Blogs / Cosmic Variance

As Sean mentioned yesterday, earlier this week the two of us recorded an episode of bloggingheads.tv, which appeared this morning and can be viewed below.

Although Sean is a veteran, it was my first time, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and as a result I was a little apprehensive about recording it. However, once we got going it was very enjoyable, and rather quickly it no longer felt so odd to be chatting over the phone while staring at myself on the monitor.

An hour sped by as we discussed the constituents of the universe, the mysteries surrounding baryonic matter, dark matter and cosmic acceleration, and just touched on the anthropic approach to the cosmological constant problem. We’re planning to do another one of these before too long, in which I think we’ll discuss inflation and more esoteric topics such as the early universe, the multiverse and (I strongly expect) the arrow of time.

Hope you enjoy it.

Update: Here’s a link to the bloggingheads.tv page, where a variety of download formats are available.

Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.

Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments “Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo”.

In other words, you wrote the equivalent of “Well, we’ve submitted this to Nature, but they won’t might not accept it or publish it if the news gets into the press, so can all of you reading this just not actually, you know, tell anyone? Oh, but can you make sure that you give us credit for the discovery, instead of the competing team? Thx!”

So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove to talk about), I’m writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors’ potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged scientists, who are then supposed to keep their mouths shut so that the authors can get a paper into a particular journal — one that is not noticeably more influential in astrophysics (i.e. the difference between Nature and non-Nature is not nearly as big a deal as it is in biology).

Look folks, either come up with an agreement with the competing team to both shut your yaps until both your papers are simultaneously released from embargo, or suck it up and just submit the paper to the Astrophysical Journal or some other high prestige journal that doesn’t require Nature’s crazy embargo rules. Your result is terrific, you should be rightly proud, and Nature should be honored to publish your work. But, if a publication in Nature is really the goal you’re after, asking all the rest of us to be complicit is a bit silly.

Plus, I’m wiling to bet that Dennis Overbye skims astro-ph…

Update: Lots of good discussion and insight in the comments, so worth clicking through.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange has lurched into the early 21st century by starting its own blog, the X-Change Files. They’re going to have a weekly “column” rotating between Lawrence Krauss, Matt Parney, Jennifer Ouellette, Sid Perkowitz, and Jerry Zucker. So you know where to go for your regular dose of science and entertainment goodness.

Jerry Zucker and his wife Janet Zucker deserve a great deal of credit for turning the idea of the Exchange into a reality. More importantly, for a twelve-year-old such as I was at the time, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a major event in modern cinema. So I was pleased to see that the title of Jerry’s post (”I’d Like to Thank the National Academy”) was the same one that I had used when I gave a talk at the NAS annual meeting. Not that either one of us should be overly proud of that particular line.

Also, he gets away with saying stuff like this:

The really great thing about these scientists is that because their brains are exactly two-and-a-half times the size of the average person’s in the movie business (although in fairness, that also includes talent agents), they are actually more creative and therefore much better at coming up with science-related ideas for movies than our so-called “creative community.” I don’t mean to offend anyone but as much as I loved Slumdog Millionaire, it’s no Viagra. Often, science gets tacked on like wallpaper in a story, but when it’s really integrated into the narrative it can take things in surprising new directions. And thanks to the Exchange and the National Academy of Sciences, research just became much more fun.

That thing about the brain sizes is what they call “creative license.” But it’s deployed in the service of making a good point! Scientists are good at coming up with ideas, and it would be great if a closer relationship between science and Hollywood helped some of those fun ideas percolate into the wider culture. (My giant brain scoffs at giving specifics about how this will actually happen.)

You can always count on the Daily Show. As John presaged earlier this month, correspondent John Oliver visited CERN to do a report on the LHC, which has finally appeared. Watch as John Ellis lays the science smackdown!

The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right. In addition to visiting CERN itself, Oliver scored an interview with Walter Wagner (”graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics”), originator of much of the hysteria and lawsuits. You’ll get to hear Wagner explain that the probability the LHC will destroy the world is — wait for it — fifty percent. You know, because when you have two things that can possibly happen, obviously each has half the probability, right? I don’t want to say too much about Walter Wagner, because, if nothing else, the guy is really fond of a good lawsuit. So I have no comment whatsoever on Walter Wagner’s competence or sanity. But I do know people who are utterly incompetent and completely insane, who resemble Walter Wagner in certain ways. I’ll stop there.

