Showing posts with label Fred Hoyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred Hoyle. Show all posts

Monday 23 November 2020

Self-destructive STEM: how scientists can devalue science

Following on from last month's exploration of external factors inhibiting the scientific enterprise, I thought it would be equally interesting to examine issues within the sector that can negatively influence STEM research. There is a range of factors that vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, showing that science and its practitioners are as prey to the whims of humanity as any other discipline. 

1) Conservatism

The German physicist Max Planck once said that a "new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." With peer review of submitted articles, it's theoretically possible that a new hypothesis could be prevented from seeing the light of day due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time; or more precisely, because the reviewers personally object to the ideas presented.

Another description of this view is that there are three stages before the old guard accept the theories of the young turks, with an avant garde idea eventually being taken as orthodoxy. One key challenge is the dislike shown by established researchers to outsiders who promote a new hypothesis in a specialisation they have no formal training in. 

A prominent example of this is the short shrift given to meteorologist Alfred Wegener when he described continental drift to the geological establishment; it took over thirty years and a plethora of evidence before plate tectonics was found to correlate with Wegener's seemingly madcap ideas. More recently, some prominent palaeontologists wrote vitriolic reviews of the geologist-led account of the Chicxulub impact as the main cause of the K-T extinction event. 

This also shows the effect impatience may have; if progress in a field is slow or seemingly negative, it may be prematurely abandoned by most if not all researchers as a dead end.

2) Putting personal preferences before evidence 

Although science is frequently sold to the public as having a purely objective attitude towards natural phenomena, disagreements at the cutting edge are common enough to become cheap ammunition for opponents of STEM research. When senior figures within a field disagree with younger colleagues, it's easy to see why there might be a catch-22 situation in which public funding is only available when there is consensus and yet consensus can only be reached when sufficient research has as placed an hypothesis on a fairly firm footing.

It is well known that Einstein wasted the last thirty or so years of his life trying to find a unified field theory without including quantum mechanics. To his tidy mind, the uncertainty principle and entanglement didn't seem to be suitable as foundation-level elements of creation, hence his famous quote usually truncated as "God doesn't play dice". In other words, just about the most important scientific theory ever didn't fit into his world picture - and yet the public's perception of Einstein during this period was that he was the world's greatest physicist.

Well-known scientists in other fields have negatively impacted their reputation late in their career. Two well-known examples are the astronomer Fred Hoyle and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Hoyle appears to have initiated increasingly fruity ideas as he got older, including the claim that the archaeopteryx fossil at London's Natural History Museum was a fake. Margulis for her part stayed within her area of expertise, endosymbiotic theory for eukaryotic cells, to claim her discoveries could account for an extremely wide range of biological functions, including the cause of AIDS. It doesn't take much to realise that if two such highly esteemed scientists can publish nonsense, then uninformed sections of the public might want to question the validity of a much wider variety of established scientific truths.

3) Cronyism and the academic establishment

While nepotism might not appear often in the annals of science history, there have still been plenty of instances in which favoured individuals gain a position at the expense of others. This is of course a phenomenon as old as natural philosophy, although thankfully the rigid social hierarchy that affected the careers of nineteenth century luminaries such as physicist Michael Faraday and dinosaur pioneer Gideon Mantell is no longer much of an issue. 

Today, competition for a limited number of places in university research faculties can lead to results as unfair as in any humanities department.  A congenial personality and an ability to self-publicise may tip the balance on gaining tenure as a faculty junior; scientists with poor interpersonal skills can fare badly. As a result, their reputation can be denigrated even after their death, as happened with DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin in James Watson's memoirs. 

As opponents of string theory are keen to point out, graduates are often forced to get on bandwagons in order to gain vital grants or academic tenure. This suggests that playing safe by studying contemporary ‘hot' areas of research is preferred to investigating a wider range of new ones. Nobel Laureate and former Stephen Hawking collaborator Roger Penrose describes this as being particularly common in theoretical physics, whereby the new kids on the block have to join the entourage of an establishment figure rather than strike out with their own ideas.

Even once a graduate student has gained a research grant, it doesn't mean that their work will be fairly recognised. Perhaps the most infamous example of this occurred with the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. One of the two recipients was Antony Hewish, who gained the prize for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars”. Yet it was his student Jocelyn Bell who promoted the hypothesis while Hewish was claiming the signal to be man-made interference. 

4) Jealousy and competitiveness

Although being personable and a team player can be important, anyone deemed to be too keen on self-aggrandising may attract the contempt of the scientific establishment. Carl Sagan was perhaps the most prominent science communicator of his generation but was blackballed from the US National Academy of Sciences due to being seen as too popular! This is despite some serious planetary astronomy in his earlier career, including work on various Jet Propulsion Laboratory probes. 

