illuminating science

That’s right - today I turn “four factorial” = 24 years old! (That was Brett’s observation - I think the uninteresting number paradox applies here…and that’s a real proof, too!)

Fingers crossed for my private jet or giant laser, but failing that some new kitchen gear! (I love cooking, and I’ve recently been getting into having good knives and so forth - makes cooking even more fun!) And my wonderful partner is currently making me a fantastic present (yep, I’m in on the secret!) which I’ll post photos of when it’s finished - it’s soooort of related to physics!

Brett has a follow up to my recent post on my experiences at the “What the bleep!?” panel session. It’s an interesting discussion about how people handle criticism they don’t want to receive, and how effective debates about this sort of thing really are.

The University of Queensland, where I study, holds a giant book fair every two years, run by the Alumni (the association of past graduates). They fill a giant hall with books in pretty much every conceivable subject, from quantum physics to croquet, from sci-fi to classical music scores. The best thing (for me, anyway!) is that they get rid of old library books, including text books and other relevant stuff! Everything is incredibly cheap too (e.g., textbooks $3-$4, fiction $1-$3) and usually in quite good condition. So, inevitably, there’s a queue up at least an hour beforehand, full of die hard book buyers with trolleys, backpacks, rations, portable chairs, etc…Once the doors open, it’s a bit like the Christmas sales, everyone running for the table they particularly want, and grabbing what they hope the best bargains are!

This year, I got there about 30 minutes early, and staked my claim near the front of the line. I had my battle plan all set out - straight to the physics table! Last time, a couple of people picked up really good physics books, and I was hoping that I might score this year! I also happened to know there were no physicists I knew ahead of me in the queue. (Yes, I know I’m making this out to be very serious, but it’s not - it’s quite good fun, actually!)

So the doors opened, and in we go. A couple of people were already at the science table, but more interested in the engineering stuff. I was scanning down the books, looking for something worthwhile or interesting - I picked up a book on special relativity, a book on optics by Young, and a John Gribbin popular science book. (All this took about 38 seconds…) Just as I was ready to swap sides of the table, my eyes settled on a set of old books tied together, and I lunged! It was my catch of the day - a complete set of the Feynman Lectures of Physics! These are a very famous set of “introductory” lectures notes written by Feynman, an equally famous physicist. Although they’re probably not the ideal text book for a first year course, once you know some physics they’re a great way to really appreciate and understand on a deeper level what you know. That said, they’re based on the course that Feynman taught to undergrads over two years, so they’re probably pretty decent. Anyway, they’re high on most physicist’s library lists, and typically cost about US$100 (A$130) - I got them for $6! Whee!

Other nice physics books included a couple of textbooks by Kittel (a big name in the “condensed matter” field, dealing with crystals, thermodynamics, etc) and the The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating history of codes and cryptography from ancient to modern times. Other good finds were a variety of science fiction, especially Asimov, that I’ve been after, and a series by Stephen Donaldson which will probably be rather depressing to read (he’s horrible to his characters - loves tormenting them!), but good nonetheless.

All in all, I spent about $100, but got nearly three boxes of books, so I think I did okay! Should tide me over until 2007…

After watching What the bleep?! the other day, I’ve been thinking about something that they said in the movie, i.e., that quantum mechanics is “utterly astounding” or “magical”. They really pushed the connection that because quantum mechanics is mystical, and mysticism is, well, mystical, that the two must be related. That quantum mechanics is astounding is probably up to personal opinion (and how long you’ve been studying it!) but should it be considered magical or mystical? I would argue that quantum mechanics is just unintuitive and unfamiliar, and that once you’ve learned about it and understand it a bit more it’s not magical. It’s a little hard to exactly put into words what I’m saying here, and were it not for the recurring nightmares I should probably see the movie again, but I hope you get the gist.

What makes QM seem mystical? Things like quantum tunneling (the ability to pass through barriers), superpositions (being in two places at once) or entanglement (”spooky action at a distance”, where the state (or fate) of two objects becomes linked, no matter how far apart they are). These are all strange and bizarre, no doubt, and are literally straight out of the pages of science fiction. Yet physicists claim that these are the underlying laws of the universe - something that many people have a hard time believing.

