Brian Clegg's Blog, page 86

Spin the Moon

I get lots of emails and comments on my Facebook page and Twitter about my books, most of them very positive. But occasionally people do email me to point out an error.
And sometimes I have to hold my hand up and say 'Oops, I made a mistake.' Because I'm human, and it's easily done. Even on something absolutely fundamental. I have (briefly) forgotten the name of a close friend when introducing them to someone else, so it's not shocking I may occasionally have a mental blip on some obscure bit of physics.

However, personally, if I was going to email someone to point out a mistake, I would do so apologetically and appreciating how easy it is to make a mistake. So it was a double blow when I got an email not just pointing out an error, but doing so decidedly aggressively. Headed Glaring Bit of Misinformation! the email read:

Dear Sir,
Began reading your latest book, “Final Frontier”, but had to quit after reading page #65, when it became obvious that you really have no clue as to what you are talking about.
You are discussing the construction of a paternoster-type space elevator on the Moon, when you state “The mechanism would be designed to swing at just the right speed to match THE ROTATION OF THE MOON”.  Unless I have been lied to by every book on planetary physics that I have ever read, the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, AND HAS NO ROTATION. Perhaps you somehow missed that small bit of information?
As I said, I stopped reading the book at that point, and will probably avoid your works in the future.

Now there's three reasons I wouldn't have done this. One is I respect anyone who gets a book published, and I wouldn't be so rude to them, even if I did think they had made a mistake. Secondly I wouldn't have made such blatant use of capital letters. But most importantly, I wouldn't have done this because, unfortunately, the writer was wrong. I had not made a mistake, he had.

To be fair, it's an easy mistake to make (which is why it's best not to be so hard on poor authors who slip up). The Moon is, indeed, tidally locked to the Earth - and that gives a mental image of it being fixed in position. But what this means is that the Moon's speed of rotation is just right to keep the same face pointing towards the Earth as it orbits. It's not that it doesn't rotate, just that it rotates at a particular, 'locked' speed. (Technically it's not so much locked as self-correcting.)

The Moon doesn't rotate very quickly - but that's not a bad thing. At the equator, the Moon's rotational velocity is about 4.5 metres/second. To put that into context, world class athletes run 100 metres in just under 10 seconds, or 10 metres per second, so at a little under half this, the Moon's equatorial surface is rotating at a jogging pace.

My message, then, is don't expect perfection from a science writer - but it pays to be polite when pointing out errors for many reasons.

Black and white politics

When I was young, I believe a lot of people went to the Saturday morning pictures (cinema) and amongst other things, they would watch cowboy adventures in which it was very easy to tell who were the bad guys and who were the good, because the bad guys wore black hats, and the good white. When I grew up I soon realised life was more complicated. It helped, I think, that I went into the sciences, because the message there is usually 'It's more complicated than you thought', a message that sadly doesn't seem to have spread to many people's politics.

I'd say the majority of my friends on Facebook are left wing politically (I will discuss my own POV at the end), which is fine, but what does irritate me it that they have the tendency to repost political propaganda that suffers wildly from the black hat/white syndrome. The other day, I had cause to raise both eyebrows when confronted with this piece of work, apparently from leftunity.org.

For me, this is the worst kind of black hat/white hat politics, because there is a serious point, worth considering behind the illogical rhetoric - but it is so covered up by that rhetoric that for anyone who doesn't have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the message, it is counterproductive.

Why don't I like it? To start with, the statements on the poster (or whatever you call these e-snippets) are blatantly untrue. There is money for schools - c £98 billion, and there is money for the health service (I'm taking "hospitals" to be a one-word version of "the health service") - c £133 billion. That's rather a lot of money, actually - so it's hard to imagine why anyone would say 'there's no money'. Is there money for war? Yes, there is money for that too - currently around £33 billion of military spending, though a fair amount of this isn't strictly 'for war'. So the statements themselves are almost meaningless, and mostly untrue.

