A few things I have learnt from professional editors

 Until a few years ago I had never engaged with or received feedback from my writing from a professional editor. This is because the only genre I wrote that involved an editor was papers for scientific journals. But the editors of journals are not really editors in the literary sense. They are more like gatekeepers. Colleagues and collaborators may provide feedback on written work, but again they are amateurs.

In the past few years, I have been writing some popular articles and a popular book and have been part of a writing group. In the process, I have engaged with several professional editors. They were getting paid to make my writing better. I have learnt a lot. Here are a few of the things. On the one hand, some of this may not seem that relevant to scientific articles and grant applications. On the other hand, think of the joy of reading a beautiful scientific article, such as those by Roald Hoffmann. Think of how many papers you try to read and you cannot figure out what they are actually about. Also, I think this is particularly relevant to writing review articles, somewhat of a lost art.

Can it be shorter? Most of the writing I have worked with editors on had a strict word limit. I struggled to stay within it. However, the editors forced/helped me in two ways. First, the fixed word limit helped me structure the work and be realistic about the volume of content. For example, for my Very Short Introduction, I broke down the 35,000-word limit to ten chapters, each of about 3500 words. This made the writing quite manageable. Second, editors helped by cutting out content that was not essential, even when I loved it. Third, editors rewrote some of my sentences making them both shorter and clearer. Seeing their improvements I became aware of some of my bad habits.

Find your voice and tell a story. We are all unique and each piece of writing is unique and is making a unique point. Don't try and be someone else. A grant application needs to make the case that your proposed project is unique and that you are uniquely qualified to do it. Your writing will be more engaging and compelling if it expresses your unique perspective and there is a natural narrative.

A few of these suggestions overlap with some of Stephen King's writing tips. 

Self-organisation in complex fluids

 I am at the beach this week and so a lot of time is spent staring at waves, clouds, sunsets, and patterns in the sand. There is a lot of beauty and a lot of beautiful science, most of which I know only a little about. For example, what is the essential physics and simplest theory that can explain the patterns below?

To start understanding the beautiful patterns seen in natural systems I have found helpful the two-page Quick Study in Physics Today

The universe in a cup of coffee by John Wettlaufer

Your morning java or tea is a rotating, cooling laboratory that reflects the physics of such large-scale phenomena as stellar dynamics and energy transport in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. 

A nice demonstration is to put the hot liquid in a glass jar and then just add a few drops of cold milk and see the beautiful patterns that emerge.

The key idea is there is a balance between thermal bouyancy (hot air rises) and viscous stresses. This balance can lead to symmetry breaking and self-organisation. In planetary systems rotation can play a significant role, particularly when there is a balance of viscous forces and the coriolis force. This can lead to the formation of vortices. The Quick Study includes snapshops from a video that is worth watching,  supplementary material from this PRL.

The article also discusses the importance of Rayleigh-Benard convection in many geophysical phenomena. Something interesting I learnt is that this is actually a misnomer, as is often the case in science. According to Wikipedia, 

This pattern of convection, whose effects are due solely to a temperature gradient, was first successfully analyzed in 1916 by Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919).^[16] Rayleigh assumed boundary conditions in which the vertical velocity component and temperature disturbance vanish at the top and bottom boundaries (perfect thermal conduction). Those assumptions resulted in the analysis losing any connection with Henri Bénard's experiment. This resulted in discrepancies between theoretical and experimental results until 1958, when John Pearson (1930– ) reworked the problem based on surface tension.^[9] This is what was originally observed by Bénard.

Systemic flaws that are undermining good science

Everyone likes to be right. But, sometimes I really wish I was wrong, particularly about problems I see in the world. I wish I was wrong about science being broken. Some of these issues I discuss in the final chapter of Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction, due to the relevance of these problems to the future of the field.

Similar concerns were discussed with greater clarity, way back in 2014, by four scientists who are much more experienced and distinguished than I am. 

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws 

Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus

Positions the different authors have held include President of the US Academy of Sciences, President of Princeton University, and Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Although the article focuses on biomedical research I think the three words "medicine, biomedical, and biology" could be replaced respectively with "technology, materials science, and condensed matter physics" almost everywhere in the article. 

Here are a few quotes.

The long-held but erroneous assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biomedical science has created an unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession—and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work. This is a recipe for long-term decline, and the problems cannot be solved with simplistic approaches. Instead, it is time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.

... the remarkable outpouring of innovative research from American laboratories—high-throughput DNA sequencing, sophisticated imaging, structural biology, designer chemistry, and computational biology—has led to impressive advances in medicine and fueled a vibrant pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector. In the context of such progress, it is remarkable that even the most successful scientists and most promising trainees are increasingly pessimistic about the future of their chosen career.

... hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science suppresses the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries.

The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas that, by definition, cannot promise success. Young investigators are discouraged from departing too far from their postdoctoral work, when they should instead be posing new questions and inventing new approaches. Seasoned investigators are inclined to stick to their tried-and-true formulas for success rather than explore new fields. 

