homunculus

Democracy, huh?

2012-02-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

Here’s my latest Muse for Nature News. But while I’m in that neck of the woods, I very much enjoyed the piece on Dickens in the latest issue. Yes, even Nature is in on that act.
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“The people who cast the votes decide nothing”, Josef Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” Little has changed in Russia, if the findings of a new preprint are to be believed. Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the lower Federal Assembly) in Russia, won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49 percent of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging [1].

This is not a new accusation. Some have claimed that the Russian statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5 or 10 percent, as though ballot officials simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet pre-determined figures. And in December the Wall Street Journal conducted its own analysis of the statistics which led political scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago to concur that there were signs of fraud.

Naturally, Putin denies this. But if you suspect that neither he nor the Wall Street Journal are exactly the most neutral of sources on Russian politics, Klimek and colleagues offer a welcome alternative. They say that the statistical distribution of votes in the Duma election shows over a hundred times more skew than a normal (bell-curve or gaussian) distribution, the expected outcome of a set of independent choices.

The same is true for the contested Ugandan election of February 2011. Both of these statistical distributions are, even at a glance, profoundly different from those of recent elections in, say, Austria, Switzerland and Spain.

Breaking down the numbers into scatter plots of regional votes lays the problems bare. For both Russia and Uganda these distributions are bimodal. Distortion in the main peak suggests ballot rigging which, for Russia, afflicts about 64 percent of districts.

But the second, smaller peaks reveal much cruder fraud. These correspond to districts showing both 100 percent turnout and 100 percent votes for the winning party. As if.

It’s good to see science expose these corruptions of democracy. Yet science also hints that democracy isn’t quite what it’s popularly sold as anyway. Take the choice of voting system. One of the most celebrated results of the branch of economics known as choice theory is that there can be no perfectly fair means of deciding the outcome of a democratic vote. Possible voting schemes are manifold, and their relative merits hotly debated: first-past-the-post (the UK), proportional representation (Scandinavia), schemes for ranking candidates rather than simply selecting one, and so on.

But as economics Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow showed in the 1950s, none of these systems, nor any other, can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic one might demand [2]. For example, a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative. What Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ implies is that either we need to accept that democratic majority rule has some undesirable consequences or we need to find alternatives – which no one has.

Other considerations can undermine the democratic principle too, such as when a bipartisan vote falls within the margin of statistical error. As the Bush vs Gore US election of 2000 showed, the result is then not democratic but legalistic.

And analysis of voting statistics suggests that, regardless of the voting system, our political choices are not free and independent (as most definitions of democracy pretend) but partly the collective result of peer influence. That is one – although not the only – explanation of why some voting statistics don’t follow a gaussian distribution but instead a relationship called a power law [3,4]. Klimek and colleagues find less extreme but significant deviations from gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections [1], which they assume to result from similar collectivization, or as they put it, voter mobilization.

A key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation [5,6] is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, not from isolated decisions. On the one hand you could say this is just how democratic societies work. On the other, it makes voting a nonlinear process in which small effects (media bias or party budgets, say) can have disproportionately big consequences. At the very least, it makes voting a more complex and less transparent process than is normally assumed.

This isn’t to invalidate Churchill’s famous dictum that democracy is the least bad political system. But let’s not fool ourselves about what it entails.

References

1. Klimek, P., Yegorov, Y., Hanel, R. & Thurner, S. preprint http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1201.3087 (2012).
2. Arrow, K. Social Choice and Individual Values (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1951).
3. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Andrade, J. S. Jr & Moreira, J. E. Phys. Rev. E 60, 1067-1068 (1999).
4. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Moreira, J. E. & Andrade, J. S. Jr, Physica A 322, 698-700 (2003).
5. Fortunato S. & Castellano, C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 138701 (2007).
6. D. Stauffer, ‘Opinion dynamics and sociophysics’, in Encyclopedia of Complexity & System Science, ed. R. A. Meyers, 6380-6388. Springer, Heidelberg, 2009.