However, I'm told I'm being too literal (allegedly a failing of the scientific education, though why would you want not to be literal about political information unless your intention is to mislead people)? What this really means is that we can't find more money, on top of the budget, for schools and hospitals, but we can for war. If this were true, it would be worth of serious comment - but I haven't seen any evidence that the fact we might do some bombing raids on the disgusting and despicable ISIS, which is what triggered this campaign, is going to mean we need extra money for the defence budget. So, again, the comparison appears to be an attempt to mislead or confused.

When I pointed this out, the person who posted it responded by saying 'I've lost my inflationary pay rise and my increment because there's "no money". Money for cruise missiles at £1.5 million apiece, though.' While I sympathise to some extent (while pointing out that, as someone who is self-employed, I current earn almost exactly the same as I did when I left BA 20 years ago, with no 'inflationary pay rise' over 20 years), again it's a false comparison. You can argue that the budget was wrong, and we should have had more for his/her pay and less for defence (unless he/she happened to work in defence). You can argue, as I probably would, that we could save a lot by getting rid of Trident. But that's not what this campaign is saying.

The reason I think this kind of thing is a real shot in the foot comes back to my own political affiliations. I am a floating voter. I have voted for all three main political parties in my time, though by default I am probably a liberal democrat (cousin Nick insists). But there's a real lesson from that one time I voted Tory. I come from a naturally Labour voting background - from a North West, working class family that read the Manchester Guardian until it did the dirty and moved down south. I wouldn't have thought of voting Tory. But when I had my first chance to vote, while at university, I got so fed up of the way my left wing friends distorted the facts in exactly this kind of way that I voted Tory in rebellion.

So, by all means make your point about everything the other parties do wrong. But do it honestly and fairly, without ad hominem attacks, and without using meaningless propaganda. Then I will listen with interest. But do this kind of thing and it will instantly make me bolshie and inclined to do the opposite.

Only £33? I pay you?

Phonetastic, pop pickers!The other day I was walking past a bus stop and paused to admire an advert for the new Amazon smartphone. I was told that I could get it for only £33 pounds a month on O2. (Actually, as was the case initially with the iPhone, you can only get it on O2.)

Whoa, I thought. That's more than I pay for a real smartphone. Now I now that's a bit unfair as this is a fully featured Android phone, and I don't want to start the old iPhone/Android rivalry (though, of course, iPhones are better), but my point was this. Yes, the Amazon Fire phone is a nice smartphone with a couple of unique but hardly showstopping features. Set against which it has some limitations that make it anything but one of the best Android options. But the point is that this is a phone that, like it or not, has very strong ties to one retailer (a retailer that wants to rule the world). Which gives said retailer huge benefits by having a direct link to my pocket and activities. So, really, should I have to pay as much or more than I do for an ordinary smartphone?

Usually if you get something tied to a particular brand you expect it to be cheap - or even for them to pay you to use it. Surely Amazon has got this back to front. If Amazon paid me to use their phone, I could understand it. But as they expect me to pay a premium, I'm afraid I'll be staying well away. (And did I mention, it's not an iPhone?)

Does Nigel Lawson's defeat mean that religions should lose charitable status?

I was interested to see that Nigel Lawson's anti-science Global Warming Policy Foundation has been rapped on the knuckles by the Charity Commission for not meeting the requirement for an educational charity to be unbiassed (and, by implication, evidence based). I presume the same requirements don't apply to religious charities, as surely they would be in trouble too.

Some while ago I wrote a post about a visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses and how their leaflet inspired me to realise that it is difficult to apply the Bible to everyday 'big questions' like 'What should we do about terrorists?' because the advice is so conflicting that it is possible to come up with pretty well diametrically opposed recommendations.

Shortly after writing this I had a bit of an epiphany*. I've always struggled to understand how climate change deniers can come up with such a strangely selective view that went against the majority scientific consensus - but now it was obvious. They don't use a scientific approach, they use a religious one.

