Watt Were They Thinking?

Or rather, what in the world goes on when a writer for almost any type of publication - whether mainstream or not - writes about anything that remotely touches on science?

Often times what comes out instead is "science," a stream of misapplied, poorly understood concepts. Maybe it's writing for deadlines, or maybe it's just the overall scientific illiteracy that grips many, but there is no doubt that the world needs more reporters that know the very basic scientific ideas. Otherwise we are all faced with an every growing body of articles and blog posts that will only reinforce the already shaky scientific foundation that many apparently have. (I have already noted recent media errors in articles on friction and gravity.)

My latest gripe? The May 12, 2008 issue of Newsweek contains a very positive article about students at MIT trying to lower energy costs wherever "energy hogs" exist, with a major hog - your typical vending machine - one of the main targets of their energy-waster-busters attention. Unfortunately, the amount of energy consumed by an average vending machine is incorrectly stated. According to Newsweek "The average soda dispenser consumes 3,500 kilowatts a year." As anyone who actually pays utilities should know, a kilowatt is a rate of energy use (it's 1000's of joules/sec). The actual unit of energy used is then found by multiplying the Rate of energy use x running time, i.e. the kilowatt-hour (kW-hr). One kW-hr is the amount of energy used by a device running at a rate of 1 kW for 1 hour. This energy amount is typically how your electric bill is determined by the electric company that services your home. The price per kw-hr will vary depending on the area of the country, the source of the electric company's energy, and time of year. Current rates for my area are approximately 17cents/kw-hr.

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Systems Chemistry

The B-Z reaction underway...Recently, R. Frederick Ludlow and Sijbren Otto, both at Cambridge, published a paper in Chemical Society Reviews calling for a new type of chemistry. Titled Systems Chemistry, their approach "deals with the emergent properties of interacting chemical systems or networks. In other words, properties that result from the interaction between the components in a network, rather than any one species acting individually."

Systems Chemistry is a different way of looking at patterns that emerge in space and time because of the complex interplay among/between constituent reactants and reactions. (Not surprisingly, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction is a canonical example of the complex results of a complex system.)

Complex chem systems are either under thermodynamic (equilibrium) or kinetic control.

The authors point out that chemical systems are good models for certain biological systems, and make a rather bold prediction:

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Purpose in the Universe

Storm in the Omega NebulaThe Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a fascinating, ongoing debate among scientists, humanists, and theologians concerning the ultimate question of who and what we are. Titled Does the Universe have a purpose, a diverse group of figures such as Elie Wiesel, David Gelertner, and Jane Goodall , weigh in with their opinions. Answers range from Unlikely, to Not Sure to Indeed, to I Hope So.

Even though a faith-based organization, Templeton's mission is remarkably secular:

The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.

Our vision is derived from John Templeton’s commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto “How little we know, how eager to learn” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

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Modeling The Universe: The History of Cosmology

So much of the history of mathematics and science is encapsulated in the study of the heavens. One can argue that the first modeling may have been early views of the universe, and the planets riding on their celestial spheres in a cascade of epicycles. The American Institute of Physics has set up a wonderful site devoted to the history of cosmology that is a terrific resource for learning more about these models, and how our ideas of the solar system and universe have matured.

Titled Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology, the site is ddivided into two broad , complementary areas - History (e.g. The Greek Worldview, The Mechanical Universe, Big Bang) and Tools (The Naked Eye, The First Telescopes, Spectroscopy).

For good reason, the site devotes ample space to Harlow Shapley, whose pioneering work in 1916 on globular clusters and the real size of the heavens exploded our view of the universe and caused us to reappraise our position in it. Shapley write eloquently about how his discoveries, and the work of all of those before him, have necessarily changed our position as observers within the physical universe, and hence the way we model the universe and ourselves:

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Who Judges Science?

As more technologically complex issues that are based on current scientific research end up in the courts, it has become increasingly apparent that judges now need to have an almost-impossible mix of scientific acumen in addition to juridical expertise.

In When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth has Many Faces, NYT writer Cornelia Dean presents a detailed look at the changing face of scientific cases over the past century. Including a history of morphing rules for the legal includability of scientific evidence and outside experts, the article is a stark warning about the dangers of scientific cases being judged by those least able to judge the science. (This is not an argument for knowing science content, but rather the process of science, from data to theory and acceptance.) In some cases, bad science rules the day in court because some judges don't know enough about the scientific process to direct juries appropriately.

As Dean quotes at the end of her piece:

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Constructal Theory of Everything?