Fake flakes

2012-01-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

Tanguy Chouard at Nature has pointed out to me Google’s tribute to the snowflake today:

This is a beautiful example of the kind of bogus flake I collected for my spot in Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People just before Christmas. Eight-pointed flakes like this are relatively common, because they are easier to draw than six-pointed ones:

(from a Prospect mailing)

(from an Amnesty Christmas card (occasionally sent by yours truly))

More rarely one sees five-pointed examples like this from some wrapping paper in 2010:

Or, more deliciously, this one from the Millibands last year:

I like to point out that the possible sighting of quasicrystalline ice should make us hesitant to be too dismissive of these inventive geometries. What’s more, there do exist claims of pentagonal flakes having been observed, though this seems extremely hard to credit. Of course, in truth quasicrystal ice, even if it exists in very rare circumstances, hardly has five- or eightfold snowflakes as its inevitable corollary. But it’s fun to think about it, especially near the quadricentenary [?] of Kepler’s classic treatise on the snowflake, De nive sexangula.

Forbidden chemistry

2012-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve just published a feature article in New Scientist on “reactions they said could never happen” (at least, that was my brief). A fair bit of the introductory discussion had to be dropped, so here’s the original full text – sorry, a long post. I’m going to put the pdf on my web site, with a few figures added.
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The award of the 2011 Nobel prize for chemistry to Dan Shechtman for discovering quasicrystals allowed reporters to relish tales of experts being proved wrong. For his heretical suggestion that the packing of atoms in crystals can have a kind of fivefold (quasi)symmetry, Shechtman was ridiculed and ostracized and almost lost his job. The eminent chemist Linus Pauling derided him as a “quasi-scientist”.

Pauling of all people should have known that sometimes it is worth risking being bold and wrong, as he was himself with the structure of DNA in the 1950s. As it turned out, Shechtman was bold and right: quasicrystals do exist, and they earn their ‘impossible’ fivefold symmetry at the cost of not being fully ordered: not truly crystalline in the traditional sense. But while everyone enjoys seeing experts with egg on their faces, there’s a much more illuminating way to think about apparent violations of what is ‘possible’ in chemistry.

Here are some other examples of chemical processes that seemed to break the rules – reactions that ‘shouldn’t’ happen. They demonstrate why chemistry is such a vibrant, exciting science: because it operates on the borders of predictability and certainty. The laws of physics have an air of finality: they don’t tolerate exceptions. No one except cranks expects the conservation of energy to be violated. In biology, in contrast, ‘laws’ seem destined to have exceptions: even the heresy of inheritance of acquired characteristics is permitted by epigenetics. Chemistry sits in the middle ground between the rigidity of physics and the permissiveness of biology. Its basis in physics sets some limits and constraints, but the messy diversity of the elements can often transcend or undermine them.

That’s why chemists often rely on intuition to decide what should or shouldn’t be possible. When his postdoc student Xiao-Dong Wen told Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann that his computer calculations found graphane – puckered sheets of carbon hexagons with hydrogens attached, with a C:H ratio of 1:1 – was more stable than familiar old benzene, Hoffmann insisted that the calculations were wrong. The superior stability of benzene, he said, “is sacrosanct - it’s hard to argue with it”. But eventually Hoffmann realized that his intuition was wrong: graphane is more stable, though no one has yet succeeded in proving definitively that it can be made.

You could say that chemistry flirts with its own law-breaking inclinations. Chemists often speak of reactions that are ‘forbidden’. For example, symmetry-forbidden reactions are ones that break the rules formulated by Hoffmann in his Nobel-winning work with organic chemist Robert Woodward in 1965 – rules governed by the mathematical symmetry properties of electron orbitals as they are rearranged or recombined by light or heat. Similarly, reactions that fail to conserve the total amount of ‘spin’, a quantum-mechanical property of electrons, are said to be spin-forbidden. And yet neither of these types of ‘forbidden’ reaction is impossible – they merely happen at slower rates. Hoffmann says that he (at Woodward’s insistence) even asserted in their 1965 paper that there were no exceptions to their rules, knowing that this would spur others into finding them.

So this gallery of ‘reactions they said couldn’t happen’ is not a litany of chemists’ conservatism and prejudice (although – let’s be honest – that sometimes played a part). It is a reflection of how chemistry itself exists in an unstable state, needing an intuition of right and wrong but having constantly to readjust that to the lessons of experience. That’s what makes it exciting – it’s not the case that anything might happen, but nevertheless big surprises certainly can. That’s why, however peculiar the claim, the right response in chemistry, perhaps more than any other branch of science, is not “that’s impossible”, but “prove it”.