The scientific approach is to use the theory best supported by experts in the field given the current evidence, until new evidence suggests we should do otherwise. There is always some contradictory evidence, and often one or two experts who disagree with the majority, but it is clearly not providing a good scientific view to take an alternative theory as 'fact' when it overwhelming countered by the best supported theory - the scientific consensus, as it is often called in climate change. So, for instance, most cosmologists support the Big Bang theory. Not all of them - and it could eventually prove wrong. But for the moment it is the theory that is best supported by the evidence, and so deserves the status of being the theory we currently work with.

However, those using a religious argument have a different approach. Because a source like the Bible or the Koran has so many different and contradictory concepts and interpretations, it is possible to support pretty well any thesis using religious argument. All you do is pick and choose the quotations from the Bible etc. that support your view and ignore the rest. And that's exactly what climate change deniers do. (As do those who think science is unfairly against alternative medicine, or ghosts or whatever.) They pick and choose the evidence that fits their worldview.

This is totally unscientific - but it is inevitably how arguments based on religious documents work. This isn't science, it's religion. And those who talk this way about climate change (or any other application of science) are entirely missing the point when they use this approach.

So we can see why it is that the GWPF will inevitably struggle to meet that 'unbiassed' requirement for an education charity. But, as I say, should we also be asking the Charity Commissioners to ensure that religious institutions given charitable status (think of the arguments over whether Scientology should be given charitable status) are equally required to be unbiassed or to lose that benefit? It's an intriguing thought.

* Yes, I do know what I've done there.

The Dispossessed - Review

I ought to hate this book. I was writing something about instantaneous transmitters and wanted to include Ursula Le Guin's ansible. I had read somewhere that its development and how it worked was explained in this book. It turns out it gets two mentions, each all of two lines long in 319 pages. But I don't care - because it's a great book.

I confess, I've never really read Le Guin apart from a not particularly enthusiastic attempt at The Left Hand of Darkness. The science fiction I largely read when I was younger was from the 1950s greats and the 1960s new wave, and while I read their later work too, and have started picking up on some newer writers, there's a big gap in my experience, including pretty well everything Le Guin wrote.

The book does have some science going on - the main character is a physicist developing a theory on time (hence the ansible cropping up), which seems mainly to be based on the block universe - but it's not really what the novel is about. It's far more an exploration of political systems. Our hero, Shevek, lives on the desolate Anarres, where humans can live, but are always fighting for survival. But he begins to find out more about and even to correspond with the twin planet Urras, which is lush and beautiful, eventually breaking with tradition and visiting it.

The drama comes from the juxtaposition of very different political systems. The main country on Urras is decadent capitalist, though the planet also has a Soviet-style communist country. Anarres is anarchist communist - not only is there genuinely no personal property, there are no laws, no rules.

Cleverly, in making the contrast between Anarres and Urras, Le Guin brings out the faults in both systems. It might seem at first that, despite the hardships, the anarchist Anarres is a paradise, because Le Guin manages to come up with a structure that would allow anarchy to work practically as a regime - no mean feat - but in reality humanity likes rules, and they are actually there, concealed and unspoken, until Shevek begins to break them.

It's absolutely not my kind of science fiction, and yet I found it both fascinating and enjoyable. I just wish I also now knew more about ansibles.

You can get The Dispossessed from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (why no Kindle version, btw - it should have one to bring it to a new audience.)

Who is in the running for the Nobels?

For the outside world, exactly who wins Nobel Prizes in the science is fairly academic (geddit?) - and even for those with a professional interest it may sometimes seem that the reason for the awards can be sliced pretty thin these days. The early prizes do seem often to have been for more 'big' work than the more subtle modern ones. But having said that, we also always get some goodies.

I didn't realize it until they sent me a press release, but Thomson Reuters do an annual prediction of the likely runners and riders - useful in case you fancy a flutter. So here are this years' favourites according to TR. On the physics side, I rather fancy the Quantum Spin Hall effect, but that's just me...

