world, plenty of brilliant socially-maladjusted scientists are female! (To be fair, Penny represents the everyperson character to which the audience is supposed to relate; in almost every activity not related to science or technology, she is much more competent than the boys.) The critique that all these nerdy scientist characters somehow damage the image of science I find much less compelling — even though, in the real world, plenty of brilliant scientists aren’t socially maladjusted at all. It is, after all, a sitcom, not a public-service announcement; sitcoms get a lot of their mileage out of stereotypes. And as socially awkward as the scientist characters are, they are also portrayed as lovable and warm people at heart. Shows like this humanize science, and who knows what ten-year-old kid will see an episode and start thinking that physics is a career to which real people can actually aspire.
Now if we could just get across the idea that even young girls can aspire to these careers, we’d be getting someplace.
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Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC!
A recent essay in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye has managed to attract quite a bit of attention around the internets — most of it not very positive. It concerns a recent paper by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya (and some earlier work) discussing a seemingly crazy-sounding proposal — that we should randomly choose a card from a million-card deck and, on the basis of which card we get, decide whether to go forward with the Large Hadron Collider. Responses have ranged from eye-rolling and heavy sighs to cries of outrage, clutching at pearls, and grim warnings that the postmodernists have finally infiltrated the scientific/journalistic establishment, this could be the straw that breaks the back of the Enlightenment camel, and worse.
Since I am quoted (in a rather non-committal way) in the essay, it’s my responsibility to dig into the papers and report back. And my message is: relax! Western civilization will survive. The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing. And an occasional fun essay about speculative science in the Times is not going to send us back to the Dark Ages, or even rank among the top ten thousand dangers along those lines.
The standard Newtonian way of thinking about the laws of physics is in terms of an initial-value problem. You specify the state of the system (positions and velocities) at one moment, then the laws of physics tell you how it will evolve into the future. But there is a completely equivalent alternative, which casts the laws of physics in terms of an action principle. In this formulation, we assign a number — the action — to every possible history of the system throughout time. (The choice of what action to assign is simply the choice of what laws of physics are operative.) Then the allowed histories, the ones that “obey the laws of physics,” are those for which the action is the smallest. That’s the “principle of least action,” and it’s a standard undergraduate exercise to show that it’s utterly equivalent to the initial-value formulation of dynamics.
In quantum mechanics, as you may have heard, things change a tiny bit. Instead of only allowing histories that minimize the action, quantum mechanics (as reformulated by Feynman) tells us to add up the contributions from every possible history, but give larger weight to those with smaller actions. In effect, we blur out the allowed trajectories around the one with absolutely smallest action.
Nielsen and Ninomiya (NN) pull an absolutely speculative idea out of their hats: they ask us to consider what would happen if the action were a complex number, rather than just a real number. Then there would be an imaginary part of the action, in addition to the real part. (This is the square-root-of-minus-one sense of “imaginary,” not the LSD-hallucination sense of “imaginary.”) No real justification — or if there is, it’s sufficiently lost in the mists that I can’t discern it from the recent papers. That’s okay; it’s just the traditional hypothesis-testing that has served science well for a few centuries now. Propose an idea, see where it leads, toss it out if it conflicts with the data, build on it if it seems promising. We don’t know all the laws of physics, so there’s no reason to stand pat.
NN argue that the effect of the imaginary action is to highly suppress the probabilities associated with certain trajectories, even if those trajectories minimize the real action. But it does so in a way that appears nonlocal in spacetime — it’s really the entire trajectory through time that seems to matter, not just what is happening in our local neighborhood. That’s a crucial difference between their version of quantum mechanics and the conventional formulation. But it’s not completely bizarre or unprecedented. Plenty of hints we have about quantum gravity indicate that it really is nonlocal. More prosaically, in everyday statistical mechanics we don’t assign equal weight to every possible trajectory consistent with our current knowledge of the universe; by hypothesis, we only allow those trajectories that have a low entropy in the past. (As readers of this blog should well know by now; and if you don’t, I have a book you should definitely read.)