Crazy tiling

In the early 1980s, Daniel Shechtman was bombarding metal alloys with electrons at the then National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Through mathematical analysis of the interference patterns formed as the beams reflected from different layers of the crystals, it was possible to determine exactly how the atoms were packed.

Among the alloys Shechtman studied, a blend of aluminium and manganese produced a beautiful pattern of sharp diffraction spots, which had always been found to be an indicator of crystalline order. But the crystal symmetry suggested by the pattern didn’t make sense. It was fivefold, like that of a pentagon. One of the basic rules of crystallography is that atoms can’t be packed into a regular, repeating arrangement with fivefold symmetry, just as pentagons can’t tile a floor in a periodic way that leaves no gaps.

Pauling wasn’t the only fierce critic of Shectman’s claims. When he persisted with them, his boss at NBS asked him to leave the group. And a paper he submitted in the summer of 1984 was rejected immediately. Only when he found some colleagues to back him up did he get the results published at the end of that year.

Yet the answer to the riddle they posed had been found already. In the 1970s the mathematician Roger Penrose had discovered that two rhombus-shaped tiles could be used to cover a flat plane without gaps and without the pattern ever repeating. In 1981, the crystallographer Alan Mackay found that if an atom were placed at every vertex of such a Penrose tiling, it would produce a diffraction pattern with fivefold symmetry, even though the tiling itself was not perfectly periodic. Shechtman’s alloy was analogous to a three-dimensional Penrose tiling. It was not a perfect crystal, because the atomic arrangement never repeated exactly; it was a quasicrystal.

Since then, many other quasicrystalline alloys have been discovered. They, or structures very much like them in polymers and assemblies of soap-like molecules called micelles. It has even been suggested that water, when confined in very narrow slits, can freeze into quasicrystalline ice.

You can’t have it both ways

For poor Boris Belousov, vindication came too late. When he was awarded the prestigious Lenin prize by the Soviet government in 1980 for his pioneering work on oscillating chemical reactions, he had already been dead for ten years.

Still, at least Belousov lived long enough to see the scorn heaped on his initial work turn to grudging acceptance by many chemists. When he discovered oscillating chemical reactions in the 1950s, he was deemed to have violated one of the most cherished principles of science: the second law of thermodynamics.

This states that all change in the universe must be accompanied by an increase in entropy – crudely speaking, it must leave things less ordered than they were to begin with. Even processes that seem to create order, such as the freezing of water to ice, in fact promote a broader disorder – here by releasing latent heat into the surroundings. This principle is what prohibits many perpetual motion machines (others violate the first law – the conservation of energy – instead). Violations of the second law are thus something that only cranks propose.

But Belousov was no crank. He was a respectable Russian biochemist interested in the mechanisms of metabolism, and specifically in glycolysis: how enzymes break down sugars. To study this process, Belousov devised a cocktail of chemical ingredients that should act like a simplified analogue of glycolysis. He shook them up and watched as the reaction proceeded, turning from clear to yellow.

Then it did something astonishing: it went clear again. Then yellow. Then clear. It began to oscillate repeatedly between these two coloured states. The problem is that entropy can’t possibly increase in both directions. So what’s up?

Belousov wasn’t actually the first to see an oscillating reaction. In 1921 American chemist William Bray reported oscillations in the reaction of hydrogen peroxide and iodate ions. But no one believed him either, even though the ecologist Alfred Lotka had shown in 1910 how oscillations could arise in a simple, hypothetical reaction. As for Belousov, he couldn’t get his findings published anywhere, and in the end he appended them to a paper in a Soviet conference proceedings on a different topic: a Pyrrhic victory, since they then remained almost totally obscure.

But not quite. In the 1960s another Soviet chemist, Anatoly Zhabotinsky, modified Belousov’s reaction mixture so that it switched between red and blue. That was pretty hard for others to ignore. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction became recognized as one of a whole class of oscillating reactions, and after it was transmitted to the West in a meeting of Soviet and Western scientists in Prague in 1967, these processes were gradually explained.