P.S. I don't know why Economics is treated as a science either.

PHYSIOLOGY or MEDICINEJames E. Darnell, Jr.Vincent Astor Professor Emeritus, Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, Rockefeller University
New York, NY USA
-and-
Robert G. RoederArnold and Mabel Beckman Professor, Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Rockefeller University
New York, NY USA
-and-
Robert TjianProfessor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California Berkeley, and President, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Berkeley, CA, and Chevy Chase, MD USA
For fundamental discoveries concerning eukaryotic transcription and gene regulationDavid JuliusMorris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine,
Professor and Chair of Physiology, University of California San Francisco
San Francisco, CA USA
For elucidating molecular mechanisms of pain sensationCharles LeeProfessor and Scientific Director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine
Farmington, CT USA -and- Stephen W. SchererSenior Scientist and Director, The Centre for Applied Genomics, The Hospital for Sick Children, Professor and Director, McLaughlin Centre, University of Toronto
Toronto ON CANADA -and- Michael H. WiglerProfessor and Head, Mammalian Cell Genetics Section, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, NY USAFor their discovery of large-scale copy number variation and its association with specific diseases

PHYSICSCharles L. Kane
Class of 1965 Endowed Term Chair Professor of Physics, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA USA -and- Laurens W. Molenkamp
Professor of Physics and Chair of Experimental Physics, University of Würzburg
Würzburg, GERMANY -and- Shoucheng ZhangJ.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics, Stanford University
Stanford, CA USA
For theoretical and experimental research on the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators James F. Scott Director of Research, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
-and- Ramamoorthy Ramesh Professor, Physics and MSE, and Associate Lab Director for Energy Technologies, University of California BerkeleyBerkeley, CA USA
-and-
Yoshinori Tokura* Director, RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, andProfessor, Department of Applied Physics, The University of TokyoSaitama and Tokyo, JAPAN
For their pioneering research on ferroelectric memory devices (Scott) and new multiferroic materials (Ramesh and Tokura). *Tokura was previously named a Citation Laureate in 2002.Peidong YangS. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair in Energy, Department of Chemistry,  Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute, and Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA USA
For his contributions to nanowire photonics including the creation of first nanowire nanolaser
CHEMISTRYCharles T. Kresge
Chief Technology Officer, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran
SAUDI ARABIA
-and- Ryong RyooDirector, Center for Nanomaterials and Chemical Reactions, Institute for Basic Science and Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Daejeon, SOUTH KOREA
-and- Galen D. StuckyE. Khashoggi Industries, LLC Professor in Letters and Science, University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA USA
For design of functional mesoporous materialsGraeme MoadChief Research Scientist, CSIRO
Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA
-and- Ezio RizzardoCSIRO Fellow, CSIRO
Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA
-and-
San H. ThangChief Research Scientist, CSIRO
Clayton, Victoria, AUSTRALIA
For development of the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization process Ching W. Tang Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bank of East Asia Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Rochester, and Chair Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Rochester, NY USA and Hong Kong, CHINA -and- Steven Van Slyke Chief Technology Officer, Kateeva
Menlo Park, CA USAFor their invention of the organic light emitting diode
ECONOMIC SCIENCESPhilippe M. Aghion
Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA USA
-and- Peter W. HowittLyn Crost Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Economics, Brown University
Providence, RI USA
For contributions to Schumpeterian growth theoryWilliam J. BaumolProfessor of Economics and Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship, New York University
New York, NY USA
-and- Israel M. KirznerEmeritus Professor of Economics, New York University
New York, NY USA
For their advancement of the study of entrepreneurismMark S. GranovetterJoan Butler Ford Professor and Chair of Sociology, and Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University
Stanford, CA USA
For his pioneering research in economic sociology
 "Nobel Prize". Via Wikipedia

Google walks

Start of the journey - BBC Wiltshire receptionYesterday I made my regular appearance on BBC Wiltshire, but I was without a car, so experienced the joys of a bus in, and decided to walk back, a distance of just over four miles. What made it different, and really rather fun, was I did it with a walking sat nav.