See, major news media? It’s not that hard!

His Brains, anyway. (Which he never talked about himself, but that’s neither here nor there.) Random fluctuations make an appearance in Dilbert. (Hat tip Nick Suntzeff.)

One can only wonder what Calvin and Hobbes could have done with this.

I’m not supposed to give away too much here. But recall that Hollywood loves science, and occasionally we can help them out with an interesting idea or two. So it’s possible that if you were to watch tonight’s episode of Bones (8 p.m., 7 Central, on Fox), our plucky heroes Booth and Brennan could be investigating a murder that makes clever use of expertise in physics. It’s even possible that the murder technique was dreamed up in part by one of our previous guest-bloggers, which might very well be reflected in the name of the research institute where the dastardly deed takes place.

I’ve probably said more than I should already.

If you watch the Daily Show, you know the inane humor of John Oliver, one of the regular “corespondents” on the show. My colleagues at CERN tell me that he’s visiting CERN now, filming one of his inimitable segments on the LHC and the experiments, to be aired “some time after April 21″. Personally, I can’t wait to see it - he is always funny and usually pretty sharply barbed. He apparently rode an LHC dipole magnet like Slim Pickens rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, and asked one of our guys “is there anything you do here that’s not boring?” His video spots are always edited tightly to get the maximum laugh quotient. Anyway, here he is in the CMS cavern, earlier today (thanks to my student Matt Searle for the photo!)

We’re happy to welcome The Intersection, featuring the bloggy stylings of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, to their new home here at Discover Blogs! Anyone who isn’t already following their excellent work is encouraged to go have a look.

It’s great timing, as Sheril and Chris are experts in the intersection of science and journalism (among other intersections), and that’s going to be a hot topic in the days to come. There was something of a dustup a few months ago, set off by dueling Bloggingheads dialogues, first from science bloggers Abbie Smith and Ed Yong, then by journalists George Johnson and John Horgan. Apparently Abbie was questioning the role of journalists in an era where scientists can reach out themselves through blogs, and George responded in a somewhat intemperate fashion. (He later apologized for the tone, although not really the sentiment.) Much back-and-forth ensued — see responses by Brian Switek and Chad Orzel. And just last week, Geoff Brumfiel at Nature wrote a feature exploring the relationship between science journalism and science blogs, with the tagline: “But can the one replace the other?”

Well, no. Science blogging will never replace science journalism, any more than other kinds of blogging will replace other kinds of journalism. (Of course blogging can include just about any kind of writing, including what we usually call “journalism”; I’m thinking here of the specific case of people whose day job is doing science, and who blog in their spare time.) They have very different roles. Journalists are paid to cover stories of wide interest, to get multiple perspectives on new results, and to be as objective as possible in separating the wheat from the chaff. Science bloggers are sometimes going to blog about something newsworthy, but most can’t be bothered trying to cover every interesting story, and years will pass before a typical blogger picks up a phone to interview a source before posting. Instead, they bring a special expertise and inside knowledge to a field that no general-purpose journalist can hope to match.

I’m not sure what the source of controversy really is. It seems perfectly obvious that science blogging should enrich and extend conventional science journalism, not aspire to replace it. (See also sensible takes from Jessica Palmer at bioephemera and Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review. [Hey! A blogger and a journalist!]) Movies didn’t replace live theater, airplanes didn’t replace cars, mammals didn’t replace birds. These are things that serve different functions.

The conversation we should be having is how the two forms can work together. How great would it be, for example, if major newspapers regularly linked to relevant blog entries by real experts when a big science story broke? It might actually require some effort to make something like that happen, just because of the way journalism these days works, including the tradition of embargoed results. When the Bullet Cluster results indicating the existence of dark matter were first released, I was lucky enough to be a participant in the original press conference, so I had access to the papers before most people did. Consequently, I was able to write an informed post that could be pointed to by people looking for an expert-level discussion. But ordinarily, such pre-embargo access is only given to professional journalists. If the communities worked a bit more closely together, we might be able to more regularly combine the reportage and explanatory skills of professional journalists with the in-depth perspective of professional scientists.