They don’t violate the second law after all, for the simple reason that the oscillations don’t last forever. Left to their own devices, they eventually die away and the reaction settles down to an unchanging state. They exist only while the reaction approaches its equilibrium state, and are thus an out-of-equilibrium phenomenon. Since thermodynamics speaks only about equilibrium states and not what happens en route to them, it is not threatened by oscillating reactions.

The oscillations are the result of self-amplifying feedback. As the reaction proceeds, one of the intermediate products (call it A) is autocatalytic: it speeds up the rate of its own production. This makes the reaction accelerate until the reagents are exhausted. But there is a second autocatalytic process that consumes A and produces another product, B, which kicks in when the first process runs out of steam. This too quickly exhausts itself, and the system reverts to the first process. It repeatedly flips back and forth between the two reactions, over-reaching itself first in one direction and then in the other. Lotka showed that the same thing can happen in populations of predators and their prey, which can get caught in alternating cycles of boom and bust.

If the BZ reaction is constantly fed fresh reagents, while the final products are removed, the oscillations can be sustained indefinitely: it remains out of equilibrium. Such oscillations are now know to happen in many chemical processes, including some industrially important reactions on metal catalysts and even in real glycolysis and other biochemical processes. If it takes place in an unstirred mixture, the BZ oscillations can spread from initiating spots as chemical waves, giving rise to complex patterns. Related patterns are the probable cause of many animal pigmentation markings. BZ chemical waves are analogues of the waves of electrical excitation that pass through heart tissue and induce regular heartbeats; if they are disturbed, the waves break up and the result can be a heart attack.

These waves might also form the basis of a novel form of computation. Andrew Adamatsky at the University of the West of England in Bristol is using their interactions to create logic gates, which he believes can be miniaturized to make a genuine “wet’” chemical computer. He and collaborators in Germany and Poland have launched a project called NeuNeu to make chemical circuits that will crudely mimic the behaviour of neurons, including a capacity for self-repair.

The quantum escape clause

It’s very cold in space. So cold that molecules encountering one another in the frigid molecular clouds that pepper the interstellar void should generally lack enough energy to react. In general, reactions proceed via the formation of high-energy intermediate molecules which then reconfigure into lower-energy products. Energy (usually thermal) is needed to get the reactants to get over this barrier, but in space there is next to none.

In the 1970s a Soviet chemist named Vitali Goldanski challenged that dogma. He showed that, with a bit of help from high-energy radiation such as gamma-rays or electron beams, some chemicals could react even when chilled by liquid helium to just four degrees above absolute zero – just a little higher than the coldest parts of space. For example, under these conditions Goldanski found that formaldehyde, a fairly common component of molecular clouds, could link up into polymer chains several hundred molecules long. At that temperature, conventional chemical kinetic theory suggested that the reaction should be so slow as to be virtually frozen.

Why was it possible? Goldanski argued that the reactions were getting help from quantum effects. It is well known that particles governed by quantum rules can get across energy barriers even if they don’t appear to have enough energy to do so. Instead of going over the top, they can pass through the barrier, a process known as tunnelling. It’s possible because of the smeared-out nature of quantum objects: they aren’t simply here or there, but have positions described by a probability distribution. A quantum particle on one side of a barrier has a small probability of suddenly and spontaneously turning up on the other side.

Goldanski saw the signature of quantum tunnelling in his ultracold experiments in the lab: the rate of formaldehyde polymerization didn’t steadily increase with temperature, as conventional kinetic theory predicts, but stayed much the same as the temperature rose.

Goldanski believed that his quantum-assisted reactions in space might have helped the molecular building blocks of life to have assembled there from simple ingredients such as hydrogen cyanide, ammonia and water. He even thought they could help to explain why biological molecules such as amino acids have a preferred ‘handedness’. Most amino acids have so-called chiral carbon atoms, to which four different chemical groups are attached, permitting two mirror-image variants. In living organisms these amino acids are always of the right-handed variety, a long-standing and still unexplained mystery. Goldanski argued that his ultracold reactions could favour one enantiomer over the other, since the tunnelling rates might be highly sensitive to tiny biasing influences such as the polarization of radiation inducing them.

