What should everyone know about science?

In a time when misunderstandings of science anti-science views are rising around the world, it is important that scientists do a better job of communicating to the broader public what science actually is, what it can do, and what it cannot do.

An interesting and important question is what it is that people should know and understand. There is a multitude of views on this (which is not necessarily a completely bad thing).

I only learned last week that in 1994, Phil Anderson had tackled this issue in a short article he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, a London-based newspaper. An interesting paper about Anderson's article just appeared. It nicely places the article in a broader context and gives a more recent perspective on the issues he raised.

Four Facts Everyone Ought to Know about Science:
The Two-Culture Concerns of Philip W. Anderson
Andrew Zhang and Andrew Zangwill

The four ``facts'' that Anderson chose were (as paraphrased by Zhang and Zangwill):

1. Science is not democratic.
2. Computers will not replace scientists.
3. Statistical methods are misused and often misunderstood.
4. Good science has aesthetic qualities.

This is a fascinating choice. 

One thing I learned was about Anderson's argument that Bayesian methods should have been used to rule out the significance of "discoveries" such as the 10 keV neutrino and the fifth force. In 1992 he wrote a Physics Today column on the subject.

Physics, Politics, Pride, and Moral Failure

Which scientist had the greatest political influence of all time? the greatest influence on government policy?
Oppenheimer? Any suggestions?

Not Schrodinger, but arguably Frederick Lindemann.
Until last week I had barely heard of Lindemann. I knew of the Lindemann criterion for estimating the melting temperature of a solid. At Oxford, I had been in the Lindemann building (the front of the Clarendon lab) many times, but had not bothered to find out who Lindemann was.

Last week I listened to a fascinating podcast by Malcolm Gladwell, The Prime Minister and the Prof, that recounts Lindemann's long relationship with Winston Churchill. The podcast draws heavily on two sources (interestingly both written by physicists). The first source is three lectures that C.P. Snow [of two cultures fame] gave at Harvard in 1960, and published as Science and Government.
The second source is a book, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee.

Lindemann was a lifelong friend and advisor of Churchill and his main scientific advisor. It was largely his advice that led Churchill to implement policies that literally led to the deaths of millions.

One disaster, considered by Mukerjee, was the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted because the British refused to send food supplies to their colony in India, even though they had bountiful supplies and shipping at the time.
The second disaster, considered by Snow, was "strategic bombing" of German civilians. Lindemann argued the bombing would break morale, even though the data he had actually supported the opposite view.

I highly recommend the podcast. It is stimulating and disturbing. I thank my daughter for bringing it to my attention. It was great listening in the car on a recent holiday together.

What other scientists can you think of who have exerted such great political influence, for better or for worse?

Learning to live with limited affirmation

My apologies to readers who saw the draft beginnings of this post. I mistakenly posted it rather than saving it as a draft. Quite embarrassing.

Teenagers who don't receive enough affirmation at home will be prone to seek affirmation in the wrong places. (A classic and controversial issue is the possible correlation between absent fathers and teenage pregnancy).

Scientists are human and we all need and enjoy affirmation for our work. But, many of us don't get as much as we would like. Just like teenagers we are prone to seek affirmation from the wrong sources. We write papers that get rejected by luxury journals. We publish papers and they may be largely ignored. Our grant applications get rejected. We don't get the invited conference invitations that we think we deserve. This can be particularly hard for the young and inexperienced.

I think it is important to be secure in yourself about the quality of your work and not start seeking affirmation from the "wrong" crowd: luxury journals, funding agencies, pretentious older colleagues, administrative bean counters, .... Just like for teenagers it will end in tears...

An old post, The alternative to doing significant research discusses how in the classic C.P. Snow novel, The Masters, many of the characters have such a pitiful academic existence.

The Physics history column in the American Physical Society News recently featured a fascinating story, Perelman posts proof of the Poincare conjecture on the arXiv.
Perelman is clearly a very secure individual who only needed the satisfaction of doing good science.