One manifestation of this shift to short-term thinking is the inflated value that is now accorded to studies that claim a close link to medical practice. Human biology has always been a central part of the US biomedical effort... Many surprising discoveries, powerful research tools, and important medical benefits have arisen from efforts to decipher complex biological phenomena in model organisms. In a climate that discourages such work by emphasizing short-term goals, scientific progress will inevitably be slowed, and revolutionary findings will be deferred.

As competition for jobs and promotions increases, the inflated value given to publishing in a small number of so-called “high impact” journals has put pressure on authors to rush into print, cut corners, exaggerate their findings, and overstate the significance of their work. 

The development of original ideas that lead to important scientific discoveries takes time for thinking, reading, and talking with peers. Today, time for reflection is a disappearing luxury for the scientific community. 

...administrative tasks are taking up an ever-increasing fraction of the day and present serious obstacles to concentration on the scientific mission itself. 

The following is particularly true of luxury journals. 

Professional editors are increasingly serving in roles played in the past by working scientists and can undermine the enterprise when they base judgments about publication on newsworthiness rather than scientific quality. 

Even after they have landed a research position in academia or research institutes, new investigators wait an average of 4–5 y to receive federal funding for their work compared with 1 y in 1980 (2). Two stark statistics tell much of the tale—the average age at which PhD recipients assume their first tenure-track job is 37 y, and they are approaching 42 y when they are awarded their first NIH grant.

Although it varies across fields and individuals, I get the impression that most scientists do their best work in the rough age range of 35-45. Currently, people are spending most of these years looking for a permanent job and then applying for grants, rather than actually doing science.

The graph below shows just how much the system changed in just thirty years. NIH grants became "gentrified". In different words, all the grants now go to "old farts" doing the same old thing, rather than to "young turks" who want to try new things and have a real impact.

Percentage of NIH R01 Principal Investigators aged 36 and younger and aged 66 and older, 1980–2010

The authors did make some concrete proposals and in a follow-up article, they discuss a broader meeting held to discuss the issues.

Addressing systemic problems in the biomedical research enterprise

To what extent progress has been made in the biomedical community in the past eight years I do not know.

Probing the relationship between superexchange and superconductivity in cuprates

One of the most basic ideas in science is the controlled experiment. A single "independent" variable is changed while all others are held fixed. One then observes how the properties of the system change. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated and there are rarely any truly independent variables, particularly in materials science.

Since the discovery of cuprate superconductors one-quarter of a century ago there has been a constant struggle to tease out systematic trends that can provide insight into the underlying physics causing the superconductivity. This is a challenge because it is difficult to change only one variable. For example, a key property is how the superconductivity changes with the chemical composition of the material, particularly with regard to the doping level, i.e., the density of charge carriers. The problem is that with changes in doping, many other things change as well: the amount of disorder, the periodicity and strength of magnetic interactions, crystal structure, ... 

There is a beautiful experimental paper that recently overcomes these problems. 

On the electron pairing mechanism of copper-oxide high temperature superconductivity

Shane M. O’Mahony, Wangping Ren, Weijiong Chen,  Yi Xue Chong, Xiaolong Liu, H. Eisaki, S. Uchida, M. H. Hamidian, and J. C. Séamus Davis 

In a very clever way they can do all their measurements on a single material of fixed chemical composition, and yet vary a key parameter, the size of the energy difference between the relevant oxygen and copper electronic states, Epsilon.

In the material under study,  Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x, there are CuO5 units, as pictured below. In the crystal there is a modulation of delta, the distance at which the fifth oxygen sits above the CuO4 squares that form the square lattices that comprise the layers responsible for the superconductivity.

Due to electrostatics, the distance delta has an effect on the energy Epsilon. This in turn changes the size of the magnetic superexchange between neighbouring copper spins, as pictured below.

In the experiment, a STM is used to measure how Epsilon varies as delta varies (see the red dots in the Figure below). We then expect this to vary the superexchange.

An electron-pair (Josephson) STM is used to measure the magnitude of the superfluid density (electron-pair density) and how it changes with delta (see the blue dots in the figure below).

These two sets of measurement are combined in the second figure below. 

The yellow band in the figure above is the range of values expected from theory, including the recent paper.

Oxygen hole content, charge-transfer gap, covalency, and cuprate superconductivity

Nicolas Kowalski, Sidhartha Shankar Dash, Patrick Sémon, David Sénéchal, and André-Marie Tremblay

The theory is based on DMFT calculations for a three-band Hubbard model, following earlier work including by Weber, Haule, Kotliar, and independently by Maier.

Quanta magazine has a popular report on the experiment. The headline, "High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last", overstates the significance of the experiment.

There are still issues of correlation versus causality. I would also like to see what other theories predict for the relationship between Epsilon and the pairing density. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful experiment and marks a significant advance.