(Update: further discussion here and here.)

Sam Harris gave a TED talk, in which he claims that science can tell us what to value, or how to be moral. Unfortunately I completely disagree with his major point. (Via Jerry Coyne and 3 Quarks Daily.)

He starts by admitting that most people are skeptical that science can lead us to certain values; science can tell us what is, but not what ought to be. There is a old saying, going back to David Hume, that you can’t derive ought from is. And Hume was right! You can’t derive ought from is. Yet people insist on trying.

Harris uses an ancient strategy to slip morality into what starts out as description. He says:

Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures… If we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they are exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. The crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim.

Let’s grant the factual nature of the claim that primates are exposed to a greater range of happiness and suffering than insects or rocks. So what? That doesn’t mean we should care about their suffering or happiness; it doesn’t imply anything at all about morality, how we ought to feel, or how to draw the line between right and wrong.

Morality and science operate in very different ways. In science, our judgments are ultimately grounded in data; when it comes to values we have no such recourse. If I believe in the Big Bang model and you believe in the Steady State cosmology, I can point to the successful predictions of the cosmic background radiation, light element nucleosynthesis, evolution of large-scale structure, and so on. Eventually you would either agree or be relegated to crackpot status. But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement? We might use empirical means to measure whether one preference or the other leads to systems that give people more successful lives on some particular scale — but that’s presuming the answer, not deriving it. Who decides what is a successful life? It’s ultimately a personal choice, not an objective truth to be found simply by looking closely at the world. How are we to balance individual rights against the collective good? You can do all the experiments you like and never find an answer to that question.

(more…)

We’ve collected enough data in our What Got You Interested in Science? poll to draw some conclusions. Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there’s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense. (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, “the internet,” received 62 votes so far.) But conclusions, nonetheless!

And the main conclusion is: there are many different things that get young proto-scientists interested in the field. Books, both non-fiction and fiction, play an important role, but no one thing really stands out.

That’s interesting, and not really what I would have expected. Given that there certainly are many things that could get someone interested in science, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a dominant source for the pipeline, but instead it’s quite a diverse porfolio.

If we think getting people interested in science is a good thing, the lesson is: there aren’t any magic bullets. A broad-based strategy seems appropriate. Interesting books, educational classes, encouraging relatives, engrossing hobbies and school activities, inspiring movies and TV shows. I approve.

Yesterday’s book club raised the question of what first inspires young people to get interested in science. Many Cosmic Variance readers aren’t scientists at all, but a lot of you are. So — what first set you down this road? For purposes of this highly non-scientific investigation, let’s define “scientist” fairly broadly, as someone who has either received a bachelor’s degree in some scientific field, or is currently on the road to doing so (e.g. someone currently in high school or college). Even if you’re not currently a full-time scientist, we’ll count you if you got the degree.

Here’s a poll based on my quick guesses as to what might be the leading causes of nudging people into science.

What first inspired you to study science?
	Parent, relative, or friend.
	Role model outside friends and family.
	Teacher or a particular class.
	Science fair, mathletics, or other scholastic activity.
	Personal hobby or tinkering.
	Science books (non-fiction).
	Science fiction or fantasy literature.
	Movies, TV, radio.
	The internet (for you youngsters).
	Other
Free polls from Pollhost.com

I’d be very interested to hear if I’m leaving out some hugely influential category. And you can vote for more than one thing, if you think you were influenced by multiple sources. Among the many flaws of this kind of poll is that you might not actually remember what first inspired you — maybe it was hearing something on the radio, which made you go check out a book, but you remember the book and not the radio show. So be it; just try your best to be honest.

Every year, not long after the state of the union address, the administration unveils its budget request to Congress. Then comes the long authorization and appropriations process; in an election year I’d bet that they try hard to have it done before November. The Obama administration’s request came out yesterday, and so it’s time to take a look at how science may fare next year.

Jeffrey Mervis at ScienceInsider over at the AAAS has a nice article summarizing the general picture for science in the budget, including an 8% increase for the National Science Foundation and a smaller 3% boost to the National Institutes of Health. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (headed by the president’s science advisor) has a set of fact sheets on science policy. Check out the one on doubling the science budget – the administration is on track for doing just that by 2017. Will Congress support that?

But, being funded by it, I always start first with the DOE Office of Science. The DOE has a summary document with budget highlights; for the Office of Science the most succinct table shows the breakdown by program and year (click on it for a bigger version):

Overall, the OS is looking at a 4.4% increase over FY2009, not including the stimulus bump in 2009, listed in the column called “recovery”. In a year when the administration wants to freeze discretionary spending, that is not bad for science. It’s clearly coming from savings elsewhere, meaning someone’s program got cut, and those people (and their congressional representatives) will be fighting like crazy to restore it.

