About five years ago I wrote a post titled “The Science of Coffee”, describing a delightful article by Ernesto Illy in Scientific American. This was serious coffee-for-nerds stuff, and I loved it. You can imagine then, how much pleasure I got last week to find a shorter attempt at the same kind of exposition, this time about another favorite beverage – beer. This article was by Andy Connelly in the Guardian, and describes the malt, the wort, the seasoning, the fermentation and the conditioning necessary to turn out one of man’s great achievements.

A lot of what is in the article will be well known to anyone who is a beer connoisseur. And these days, given the proliferation in the U.S. of great beer of every type imaginable, I find such people everywhere. However, for the rest of us it does provide a great primer on what’s going on to produce that frothy glass of deliciousness in front of us.

Science aside, there are other fascinating tidbits in the article, such as

Many cultures have seen beer as a gift from God (a medieval English term for yeast was godisgoode)

After reading Connelly’s article, I realized he’s been writing similar ones for some time now. You can find out about the science of

• Whisky Making
• Cheesemaking
• Breadmaking
• Cake
• and … Cinder Toffee!

Ok, got to go – I’m hungry now!

A National Academy of Sciences panel, chaired by Helen Quinn, has released a new report that seeks to identify “the key scientific practices, concepts and ideas that all students should learn by the time they complete high school.” An ambitious undertaking, but a sensible one. At the very least, efforts like this serve to focus attention on what’s important across a wide variety of K-12 curricula, and at best it could help prod schools (or states, really) across the country into teaching more coherent and useful science to kids. Here’s the web page for the report, a summary (pdf), and the report itself (pdf, free after you register).

So what are the core ideas of science? They are all listed in the summary report, and divided into three categories. The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.” The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.” It’s great that the organizational scheme emphasizes ideas that stretch across disciplinary boundaries, but there is definitely a danger that the resulting items come off as a bit vague. The secret to success here will be how they can be implemented, with concrete examples.

The third category is the nitty-gritty, “Core Ideas in Four Disciplinary Areas,” namely “Physical Sciences,” “Life Sciences,” “Earth and Space Sciences,” and “Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science.” (Math is not within the report’s purview.) And here are the actual core ideas proposed for the physical sciences: (more…)

In my last post I described the workshops and conferences – research travel – that I’ve been on during the first part of the summer. But when I returned from Brazil there was one other science trip I went on before taking a few weeks off. In mid June, Sean, Jennifer, Risa, Janna Levin and I were invited speakers at the first of a new initiative – the Discovery Retreats.

These are the brainchild of John Hendricks, the founder of the Discovery Channel and a host of science and education related programming. Taking place at Gateway Canyons Resort (yes, I know, sometimes we’re spoiled), these are several day events at which people come for vacation time in a stunning environment, mixed with lectures, panel discussions, star-gazing, and open discussion events. This inaugural retreat was titled “Secrets of the Universe”, at which Sean (who was organizing the scientific part of the event) gave the introductory overview of cosmology, Janna spoke about black holes, Risa discussed dark matter in the universe, I talked about dark matter and cosmic acceleration, and Jennifer gave a fascinating and fun talk on science and hollywood.

For me, by far the most enjoyable science part of the event was the panel discussion. Janna had left at this point, but we were joined by Nick Sagan, who provided his perspective as a science fiction author. Jennifer moderated this, and had a well thought out sequence of questions that guided us through a set of popular topics. However, it is always interesting to see what topics the audience is most fascinated by, even though they are often the ones you would have suspected. We were led through the nature of the big bang singularity, the ideas of inflation, string theory, the question of whether the universe has an edge, and a bunch of other big issues that frequently arise when one gets into chats about cosmology. We certainly had a great time – I hope the audience did.

One of the more fun non-science events was a tour of John’s extensive car museum at the resort. Here are Janna and I sitting in front of one of the many beautiful exhibits

In many ways this first retreat was a bit of a dry run, in which we were feeling out the right format and exploring the mix of scheduled and free time. There are going to be more of these events, not just focused on cosmology but on the frontiers of other scientific areas. Hopefully our first attempt wasn’t just fun, but also gave enough feedback that these future attempts work as well as possible.

Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”

Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

I know everyone is excited about this weekend’s premiere (at least here in the U.S.) of Thor, the latest superhero extravaganza from Marvel studios. At least I am, for my usual selfish reasons: I helped do some consulting (through the Science and Entertainment Exchange) for the movie. Also, there is a mystical hammer that smashes things; what’s not to like?

Unlike TRON: Legacy, where we came in after the screenplay had been drafted, on Thor we came in near the beginning. Marvel had done a lot of work on the idea, but there wasn’t yet a script. The Exchange set up a consult meeting with director Kenneth Branagh, the screenwriter, and few people on the design and production side of things, along with three scientists — Jim Hartle from USCB, Kevin Hand from JPL, and myself.

We bandied around lots of issues relating to the Thor universe and how it fit in with Marvel’s bigger plans. Once there was a script, I came in to read it and offer some more comments. Since that time, the script was re-written by the dynamic duo of Ash Miller and Zack Stentz, and I haven’t actually seen the film yet, so I can’t speak to what kind of impact we had in the end. Let’s just say that there was one thing in particular that they were planning on doing in the movie that drove all the scientists batty — I think we convinced them to fix it, but we’ll have to see. And once filming started, they recruited Caltech student Kevin Hickerson to help with the tech-gadgetry end of things. So I have high hopes. (Early reviews are very positive. And of course, Agent Coulson returns, with a larger role than in the Iron Man films. Everyone loves Agent Coulson.)

You might be wondering, where is there room for any sort of science in a comic-book movie about a Norse god in a red cape who swings a magical hammer? Well I’m glad you asked. Actually there were a couple of different things where the movie people were very interested in our input. One was constructing a coherent framework for the Marvel universe — ultimately, this story about Thor the thunder god is going to have to be compatible with Tony Stark’s Iron Man world, since the two characters are both part of the Avengers. (I also got to read the script for that, and yes — it is as great as the rumors suggest.)

Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, is a huge proponent of having the world of these films ultimately “make sense.” It’s not our world, obviously, but there needs to be a set of “natural laws” that keeps things in order — not just for Iron Man and Thor, but all the way up to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who will get his own movie before too long. The thinking here is very much based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the trailer above, Thor basically gives exactly this pitch to Jane Foster.

That’s the other area where we science consultants were able to help out: (more…)

The Templeton Prize has to be the most efficient publicity campaign ever. The Templeton Foundation gives a million British pounds to a scientist who is willing to say that science and religion are compatible, and in return they get many times that value in publicity. (The formal citation is “for making an exceptional contribution to investigating life’s spiritual dimension”) Atheists should really just refuse to talk about it, but — can’t resist!

This year’s winner is Sir Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists. Like everyone else, I have nothing but enormous respect for Sir Martin’s work. He focuses mostly on “physical” cosmology — that part that involves actual known laws of physics, like galaxy formation — but is more willing than most folks in that game to think about speculative ideas concerning the multiverse and the Big Bang. He describes himself as non-religious but church-going, and would rather science and religion just get along than be constantly at each other’s throats. You can read an extremely awkward interview with him by Ian Sample in the Guardian — it’s clear Rees has no interest at all in talking about science/religion issues, but that’s going to come up when you win the Templeton prize.

But the really telling thing is this companion piece at the Guardian‘s website by Mark Vernon. (Another piece by Jerry Coyne provides some balance.) The real problem with the Templeton Foundation, in my view, is that it works very hard to give people a false impression that science and religion are actually reconciling, not just that they should be. If you want to see the publicity machine at work, this piece is a perfect example. Here’s the money paragraph:

But with Rees’s acceptance, the substantial resources of the Templeton Foundation have, in effect, been welcomed at the heart of the British scientific establishment. That such a highly regarded figure has received its premier prize will make it that little bit harder for Dawkins to sustain respect amongst his peers for his crusade against religion.

There you go — now that such a distinguished and respectable scientist has accepted the Templeton Prize, we may conclude that “the British scientific establishment” is rejecting Dawkins and his fellow noisome atheists in favor of warm and fuzzy Templetonianism. That’s exactly the publicity effect they are hoping for.

In unrelated news, Mark Vernon spent time at Cambridge in a journalism fellowship paid for by the Templeton Foundation. Have to hand it to them, these guys know how to get a message out.