I think the point is, though, that these effects aren’t “weird” or “mystical” - they’re just unfamiliar since they don’t apply to world on the scale where we usually interact. There are other laws of physics that we take for granted, even though they predict equally astounding things - take gravity for example. Imagine that you’d lived your whole life on a space ship in deep space, far away from any stars or planets. Your whole life has been in zero-G, and you’ve never even heard of gravity. Then, one day, your captain brings you news of this strange theory of gravity which says “every object attracts every other object”. This seems pretty strange and unlikely - after all, objects don’t clump together as it floats around the ship, and nor do you stick to the walls. And why should you? Why should objects attract at all? It would probably sound intuitive, and probably flat out wrong. But if you studied the theory close enough, you’d realise that it just never mattered to you before because you’d never been near anything big enough or worked with anything small enough. If, however, you could go and visit a planet, or carried out some simple but subtle experiments, you’d find that the theory of gravity explains everything very nicely, and you’d probably come to accept it.

Similarly, quantum mechanics makes predictions which are very hard to understand in terms of what we’re used to. But a few simple experiments give you a tantalising hint of the truth, and eventually quantum mechanics becomes, if not intuitive, then at least acceptable. I’ve been at it for a mere six years or so, so I can’t claim to understand quantum mechanics, but things like tunnelling or wave-particle duality don’t freak me out anymore. And I think a part of it, too, is that science shows and books love to make a big thing about how strange quantum mechanics is (”it’s both a particle and a wave! Oooooh!”).

So I’m not sure what the real aim of this meander was - I guess just to point out that the predictions of quantum mechanics aren’t really as bizarre as they’re often made out to be. They’re different, unfamiliar and at times counter-intuitive, but there’s nothing magical about it!

So, at long last, here’s my summary of the “What the bleep do we know?!” panel session last week. The deal was that in exchange for pizza from the world famous (okay, I made that up) Pizza Caffe, I would be part of a question and answer session after the Sunday session. For the record, I agreed to this before I saw the movie, but I would still have done it - I felt I owed it to the public to debunk some of these myths!

So, on the panel was Chris, who’d studied theology and had some really interesting things to say, as I’ll mention. There was me, the token physicist, and then there were two others from SLAM, the “Spirituality, Leadership and Management” network. One of them, who I’ll call Deidri, claimed to have previously undergone a “quantum experience” much like Amanda, the main character from the movie. The other was, I think, involved in counselling (through SLAM).

We all got to introduce ourselves The first question from the audience was directed at me, asking about my opinion on the physics in the brain portrayed in the movie. I was a bit flustered, partially from nerves, and partially because the movie didn’t talk about any physics in the brain, just biology. So I didn’t give a particularly good answer, instead commenting on minor things which I knew they’d got incorrect. As I spoke, I realised that eyes were narrowing all around the room and the penny dropped - this was not a statistically normal audience! In fact, nearly everyone there (if not all) were staunch believers in the movie. Uh oh. Guess who’s already on the back foot.

So, I shut up for a little bit, and let other have their say and tried to get a feel for the crowd. At one point, one woman from the audience started talking about how important it was that they take the messages from this movie and make them part of our schools, our government, our policies, etc, etc. I refrained from screaming, and the finger nail punctures on my palms are healing quite well, thank you. I interjected a few small things along the way, putting in the physicist’s perspective.

Finally, they got onto the subject of creating reality (ala the quantum mechanical idea of “collapsing” the wave function, and changing the state of the world by observations). One guy from the audience confirmed that he wholeheartedly believed that man could walk on water if everyone believed strongly enough [Sexism is verbatim!]. My silent was response was that if more people believed they could walk on water, population growth would become a thing of the past.

The clincher came when Deidre said that women who go for mammograms, and the doctors examining them, are looking for cancer cells - and so what do they find? Cancer cells. The implication of this being, we create the cancer cells because we’re looking for them. At this point, I was openly shaking my head with a horrified look on my face, as were others around the room (thank goodness!). I’m willing to consider (or tolerate…) all sorts of mystical mumbo jumbo, but when you started advising people not to have cancer screenings, that’s just plain dangerous and loony. And this is the sort of thing they want to be national policy?!

Fortunately, at this point Chris (the theologian) stepped in, and said, although more eloquently, something along the lines of “Positive thinking is very important, but I don’t think it’s enough. We need to take action as well - like supporting Oxfam, Community Aid Abroad.” He recommended using the movie as motivation to think more about the state of the world and fellow humans, and from there set out to improve things. I thought that was an excellent point, and the most sensible thing I heard all night. Positive thinking might enable us to take action, but it doesn’t do anything by itself!