Within the OS there are winners and losers as well. Basic Energy Sciences, which covers a host of research in condensed matter including nanotechnology, materials, and multipurpose facilities such as the large light sources, gets the lion’s share of the OS budget, and are slated for a 12% increase. I think this reflects the administration’s desire to foster research in areas that could lead in the near to medium term to new sources of energy. That increase, though, along with increases for advanced computing and bio/environment research, has to come from the other programs in OS, and it appears that fusion energy (-10%) and a line titled “Congressionally Directed Projects” . Now what on earth is that?

Now, I am not a Washington insider by any means, but I don’t recall seeing that designation explicitly in the tables before. I believe, though, that it means projects funded through Congressional earmarks. Are all earmark-funded projects being killed? It certainly appears so…

Within my own field the tea leaves say that the administration is requesting that the Tevatron remain in operation through 2011, support participation in the LHC and work on future upgrades to the experiments, and begin to develop the next big project at Fermilab, so-called “Project X” (which deserves a post all by itself some day). Project X will deliver an ultra-intense beam of protons for neutrino and rare decay experiments, including the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota. There is also a substantial appropriation for the Dark Energy Survey; Fermilab is building the camera.

So begins the 2011 budget cycle.

Over the last few months I have had the pleasure of discussing science and science journalism with Faye Flam, who covers science for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Faye reports on all kinds of science, and a number of other topics, as you can read about on her web site. But most recently she has put a great deal of work into covering climate change; even interviewing Michael Mann, who will be visiting us at Penn for a physics colloquium in just a couple of weeks. And she has found it enough of a challenge that she has chosen to write about it as a (first of several, I hope) guest post.

This is a hot topic, as we all know, and I’m hoping we get a thoughtful and respectful discussion in the comments. Nevertheless, this might be a good place to remind people that we’ll generally delete comments that are off topic or offensive.

Now, here’s Faye.

There must be some redeeming lesson to come from covering the so-called climate gate scandal that’s dragged on over the last two months. Member of the public actually care about science. They’re even passionate about it. But when that happens it’s not always pretty.

Never in my 14 years as a newspaper science writer have I found myself on the receiving end of such a powerful stream of hate mail – searing bombs of name-calling that get fired into my personal and work inboxes, as well as screaming, profanity-laced screeds landing in my voice mail. There’s much gloating about the downfall of newspapers and speculation that soon I’ll perish on the streets, begging for pennies.

I even got my first death threat following this story. It was the first of three stories I wrote on this topic for the Philadelphia Inquirer after a cache of e-mail messages were stolen from some prominent climate scientists and picked over by their worst enemies for signs of malfeasance.

Many member of the public are raging at me for failing to point out what they see as an inexcusable case of scientific fraud. For them, there’s no distinction between committing fraud and being wrong. That might worry some members of the scientific community.

I wasn’t ordered to write anything on this issue. During the same period I also wrote a nice story about the Hubble Telescope, and one about heroic cancer researchers. I could easily have skipped this whole mess and written other nice stories – on Kepler, or maybe LHC. People always like stories about planets and particles.

But instead, I returned from Thanksgiving vacation to write this quick overview, followed by the more offbeat Q and A story linked above.

Then, in a fit of masochism, I decided to profile one of the scientists involved – Michael Mann – because he works nearby at Penn State University. That gave the whole thing a local angle.

Mann’s work has been scrutinized for years, after a researcher in Canada pointed out a possible statistical flaw in some climate reconstructions done in the 1990s. That eventually led to an investigation by a National Academy panel. They concluded that Mann’s initial papers weren’t perfect but the general conclusions held up, and there was no evidence of fraud.

In other areas of science, the public can be more tolerant. Back in the 1990s, people were in some disagreement about the age of the universe. When new information came in, some were shown to be off be a few billions years, give or take, but they didn’t get carted off to Siberia.

Others had wrong ideas about the shape and fate of the universe, since nobody back then thought it was accelerating. That’s the beauty of science. It’s self-correcting – though sometimes the corrections can take a while.

The other lesson here is that many people don’t understand the role of uncertainty in science. There is uncertainty over the way water vapor changes the situation, for example, with most experts saying it will create a positive feedback but a few arguing for a negative one.

And still, some people write to inform me that the science is “settled.” These critics are not sure what’s settled but they’ve heard this and seem to think it’s important to repeat.

Others recognize the uncertainty in climate science and find it appalling. That’s particularly true of engineers, who seem pretty well-represented among self-proclaimed global warming skeptics. It’s a level of uncertainty that would never fly in modeling systems for chemical refineries, or so they tell me.