It's not the first time I've used GPS on a phone for guidance while walking - in fact I've done it when finding my way across cities on foot for years - but what I've always done before is kept my phone in my hands, glancing at the map to see where I should go. This time, I plugged in a pair of earbuds, stuck the phone in my pocket and let the software do the talking. And it worked brilliantly.

Ms Google starts me offOne essential before getting started on this was to use Google Maps. More often than not I use Apple's mapping app - after its initial teething problems it works fine for most uses, including my strolls around cities. But for the kind of journey I was about to do it has a fatal flaw. It doesn't know about footpaths (certainly not footpaths in Swindon). Google does - and it makes a real difference to the walk.

So off I set with the slightly whiny, but assertive American woman telling me what to do in my ears. It was strangely intimate. When a car sat nav tells you what to do, it is clearly coming from that piece of kit on the dashboard, but when a voice in your ears tells you to turn left onto Regent Street, there really is quite a strong urge to respond and make it a conversation.

As always when I take these mid-range walks across Swindon it's a delight that's rather similar to the experience of travelling on a narrowboat on one of the UK's canals. There's that same mix of passing close by everything from industrial architecture to open fields at a pace where you can really look around and observe things, seeing the world from an angle you don't usually get to experience.

Ms Google did the job perfectly, though I did find it a little unnerving, only following voice commands. Three times I gave in and got the phone out to check the map (especially when she appeared to be directing me to cross the road and walk up a set of steps, as indeed she was), but each time what I thought she meant was correct. She even got a little cheeky.


Occasionally she would make apparently reassuring comments that were clearly intended to wind me up, as they would only be of use to a scout. I would be powering up a steep sloping bend and she would suddenly say 'Head north west.' Now, bearing in mind the phone was in my pocket, unless I had a compass in hand, or had one of those pairs of shoes (Wayfinders) with a compass in the heel I always wanted as a kid, but wasn't allowed because my mum (rightly) said the compass would be rubbish, this information was totally without value. Still, it broke the awkward silences.

All in all, a real success. I think Ms Google will be my companion on many more trips to come...

What's the best science-related quote?

I enjoy wheeling out the odd science-related quote, and would be interested to collect more. To be really great, I think a quote like this needs to be pithy, funny... and make you think. Do you have a favourite? (Please ensure they are from a reliable source.)

It's hard to go wrong with Rutherford's famous:

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Which is particularly useful to wind up biologists. I am also rather fond of Konrad Lorenz's advice, which rather a lot of scientists could do to consider:

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.

But the one I'll leave you with this morning, which I shall dedicate to cosmologists and string theorists, is:

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Science facts and black holes

Chandra image of the black hole (or not)
at the centre of spiral galaxy M81As any regular readers will know, I have a habit of banging on about the nature of science - that it isn't about establishing the 'truth' about reality, but rather about developing models that produce as close as possible results to what is observed, and that these models are inevitably provisional and could always be thrown out as new data becomes available.

This not saying 'anything goes' or 'all theories have equal value.' We will typically have a best theory of the moment, and the only sensible thing is to use that until something is established to have better credibility. But it does mean we shouldn't treat our models as certainties.

Sometimes when the model suffers a defeat it is patched up - as in the introduction of inflation to the big bang model. This isn't always a good thing as it can lead to epicycles - effectively taking a bad model and making it more and more complex and obscure to match observation. Other times the old model is genuinely thrown away.

Different areas of science have to be more or less loose with the models they accept. Cosmology, for instance, suffers hugely from the fact you can't do experiments in the lab and there is no opportunity for repetition. Inevitably, then, cosmological models are particularly at risk of revision or rejection as new data emerges. This is why I have always been very uncomfortable with saying that the universe began with* the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, something you will generally hear stated as fact by pretty well anyone doing science presentation on TV. (Naming no names.) I understand why they do this - there is a huge temptation to over-simply under media pressure. I've done it myself. But what they really should say at least once is 'when I say this happened, please take this as having an unsaid proviso "this is our best current theory, but it may well change in the future."'