I’ve been on somewhat of an unintended hiatus for the past few months, as I try to wrap up some projects, and deal with a few other things in my life. However, I just read something that has given me a kick in the pants. And I don’t mean that in a good way. In late December there was an article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker titled “The truth wears off”. Much more suggestive was the subtitle, “Is there something wrong with the scientific method?”. The story discusses the “decline effect”: an article is published with startling results, and then subsequent work finds increasingly diminished evidence for the initial unexpected result. It’s as if there’s “cosmic habituation”, with the Universe conspiring to make a surprising result go away with time. The last paragraph sums things up:

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I don’t particularly disagree with any of this. But it’s completely besides the point, and to untutored ears can be immensely misleading. The article is a perfect example of precisely the effect it seeks to describe (there must be a catchy word for this? Intellectual onomatopoeia?). The article gives a few examples of people finding interesting results, only to have them disappear on sustained scrutiny. It makes it sound like there is an epidemic of declining confidence:

One of the first demonstrations of this mysterious phenomenon came in the early nineteen-thirties. Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring Zener cards, a special deck of twenty-five cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. Most of Rhine’s subjects guessed about twenty per cent of the cards correctly, as you’d expect, but an undergraduate named Adam Linzmayer averaged nearly fifty per cent during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million. Linzmayer did it three times.

Rhine documented these stunning results in his notebook and prepared several papers for publication. But then, just as he began to believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception, the student lost his spooky talent. Between 1931 and 1933, Linzmayer guessed at the identity of another several thousand cards, but his success rate was now barely above chance. Rhine was forced to conclude that the student’s “extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline.”

This all sounds quite impressive. I don’t know the details of how many cards he was going through, but it sounds like it’s easily thousands. I calculate the odds of a 9 card streak as a tenth of a percent if you go through a couple of thousand cards. This is much more likely than 1 in 2 million (which is relevant only if you only look at 9 cards, one time). No doubt getting 9 in a row three times over a period of a few weeks (or even years) would be a large statistical anomaly. But it’s a long way from something I would issue a press release about. Carl Sagan summed it up best: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. If you’re going to claim some “extra-sensory perception” that would require a new physical force, and fundamentally alter all of modern physics, you might need more than a one-time statistical fluke. How about a whole series of controlled, double-blind experiments? Lo and behold, when this is done, the effects vanish. But by then the original results are published, and the damage is done. We’re still talking about this one “experiment” 80 years later. But if we integrate over all the equivalent subsequent experiments, there’s no doubt that the effect regressed to the mean, and can be ignored. So how is this even remotely interesting?

It takes Lehrer six pages to finally get around to the topic of publication bias. Suppose you do an experiment and find a sensational, Earth-shattering result. Human nature being what it is, you’re likely to try to publish it (and journals like Nature are likely to publicize it). Fads happen all the time in science. It’s a human activity after all. And then you (and the rest of the community) do a lot more work, and if it’s a statistical fluke, or poorly analyzed data, or a poorly conceived or biased experiment, the result will fade into oblivion. The “decline effect” that this article is making a fuss about is precisely the process by which the scientific method works. The truth will out.

On the other hand, suppose you do an experiment and find the result you (and everyone else) would expect. For example, you drop a ball and, indeed, it falls to the floor, exactly in accordance with our theory of gravity. You’re unlikely to write up the results. You’re even less likely to be able to get them published. And you’re certainly not going to spawn a whole bunch of follow-up experiments trying to duplicate your “null” results. So there’s no “incline effect”. This is not a surprise. It’s not a sign that science is broken. It’s a sign that we try to be selective and efficient in our experiments.

None of this is to say that there aren’t legitimate concerns. It’s one thing for publication bias and poor data to lead to a (temporarily) incorrect measure of the Hubble constant, and hence the age of the Universe. It’s an entirely different matter when a statistical fluke (encouraged by huge sums of money) engenders useless (or worse) medical treatment for millions of people. The only way to address this is by ever more careful and thorough application of the scientific method. (Obama’s Comparative Effectiveness Council, one of the many positive aspects of his new healthcare bill, is a good example of this.)