A very interesting text that describes what appears to be a bold new approach to modeling many possible systems - even human ones - is about to be released. Titled Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics and  edited by Adrian Bejan and Gilbert W. Merkx, the text "brings together for the first time social scientists and engineers to develop a predictive theory of social organization, as a conglomerate of mating flows that morph in time to flow more easily (people, goods, money, energy, information). These flows have objectives (e.g., minimization of effort, travel time, cost), and the objectives clash with global constraints (space, time, resources). The result is organization (flow architecture) derived from one principle of configuration evolution in time (the constructal law): "for a flow system to persist in time, its configuration must morph such that it provides easier access to its streams."

Begin and Merkx are from Duke. The Duke press release  is very enticing - this is certainly a text that will serve as a reference for the chaos and fractals course, or perhaps a primary source.

Some tantalizing tidbits:

Why does a railway network look like a river? Why do the streets of old Rome look like a leaf? Because whether their shape is determined by the interactions of molecules or the choices made by individual humans, all of these systems of flow are governed by a relatively simple new principle of thermodynamics.

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Empirical Prayers & Logical Fallacies

In Prayer: A Neurological Inquiry Skeptical Inquirer author David Haas asks "Are silent prayers transmissible to, or readable by, a supernatural being?" He then attempts to answer this question using "modern information about the brain."

Haas makes a distinction between thoughts and prayers and the underlying brain activity, stressing the non-naturalness of the prayer processes:

"The brain, an electrochemical organ, consists of matter and energy, but the mental states that are the epiphenomena of its physiological processes are neither material substances nor forms of energy ...If thoughts—including silent prayers—are not a form of energy, then there is no known natural means by which they could be transmitted beyond ourselves or read within us. "

Haas then gets to his main question - "Though thoughts and prayers are neither transmissible nor readable by any natural means, could they be known to a supernatural being?"

This is a provocative, $64,000 Question, one which cannot be answered to anyone's satisfaction, but one that leads to all sorts of meta-issues involving all-knowing and all-powerful deities.

Unfortunately, Haas trips up immediately. Here's how he wishes to answer the question of whether prayers can be known to a supernatural being:"Evidence for or against this can be obtained by determining whether prayers are followed by what was solicited by them."

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Poetry, Space-time, and Entropy

Plotkin's Entropy by Donna Bellas. See text for info. With the amazing success of Isaacson's bio of Einstein, and the translation and release in the US of Neffe's uniquely-German bio, Einstein is certainly in the air. Not as much as 100 years ago, when he was perhaps the most famous person in the world, but nevertheless many are reading, and writing poetic about Albert.

From Bernhardt Blumenthal, a colleague at La Salle who is a Rilke scholar and poet (and in his spare time chair of the Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literatures and the Master's Program in Central & Eastern European Studies) describes Einstein's influence on his latest work:

...my latest poem, Schwere Seelen, (Heavy Souls), which just appeared last week in a German literary periodical plays on Einstein's General Relativity. The souls, heavy with love and suffering, warp reality and pass over the space-time curve through hyper-space into another universe--one without entropy. The female lover, incidentally, transits space escaping on a light beam exiting a black hole (thus faster than our conventional absolute speed of light) and rescues the beloved from his entropic situation.

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Fractal Solar Wind

Massive solar flare starting and ending on earth's surface. Click to enlarge.Sunspot cycles are hot right now - literally and figuratively. After just posting about Cycle 24 - the about-to-begin 11-year cycle of sunspot activity, I now see a lot of references to scientists at Warwick University reporting on observed fractal nature of the solar wind, and the ramifications for prediction and understanding of sunspot cycles

The articles announcing the findings have been very exuberant about this latest finding, but so far they are short on some crucial facts. They are also woefully inadequate when it comes to reporting previous work.

Most web sites are just reproducing the press release from the University of Warwick:

The researchers, led by Professor Sandra Chapman, have also been able to directly tie these fractal patterns to the Sun's 'storm season'. The Sun goes through a solar cycle roughly 11 years long. The researchers found the fractal patterns in the solar wind occur when the Sun was at the peak of this cycle when the solar corona was at its most active, stormy and complex - sunspot activity, solar flares etc. When the corona was quieter no fractal patterns were found in the solar wind only general turbulence.

From this description it is not clear what the fractal pattern is. The New Scientist site provides more details, including a possible reason for the fractal pattern:

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The Two Einsteins

A lot has been written about the latest Isaacson bio of Einstein, and it's now on all US best-seller lists.  Remarkably, there is another Einstein bio just released by Jüurgen Neffe (actually released 2 years ago in Germany and then most of  Europe where it has been a best-seller equivalent to Isaacson) .

I was lucky enough to get the Inquirer assignment for both of them. See the full review. (Because the Inquirer piece was restricted to 850 words, I will have much more to say about both of these books shortly.)

They're both amazing books, with Neffe's maybe the more interesting... If you have the time, read them both!