He also said he wasn’t really qualified to talk about quantum mechanics, which was the opening I needed. Before Deidre could get the microphone, I said:

“I just wanted to clarify something here. I’m not saying anything about the spiritual messages in the movie - I’m not qualified to say they’re right or wrong, and I actually think there were some very interesting discussions there. But what I can tell you is that quantum mechanics isn’t ready to explain those things. At best, it can say the movie wasn’t absolutely impossible.

The big problem is that you’re borrowing words from quantum mechanics like “quantum field”, “measurement” and “the observer”, which have very specific meanings, and trying to them in a “loose” way. Talking about “antigravity magnets” and “zero point energy” and “bio-body suits” - all these terms mean very specific things to a physicist, and they don’t make sense in this context - a physicist will just laugh! What we’ve really got is a communication problem, and we need both sides to learn to understand and appreciate the language of the other, so that we can explore things like the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness, and get some useful dialogues going.”

I was gratified to see people nodding and appreciating what I’d said - this was a point I thought to be very important, and had planned to say before I came, so hopefully, they’ll think at least a little about the truth or otherwise of the movie’s physics. I also had a chance to speak about scientific process - mainly that the “experts” in the movie are very much in the minority, and the idea that emotions can change the type of crystals that water forms. In these experiments, things like “I love you” or “I hate you” are written on test tubes of water, which are frozen and examined under a high powered microscope. Sure enough, the nice messages produce nice crystals, and the nasty message produce horrid ones. While it’s possible that this is a real effect, far more likely is that the experimenters were looking for a certain type of crystal, and found what they sought - it’s called selection bias, and can only be solved with a blind test, where the researcher doesn’t know what’s on each tube (which wasn’t done).

One guy from the audience stood up and said “I agree with you, Joel. The water doesn’t care about our emotions!” I’m ecstatic at this point - I got through to someone! Then he continued: “Water is wonderful in that it doesn’t “judge” us. Water is passive and timeless, and it can’t feel the positive or negative aspects of our emotions - only we decide what’s good and bad.” And so on.

In the end, I don’t think I had a significant impact on most people - everyone knew what they wanted to believe, and weren’t going to be swayed. In some ways, it doesn’t matter - the physics wasn’t the important part for their beliefs (if you want to trust a 35,000 year old spirit, then that’s your choice). But it’s also frustrating - I would have liked to convince them that the physics from the movie was downright wrong, but they wanted to believe it was right, that the establishment was wrong, full of pig-headed, stubborn old scientists who won’t open their mind. But I think a few people, maybe just a couple of them, heard what I was trying to say, and might think critically about the inevitable sequel. And that’s good enough for me - a night well spent.

The most telling point, however, is that they’re organising another session next Tuesday. They’re even flying over the director, and they’re bringing back the SLAM people. But guess who didn’t get an invite? Guess a negative review doesn’t sell tickets… Ah well - no-one ever said being a physicist was a glamorous job!

My review of the “What the bleep” panel is coming…I’m just a little frantic with other things at the moment! One of them is this neat little Traffic Control game. It’s pretty simple, and a little boring to start with, but it does highlight the difficulties of how you should set your traffic light settings.

It would be really interesting if you could program some of the lights automatically, and try and work out the optimal pattern. Or, better yet, if you could set up some sort of genetic algorithm or neural network, and see if it could learn what the best solution was. Of course, you’d need to decide on your most important variables then. I expect that total traffic flow (which increases during the game), cars waiting at the red light and, of course, location of the traffic light would be most important, and this is reflected in real life by sensors that detect when you’re waiting at the light. But it would also be good to include the state of lights around you as well, which is also reflected in real life by lights which are synchronised to give you a good run.

Anyway, my first-time score was 181

Check out this photographic proof!

(Who would have thought that NASA had a sense of humour?!)

Well, continuing with posting my detailed medical history on the web, I went to the optometrist this morning to have an eye checkup. It was all free (wow! Medicare (Australia’s public health system) is working right! It’s not perfect, but I have to say it beats the pants of the U.S. system.) Right up until the bit where I bought new glasses, anyway…

I have a slight astigmatism in my right eye, which basically means my eyeball isn’t perfectly spherical. I need a -2.5 dioptre lense in the horizontal direction, but an extra 0.75 in the vertical. My left eye, however, is a steady -2.5D. These measurements refer to the strength of the lens needed to correct my eye, and if you take a first year physics course you’ll learn all about them. They’re measured in “inverse metres”, which means that -2.5 diopter is “equivalent” to about 40cm (though what that physically has to do with your vision is a little more complicated.) Basically, as a short-sighter, my “far point” (furthest distance I can see) is at about 40cm or so, rather than at infinity like a normal person. My glasses shift images from infinity to about 40cm.