Chemical reactions assisted by quantum tunnelling are now well established – not just in space, but in the living cell. Some enzymes are more efficient catalysts than one would expect classically, because they involve the movement of hydrogen ions – lone protons, which are light enough to experience significant quantum tunnelling.

This counter-intuitive phenomenon can also subvert conventional expectations about what the products of a reaction will be. That was demonstrated very recently by Wesley Allen of the University of Georgia and his coworkers. They trapped a highly reactive free-radical molecule called methylhydroxycarbene, which has unpaired electrons that predispose it to react fast, in an inert matrix of solid argon at 11 degrees Kelvin. This molecule can in theory rearrange its atoms to form vinyl alcohol or acetaldehyde. In practice, however, it shouldn’t have enough energy to get over the barrier to these reactions under these ultracold conditions. But the carbene was transformed nonetheless – because of tunnelling.

“Tunnelling is not specifically a low-temperature phenomenon”, Allen explains. “It occurs at all temperatures. But at low temperatures the thermal activation shuts off, so tunnelling is all that is left.”

What’s more, although the formation of vinyl alcohol has a lower energy barrier, Allen and colleagues found that most of the carbene was transformed instead to acetaldehyde. That defied kinetic theory, which says that the lower the energy barrier to the formation of a product, the faster it will be produced and so the more it dominates the resulting mixture. The researchers figured that although the barrier to formation of acetaldehyde may have been higher, it was also narrower, which meant that it was easier to tunnel through.

Tunnelling through such high barriers as these “was quite a shock to most chemists”, says Allen. He says the result shows that “tunnelling is a broader aspect of chemical kinetics that has been understood in the past”.

Not so noble

Dmitri Mendeleev’s first periodic table in 1869 didn’t just have some gaps for yet-undiscovered elements. It had a whole column missing: a whole family of chemical elements whose existence no one suspected. The lightest of them – helium – was discovered that very same year, and the others began to turn up in the 1890s, starting with argon. The reason they took so long to surface, even though they are abundant (helium is the second most abundant element in the universe) is that they don’t do anything: they are inert, “noble”, not reacting with other elements.

That supposed unreactivity was tested with every extreme chemists could devise. Just after the noble gas argon was discovered in 1894, the French chemist Henri Moissan mixed it with fluorine, the viciously reactive element that he had isolated in 1886, and sent sparks through the mixture. Result: nothing. By 1924, the Austrian chemist Friedrich Paneth pronounced the consensus: “the unreactivity of the noble gas elements belongs to the surest of all experimental results.” Theories of chemical bonding seemed to explain why that was: the noble gases had filled shells of electrons, and therefore no capacity for adding more by sharing electrons in chemical bonds.

Linus Pauling, the chief architect of those theories, didn’t give up. In the 1930s he blagged a rare sample of the noble gas xenon and peruaded his colleague Don Yost at Caltech to try to get it to react with fluorine. After more cooking and sparking, Yost had succeeded only in corroding the walls of his supposedly inert quartz flasks.

Against this intransigent background, it was either a brave or foolish soul who would still try to make compounds from noble gases. But the first person to do so, British chemist Neil Bartlett at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was not setting out to be an iconoclast. He was just following some wonderfully plain reasoning.

In 1961 Bartlett discovered that the compound platinum hexafluoride (PtF6), first made three years earlier by US chemists, was an eye-wateringly powerful oxidant. Oxidation – the removal of electrons from a chemical element or compound – is so named because its prototypical form is the reaction with oxygen gas, a substance almost unparalleled in its ability to grab electrons. But Bartlett found that PtF6 can out-oxidize oxygen itself.

In early 1962 Bartlett was preparing a standard undergraduate lecture on inorganic chemistry and happened to glance at a textbook graph of ‘ionization potentials’ of substances: how much energy is needed to remove an electron from them. He noticed that it takes almost exactly the same energy to ionize – that is, to oxidize – oxygen molecules as xenon atoms. He realised that if PtF6 can do it to oxygen, it should do it to xenon too.

So he tried the experiment, simply mixing red gaseous PtF6 and colourless xenon. Straight away, the glass was covered with a yellow material, which Bartlett found to have the formula XePtF6: the first noble-gas compound.

