College Programs in Science Writing

I am always interested in university programs that combine science and writing. The Stevens Institute of Technology has a very unique program titled the Center for Science Writings, which was created in 2005 to "emphasize the vital importance of writing and other forms of communication to science."

With award-winning author and journalist John Horgan as Director, the CSW sponsors a number of exciting and important activities. Two of particular interest to me are a blog that "explore(s) the boundaries between science and the media", and a list of the greatest science books of the 20th century. So far there are 50 books listed, and readers are encouraged to comment and suggest other books. The CSW criteria are that the books "stand out because of their subject matter, their rhetorical style and their impact on science and the rest of culture."

The blog contains a number of interesting posts that are motivated by press reports - something that I occasionally post about here. There are also a few posts written by students, although it is not clear whether these are class assignments. I will be teaching Chaos and Fractals again in Fall 2007, and all students will soon be posting here - most likely in a separate journal on this site. The CSW blog has already given me some a source of interesting readings for my upcoming class and a possible assignment - having my students respond to some of the CSW posts.

The book list is fascinating. Along with standards that all would expect - Einsteins' The Meaning of Relativity, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Dawkins' Selfish Gene,  Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, Watson/Crick's Double Helix, etc.. - I am really glad to see that Gleick's Chaos made the list as well as Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature. Then there other books that I probably would never have come up with, but am glad that someone did: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, Dianne Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses...even Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So be sure to check out the list, and make a suggestion or two. (Don't Panic - I see that someone has recommended Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe!)

If there are any readers out there who know of other interesting science & writing programs, please post a comment with a link.

Imagery in Art and Science - from da Vinci to the Desktop

da Vinci catheterized? See below for details.  Click to enlargeReaders interested in more of the science-art boundary should check out the review by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles in the May 2007 Scientific American. Titled The Interplay of Art and Science,the piece is an in-depth look at two books by Martin Kemp:

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design
and
Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope

(Note: Kemp is a frequent contributor to the Science in Culture column in Nature. A leading expert on da Vinci, he is professor of art history at Oxford.)

According to Kevles, a common theme in both books is how art affects imagery in science and science affects imagery in art, which leads to some very interesting and provocative ideas about digital imagery.

Two parts of the review are of particular interest. In one, Kevles describes how Kemp relates D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's analysis of the shape and size of living organisms spelled out in his famous work On Growth and Form to the "visual mathematics of fractals, chaos theory and machine-made images."

Continuing with the idea of the connection between visual imagery, art, science, and life, Kevles closes with some of Kemp's concerns about the imagery produced by science (e.g. in the form of medical imaging technology) and the reality behind it. The following is an excerpt: (See Kevles' full review for much more)

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Poker, Popper, and Wittgenstein - This Ain't No Love Story

It's hard to imagine a time when big-time philosophers roamed the earth as true public figures, in search of weighty issues, faculty positions, and total intellectual superiority over fellow philosophers who dared to argue with them.

Such was the time in the first half of the 20th Century, with one of the main battlegrounds the post-war scene at Cambridge University, home base of Bertrand Russel, GE Moore, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein - the iconoclastic bad boy of philosophy, cult figure, and master of cryptic utterances who had a devastating penchant for eviscerating the work of philosophers he disagreed with - which was most other philosophers without the initials LW.

The scene was the Moral Science Society, which was was holding their monthly meeting on October 25, 1946. Karl Popper - at that time just starting a position at the London School of Economics, was already causing a stir with his The Logic of Scientific Discovery - was in town presenting a talk titled Are There Philosophical Problems?

The head of the MSD was none other than Ludwig W. Wittgenstein, scion of one of the wealthiest families in pre-war Austria, who had renounced all his wealth to live an ascetic life of the mind, spirit, and body that is so improbably eccentric that he and his ideas are recurring figures and themes in many fictional stories that need a touch of the bizarre (e.g. The World As I Found It, by Bruce Duffy, A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr, Wittgensteins' Mistress by David Markson).

Apparently Popper was no no shrinking violet either : a truly fesity, take-no-philosophical-prisoner scold according to many contemporaries.

