Brian Clegg's Blog, page 63

The Book of Magic - Review

I have always been fascinated by magic, whether in its use in fiction or beliefs about magic. As I read more popular science than anything (and because I was sent a review copy) I had got it into my head that this was a book on the practice of and attitude to magic from a scientific, analytical viewpoint - looking at what was believed and why they believed it. However, the actual book was very different from this, and I suspect it will only appeal to a very narrow readership.

What Brian Copenhaver does is to take a series of texts: biblical, medieval and renaissance (but no modern ones) that reference magic in some way and gives us a brief commentary on each (usually just one paragraph) before quoting the document at length. I am sure from a scholastic viewpoint this is useful and may even be important, but I really can't see why it is being published by Penguin in a manner that implies it is for a general readership, because it certainly isn't.

So unless you have the patience and the interest to read a whole string of obscure and verbose medieval documents, it probably shouldn't be on your to-read list.

If you are the kind of person for whom this should be on your to-read list, The Book of Magic is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

Sound of tearing hair

Not long ago I mentioned the evils of science exaggeration. It's all too easy for journalists, often aided and abetted by either university PRs or scientists themselves, to make over-the-top claims. I think I've just come across the most dramatic example of this I've ever seen.

'Teenagers' maths theorem could pave the way for interstellar travel,' screams the headline. No, it really, really couldn't. There's a lot to be said for that Metro masthead 'news... but not as you know it'. Though to be fair, they were by no means alone in making this claim.

The origin of this hysterical unlikelihood was a geometry paper by a pair of 17-year-olds. The fact that Xuming Liang and Ivan Zelich produced the paper, published in the International Journal of Geometry is certainly newsworthy. But the leap from Generalisations of the Properties of the Neuberg Cubic to the Euler Pencil of Isopivotal Cubics to Starfleet is considerable.

Here is the phrase that does all the damage. 'The theorem will contribute to our understanding of intergalactic travel because string theory predicts existence shortcuts in space, or so-called "wormholes" to cut through space.' The quote is from co-author Zelich. But the journalists involved don't seem to have given any thought to the possibility that a 17-year-old could be good at geometry without knowing too much about life, the universe and PR.

The first problem with that statement is that string theory doesn't predict wormholes. It doesn't predict anything - that's one of the problems with string theory. Nothing predicts wormholes actually exist, but general relativity does provide a potential mechanism for them with the proviso that they would be  pretty well impossible to travel through. But even if string theory did predict wormholes, so what? String theory is not at this stage a useful scientific theory for anything, and may well end up being discarded. And even if it that weren't the case, a geometry theorem does not somehow turn string theory into an interstellar transport mechanism. To put it politely, it's baloney.

Perhaps slightly more with-it journalists than those on the Metro would have raised an eyebrow at Zelich's other quote 'It also helps finding minimal possible math between certain planets based on their structure,' which I've read ten times and still haven't a clue what it means.

So, thanks to the wonders of science exaggeration, what was a really good story - teens publish impressive original geometry paper - has become a truly naff example of non-science reporting. Nice.

How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?

I can't remember when I was last as excited about a new book coming out as I am about How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? , my science quiz book, which is available from today. And to make it even better, it was great fun to write.

One driver for this is that I enjoy pub quizzes, but I've always been disappointed with the quality and quantity of the science and technology questions. I think the thing that pushed me over the edge was taking part in a quiz which featured the question 'Who invented the gramophone?' According to the organisers, the answer was Thomas Edison, and despite my protests, they would not accept the correct answer. (It is, of course in the book.) So one thing this book does is provide two complete quizzes, each containing 6 traditional rounds with 8 questions each, plus two special rounds, one partly pictorial and the other with a sort of puzzle element, which can be used as table rounds. This means it can be run as a science quiz, or to provide science rounds to a general quiz.

However, realistically, 99% of readers are not going to run a quiz, so it's designed to be enjoyable to read through from end to end as well. Each of the 96 normal questions has the question, plus a few 'while you are thinking' factoids on one page and the answer, plus a page of explanation that expands on the answer, over the other side. And a reference to read more, if the topic grabs you. So you can test yourself, turn over and be surprised, then fascinated by what are inevitably the most weird, wonderful and unexpected answers I could find in all of science.

The other reason I'm delighted is that I think the publisher has done a great job with the book - the cover, which is textured, looks great, and it's priced to make it a really attractive stocking filler or just a 'Why not?' buy.