What I found interesting was that a person with short sightedness (e.g., me) has perfect vision up until their far point - I’d always thought my vision was always flawed, but just negligibly so up close. Of course when thinking about the physics of it, it makes sense - my lens just can’t relax enough to focus those far images, but once I get in close it works just like anyone elses. Another interesting tidbit is that I’m (supposedly) unlikely to ever need reading glasses (or at least not until I’m older than normal) as my eyes are typically more relaxed in close. (I haven’t really thought through the physics of this…)

Lenses also magnify (or diminish?) the images slightly - not much, but when you get a new pair of glasses your world looks a little strange for a few hours. Your brain adjusts pretty quickly though! A neat story the optometrist was telling me was that when he started out he tested his brother. When he asked “Which looks better, A or B?” the brother kept giving different answers. The optom thought he was being made fun of, until he realised that his brother had a major astigmatism (oval eyeballs) in both eyes! When they gave him glasses, he said that everyone looked short and fat, because the correcting lenses basically just squished everything in the vertical direction. Of course, his brain adjusted quickly, but it raises some interesting questions about perception and vision. I particularly reminded of the experiments where people where headsets that flip the world upside down - they learn to adjust within a day or two and notice nothing out of the ordinary. But when they take the headsets off, it takes them another day to adjust to normal!

Who knew a trip to the optometrist could be such fun?!

So, as you all know, last Friday I went to see “What the bleep do we know!?” I thought I’d write a review from a physicist’s perspective. That includes, but is not limited to, evaluating the physics (or otherwise) included in the movie. My review of the post-movie discussion will follow tomorrow!

So, brief synopsis: The movie follows our “hero”, Amanda, as her life is changed through a series of strange encounters, where weird “quantum effects” (apparently) intrude on her life, and a Morpheus-clone talks at length about reality and basketball. Throughout, we hear the opinions, thoughts and, occasionally, rants of various “experts” that comment on quantum mechanics, philosophy, biology and religion. These snippets are linked into the story, and are there to “explain” what Amanda is experiencing. They range from a 35,000 year old spirit from Atlantis (who is being channeled through the leader of the cult/school that the film makers hail from) to a scientist who’s “trying to learn physics” to a guy who mentally creates (yes, literally) his day every morning.

If we were purely going on cinematography, then the movie is quite impressive, especially for an independent film, with some neat special effects and computer generated graphics. The acting is good, the music appropriate, etc. But then we reach the subject matter. To be honest, the story lacks coherence (there’s a quantum joke there for the physicists among you…) The movie attempts to “open our eyes” to a world of possibilities, and convince us that we are in charge of our destiny, and by the power of positive thinking we can actually create the reality we want. There’s some interesting ideas there, but the basic messages are really just common sense - be positive, optimistic, organised and take control of your life. The movie just takes everything a little more literally, a lot of which stems, I think, from misinterpreting the language of quantum mechanics and physics in general.

Much of the movie’s philosophy comes from a boy with a passion for quantum physics and basketball, and who is almost certainly Morpheus from a Matrix beta-test. Just like in the Matrix, he talks about the nature of reality and the over-worked analogy of journeying down rabbit holes like good ol’ Alice. Is there reality independent of us, and of what we see? Or does reality only take form when our brains process what we see? If so, can we control reality by our thoughts? If you’re confused, then don’t worry - so are the movie’s “experts”.
While I’m open to all sorts of spiritual beliefs (no matter what my personal opinion of them, which in this case is that they’re a little wacky) the movie completely falls apart when they attempt to justify and even “prove” their ideas through first quantum mechanics and then biology. While they have some real physics in there (and, at times, actually explain some pretty advanced concepts quite well) the bottom line is that at best quantum mechanics might not disprove their theories, whereas they would like you to believe that their spiritual ideas have a quantitative basis in science.