Thankfully, attitudes towards sci-comm have started to improve. The Royal Society has advocated the notion that prominent scientists should become involved in promoting their field, as public engagement has been commonly judged by STEM practitioners as the remit of those at the lower end of scientific ability. Even so, there remains the perception that those engaged in communicating science to the general public are not proficient enough for a career in research. Conversely, research scientists should be able to concentrate on their work rather than having to spend large amounts of their time of seeking grants or undertaking administration - but such ideals are not likely to come to in the near future!

5) Frauds, hoaxes and general misdemeanours 

Scientists are as human as everyone else and given the temptation have been known to resort to underhand behaviour in order to obtain positions, grants and renown. Such behaviour has been occurring since the Enlightenment and varies from deliberate use of selective evidence through to full-blown fraud that has major repercussions for a field of research. 

One well-known example is the Piltdown Man hoax, which wasn't uncovered for forty years. This is rather more due to the material fitting in with contemporary social attitudes rather than the quality - or lack thereof - of the finds. However, other than generating public attention of how scientists can be fooled, it didn't damage science in the long run. 

A far more insidious instance is that of Cyril Burt's research into the heritability of intelligence. After his death, others tried to track down Burt's assistants, only to find they didn't exist. This of course placed serious doubt on the reliability of both his data and conclusions, but even worse his work was used by several governments in the late twentieth century as the basis for social engineering. 

Scandals are not unknown in recent years, providing ammunition for those wanting to deny recognition of fundamental scientific theories (rarely the practical application). In this age of social media, it can take only one person's mistake - deliberate or otherwise - to set in motion a global campaign that rejects the findings of science, regardless of the evidence in its favour. As the anti-vaccination lobby have proven, science communication still has long way to go if we are to combine the best of both worlds: a healthy scepticism with an acceptance of how the weird and wonderful universe really works, and not how we would like it to.

Monday 29 October 2018

Space is the place: did life begin in the cosmic void?

A few weeks' ago I was watching a television documentary about the search for intelligence aliens and featuring the usual SETI experts Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak when I realised that we rarely see any crossover with research into non-intelligent extra-terrestrial life. Whereas the former is often seen by outsiders as pie-in-the-sky work by idealistic dreamers, the latter has more of a down-to-Earth feel about it, even though it has at times also suffered from a lack of credibility.

Based on current thinking, it seems far more probable that life in the universe will mostly be very small and entirely lacking consciousness, in other words, microbial. After all, life on Earth arose pretty much as soon as the environment was stable enough, around 3.7 billion years ago or even earlier. In contrast, lifeforms large enough to be visible without a microscope evolved around 1 billion or so years ago (for photosynthetic plants) and only about 580 million years ago for complex marine animals.

The recent publicity surrounding the seasonal variations in methane on Mars has provided ever more tantalising hints that microbial life may survive in ultraviolet-free shelters near the Martian surface, although it will be some years before a robot mission sophisticated enough to visit sink holes or canyon walls can investigate likely habitats. (As for the oft-talked about but yet to be planned crewed mission, see this post from 2015.)

Therefore it seems that it is worth concentrating on finding biological or pre-biological compounds in extra-terrestrial objects as much as listening for radio signals. The search can be via remote sensing (e.g. of molecular clouds, comets and asteroids) as well as investigating meteorites - bearing in mind that the Earth receives up to one million kilogrammes of material per day, although less than one percent is large enough to be identified as such.

The problem is that this area of research has at times had a fairly poor reputation due to the occasional premature claim of success. Stories then become widespread via non-specialist media in such a way that the resulting hype frequently bears little relation to the initial scientific report. In addition, if further evidence reverses that conclusion, the public's lack of understanding of the error-correcting methods of science leads to disillusion at best and apathy at worst.

One key hypothesis that has received more than its fair share of negative publicity has been that of panspermia, which suggests not just the chemicals of biology but life itself has been brought to Earth by cosmic impactors. The best known advocates are Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, but their outspoken championing of an hypothesis severely lacking in evidence has done little to promote the idea. For while it is feasible - especially with the ongoing discovery of extremophiles everywhere from deep ocean vents to the coolant ponds of nuclear reactors - to envisage microbial life reaching Earth from cometary or asteroid material, the notion that these extra-terrestrials have been responsible for various epidemics seems to be a step too far.