Okay, I'm biassed. But wouldn't you want to try out questions like these?

If the Earth were made into a black hole, what would be the diameter of its event horizon?What links the elephant Tusko at Oklahoma City Zoo and Timothy Leary?If you too one step each second in seven-league boots, what would your speed be in miles per hour?What was Einstein’s 1930 patent for?Why did Uuq become Fl?I think this does what QI does for TV in a book - but in a less 'Nah-nah, you're wrong!' fashion. Which is appropriate given the title question, where I disagree with every answer that QI has ever given on that topic.
It's available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. If you prefer other ebook formats, its on those too - take a look at its web page with full details.

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3.

Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable.
It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. 
However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign.

Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only works because they are using childish language. A secondary school teacher is more like to expand 'times' as 'multiplied by'. And so we get '5 multiplied by 3' - if you think about it, this clearly means 'take 5 and reproduce it three times.' So it means 5x5x5.

I think an excellent last word can be given to a Dr Petersen on the Math [sic] Forum: [Multiplication] is a commutative operation that can be modeled in two symmetrical ways as repeated addition (when applied to whole numbers).

Conclusion? The child was as correct to use this formulation as the one being taught, and the teacher was wrong to mark him/her down.

Is your business card intelligent?

Some of my Moo cardsBusiness cards are generally boring necessities, and like many people I've tended in the past to get my cards from the cheapest possible supplier - they might not look beautiful, but they do the job. I confess, I still do this with my 'gig handout cards' which just give details of my website, Twitter address etc. so anyone who feels the urge to follow me up after a talk can do so. But for my 'proper' cards with full contact details, I've switched over to Moo*.

This company has been recommended to me for ages by fellow writers, and having got some of their products, I can see why. They feel to be a truly quality product, and they have a number of innovations, including half height cards, cards with curved corners, square cards and cards with a different, full colour photo on the back of each. They also make it easy to incorporate useful features, like phone-scannable QR codes to jump straight to your website. In fact I loved them so much I got both half height and full-sized versions. There's no doubt they are relatively expensive, but I find I don't give out this kind of card very often, so it's not much of a luxury.

Now Moo has a new product: business cards with a built-in NFC chip, so you can use phones with the ability to pay-by-tap to pull up anything from contact details to go straight into your address book to that good old website link again. My feelings are a bit mixed about this. I applaud their innovation, but I'm not sure how useful they'll be as you are bound to discover that most of the people you give a card to don't have the hardware (and even if they do, might be reluctant to download any required software).

Even so, you have to admire the company for ensuring that it stays at the leading edge of businesscardery.

* As it is sometimes the case, I need to emphasise I am not being sponsored by Moo in any way to make this recommendation. However, if they would like to send me a voucher to get some more cards for free, I wouldn't complain.

Bin the PPI calls

'Hello, I'm not selling anything, I just
want to ask you a few questions...'I'm sure I'm not alone in having been pestered with calls on my mobile, telling me that I ought to get compensation for my PPI (something that, as a self-employed person I couldn't have sensibly taken out) - and just as that fad is fading, we will no doubt be hit by loads of calls for the next banking miss-selling scandal: probably Sentinel card protection insurance.

I never get calls like this on my home phone, because I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Scheme. This is a brilliant service (UK-only, but there may be equivalents elsewhere, particularly in other EU countries) where you register you number and all legitimate call centres should take you off their calling lists. It's not 100 per cent perfect. It can't stop those calls from the Indian subcontinent claiming to be from 'Windows' and telling you your PC is compromised. And the occasional legitimate call slips through where the lists haven't been updated - though they then apologise and hang up if you tell them you are TPS registered. But on the whole, it's wonderful. We never get those irritating teatime cold calls about double glazing or whatever the sales push du jour happens to be.

However, I was increasingly getting those mobile nasties. It had never occurred to me to check whether mobile phones can also be listed - but apparently they can. So I will be running, not walking to the TPS website to register. It's quick and easy. You can register your landline, mobile and even business number if you have one (the only proviso is that the business version has to be renewed each year, while the personal version is self-renewing). There is also a mail equivalent, though most people are less fussy about junk mail, which, after all, is less intrusive.

Have you registered for TPS? If not, why not?