Since then, many other compounds of both xenon and krypton, another noble gas, have been made. Some are explosively unstable: Bartlett nearly lost an eye studying xenon dioxide. Heavy, radioactive radon forms compounds too, although it wasn’t until 2000 that the first compound of argon was reported by a group in Finland. Even now, the noble gases continue to produce surprises. Roald Hoffmann admits to being shocked when, in that same year, a compound of xenon and gold was reported by chemists in Berlin – for gold is supposed to be a noble, unreactive metal too. You can persuade elements to do almost anything, it seems.

Improper bonds

Covalent chemical bonds form when two atoms share a pair of electrons, which act as a glue that binds the union. At least, that’s what we learn at school. But chemists have come to accept that there are plenty of other ways to form bonds.

Take the hydrogen bond – the interaction of electron ‘lone pairs’ on one atom such as oxygen or nitrogen with a hydrogen atom on another molecular group with a slight positive charge. This interaction is now acknowledged as the key to water’s unusual properties and the glue that sticks DNA’s double helix together. But the formation of a second bond by hydrogen, supposedly a one-bond atom, was initially derided in the 1920s as a fictitious kind of chemical “bigamy”.

That, however, was nothing compared to the controversy that surrounded the notion, first put forward in the 1940s, that some organic molecules, such as ‘carbocations’ in which carbon atoms are positively charged, could form short-lived structures over the course of a reaction in which a pair of electrons was dispersed over three rather than two atoms. This arrangement was considered so extraordinary that it became known as non-classical bonding.

The idea was invoked to explain some reactions involving the swapping of dangling groups attached to molecules with bridged carbon rings. In the first step of the reaction, the ‘leaving group’ falls off to create an intermediate carbocation. By rights, the replacement dangling group, with an overall negative charge, should have attached at the same place, at the positively charged atom. But it didn’t: the “reactive centre” of the carbocation seemed able to shift.

Some chemists, especially Saul Winstein at the University of California at Los Angeles, argued that the intermediate carbocation is bridged by a non-classical bond that bridged three carbon atoms in a triangular ring, with its positive charge smeared between them, giving the replacement group more than one place to dock. This bonding structure would temporarily, and rather heretically, give one of the carbon atoms five instead of the usual four bonding partners.

Such an unusual kind of bonding offended the sensibilities of other chemists, most of all Herbert Brown, who was awarded a Nobel prize in 1979 for his work on boron compounds. In 1961 he opened the “non-classical ion” war with a paper dismissing proposals for these structures as lacking “the same care and same sound experimental basis as that which is customary in other areas of experimental organic chemistry”. The ensuing arguments raged for two decades in what Brown called a “holy war”. “By the time the controversy sputtered to a halt in the early 1980s”, says philosopher of chemistry William Goodwin of Rowan University in New Jersey, “a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, resources, and invective had been invested in resolving an issue that was crucial neither to progress in physical organic chemistry generally nor to the subfield of carbocation chemistry.” Both sides accused the rival theory of being ‘soft’ – able to fit any result, and therefore not truly scientific.

Brown and his followers didn’t object in principle to the idea of electrons being smeared over more than two atomic nuclei – that happened in benzene, after all. But they considered the nonclassical ion an unnecessary and faddish imposition for an effect that could be explained by less drastic, more traditional means. The argument was really about how to interpret the experiments that bore on the matter, and it shows that, particularly in chemistry, it could and still can be very hard to apply a kind of Popperian falsification to distinguish between rival theories. Goodwin thinks that the non-classical ion dispute was provoked and sustained by ambiguities built into in the way organic chemists try to understand and describe the mechanisms of their reactions. “Organic chemists have sacrificed unambiguous explanation for something much more useful – a theory that helps them make plausible, but fallible, assessments of the chemical behavior of novel, complex compounds”, he says. As a result, chemistry is naturally prone to arguments that get resolved only when one side or the other runs out of energy – or dies.

The non-classical ion argument raged for two decades, until eventually most chemists except Brown accepted that these ions were real. Ironically, in the course of the debate both Winstein and Brown implied to a young Hungarian emigré chemist, George Olah, that his claim to have isolated a relatively long-lived carbocation – a development that ultimately helped resolve the issue – was unwise. This was another ‘reaction that couldn’t happen’, they advised – the ions were too unstable. But Olah was right, and his work on carbocations earned him a Nobel prize in 1994.