Meanwhile, newspapers are dying. CNN shut down its science division. The amount of real science journalism is shrinking dramatically, and any scientist who thinks that’s a good thing for the field as a whole is living in crazy land. The old ways of doing business are crumbling, and we have to find new ways to work together.

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes about how physicists are the harbingers of doom, and are responsible for the end times. Or, more specifically, it’s because of physicists that the financial markets are in tatters all around us.

The basic idea is that greedy physicists have gone to Wall Street, cooked up all sorts of arcane derivative products, and subsequently unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the financial markets. This sentiment is best epitomized by a statement from none other than Warren Buffett (perhaps the world’s most successful investor, and certainly the world’s richest): “beware of geeks bearing formulas”

Undoubtedly there is some truth underlying this sentiment, in the sense that there are plenty of (mostly lapsed) physicists working on Wall Street. And these physicists have indeed helped develop fairly mathematical and esoteric models for the markets. These models made it possible to leverage excessively (i.e., invest significantly with very little money down), and made it exceedingly difficult to evaluate risk. And it sure is convenient to find scapegoats on which to blame the global recession. But, fundamentally, the markets are in free-fall because of rampant and unfettered greed. And it turns out there was plenty of that to go around. For the last few years it was simply too easy to make huge sums of money by taking on large risk. So long as the markets went up, all was good. But when there’s the possibility to make vast sums of money, there’s an equal and opposite possibility of losing vast sums of money. Newton’s 3rd law of finance, I suppose. And this law has been much in evidence as of late.

Well, it seems that (influenced by Sean, I’m sure) Maureen Dowd has picked up on John McCain’s twitter feed, and has placed yet another mocking stab at science in the mainstream press. (”Catfish and grape genetics”? Ha ha ha! “Promotion of astronomy”? Bwah!)

The specific line from McCain’s feed is the sarcastic “nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy”. And I think this is the essence of why scientific projects continue to be held up for derision.

Simply, most people assume science has absolutely nothing to do with them. Nobody blinks an eye at massive building projects that funnel money to construction workers, even though construction accounts for only 5% of the non-farm employment in the US. However, even though the “average american” is highly unlikely to work in construction, they at least imagine that they could.

In contrast, science is perceived as something that is done by an elite group of people that “average americans” could never hope to join, or even meet. So, it’s not that the government’s money is going to someone else, it’s that it seems to be going to someone they could never, ever be. I’ve always found it terribly sad that scientists are almost universally cast as a tribe of “others”, so distinct from “average americans” that they cease to be realistic aspirational figures. Pro-basketball players are equally unusual and elite in their physical attributes, training, and skill sets, but that doesn’t stop generation of kids wanting to grow up and play in the NBA. In contrast, scientists often come across as “born that way”, and not as the end products of rigorous training that a large fraction of smarter-than-average people could engage in. (And note that it’s not just the fault of the nebulous “media” — in their quest to climb to the top of the scientific heap, plenty of scientists cultivate an aura of “impressiveness”; while this may be useful for their individual careers, it can be plenty demoralizing for those on the lower rungs, who are questioning if they have what it takes.)

On top of this is a disconnect between what science actually does, and people’s perception of how it affects their own lives. Most “average americans” probably don’t have many gripes with the NIH budget, because they understand that curing disease is something that could potentially help them in the end. Most physical sciences, however, don’t present obvious, immediate connections to people’s day to day life, or to the main engines of the US economy. Those connections are of course there (grape genetics = wine production = millions of dollars in farming economy = tasty beverages produced more cheaply domestically), but they’re not obvious. Science is left playing catchup every time we’re mocked — yes, lots of articles came out pointing out that “volcano monitoring” was in fact useful, but not in time to stop the initial spurt of derision on the national stage.

Sadly, I don’t have any obvious solution to this, except the usual calls for increased outreach and better science teaching.