No more passwords

Reflecting the exaggerated claim syndrome I mentioned a few days ago, New Scientist recently carried a quote on quantum key distribution (QKD*), where an encryption key is randomly generated when needed from a quantum source. Apparently John Rarity of the University of Bristol told the magazine that you will soon be able to pick up a batch of keys on a credit card sized device, perhaps from an ATM, and use them to login to an account, such as your bank.

'You would never need to remember a password or pin again, QKD does all the work for you.' Was the dramatic pull quote.
Leaving aside the fact that most of us are less likely to use ATMs these days than we once did, what isn't all that obvious is why this is any better than, say, storing a very strong password on your phone. In either case all someone needs do is steal the device and they're in. Which means the the device needs to be protected by either biometrics or, duh, a password or PIN. So how does this improve security?

I've contacted Dr Rarity asking if he could explain, but as yet have not had a reply.

* Not to be confused with WKD, which I believe is an alcoholic drink.

Sexy statistics

I am totally baffled by some statistics that are are frequently used on the average numbers of sexual partners for males and females. It has been in most of the newspapers, and I most recently saw it in New Scientist, where the common numbers of males having 12 partners and females having 8 partners came up. This seems strangely asymmetrical when there are approximately similar sized populations of male and female. And yet, bizarrely none of the articles question this oddity. Neither do the main sources the papers used: the Lancet and the Wellcome Trust.

Let's see if we can make sense of these numbers using a mini model. As always with scientific models we need to be clear what assumptions are being made. Initially I am only looking at heterosexual partnerships - which may be an issue, so I will come back to this later. As we have a ratio of 3 to 2 between the numbers of partners, I'm going to try to set up my model with each male having three partners and each female two. I have a population with six males (A...F) and six females: (1...6).

Let's set up the males with three partners each a couple of different ways, starting with a simple, systematic allocation:
A: 1,2,3
B: 4,5,6
C: 1,2,3
D: 4,5,6
E: 1,2,3
F:4,5,6

Here females 1,2 and 3 have partners A,C,E and 4, 5 and 6 have B,D,F. Not surprisingly, females have the same number of partners as males.

Let's try a more scrambled set:
A: 1,2,3
B: 5,1,2
C:2,3,4
D:1,6,2
E:1,2,4
F:4.5.6

Now how have we done? Here are the females:
1:A,B,D,E
2:A,B,C,D,E
3: A,C
4:C,E,F
5:B,F
6:D,F

Aha, it's no longer symmetrical. But take the mean and once more the females have an average of 3 partners. So without homosexual partners it's difficult to make the maths work. Here's an arrangement that does produce the right ratio:

A: 1, 2, 3, B, C
B: A, C
C: A, B
D: 1, 2, 3
E: 4, 5, 6
F: 4, 5, 6

Yet this too looks dubious. According to the same studies that produce these figures, the percentage of men reporting homosexual relationships is 4.8%, where I needed 50%. With 4.8% of males having homosexual partners and no females having them, we would need those males to have vast numbers of extra partners - and this ignores the reported female homosexual partnerships, where the percentage was 7.9% - more than the males. Result? Total confusion.

Unless someone can clarify where I've gone horribly wrong here, I think all those newspapers (and New Scientist), the Lancet and the Wellcome Trust) announcing that on average males have 12 sexual partners and females 8 are simply getting the facts wrong. Admittedly the original press release said that for instance 'males reported 12 partners', but this quickly became 'on average men have had 12 partners.' However, what they really should be reporting is that people don't tell the truth about the number of partners they have and because of this, these numbers are useless, except as a study of the psychology of lying.

Why psi research and ghost hunting will always struggle as science

I've always been interested in the possibilities of psychic phenomena and ghosts - as a teenager, the books about the Borley Rectory hauntings were amongst my favourite reading material, and it was part of the reason I wrote Extra Sensory. There are, without doubt, those amongst the community investigating these phenomena who take a genuinely scientific approach. But it has struck me recently, while reading a book by a scientist on the effects of the moon on living creatures, that in this kind of field it will always be an uphill struggle to take a scientific view.

Here's why. Let's take the example of physics researchers attempting to detect gravitational waves. These ripples in spacetime are predicted by the general theory of relativity, but have never been directly detected. A couple of experiments have recently failed to detect these waves, in one case (BICEP2) rather dramatically, after first claiming that they had been found. But here's the thing. In physics, the null hypothesis is usually just as interesting as finding what theory predicted. If you can show that it's highly likely that gravitational waves don't exist, it's arguably even better than finding them. Yes, finding them would support the current best theory - but if you can show they don't exist you have found a hole in a major theory and have cause for celebration.