It's long been known that comets contain vast amounts of water; indeed, simulations suggest that until the Late Heavy Bombardment around four billion years ago there may have been far less water on Earth than subsequently. Considering the volumes of water ice now being discovered on Mars and the Moon, the probability of life-sustaining environments off the Earth has gained a respectable boost.

It isn't just water, either: organic compounds that are precursors to biological material have been found in vast quantities in interstellar space; and now they are being found in the inner solar system too. That's not to say that this research has been without controversy as well. Since the early 1960s, Bartholomew Nagy has stirred debate by announcing the discovery of sophisticated pre-biological material in impactors such as the Orgueil meteorite. Examination by other teams has found that contamination has skewed the results, implying that Nagy's conclusions were based on inadequate research. Although more recent investigation of meteorites and spectrophotometry of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids have supplied genuine positives, the earlier mistakes have sullied the field.

Luckily, thorough examination of the Australian Murchison meteorite has promoted the discipline again, with numerous amino acids being confirmed as of non-terrestrial origin. The RNA nucleobase uracil has also been found in the Murchison meteorite, with ultraviolet radiation in the outer space vacuum being deemed responsible for the construction of these complex compounds.

Not that there haven't been other examples of premature results leading to unwarranted hype. Perhaps the best known example of this was the 1996 announcement of minute bacteria-like forms in the Martian ALH84001 meteorite. The international headlines soon waned when a potential non-biological origin was found.

In addition to examination of these objects, experiments are increasingly being performed to test the resilience of life forms in either vacuum chambers or real outer space, courtesy of the International Space Station. After all, if terrestrial life can survive in such a hostile environment, the higher the likelihood that alien microbiology could arrive on Earth via meteorite impact or cometary tail (and at least one amino acid, glycine, has been found on several comets).

Unmanned probes are now replicating these findings, with the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft finding glycine in the dust cloud around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2016. Although these extra-terrestrial objects may lack the energy source required to kick-start life itself, some are clearly harbouring many of the complex molecules used in life on Earth.

It has now been proven beyond any doubt that organic and pre-biological material is common in space. The much higher frequency of impacts in the early solar system suggests that key components of Earth's surface chemistry - and its water - were delivered via meteorites and comets. Unfortunately, the unwary publication of provisional results, when combined with the general public's feeble grasp of scientific methodology, has hindered support for what is surely one of the most exciting areas in contemporary science. A multi-faceted approach may in time supply the answers to the ultimate questions surrounding the origin of life and its precursor material. This really is a case of watch (this) space!

Friday 15 March 2013

Preaching to the unconverted: or how to convey science to the devout

It's said that charity begins at home. Likewise, a recent conversation I had with a pious Mormon started me thinking: just how do you promote science, both the method and the uncomfortable facts, to someone who has been raised to mistrust the discipline? Of course, there is a (hopefully) very small segment of the human race that will continue to ignore the evidence even after it is presented right in front of them, but stopping to consider those on the front line - such as biology teachers and ‘outed' atheists in the U.S. Bible Belt - how do you present a well-reasoned set of arguments to promote the theory and practice of science? 