Let’s take one of the central themes from the movie: humans have the capacity to create their own reality. In quantum mechanics, there’s an important principle that when we measure a system, we affect it. The idea goes is that an object (electron, atom, basket ball) can be in two or more places at once - called a “superposition”. But when we try and see where it is, it’s forced to choose where it will be: we say that the superposition collapsed into a definite state. It may seem strange, but experiment agrees brilliantly with this picture.

The movie says this shows that we can affect the reality around us, and by positive thinking we can create the reality we want. ‘Fraid not. The collapse mentioned above is non-deterministic: you can’t control which position the object collapses in to. You can make statistical guesses, which are right in the long run (like tossing heads 50% of the time) but you can’t predict, let alone control, each collapse. This is strongly backed by experiment. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be us doing the measurement - as even one of the experts points out, the “collapse” can come from interacting with a rock or a tree - should we assume they also create their own reality?!

But it gets worse - while they correctly note that atoms, and hence matter, are mostly empty space, they then liken atoms to “thoughts”, and suggest that matter is made up entirely of thoughts and our imagination! One expert claims that he firmly believes humans can walk on water if they set their mind to it. Others talk about “antigravity magnets” and “holographically imprinted chemicals”. I guarantee you, these have no basis in reality.

But, you might ask, what about all the experts on the panel? They had a dozen scientists there - surely they can’t all be wrong? Unfortunately, we have some sample bias. If you were to survey all the scientists in the world, then that dozen in movie are probably the only ones who believe it. In fact, the only dissenter interviewed was misrepresented, when in fact he disagrees that quantum mechanics and consciousness are connected. In fact, any sort of scientific method goes completely out the window in this movie, not least of all in the “water crystals” that apparently respond to thought, but are in fact almost certainly just the experimenter selecting the “correct” images for display.

In summary, I can’t help but think that if the the movie had focussed on just either the spiritual development or the quantum mechanics then we might have had an interesting movie. The spiritual and philosophical questions about reality had the potential to be interesting, but got mired in wacky ramblings. And the role of quantum mechanics in biology (and, to a lesser extent, consciousness) is actually a real and fascinating field (and also the topic of my PhD!) and could have made an interesting documentary, involving real physicists on both sides of the fence. Instead, fringe researchers with dubious credentials pose half baked theories and loose analogies and claim it to be a spiritual revolution. In particular, as a physicist I couldn’t help but laugh at what they were proposing.

My advice? Go and have a long relaxing bath, then read a top class popular physics book by Paul Davies. An hour and a half of that will enlighten you much more than this movie will. In the end, I couldn’t help but think not “What the bleep do we know!?” but just, “What the (bleep)!?”

So, an email came around last week that the campus cinema was seeking some knowledgeable physicists (or even just physicists) to be part of a panel for a post-movie session. The movie? Independently produced “What the (bleep) do we know?!” Given that I’m keen on science communication, I thought I’d volunteer so they finally got back to me today (a week later…) saying they’d be interested. So I’m off to see the movie this afternoon before the Q&A session on Sunday. In the meantime, I checked out the movie’s website as well as the always helpful Wikipedia page.

I won’t say too much more at this point, but it certainly looks like I’ll have plenty of material to discuss at the panel. Basically, these guys belong to a weird cult society where a 35,000 year old warrior from Atlantis named “Ramtha” speaks through a Ms. “JZ Knight”. We’re talking seriously weird. From what I’ve read so far, they misrepresented the only serious scientist, are babbling about “infecting the quantum field” and generally giving science a bad name.

Of course, I can understand why they do it - mention quantum mechanics, and you gain instant scientific credibility for your spiritual beliefs. Maybe. So I feel it my bound and solemn duty to try and convince people to take all this with a grain of salt. Of course, I haven’t even seen the movie yet - and despite what my other physicist friends say, it might be worthwhile. Guess you’ll all find out on Monday what I thought!