A recent paper suggests that one of the keystones of modern cosmology, black holes, don't exist. There have been mutterings about black holes in the past, but this a mathematical proof that they can't form. The paper hasn't been peer reviewed yet, so there's a big proviso to this, but it's entirely possible it's true. If so, in some ways it's a relief. We would still have near black holes, doing all the things currently ascribed to black holes by astrophysicists and cosmologists. We would still have spaghettification. But we wouldn't have all the uncomfortable weirdness and breakdown of theory provided by the event horizon and the singularity.

However, my point here isn't so much the implications of the proof, if true. Rather it's that here again is something that we all knew was speculative, but have spoken about far too often and too long as if we were dealing with fact. It's time scientists and science presenters were rather more, erm, scientific about the way they presented what we know - and don't know.

* Technically just before (this is inserted to keep John Gribbin happy)

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Wisconsin/D.Pooley & CfA/A.Zezas; Optical: NASA/ESA/CfA/A.Zezas; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J.Huchra et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA

What to do with a fish kettle

I am always interested in books about autism, in part because like most people with a scientific background,  I share some traits with those on the spectrum. I've previously reviewed, for instance Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference , and most fascinatingly, if rather hard work, Richard Maguire's I Dream in Autism . So it was with real interest I agreed to take a look at a copy of Michael Barton's A Different Kettle of Fish, in which he, a physics student with high functioning autism, describes what it's like to take a trip into London.

My first opinion was that it is a very slim book at just 80 pages of large, well-spaced print, which for £10 seems a little skimpy. Nonetheless I would recommend it to get some insights into a different way of looking at the world. Our biggest difficulty in sharing the world with people on the autistic spectrum is understanding why and how they see and feel things differently. It is partly about the way we so often say things we don't really mean, and partly in the sensory overload they can feel with the need to process everything that most of us ignore or don't notice in the first place.

One thing that did irritate me slightly was the constant mention of strange sounding euphemisms and idioms. Time and again, Barton tells us he doesn't get what is being said, because it sounds weird. But we all think this the first time we hear such an expression, then we assign a meaning to it, just like any other vocabulary. 'Sausage' sounds weird if you don't know what it means. It would really have helped if Barton could have explained why someone with autism can't learn what a euphemism codes for and assign a meaning to it. Unpacking the experience and explaining would have meant so much more than coming up with more and more examples with no context. Later in the book he does admit to learning them most of the time, but notes he has to learn them first, where most people seem to pick them up naturally - I'm not sure this is true. I think we all think 'What???" the first time we hear about a red herring, say. What is more interesting and informative is his failure to understand indirect requests like 'Can you pass the salt?' (Response: 'Yes.')

I was also slightly suspicious that the author was trying to find 'funny' meanings in announcements to the extent that he at least once created one. I can absolutely understand being amused by an announcement saying 'This is an announcement,' or a sign saying 'Dogs must be carried' - plenty of people who aren't on the autistic spectrum laugh at this kind of thing too. You regularly see them on Facebook and the like. But when Barton tells us a tube announcement says 'Please let other people off the train first,' with its implication that no one will make the first move, it smacks of constructed humour - because the actual announcement is 'Let customers off the train first, please.' (You can even hear it by clicking the play button at the top of the post.) The exact wording, by not having that 'other', and the fact that the announcement is on the platform speakers, not the train speakers, makes it much clearer that this is addressed to people who aren't on the train. The announcement makes perfect sense.

Overall, the book is still quite a good way to get the message across to some who aren't aware of people on the autistic spectrum. The bumf says the book is aimed at everyone from children aged 8 plus to adults, but I think it would be best confined to the 8-12 range (in which case, the pricing should be seriously reduced).

You can find out more about the book, or purchase it, at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.