Science

It’s experiments like this that make being a scientist all worthwhile (thanks to Bandy for the link…)

I’ve always been fascinated by modern physics, but too often explanations in physics books either (a) give simplified explanations that don’t hold up under closer scrutiny, or (b) use so much specialized vocabulary and mathematics that they might as well be in Greek. The following four books are the ones I’ve found to be well-written exceptions:

• The Einstein Paradox, and other science mysteries solved by Sherlock Holmes, by Colin Bruce, Perseus Books, 1997. Bruce presents 12 new short stories staring Sherlock Holmes as he solves cases that loosely follow the progress of physics through the last century, from a case of a mysterious sniper on a train (explaining Einstein’s Relativity) to one of the best descriptions of the EPR paradox I’ve seen in a case involving gambling fraud.

• QED: The Strange Thory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman, Princeton University Press, 1985. Feynman was a brilliant teacher as well as physicist, and here he beautifully explains quantum electrodynamics, the theory that won him a Nobel prize. Based on a series of lectures he gave at UCLA that were designed specifically for a nontechnical audience.

• In Search of Schroginger’s Cat and the sequel Schrodinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries, both by John Gribbin (1984 and 1995). While I didn’t get quite as much understanding out of these books as I did from the first two I listed (there was a bit too much hand-waving for my taste), they still lay a good foundation and cover a wide field of the bizarreness that is quantum physics.

There’s a debate going on over at The Edge about the role of common sense in science, especially physics and cognitive science. John Horgan is the science journalist who started the debate with a NYT op-ed:

[String theory and the idea of parallel universes] are preposterous, but that’s not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.

Common sense — and a little historical perspective — makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans — not to mention watching lots of TV and movies — I’ve concluded that as individuals we’re pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I’m thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause.

He later responds to comments with:

The question that I raised — and that all these respondents have studiously avoided — is what we should do when presented with theories such as psychoanalysis or string theory, which are not only counterintuitive but also lacking in evidence. Common sense tells me that in these cases common sense can come in handy.

As I see it, Horgan is mistaking lack of differentiation for lack of evidence. Unlike the so-called theory of Intelligent Design, String Theory and the Parallel Universes interpretation of quantum physics have a great deal of predictive power and evidence behind them. The problem is that (currently) this is the exact same set of evidence that supports quantum theory in general, so there’s no way to say that one interpretation is better than the other. However, if we found evidence that our understanding of quantum theory was fundamentally wrong, the other two theories would also be out the window.

Horgan is also wrong about why these theories are so non-sensical. The reason is not, as he implies, that scientists mistake preposterousness for profundity, nor is it that they just like making fun of English majors like himself. As Stanford professor Susskind points out in the debate, the reason these theories violate our common sense is that the world violates our common sense as soon as we look outside of our comfort zone. No theory that fits the experimental evidence will satisfy our common-sense understanding because the evidence itself fails to do so.

(Props to Mind Hacks for the link.)

Intelligent Design has two key arguments:

1. Evolution is not enough to explain the biological and chemical complexity found in living beings.
2. A reasonable hypothesis is that life was created by some “intelligence.”

The first argument has been addressed by a number of people, but it seems like the second argument has been largely dismissed since (just like Creationism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory) it doesn’t have predictive power and thus is a gut-feel rhetorical argument rather than a scientific theory. I think it should be dismissed on those grounds when it comes to science classes, but what surprises me is how silly the rhetorical argument is as well.

Consider: Intelligent Design claims that life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligence, even though:

• The best known example of intelligence, namely man, is still woefully incapable of producing such a complex system.
• When it comes to “designing” a biological system, the way we humans perform anything more major than a simple tweak is by evolving the new traits, be it by breeding dogs or in a petrie dish.
• There’s not even agreement on what the word “intelligence” means beyond the fact that (most) humans posses the trait.

Given these rhetorical holes, I have to wonder whether the real reason Intelligent Design proponents feel something so complex must have been designed by an intelligence is because emotionally they’ve already assumed the reverse, namely that any system able to produce something so complex must in its own right be intelligent.

If so, then in a way Intelligent Design proponents are correct: there is an intelligence that designed life. That intelligence is the distributed system of naturally occurring patterns of reproduction, natural selection and genetic drift that we call evolution.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a good overview on the potential link between mercury-based preservatives used in vaccines from 1981 to 2003 and the simultaneous huge increase in autism. I’d sort of bunched this theory in with fluoridation paranoia, but it looks like there’s a lot of concern among level-headed people who have looked at the data and have the expertise to understand it. If what this article implies is accurate, this whole thing could blow into another Thalidomide.