Well, today I had to make a trip to the dentist. I went for my not-so-annual checkup a few weeks ago, and he decreed that fillings were probably in order. A couple of X-rays confirmed this, and so I had to go under the drill today. (Incidentally, when I was little, the same dentist took X-rays of my teeth for the first time, but did it without saying anything to me about what was going on. He was just chatting to the nurse about which dentist was sleeping with which assistant*, wacked a heavy metal vest on my chest, stuck this big machine by my head, and he and the nurse ran out of the room, still chatting! There’s a buzz and a thud, and then he comes back in like nothing had happened. Meanwhile, I’m a little freaked out…)

I opted for no anaesthetic (I hate needles…) and just put up with the discomfort of the drilling. But I did ask lots of questions (when I could move my mouth) about what type of fillings he was using, which was better, etc. Slightly puzzling was that the nurse kept shining this blue light into my mouth, while holding orange plastic in front of her eyes. It turns out that the filling paste they use sets, in about 15 seconds, under blue light! Some sort of chemical catalyst reacts very strongly to that frequency. In the early days, they used UV light, but sunburn was an issue! The orange plastic was simply to dim the light so that she could see what she was doing. This occupied my thinking long enough to distract from the rest of the drilling. See? Science can help you avoid pain!

All in all, it was a pretty painless experience (far better than having my wisdom teeth out!) And I got my revenge by making him answer all my questions, so I think we’re even (discounting the ridiculous hourly rate he just got paid…) Still, I’m flossing much more regularly now! Oh, and the strangest moment was when the not-unattractive dental nurse leaned down, looked into my mouth, and said to the dentist, with a strange glint in her eyes, “Mmmmmmmm…Nice teeth!”

(*) Actually, I made that bit up. They were talking about what they did on the weekend or something…Sorry.

Perhaps this isn’t of interest to the non-Aussies out there (and possible not even to the Aussies!) and it doesn’t have an awful lot to do with physics, but I the Australian Bureau of Statistics has some interesting facts about Australia online. For instance, there’s the marriage and divorce rates (did you know that 33% of marriages in Australia end in divorce after an average of 8 years?) Much more interesting, however, is the apopulation clock which displays a real time estimate of Australia’s population! Roughly every 2 minutes a person is born, roughly every 4 minutes a person dies, but there’s also a net gain of one international migrant every 4 minutes - so on average, the population goes up by one every two minutes. Neat, hey? It also means that if Australia was suddenly isolated (no-one in, no-one out) then we would still have an increasing population (at least for now - that may change as the aging population begins to, well, die off.)

But most horrifying of all, is that Google undersells our population by 400,000. Gah!

So, browsing Slashdot earlier this week, I came across an article where a physicist has claimed that “It’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist.” I’d just like to comment briefly on this and the way the media has handled it.

Brief background: The generally accepted theory is that black holes form when a large star runs out of fuel (hydrogen) and the stars gravity forces it to collapse in on itself. A star like our sun is too small, and will become a white dwarf - pretty boring, really. But a large star will crush itself smaller and smaller until it becomes a just a “point” with infinite density but zero volume. This is a black hole, and responsible for all the weird black hole effects you might have heard about.

So, enter George Chapline, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who claims that this doesn’t properly account for “dark energy“, the mysterious force which acts like antigravity to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Instead, he claims, the collapsing stars fill with this dark energy which prevents the black hole from forming. Instead, this antigravity core would fling matter back out of the “black hole” where it could collide with entering matter and give off the same energy signiatures as the objects we today believe are black holes.

As strange as it sounds, we have to consider the possibility that it’s true. It’s unlikely - an awful lot of awfully smart people have thought about black holes - but Chapline might have seen something that no-one else had. After all, new discoveries have to come from someone! But as far as I can see, his work hasn’t yet been published in a “peer reviewed” journal (i.e., a journal where other scientists have checked his work) and his online article is a summary of a talk he gave at a conference. So it’s pretty hard for a relative lay person like myself to pass judgement.

And yet, from the way Nature is reporting, you’d think that he was already revolutionising physics. He claims his findings are a “near certainty”, and the Nature reporter does nothing to dampen the enthusiasm or provide comments from other scientists. If I didn’t know better, I’d be convinced despite the lack of evidence. So is this good reporting?

The problem, of course, is that sensational headlines sell papers (or at least, attract readers!) so magazines like New Scientist, in particular, must always be looking for a sensational or controversial story that will attract attention. New Scientist serves an important role in promoting science, and is a great magazine within this role, but one has to wonder what people think about all these wacky theories that physcists come up with…Today, black holes are “disproven”, and yet tomorrow we’ve discovered new “proof” of a black hole in the centre of the galaxy. How can we have proven it both ways? Of course we haven’t, and scientists know that, but what about the rest of the world? The media is painting a very black and white view of the way research works, and I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or not. Maybe “any publicity is good publicity”, but how can people have faith in physics if we make claims we can’t back up? How can anyone be sure about global warming or mobile phones if every week the headlines proclaim a new and different study with an absolutely conclusive, but completely disagreeing, proof? As a physicist, I know that it’s a part of physics, but I wonder if everyone else does.