One MIT-trained engineer said his own calculations prove that the climate models can’t work because, in short: “junk in equals junk out”. It would make for a great story if a local guy who worked for a chemical refinery took down the whole climate science establishment on the back of an envelope. Unfortunately, I have to consider the possibility that he hasn’t.

The global warming skeptics also love to use the term “AGW theory”. This proved a great strategy for debating because the scientists don’t really refer to anthropogenic global warming as a theory, and many aren’t sure what AGW theory means. That gives the critics the freedom to say it means that only humans can influence the climate – and that the climate never changed at all before humans hit the scene. Then they can point to this untenable position and say, “ha ha – aren’t these scientists dumb!”

Coming from the more liberal side of things, a reader suggested that even if some fatal flaw crops up in both the climate models and the climate reconstructions, and the world does plunge into a protracted global cold spell, the scientists who had done the original work shouldn’t necessarily be thrown in prison or burned at the stake.

It might seem strange, even insane, for the public to base views of the carbon cycle and water vapor feedbacks on politics. Is it a problem of science illiteracy? I don’t think so. We could all be better educated about basic physics and chemistry and this debate would still play out the same way.

It all makes more sense, though, in light of the way differing political philosophies tolerate uncertainty – whether they’re considering government-funded scientists delivering uncertainty or the prospect of policy changes based on uncertain science. How much should we know before we start conserving energy? Classify CO2 as a pollutant? Submitting to international regulations? The best we can do as scientists and science writers is respect those political differences, state what’s known as clearly as possible, and be honest about what’s not known. People will still hate us, of course. There’s no way to escape that.

Over at the Intersection, Chris Mooney is concerned that we haven’t had a science/religion tiff in what, days? So he wants to offer a defense of organizations like the National Center for Science Education, who choose to promote science by downplaying any conflicts between science and religion. For example, the NCSE sponsors a Faith Project, where you can be reassured that scientists aren’t nearly as godless as the newspapers would have you believe.

In the real world, scientists have different stances toward religion. Some of us think that science and religion are (for conventional definitions of science and religion) incompatible. Others find them perfectly consistent with each other. (It’s worth pointing out that “X is true” and “People exist who believe X is true” are not actually the same statement, despite what Chad and Chris and others would have you believe. I’ve tried to emphasize that distinction over and over, to little avail.)

In response to this situation, we uncompromising atheists have a typically strident and trouble-making idea: organizations that bill themselves as “centers for science education” and “associations for science” and “academies of science” should not take stances on matters of religion. Outlandish, I know. But we think that organizations dedicated to science should not wander off into theology, even with the best of intentions. Stick with talking about science, and everyone should be happy.

But they’re not happy; Chris and others (Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas is a thoughtful example) think that the NCSE can be more effective if it proactively tries to convince people that science and religion need not be incompatible. As an argument toward this conclusion, Chris attempts to horrify us by offering the following hypothetical conversation between a religious believer and an NCSE representative:

Religious believer: I know you say that evolution is good science, but I’m afraid of what my pastor says–that accepting it is the road to damnation.

NCSE: As a policy, we only talk about science and to not take any stance on religion. So we couldn’t comment on that.

Religious believer: I do have one friend who accepts evolution, but he stopped going to church too and that worries me.

NCSE: All we can really tell you is that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology, and universally accepted within the scientific community.

Religious believer: And I’m worried about my children. If I let them learn about evolution in school, will they come home one day and tell me that we’re all nothing but matter in motion?

NCSE: ….

To which I can only reply … um, yeah? That doesn’t seem very bad at all to me. Do we seriously want representatives of the NCSE saying “No, the claim that accepting evolution is the road to damnation is based on a misreading of Scripture and is pretty bad theology. If we go back to Saint Augustine, we see that the Church has a long tradition of…” Gag me with a spoon, as I understand the kids say these days.

Of course, we could also imagine something like this: (more…)

Last week ended with the encouraging cosmological news that the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HiFi), on the Herschel Space Observatory, is once again working. How stars are born, and the influence of the environments in which this takes place is, as you might imagine, an important astrophysical question. Part of Herschel’s mission is to address this issue by using HiFi, which is a high-resolution spectrometer, to provide detailed measurements of the composition of stellar nurseries. This question is also important for cosmology, where we are increasingly interested in the details of how galaxies formed and evolved over cosmic time, in order to be able to separate out the astrophysics from the features of large scale structure that are sensitively dependent on the background cosmology.