It's relatively easy for the likes of Richard Dawkins to argue his case when he has large audiences of professionals or sympathetic listeners, but what is the best approach when endorsing science to a Biblical literalist on a one-to-one basis? The example above involved explaining just how we know the age of the Earth. Not being the first time I've been asked this, I was fully prepared to enlighten on the likes of uranium series dating, but not having to mention the 'D' words (Darwin or Dawkins) made this a relatively easy task. To aid any fans of science who might find themselves in a similar position I've put together a small toolkit of ideas, even if the conversation veers into that ultimate of controversial subjects, the evolution of the human race:
  1. A possible starting point is to be diffident, explaining the limitations of science and dispelling the notion that it isn't the catalogue of sundry facts it is sometimes described as (for example, in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything). It is difficult but nonetheless profitable to explain the concept that once-accepted elements of scientific knowledge can ostensibly be surpassed by later theories, only to maintain usefulness on a special case basis. A good illustration of this is Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, which explains the force of gravity but not what creates it. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity provides a solution but Newton's Law is much easier to use, being accurate enough to use even to guide spacecraft. And since General Relativity cannot be combined with quantum mechanics, there is probably another theory waiting to be discovered…somewhere. As British astrophysicist and populariser John Gribbin has often pointed out, elements at the cutting edge of physics are sometimes only describable via metaphor, there not being anything within human experience that can be used as a comparison. Indeed, no-one has ever observed a quark and in the early days of the theory some deemed it just a convenient mathematical model. As for string theory, it's as bizarre as many a creation myth (although you might not want to admit that bit).
  2. Sometimes (as can be seen with Newton and gravity) the 'what' is known whilst the 'why' isn't. Even so, scientists can use the partial theories to extrapolate potential 'truths' or even exploit them via technology. Semi-conductors require quantum mechanics, a theory that no-one really understands. Indeed, no less a figure than Einstein refused to accept many of its implications.  There are many competing interpretations, some clearly more absurd than others, but that doesn't stop it being the most successful scientific theory ever, in terms of the correspondence between the equations and experimental data. So despite the uncertainty - or should that be Uncertainty (that's a pun, for the quantum mechanically-minded) - the theory is a cornerstone of modern physics.
  3. As far as I know, the stereotype of scientists as wild-haired, lab-coated, dispassionate and unemotional beings may stem from the Cold War, when the development of the first civilisation-destroying weapons led many to point their fingers at the inventors rather than their political paymasters. Yet scientists can be as creative as artists. Einstein conducted thought experiments, often aiming for a child-like simplicity, in order to obtain results. The idea that logic alone makes a good scientist is clearly bunkum. Hunches and aesthetics can prove as pivotal as experimental data or equations.
  4. Leading on from this, scientists are just as fallible as the rest of us. Famous examples range from Fred Hoyle's belief in the Steady State theory (and strangely, that the original Archaeopteryx fossils are fakes) through to the British scientific establishment's forty-year failure to recognise that the Piltdown Man finds were crude fakes. However, it isn't always as straightforward as these examples: Einstein's greatest blunder - the cosmological constant - was abandoned after the expansion of the universe was discovered, only for it to reappear in recent years as the result of dark energy. And of course mistakes can prove more useful than finding the correct answer the first time!
  5. There are numerous examples of deeply religious scientists, from Kepler and Newton via Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, to the contemporary British particle physicist the Reverend John Polkinghorne. Unlike the good versus evil dichotomy promoted by Hollywood movies, it's rarely a case of us versus them.
  6. Although there are searches for final theories such as the Grand Unified Theory of fundamental forces, one of the current aspects of science that differs profoundly from the attitudes of a century or so ago is that there is the possibility of never finding a final set of solutions. Indeed, a good experiment should generate as many new questions as it answers.
  7. If you feel that you're doing well, you could explain how easy it is to be fooled by non-existent patterns and that our brains aren't really geared up for pure logic. It's quite easy to apparently alter statistics using left- or right-skewed graphs, or to use a logarithmic scale on one axis. In addition, we recognise correlations that just aren't there but we which we would like to think are true. In the case of my Mormon colleague he was entrenched in the notion of UFOs as alien spacecraft! At this point you could even conduct an experiment: make two drawings, one of a constellation and one of evenly-spaced dots, and ask them to identify which one is random. Chances are they will pick the latter. After all, every culture has seen pictures in the random placements of stars in the night sky (or the face of Jesus in a piece of toast).
Constellation vs random dots
Ursa Major (see what you like) vs evenly-spaced dots

So to sum up:
  1. There's a fuzzy line at the cutting edge of physics and no-one understands what most of it means;
  2. We've barely started answering fundamental questions, and there are probably countless more we don't even know to ask yet;
  3. Science doesn't seek to provide comforting truths, only gain objective knowledge, but...
  4. ...due to the way our brains function we can never remove all subjectivity from the method;
  5. No one theory is the last word on a subject;
  6. Prominent scientists easily make mistakes;
  7. And most of all, science is a method for finding out about reality, not a collection of carved-in-stone facts.
So go out there and proselytise. I mean evangelise. Err...spread the word. Pass on the message. You get the picture: good luck!

Saturday 9 January 2010

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Or who validates popular science books?)

Gandhi once said "learn as if you were to live forever", but for the non-scientist interested in gaining accurate scientific knowledge this can prove rather tricky. Several options are available in the UK, most with drawbacks: there are few 'casual' part-time adult science courses (including the Open University); the World Wide Web is useful but inhibits organised, cohesive learning and there's always the danger of being taken in by some complete twaddle; whilst television documentaries and periodicals rarely delve into enough detail. This only leaves the ever-expanding genre of popular science books, with the best examples often including the false starts and failed hypotheses that make science so interesting.

However, there is a problem: if the book includes mistakes then the general reader is unlikely to know any better. I'm not talking about the usual spelling typos but more serious flaws concerning incorrect facts or worse still, errors of emphasis and misleading information. Admittedly the first category can be quite fun in a 'spot the mistake' sort of way: to have the particle physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw inform you that there were Muslims in the second century AD, as they do in Why does E=mc2? (and why should we care?) helps to make the authors a bit more human. After all, why should a physicist also have good historical knowledge? Then again, this is the sort of fact that is extremely easy to verify, so why wasn't this checked in the editing process? You expect Dan Brown's novels to be riddled with scientific errors, but are popular science book editors blind to non-science topics?