I don’t know what the solution is - certainly not having a vote every year on what theories to accept or reject! And some controversy is good - it makes physics seem exciting and vibrant (just think of string theory or cold fusion!) But promoting the minority equal to the majority produces problems like a mistrust of genetic engineering or nanotechnology or the nuclear irradiation of food. I guess it comes down to better communication from scientists, and educating people about the “scientific process” - teaching people to think more critically about the research they hear about, and how in science it’s majority rules.

More news from Oz - a study has shown that students from public schools (which here means free, government run schools, which the majority of students attend) “do better” at University than students from private schools (where students (=parents) pay for schooling.)

The main findings were that students from independent schools and selective government schools got the highest scores in year 12 [the final year of high school] but their lower-scoring colleagues from non-selective, standard government schools caught up and went ahead of them in university.

They suggest that this is because

Students that attend government schools have got used to a bit of relative rough and tumble and they’re better able to cope when left to their own devices a little more at university,”

This reflects a popular idea, and almost certainly is true to some extent. For instance, in Queensland we have a statewide test (Queensland Core Skills test) taken by all students that scales the school’s results - the better the average mark, the better everyone at the school’s final ranking. Private schools train their students rigorously on how to do well in these tests (and, in disreptuable cases, have even been known to subtly remove “bad” students so as to improve the average.)

To be fair and scientific, the report might need to be taken with a grain of salt, as I’m not clear on how the statistics were compiled (e.g., is this the average trend for individual students, or are they just comparing the group means? Is there a sampling issue in that more private school students go to university, diluting the average?) But it certainly provides for interesting discussion.

I personally went to a public school, and couldn’t rate it highly enough. From talking to others, I’m convinced that the quality of teaching was as high at Kenmore High as anywhere else (and in all modesty!!!) I couldn’t have done better at a private school. I really think it’s ridiculous to pay upwards of $10,000 per year - perhaps as much as $100,000 for an entire schooling - for the same education I can receive as a public school. I’d much rather the money saved or invested and given to me for a downpayment on a house! Better yet, use it for travel or holidays or something which will enrich the child’s life a lot more than wearing a tie to school every day!

To be fair, some students probably function better in the more structured private school environment. But the above research shows the benefits probably aren’t long term (It might be possible that the private students are still better at Uni than they would have been if they’d gone to a public school.) The major advantage to me is the facilities - music, sport or academic, you’re usually going to get better at a private school since they’ve got the money to burn. But is it worth ten thousand dollars a year?! Although it will be (and should be!) debated, I think this study is important, and might raise awareness of the need or otherwise for private education.

I’m afraid that this is a bit of an angry post, but this sort of thing really gets my goat. There was a report recently (thanks, Les!) where over 1300 scientists from 95 countries around the world conducted the most comprehensive study to date of how the world’s oceans, dry lands, forests and species interact and depend on one another. Their findings were that the world’s ecosystems are in critical danger and might not support future generations unless radical measures are implemented to protect and revive them.

In a recent interview on Australian TV show Lateline, Professor Lord Robert May, president of the scientific Royal Society said,

Overall, the average footprint cast by humanity - and these are imprecise calculations - appears roughly to have gone beyond that which is sustainable about 10 years ago. Now, that’s all very rough. Maybe it hasn’t yet, maybe it occurred 20 years ago. But we’re at that point in history.

Basically, if we haven’t already passed the critical point for preserving the environment, then we will be soon.

You’d think this would be cause for concern wouldn’t you? This is 1300 of the world’s top scientists we’re talking about. You’d think that governments might sit up and take notice.

No. Instead, we have this gem from Australia’s Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell:

Can we do more? Yes, we can. Do we need to invest more? Yes, we do. Will that occur by apocalyptic reports that exaggerate the problems or minimise the chance of finding solutions? I don’t think that’s a good way to go forward. So more information is a good thing, but it needs to be accurate and it needs to be in context.