A study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for migraine headaches against “sham acupuncture” where the doctors used needles at non-acupuncture points. The results of the two groups were virtually identical: a 2.2-day reduction in the number of days with moderate or severe headaches in a four-week period. That’s significantly better than the 0.8-day reduction for the control “waiting list” group that got no treatment, but begs the obvious question: why spend years studying acupuncture if needle location doesn’t really matter?

As a side note, I’m too cheap to pay the $12 to to download the full paper, but there’s a nice breakdown of the study at the UK National electronic Library for Health. (Thanks to Bob Park’s What’s New for the link!)

image courtesy Cornell University

Cornell Researchers Viktor Zykov, Efstathios Mytilinaios, Bryant Adams, and Hod Lipson have built a self-replicating robot (video). The robot itself is just a basic proof-of-concept — their real contribution is how they try to redefine the whole concept of self-replication from being a “you either have it or you don’t” binary property to being a continuum. From their FAQ:

Contrary to previously held views that self-replication is a property that a system either has or has not (“you can’t be half pregnant”), our theory suggests that it is actually a continuum, where different systems can self-reproduce to different extents. The extent to which a system is self replicating depends on things like how fast does it self replicate, how accurately does it self replicate, how dependent is it on its environment to self replicate, how complex are its building blocks, how complex it is itself, etc. etc. For example, crystals self replicate, but only in a solution; rabbits self-replicate – less accurately and more slowly than a crystal – but they are less dependent on having a specific environment.

Nothing to do on a rainy saturday? Build your own cloud chamber!

An two-year-old speech by Michael Crichton that came across a mailing list I’m on slams scientists for being “seduced by the… lures of politics and publicity,” bringing its skepticism to bear on the growing scientific consensus on global warming. One person on the list asked the obvious question after reading it, namely who is the layman to trust?

My response was that it’s not really that hard (though I should have added it’s a skill that needs to be learned).

Start by being skeptical of anyone who wears being a lone skeptic against a vast sea of consensus as a badge of honor, especially when he’s not an expert in the field he’s criticizing. One in a million really is the genius he thinks he is, but most of the time there’s a good reason everyone else thinks he’s full of it. Then be doubly suspicious of any explanation of an idea or study given by someone who opposes it. (I’m reminded of a born-again Baptist friend of mine in high school who kept trying to explain to my Catholic girlfriend what “Catholics believe” — as described in some Catholic-bashing pamphlet her church was handing out.)

Next, see what parts of what they’re saying you do know something about, or can find out through a quick Web search. I can’t speak to everything Crichton’s complaining about, but I do know he’s wrong that SETI isn’t science (regardless of whether they’re barking up the wrong tree), he’s either wrong or highly selective on second-hand smoke and he’s wrong when it comes to lack of scientific debate about the existence of global warming (there’s been plenty of debate over the years — I gather he just doesn’t like which side is coming out on top). He’s also wrong in his defense of his fellow lone wolf, Lomborg. Lomborg wasn’t attacked for coming to the wrong conclusions, he was attacked for “selective use of data, misuse of data, misinterpretations, inappropriate precision, [and] errors of fact.” I’d say the fact that he was shouted down in the scientific community, in spite of economic and political pressure on his side, is a sign of something right with science. (Crichton’s insinuation that Lomborg’s critics don’t substantiate their attacks in detail is nonsense — see the above-linked review for one of many examples.)

As a side-note, Crichton’s comment that “to predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd” is strange coming as it does from a science fiction author. It’s also yet another straw-man — computer models don’t make predictions, they assign probabilities based on our best guesses and based on different choices we might make. It’s impossible for anyone to predict whether a fire will start while I sleep, but that doesn’t stop me from upgrading old electrical wiring and getting fire insurance based on my best guess at the likelihood of a fire. Ray Bradberry once said the function of science fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it. In this case, that’s probably a good function of science fact as well.

Photo credit: Matt Yourst

In early November & late January MIT has a little local astronomical phenominon known as MIThenge, when the sun shines directly down the 825-foot infinite corridor that forms the spine of main campus. This year’s convergence starts at around 4:49pm EST for the next few days.

I always loved this little architectural Easter egg when I was a student, but according to the MIT News Office the phenominon is likely by accident rather than design:

Historical data suggests that the solar alignment was not intended by the buildings’ architects, who were more concerned with the view of the Charles River. According to a recent article in Sky & Telescope magazine, the phenomenon was noticed and publicized in the 1970s by Thomas K. Norton, a research affiliate in architecture. Students at the time did some calculations as part of a class project, and posters were put up around campus advertising a “sun set celebration.”