However, most reseachers in psi and ghost hunting (and for that matter in medicine, though that's a different story) have a particular outcome they want to support. They want, for instance, ghosts to exist. And finding nothing is not an exciting alternative. It's an unwanted outcome. So although some investigators will be truly scientific and publish a null result, many will put the negative outcome to one side and will only ever report an apparent positive finding. Cherry picking of results becomes endemic - because the null hypothesis 'there are no ghosts' or whatever, means that what you've been doing is pretty much a waste of time, apart from highlighting some oddities of human psychology.

So I think we should have some sympathy with anyone trying to be sceptical and scientific in these kinds of fields. They face a challenge that scientists working in more core disciplines rarely have to encounter.

The evils of science exaggeration

From the paper mentioned belowOn the whole, science journalism is reasonably good in the UK and the US. But if there is one really bad habit that science journalists have, it is removing qualifiers to turn a weak statement into a strong one. Even highly respectable sources like New Scientist have a habit of doing this with headlines, so you'll see a splash across the front cover saying something like 'Black Holes Don't Exist.' When you read the article, it is describing an alternative theory that may or may not explain some or all of the phenomena we believe may be caused by black holes, but as yet has little theoretical or observational support.

That was an imaginary example, but here are two real ones. In the last week or so we have been bombarded with articles with headlines like 'Astronomers find alien megastructure', where in reality they have found evidence for a group of smaller objects in orbit around a star, which could have many natural explanations. Yes, in principle it could also be caused by a vast structure - but this is extremely unlikely. 
Even worse, a few years ago we saw the headlines 'Star Wars lightsabers finally invented,' and 'Scientists Finally Invent Real, Working Lightsabers.' I love that 'finally' - I mean, come on, scientists, get your act together, George Lucas had them nearly 40 years ago. Those are both actual headlines. But, no, scientists did not invent 'real, working lightsabers'. What they did was produce a genuinely interesting effect where two photons briefly linked together. That was it. (Admittedly in this case, a scientist involved rather foolishly used the 'lightsaber' word in a press release and started it all.)
This kind of vastly over-inflated headline to draw the reader in seems self-defeating. The result is that after a few disappointments you don't trust the headlines. You know you are going to be a let down. But at least in many cases the body text of the article makes it clear that the headline was over-the-top. However sometimes the problem extends right through the text, and that's where the reporting is not just a matter of an exaggerated title but of irresponsible representation of the facts.
The piece that started me on this was one dating back to 2013, dramatically titled Physicists create world's first multiverse of universes in the lab . Being used to eye-catching headlines, I assumed that the statement would be an exaggeration. For instance, maybe they constructed a multiverse model in a computer program - which isn't really 'in the lab'. But, no, this was a physical experiment involving a metamaterial, an electromagnet and polarised light. And throughout the article it was clear that this was the real thing. The researchers, we are told, 'created multiple universes.' Wow, and furthermore, phew! As the article says, and who can argue, 'this is the first ever time that new universes have been created in a laboratory setting.'
I naturally wanted to find out more, and the article helpfully gives you a link to the paper. There I was confronted with this in the abstract: 'Extraordinary light rays propagating inside a hyperbolic metamaterial look similar to particle world lines' and 'thermal fluctuations in a ferrofluid look similar to creation and disappearance of individual Minkowski spacetimes (universes) in the cosmological multiverse.' Don't worry if you aren't familiar with all the terminology used here. The key words here are perfectly everyday English: 'look similar to.'
Now, I'm sorry, but those are very important words, which are simply not given the weight they should have in the article that caught my eye in the first place. After all, I've seen pictures of a cat on Facebook that looks similar to Hitler. But it would be a bit of a stretch to write an article saying 'cat owner discovers Hitler in her front room.' This is a slightly exaggerated illustration, I admit, but there is a world (nay, a multiverse) of difference between something 'looking similar' to something else and something being something else.
You might think I have no room to complain because the article did include a link to the paper, so anyone could do what I did and check the details - and that's great. I applaud that opportunity. But the vast majority of people won't do that. And so another science myth gets perpetrated. Those in the science community often bemoan the lack of understanding of science in the general public - but as long as we continue with this kind of exaggeration, then science writers and other journalists who pick up on science-based stories (and, yes, scientists and PR officers who misrepresent stories in press releases) need to shoulder a fair amount of the blame.