To make progress with this idea, you have to make a choice for what the imaginary part of the action is supposed to be. Here, in the eyes of this not-quite-expert, NN seem to cheat a little bit. They basically want the imaginary action to look very similar to the real action, but it turns out that this choice is naively ruled out. So they jump through some hoops until they get a more palatable choice of model, with the property that it is basically impotent except where the Higgs boson is concerned. (The Higgs, as a fundamental scalar, interacts differently than other particles, so this isn’t completely ad hoc — just a little bit.) Because they are not actually crackpots, they even admit what they’re doing — in their own words, “Our model with an imaginary part of the action begins with a series of not completely convincing, but still suggestive, assumptions.”
Having invoked the tooth fairy twice — contemplating an imaginary part of the action, then choosing its form so as to only be relevant where the Higgs is concerned — they consider consequences. Remember that the effect of the imaginary action is non-local in time — it depends on what happens throughout the history of the universe, not just here and now. In particular, given their assumptions, it provides a large suppression to any history in which large numbers of Higgs bosons are produced, even if they won’t be produced until some time in the future.
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Attack of the Boltzmann Brains!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a provocative scientific idea will, before too long, end up in the hands of villains that must be fought by superheroes. Witness Boltzmann brains. Sure, they’ve already made a cameo in Dilbert, but the stakes were pretty low. Now Jim Kakalios (author of the excellent The Physics of Superheroes) sends along sends along a couple of snippets from The Incredible Hercules #133 — in which our intrepid protagonists are attacked by freak observers fluctuated out of thermal equilibrium!
Actually here they are described as “freaky observers,” rather than the more conventional “freak observers.” That description brings to mind Smoove B rather than Ludwig Boltzmann, but who knows? Maybe unlikely thermal fluctuations tend to be pretty kinky.
And yes, before you all start in: we know that Boltzmann Brains don’t really make for a credible alien menace, if you insist on being persnickety about what they supposedly really represent. It’s not that they “perceive” a universe more chaotic than ours — it’s that they would dominate the total number of observers if the universe really were more chaotic than ours. (Which it isn’t!) Also, they would tend to dissolve back into the chaos from which they came, rather than staging a coordinated attack on our homeland. Still! What a novel challenge for the Allies’ greatest hero.
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Jerry Zucker Steals My Joke
The Science and Entertainment Exchange has lurched into the early 21st century by starting its own blog, the X-Change Files. They’re going to have a weekly “column” rotating between Lawrence Krauss, Matt Parney, Jennifer Ouellette, Sid Perkowitz, and Jerry Zucker. So you know where to go for your regular dose of science and entertainment goodness.
Jerry Zucker and his wife Janet Zucker deserve a great deal of credit for turning the idea of the Exchange into a reality. More importantly, for a twelve-year-old such as I was at the time, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a major event in modern cinema. So I was pleased to see that the title of Jerry’s post (“I’d Like to Thank the National Academy”) was the same one that I had used when I gave a talk at the NAS annual meeting. Not that either one of us should be overly proud of that particular line.
Also, he gets away with saying stuff like this:
The really great thing about these scientists is that because their brains are exactly two-and-a-half times the size of the average person’s in the movie business (although in fairness, that also includes talent agents), they are actually more creative and therefore much better at coming up with science-related ideas for movies than our so-called “creative community.” I don’t mean to offend anyone but as much as I loved Slumdog Millionaire, it’s no Viagra. Often, science gets tacked on like wallpaper in a story, but when it’s really integrated into the narrative it can take things in surprising new directions. And thanks to the Exchange and the National Academy of Sciences, research just became much more fun.
That thing about the brain sizes is what they call “creative license.” But it’s deployed in the service of making a good point! Scientists are good at coming up with ideas, and it would be great if a closer relationship between science and Hollywood helped some of those fun ideas percolate into the wider culture. (My giant brain scoffs at giving specifics about how this will actually happen.)
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