Two cultures of seminars

Previously I posted about The Two Cultures of C.P. Snow who noted how the academic cultures of science and the humanities diverged in the twentieth century. I agree that both are the poorer for it.

Yesterday I went to a history seminar. The purpose of this post is not to discuss the content, which was fascinating. But rather, to note the striking difference between the mode of presentation and discussion from a typical science seminar.

First, the paper was read. Literally! The speaker had a manuscript which they read without interuption. There were no PowerPoint slides. Yet, the talk/paper was very engaging, interesting, and easy to follow, even for me a non-historian.

Second, the seminar went for 90 minutes, with about 40 minutes devoted to questions and discussions! Probably ten different people asked questions. This was also engaging and interesting. Furthermore, I felt everyone [speaker, questioner, and audience] benefited from this.

One might easily dismiss these differences as being solely due to the different content of disciplines or just how this particular seminar was run. However, I think science seminars and conference presentations could be more interesting and productive if
-they were more accessible
-they had fewer PowerPoint slides (or none!)
-there was more extended time for questions and discussion
-more people asked questions

Alternatives to struggling to do significant research

In a previous post The importance of being stupid! I highlighted the point that doing significant research is really hard.

Doing significant research should not be confused with publishing papers, getting grants, setting up a lab, getting tenure, getting cited, getting promoted, getting invited to speak at conferences.... All these activities are actually a lot easier. Because making real contributions over an extended period is so hard it is easier to get distracted or consumed with the "busy" activities listed above. There are also even worse options...

I was reminded of this recently when I read the novel The Masters, by C.P. Snow.
I was stimulated to read it by a lecture on C.S. Lewis and scientism, by Fritz Schaefer who recommends the novel for insights into the internal politics of Oxbridge colleges. The novel is part of a series, Strangers and Brothers, chronicling the life experience of Lewis Eliot as over course of several decades he moves from law office to university to industry to government. Some of the series parallels Snow’s own diverse life experience: he began his professional life as a molecular physicist, turned to writing novels, and eventually became a Baron and held high positions in the U.K. government. He is best known for his Rede lectures: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which were delivered exactly 50 years ago this month.


The novel, the Masters, describes the political struggle amongst Fellows in a Cambridge College as they position, posture, and politic in anticipation of the election of the next Master of the college, while they wait for the current Master to die, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Snow is perceptive about human nature and paints an intimate portrait of his characters. Here is a random selection (page numbers are from the Penguin 1983 edition):

“I had known for minutes past, that this was coming: I had not wanted to talk of it that night. Jago was longing for me to say that he ought to be the next Master, that my own mind was made up, that I should vote from him. He had longed for me to say it without prompting. It was anguish to him to make the faintest hint without repsonse. Yet he was impelled to go on, he could not stop. It harassed me to see this proud man humiliating himself.” (p. 15)

The Master says, “Do you remember the trouble we had getting him [Calvert] elected [as a Fellow of the College], Eliot? Some of our friends show a singular instinct for preferring mediocrity. Like elects like of course. Or between me and you,” he whispered, “dull men elect dull men.” (p. 20)

Nightingale “was intensely suspicious, certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain….. He had once possessed great promise. That was his bitterness. … By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure… but the spark burnt out… Often he had new conceptions: but the power to execute them had escaped from him. ……It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingale’s it made him fester with envy…. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suspiscion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him…… as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal Society elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspicousness…” (p.46,47)

“Chrystal wanted to be no more than Dean, but he wanted the Dean, in this little empire of the college, to be known as a man of power. Less subltle, less reflective, more immediate than his friend [Brown], he needed the moment-by-moment sensation of power. He needed to feel that he was listened to, ……, that his word was obeyed.” (p.61)

50th anniversary of a famous quote

Fifty years ago this month, the novelist (and physicist) C.P. Snow gave what has been described as "one of the most influential lectures in Western society". A quote physicists tend to love (but should think twice about) is:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.