Herschel, which was launched along with the Planck satellite, but a few months into operation, HiFi developed an electronics problem and was switched off. This week, after a careful study of the incident, HiFi’s reserve electronics were switched on, and appear to be working correctly. While HiFi was down, Herschel’s other two instruments – Pacs and Spire were able to hog the observing time and do some lovely far-infrared and sub-millimeter science. To make up for this, the plan is now to give HiFi a larger slice of the observing pie for a while, in order to make sure it can accomplish its mission.

All in all this is wonderful news for cosmology and I’m delighted that another of our suite of outstanding experiments is once again up and running. One thing did make me giggle a little though. Speaking to the BBC, Frank Helmich, who leads HiFi, pulls one of my favorite academic tricks, saying

“I don’t watch much television but I know Crime Scene Investigation and this was just such an investigation – but in space! We found out what happened and then we designed all the mitigating measures,”

The CSI angle is a mild attempt to connect with popular culture for the benefit of the large and diverse readership of a BBC story, and I think that isn’t a bad idea at all. But what I find hilarious is the initial qualification. Although irrelevant to the point, it has to be said anyway, to satisfy what I’ve referred to before as the unspoken academic code, which I’ve paraphrased as

“Do not engage in any activity that is part of popular culture. Such activities include, but are not limited to; playing video games, playing card games (bridge excepted), watching movies without a serious social message and watching television (PBS, in particular NOVA, occasionally excepted). Any violation of the above may lead to a stubborn stain on your intellectual reputation, which may only be removed by repeatedly attending highly experimental theater.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to some interpretive dance.

With the arrival of a certain book (selling like hotcakes on Amazon!), Sean has generously sent out thank you gifts to all deserving participants of the DonorsChoose challenge.

The final tally was 36 donors contributing $12,125, reaching a total of 3,112 students across the nation. These are incredible numbers! We can all feel proud that we have had a tangible impact on so many lives. And who knows, maybe one of the kids we have reached will now be inspired to become the next Einstein?

As promised, we’re doling out loot. 13 people gave over $100, and 4 gave over $500 (with 2 giving over $1k each!). Here is the list of recipients:
>$100: copy of Sean’s book
Raymundo in College Station, TX
James in New York, NY
Pete in St. Paul, MN
Paul in Dearborn, MI

>$500: copy of Sean’s lectures
Kitty’s Coffee in Cincinnati, OH
Sili in Odense, Denmark

There are many people that “qualified”, but haven’t sent me their addresses (of special note were Meghan in Melbourne, FL and Herbert in Bahama, NC, who were especially generous). If you would like to receive a token of our appreciation, please contact me.

Thank you again to everyone for participating!

A few weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History posted a video showing a voyage from the surface of the Earth to the last-scattering surface (at the “edge” of the Universe). What makes the video unique is that it is based on real data, not an artist’s conception. The thin ellipses represent actual satellites orbiting the Earth; the dots represent the location of actual quasars billions of lightyears away. (No, the Universe is not composed of pie slices of galaxies, as in the movie. They used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is one of our most comprehensive views of the Universe, but which has only surveyed certain areas of the sky.) Perhaps most amazingly, the video has gone viral–with over 1.9 million views and thousands of comments to date.

I was lucky enough to see an (interactive) preview of this video while I was in New York attending the Amaldi meeting. It is a modern retelling of the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames (who, as it happens, also designed fabulous furniture; I’ve been lusting after an Eames recliner for years [how many pieces of furniture have their own wikipedia entry?]). The videos help us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling, after all, to realize how insignificant we really are. Yes, we have the gall to change our planet, and threaten all living beings on its fragile surface. But, still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re a grain of sand in a vast and beautiful ocean. We’re totally irrelevant. I find this to be oddly reassuring and calming.

Apologies for the dismal lack of blogging — apparently even scientists travel around the holidays, who knew? I’m in South Carolina at the moment, so instead of the well-constructed argument (complete with witty parenthetical asides) on a pressing issue of the moment that I’d love to provide, please accept this simple link to some sketches by Richard Feynman. (Via Chad Orzel, author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog.)

Feynman’s fondness for drawing is well-known, especially when the subject was naked ladies. The sketches aren’t going to win any art competitions, but they’re certainly better that I could do. And here’s one I bet very few professional artists could pull off:

I find that the subtle use of integration by parts really speaks of man’s inhumanity to man, don’t you agree?

But my favorite recent example of science-inflected art has to be this newly discovered late-period Jackson Pollock:

Oops, sorry; that’s not an abstract expressionist masterpiece at all. It’s a plot of theoretical predictions and experimental constraints for dark matter, as linked by Brian Mingus in comments. Check out dmtools if you’d like to make your own plot. Science and art are for everyone.