Lehrer’s article is a dramatic example of the problem he decries. The title and subtitle, and the first few pages, make it sound like there’s something profoundly and mysteriously wrong with the scientific method. Far into the article the obvious and rational explanations appear. Really, the article should be titled “Science works”, with a subtitle “The scientific method conquers all (eventually).” But that would be a lot less sexy, and my guess is that the New Yorker wouldn’t have published it. So there’ll be a bunch of people out there who misread or cherry-pick the article (Deepak Chopra: “Watch out, the truth is slipping away”), and end up convinced that the scientific method is broken. And they won’t vaccinate their children, and they’ll make important life decisions based on their horoscopes, and they’ll continue to believe that the world is magic. The scientific method is healthy and well. The problem is a society that, to a surprising degree, doesn’t pay much attention to it. And this article is a brilliant example of how things go wrong.

Senator Dianne Feinstein
Chairman
Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee

Senator Lamar Alexander
Ranking Member
Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee

March 1, 2011

Dear Chairman Feinstein and Sen. Alexander,

We write in regards to the current proposed budget cuts on science, and the impact the cuts would have on the competitiveness of this nation, both in the short and long term. The economic health and world leadership of this country depends on an unbroken cycle of innovation, rooted in our ability to attract and educate new waves of creative young scientists and engineers, each year. It is this cycle of innovation, whose continuation depends on funding for basic research, that drives both basic and applied sciences, and the creation of new technologies and treatments that define and improve the quality of everyday life.

In order for the cycle to remain unbroken, and for the nation’s position of leadership to continue, basic research needs to be supported, even when the times demand strict fiscal responsibility. One never knows where the next transformative breakthrough will emerge, or who the next young scientist will be that creates it.

(more…)

Jerry Coyne, cheerful fire-breathing atheist that he is, gets invited to a church to talk about evolution. That’s not how it worked out, as people were more interested in talking about the relationship between science and religion. You can guess what happened — or maybe not. There was a productive two-hour conversation in which both sides learned something.

That’s pretty much the same thing that happened when I visited a Chicago church back in the day. There’s obviously a selection effect at work: the kinds of churches that invite atheists in for conversations are generally ones that enjoy some kind of open dialogue. Not that it’s all warm hugs and pleasant disagreement; I noticed that the older generation in my audience was a lot less open to even thinking about some of the points I raised, while Jerry had to fend off someone who thought that math and science had led to Nazi Germany.

Jerry concludes that the harmful aspects of religion are correlated with the certainty displayed by its adherents. This is a true but subtle point, as of course there are those who love to accuse scientists and/or atheists of unwarranted certitude. I think the difference is that we feel relatively sure about some things, while we’re quite ready to admit that we don’t know the answer to other questions, and we have a clear notion of where the distinction lies. But I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Conversations like these are enormously helpful. The trick is that it’s much easier — on both sides — to be polite and interactive in person, while the temptation to lecture people from on high is irresistible in other contexts, where it’s easier to think of the opposition as cartoons rather than real people.

I don’t like to spend too much time highlighting and making fun of silly things on the internet; it’s not like they are going to be stamped out by a few well-placed blog posts. But this awful little article by Chris Ormell in Times Higher Education merits an exception. It has been ably demolished Jon Butterworth at the Guardian, but is worth revisiting, because its badness illuminates a larger point. (Via @astroparticle.)

Ormell’s thesis is laid out at the start:

Mathematics tends to be both misunderstood and credited with magic powers, especially by those who are intelligent but not mathematically inclined. Arising from this, there is a perennial temptation for mathematicians to play to the gallery and to assume the role of magicians and, even more temptingly, high priests.

The worrisome sign here is not the explicit content, which is vague enough to be unobjectionable, but the gleeful indulgence in overgeneralization. It seems clear that what we are in for is a broad denunciation of mathematicians and their ilk, not a nuanced appreciation. The devil will be in the details.

We have seen blind faith in mathematics in action recently. In addition to the contribution of mathematical models to the great credit crunch of 2008, take physicist Stephen Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead. The reason he gave was that philosophers have stopped bothering trying to understand modern mathematical cosmology. This cosmology is based on current mathematical physics, most of which has been in place for less than 100 years. It is an impressive edifice of concepts and mathematical models, but one that has not yet built up a track record for reliability over a thousand years, let alone a million years.

Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead was silly, but not nearly as silly as this. I’m not sure what the implication is supposed to be — we shouldn’t trust sciences that don’t have a thousand-year track record of reliability? Since that includes almost all of contemporary science except for a bit of astronomy, we’d be living in primitive circumstances indeed. The “million years” criterion is even more awesome. That means we shouldn’t trust things like “writing,” or for that matter “human beings.”

(more…)