Since the above is an historical error many readers may be aware of the mistake, but the general public will often not be aware of inaccuracies relating to scientific facts and theories. Good examples of the latter can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling popular science book in the UK in 2005. As a non-scientist Bryson admits that it's likely to be full of "inky embarrassments" and he's not wrong. For instance, he makes several references to the DNA base Thymine but at one point calls it Thiamine, which is actually Vitamin B1. However, since Bryson is presenting themed chapters of facts (his vision of science rather than any explanation of methods) these are fairly minor issues and don't markedly detract from the substance of the book.

So far that might seem a bit nitpicky but there are other works containing more fundamental flaws that give a wholly inaccurate description of a scientific technique. My favourite error of this sort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium and is howler that continues to astonish me more than a decade after first reading. Gould correctly states that raw radiocarbon dates are expressed as years BP (Before Present) but then posits that this 'present' relates directly to the year of publication of the work containing that date. In other words, if you read a book published in AD 2010 that refers to the date 1010 BP, the latter year is equivalent to AD 1000; whereas for a book published in AD 2000, 1010 BP would equate to AD 990. It's astounding that Gould, who as a palaeontologist presumably had some understanding of other radiometric dating methods, could believe such a system would be workable. The 'present' in the term BP was fixed at AD 1950 decades before Gould's book was published, so it doubly astonishes that no-one questioned his definition. You have to ask were his editors so in awe that they were afraid to query his text, or did his prominence give him copy-editing control of his own material? A mistake of this sort in a discipline so close to Gould's area of expertise can only engender doubt as to the veracity of his other information.

A more dangerous type of error is when the author misleads his readership through personal bias presented as fact. This is particularly important in books dealing with recent scientific developments as there will be few alternative sources for the public to glean the information from. In turn, this highlights the difference between professionals and their peer-reviewed papers and the popularisations available to the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing library of popular books discussing superstrings and M-theory but most make the same mistake of promoting this highly speculative branch of physics not just as the leading contender in the search for a unified field theory, but as the only option. Of course a hypothesis that cannot be experimentally verified is not exactly following a central tenet of science anyway. There has been discussion in recent years of a string theory Mafia so perhaps this is only a natural extension into print; nonetheless it is worrying to see a largely mathematical framework given so much premature attention. I suppose only time will tell...

It also appears that some publishers will accept material from senior but non-mainstream scientists on the basis of the scientist's stature, even if their hypotheses border on pseudoscience. The late Fred Hoyle was a good example of a prominent scientist with a penchant for quirky (some might say bizarre) ideas such as panspermia, who although unfairly ignored by the Nobel Committee seems to have had few problems getting his theories into print. Another example is Elaine Morgan, who over nearly four decades has written a string of volumes promoting the aquatic ape hypothesis despite lack of evidence in the ever-increasing fossil record.

But whereas Hoyle and Morgan's ideas have long been viewed as off the beaten track, there are more conventional figures whose popular accounts can be extremely misleading, particularly if they promote the writer's pet ideas over the accepted norm. Stephen Jay Gould himself frequently came in for criticism for overemphasising various evolutionary methods at the expense of natural selection, yet his peers' viewpoint is never discussed in his popular writings. Another problem can be seen in Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve, which received enormous publicity on publication as it gratifies our desire to understand human origins. However, the book includes a jumbled combination of extreme speculation and pure fiction, tailored in such a way as to maximise interest at the expense of clarification. Some critics have argued the reason behind Sykes's approach is to promote his laboratory's mitochondrial DNA test, capable of revealing which 'daughter' the customer is descended from. Scientists have to make a living like everyone else, but this commercially-driven example perhaps sums up the old adage that you should never believe everything you read. The Catch-22 of course is that unless you understand enough of the subject beforehand, how will you know if a popular science book contains errors?

A final example does indeed suggest that some science books aimed at a general audience prove to be just too complex for comprehensive editing by anyone other than the author. I am talking about Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. At over one thousand pages this great tome is marketed with the sentence "No particular mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader is assumed", yet I wonder whether the cover blurb writer had their tongue firmly in their cheek? It is supposed to have taken Penrose eight years to write and from my occasional flick-throughs in bookshops I can see it might take me that long to read, never mind understand. I must confess all those equations haven't really tempted me yet, at least not until I have taken a couple of Maths degrees...