Back to the dom's room at Cambridge. You get the picture: smoky, with drab walls, scuffed, darkened oak chairs and table, leaded glass separators on the casement windows, bottles of port, an old fireplace with soot-covered bricks inside, and... a fireplace poker soon to be infamous for the briefest of philosophical battles. What happened in that room is the stuff of philosophical lore - 10-minute argument that flashed between Wittgenstein and Popper that is still recounted and debated today.

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Thomas Kuhn in High Def - Paradigm Shifts, Blu-Rays, and the NFL

Until I read James Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science in 1987, I had only a passing knowledge of  paradigm shifts, one of the defining features of science described by Thomas Kuhn in his Structures of Scientific Revolution. Gleick used the paradigm shift idea to describe the break with the overly linear science brought on by the new discoveries of Chaos Theory - a usage of the paradigm shift concept that seems to adhere to Kuhn's definition.

A concise summary of  Kuhn's ideas can be found in Lawrence van Gelder's June 19, 1996 NYTimes obit:

His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could overthrow theories of a world governed by design.

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As the World Turns - Foucault's Eco

Feb. 3rd marked the 156th anniversary of Léon Foucault's demonstration that the earth revolved on its axis. The experiment was brilliantly simple: let a large pendulum swing back and forth over the course of a day, with a sharp tip hanging off of the pendulum bob making patterns in a bed of sand below it. As the pendulum bob moves back and fort in a vertical plane the earth rotates beneath it, and this rotation can be measured by the marks in the sand. (For a nice intro to Foucault's Pendulum, check out the scriptographic booklet on the subject at the California Academy of Sciences.)

Foucault did not stop with simply showing that the earth rotates. He was able to predict how fast the pendulum would appear to rotate because of the fact that the rate at which the marks carve out a pattern depends on the latitude of the pendulum. So, for example, at one of the poles the earth will spin once in 24 hours, while at the equator the earth does not spin with respect to the plane of the pendulum. Anywhere in between the amount of time it takes for the pendulum to make one complete rotation is given by

T = 24/sin L

Here T is the time for the pendulum to return to its original position (in hours), and L is the latitude at which the experiment is carried out.

The pendulum demonstration was a huge success, showing as it did in a very simple way what could not be felt by earthly inhabitants - the rotation of the earth they were standing on. (It was also a majestic demonstration, being conducted in the the Panthéon in Paris.) The fact that Foucault could actually predict the exact timing of the rotation made him akin to the explorers who mesmerized remote villagers with abilities to predict eclipses, and he achieved physics rock-star status - maybe the most until Einstein.

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When Scientists Argue About Religion and Science

God the GeometerIn his July 2006 Addressing the public about science and religion opinion piece for Physics Today,  Murray Peshkin - a theoretical physicist at Argonne national Lab - argues passionately about the benefits of scientists addressing the boundary between religion and science in a public forum. Peshkin describes how his public appearances have led to some interesting give-and-take - learning experiences for him and his audiences.

Peshkin's position is summarized by the title and opening line of an essay published in the Chicago Tribune magazine:

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: CAN THEY LEARN TO LIVE WITH EACH OTHER?
The answer is that they can and they must, or we will all suffer the consequences.

Given the nature of the polarized debates surrounding Intelligent Design, and particularly the Dover court case, it's clear that two topics need a good deal of elaboration: describing how a scientist uses the word theory, and the need for a theory to be falsifiable in order to count as science.

Peshkin uses an interesting, and effective hypothetical situation to drive home the falsifiable idea, which leads to his main point about the inherent differences between a scientific and religious world view:

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Breaking the Ice Shelf - Why Hide the Crack?

The ice shelf breaks away. Click to enlarge.

In December 2006 it was widely reported that the 25.5-square-mile Ayles ice-shelf broke free from Ellesmere island, some 500 miles south of the North Pole. (See the National Geographic report for more details.)

This event actually occurred in 2005 when it had been observed by satellite images (click here for animations of the event), but, according to Luke Copeland of the University of Ottawa Global Laboratory for Cryospheric Research, the information was not released until the reasons for the split could be determined.