I’m not exactly clear what he’s trying to say, but it doesn’t sound good. He agrees that we need to do more and invest more to preserve our environment. But instead of agreeing to do something, he starts attacking the report (Political Tactics 101) and basically saying that he knows better than all those scientists. He seems to think that reporting the facts (as those scientists perceive them, anyway) causes the problem: “apoccalyptic reports that…minimise the chance of finding solutions”! If the facts say that there are no easy solutions, keeping them hidden won’t produce new answers, will it? Instead, the miniser would like the information “in context”, which presumably means he’d like them to say that things will be fine at leas until he’s out of office. Which hopefully won’t be far away.

The ABC reporter Brett Evans says, “The report’s authors say they want to influence policy-makers. Obviously they’ll have to try harder.” I’d like to think that it’s the politicians that need to try harder, but in reality, I think we need the voters to vote with their feet, which means it’s up to us scientists to convince them. It certainly seems that policy change isn’t going to happen from the top down.

From Wired News comes this pretty amazing story:

MIT Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and some MIT colleagues are hard at work on a project they hope will brighten the lives and prospects of hundreds of millions of developing world kids. It’s a grand idea and a daunting challenge: to create rugged, internet- and multimedia-capable laptop computers at a cost of $100 apiece.[…] The laptops would be mass-produced in orders of no smaller than 1 million units and bought by governments, which would distribute them. […] The “one laptop per child” project.

It’s a pretty impressive - they’re backed by Advanced Micro devices (a processor company), Rupert Murdoch’s media megalopoly (for their satellites) and (should you be surprised?) Google, the “Do No Evil” king of the search. The computers will be have wireless internet connections (where available, but at least local peer-to-peer networking otherwise), have USB ports - and probably a battery that can be recharged using a hand crank!

This story got me thinking though - is this the “best” use of $100 per child? On the one hand, that could buy a lot of food, water, clothes, facilities, etc. Should we be looking towards technology when the basics aren’t even there? But perhaps the only way to really change the situation is to increase their connectivity with the developed world, and to start introducing technology to the next generation. Rather than “just” tackling the most basic issues, perhaps we need to jump ahead and start preparing now for the future?

Any thoughts?

Anyone who has every studied physics, or even science in general, has probably been frustrated by “units”. Now, I’m not talking about housing problems (like trying to get a bed up a narrow flight of stairs) - I’m talking about those pesky things like metres, centimetres, kilograms and so on. If you’re an undergrad at University, I guarantee you that sooner or later your tutor will go on a rampage about how you must put units on all your numbers, and how answer don’t make sense without units, and so forth. I’ve certainly been there on both the giving and receiving end of a “discussion” like that.

So why are units so important? Well, the first part is that if you’re trying to derive a long and complicated formula, then you can check that your answer has the correct units, and that you haven’t forgotten to take a square root or something like that. This is called dimensional analysis and is a very useful tool not only for checking your answers, but for actually deriving important physics - you can even calculate the radius of a black hole! (Up to a constant anyway, but you can tell how it depends on the mass of the black hole which is very interesting.)

The second part is simply that whether something is 10 centimetres or 10 kilometres is kind of important! Most famously, a NASA mission to Mars failed because one group of scientists were using metric units while the other were using “imperial” units (like inches, etc). The result? The $125 million probe is now lost, hurtling off somewhere in space. While you might think that the units are usually obvious, it’s not always the case - can you easily tell me whether the radius of Earth’s orbit is a 150 million metres or 150 million kilometres? (It’s the latter!) This is why most scientists use a standard set of units known as SI units.

Why am I writing about this today? Because I’ve tearing my hair out trying to understand some papers not in SI units but in these ghastly things called atomic units. In this system, most properties - length, time, speed - all have the same “units”, called “atomic units”. Your speed might be 3 atomic units, while it might take you 6 atomic units to get to work, using an energy of 12 atomic units. Confused yet? How about you also mix in “cgs” units, where you measure things in grams and centimetres instead of the normal kilograms and metres, and you drop important constants, which somehow need to be slipped back in at the end if you want to convert back to SI units. To be fair, the advantage of these systems is that your answers tend to be numbers around 3 instead of 0.000000000000000000003 and they simplify your equations considerably, so they’re much loved by high energy physicists, biologists and computational chemists.

I, however, am slowly going mad. I’ve got two different formulas yielding three different answers in different units, and when I try and convert anything to SI units, I get 4 different answers depending on what factors I include! It’s far too much for a Friday afternoon…

So, I leave you to your weekend with this sage advice - always write your units, pleeeeease use the SI units and say what you’re using! Oh yes, and have a good weekend.