Not surprisingly, Copeland and colleagues found that the event, which was sizeable enough to register on earthquake monitors 155 miles away, is consistent with global warming.

I understand that scientists should be as deliberate as possible in doing their research, and circumspect (or silent) about their work until all of the essential methodology of good scientific research prior to publishing are carried out.

But I find it incredibly surprising that the news of the ice-shelf breaking off was held back from publication for almost one-and-a-half years! After all, the ice-shelf cracking is incontrovertible data that is not in question. More important, it is essential data for all inhabitants of this planet.

Why was the news withheld?

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In Praise of Friction The Media Slips Again

I recently posted a complaint about physics misconceptions promulgated by the media. To be fair, I need to report a good job describing the physics of a situation when it appears.

In an article posted on Dec. 27, 2006 by the op/ed staff of the North County Times (near San Diego), and titled A Physics Lesson, the authors do a very nice job of describing the role of friction in driving:

Your tires rely on friction to speed up, turn or stop. On a dry day, there's usually plenty of friction when the rubber hits the road. When it rains, the weight of your car must push water out of the way for the tires to reach the road.

The faster you drive, the greater amount of water your tires must push aside. If that water gets trapped between the asphalt and the tires, you'll lose control of your car -- you'll be hydroplaning. The lesson here is that when the roads are wet, you can't drive as fast as you would on a normal day. Even if the rain is light, slow down at least five to 10 mph.

When I teach a first-semester course in Physics, I typically begin the first day trying to get students to identify forces acting on them as they do basic things. My favorite example is on walking. I ask the following question: if you go from standing still to walking at a steady pace, you accelerated. According to Newton there must be an unbalanced force acting on you in the direction of your acceleration. What is this force?

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A Jolting Message: Hemingway's Snow and Climate Change

Kilimanjaro, then and now. Click to enlarge.I have remarked before on the ever-increasing media coverage given to global warming. As more and more scientific evidence comes in about the effects of global warming (see my recent post On the Increase in Greenland Ice Loss), the facts, interpretations, scientific theories, and political reactions to climate change are incredibly varied in the face of almost overwhelming evidence. Making sense of what is really happening, and how we should react, calls for insightful commentary from expert sources.

One such source is an article by Doug Macdougall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography titled Jolting Messages on Climate Change. (The Chronicle, April 2006). In addition to his clear enunciation of global climate change facts and a strong call for "jolting messages" that will move "politicians and the public into effective action," Macdougall reviews five books about climate change published in 2005 and 2006:

• Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What it Means for our Future, by John D. Cox
• Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy by William Sweet
• The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, by Tim Flannery
• The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, by Eugene Linden

According to Macdougall, each of these books have strong points. I encourage you to read Macdougall's reviews, which are very even-handed. Some of the authors are more pessimistic than the others in terms of what can be done (via science, engineering, politics), but all agree on the scope of the problem. Most of the books do take on the sudden climate changes that were first observed in studies of the Greenland ice sheet.

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Frisbees in Space: Gettin' Funky With Gravity

This is a cautionary tale of frisbees in space, and those in the media who report about them...

Probably the main issue in all of physics education is how to help students learn in the face of their often serious misconceptions about the nature of forces in the world. Most carry with them an Aristotelian view of physics, in which forces are needed for motion. This view is in direct contrast with Newton's Laws (specifically the First Law). According to Newton, forces are needed to change motion, i.e. accelerate an object.

The Aristotelian view leads to totally incorrect views of everyday situations, views that are repeated continually because they have become so ingrained in our thinking and reactions. For example,when a driver moves to the left when making a sharp-right-hand turn, the common statement is that there is a "centrifugal force" pushing leftward. There is no such force: the driver is moving straight while the car moves to the right. The driver then feels the door on the left - the inclination is then to assume that a force "pushed" the driver into the door. There are many other situations where we instinctively believe that a force is acting when in fact it isn't. (See Aristotelian Physics and Why We Hate It by R.G. Brown of Duke U.)

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