Nanotheology

2012-01-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

Belatedly, here’s my final column for the Saturday Guardian. It’s final because, in a reshuffle to ‘consolidate’ the paper (i.e. save space because they’re losing so much money), the back page and its contents have been chopped. It was kind of fun while it lasted, though I intend shortly to post a few thoughts on being exposed to (and encouraged to engage with) the Comment is Free feedback. This piece was particularly revealing in that respect, eliciting as it did a fair bit of outrage from the transhumanists. Who’d have thought there were so many people desperately and credulously hanging out for the Singularity?
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What does God think of nanotechnology? The glib answer is that, like the rest of us, he’s only just heard of it. If you think it’s a silly question anyway, consider that a 2009 study claimed “religiosity is the dominant predictor of moral acceptance of nanotechnology.” ‘Science anthropologist’ Chris Toumey has recently surveyed this moral landscape.

Nanotechnology is a catch-all term that encompasses a host of diverse efforts to manipulate matter on the very small scales of atoms and cells. There’s no single objective. Some nanotechnologists are exploring new approaches to medicine, others want to make computer circuits or new materials.

Of the rather few explicitly religious commentaries on nanotech so far, some have focused on issues that could equally be raised by secular voices: sensible concerns about safety, commercial control and accountability, and responsible application. (None seems too bothered about the strong military interest.)

Yet much of the discussion has headed down the blind alley of transhumanism. Nanotech scientists have long sought to rescue their discipline’s public image from the vocal but fringe spokespersons such as Eric Drexler and billionaire inventor Ray Kurzweil, who have painted a fantastic picture of tiny robots patching up our cells and perhaps hugely extending our longevity. Kurzweil has suggested that nanotech will play a big role in guiding us to a moment he calls the Singularity: a convergence of exponentially growing computer power and medical capability that will transform us into disembodied immortals. He has even set up a Singularity University, based on NASA’s research park in Silicon Valley, to prepare the way.

Needless to say, immortality – or its pursuit – isn’t acceptable to most religious observers of any creed, since it entails a hubristic attempt to transcend the divinely decreed limitations of the human body, and relieves us from saving our souls. But the transhumanism question isn’t unique to nanotech – it’s part of a wider debate about the ethics of human enhancement and modification.

In any case, as far as nanotech is concerned the theologians can relax. Transhumanism and Kurzweil’s Singularity are just delirious dreams and on no serious scientist’s agenda. One Christian writer admitted to being shocked by what he heard at a transhumanist conference. Quite right too: all these folks determined to freeze their heads or download their consciousness into computers are living in an infantile fantasy.

So are there any ethical issues in nanotech that really do have a religious dimension? Science-fiction writer Charles Stross has imagined the dilemmas of Muslims faced with bacon that is chemically identical to the real thing but assembled by nanotechnology rather than pigs. He wasn’t entirely serious, but some liberal Muslim scholars have debated whether the Qu’ran places any constraints on the permitted rearrangements of matter. Given that chemistry was pioneered by Muslims between the eighth and twelfth centuries, this seems unlikely. Jewish scholars, meanwhile, have used the legend of the golem to think about the ethics of making life from inanimate matter, partly in reference to nanotech and artificial intelligence. In the 1960s the pre-eminent expert on the golem legends Gershom Scholem was sanguine about the idea, asking only that our digital golems “develop peacefully and don’t destroy the world.”

These academic discussions have so far been rather considered and tolerant. Toumey wonders whether they’d impinge on the views of, say, your average Southern Baptist, hinting tactfully at what we might suspect anyway: both sensible people and bigots adapt their religion to their temperament and prejudices rather than vice versa.

One British study of attitudes to nanotech made the point that religious groups were better able than secular ones to articulate their ethical concerns because they possessed a vocabulary and conceptual framework for them. The researchers suggested that religious groups might therefore take the lead in communicating public perceptions. I’m not so sure. Articulacy is useful, but it’s more important that you first understand the science. And just because you can couch your views eloquently in terms of souls and afterlives doesn’t make them more valid.

Forever young?

2012-01-17T13:16:00.000-08:00

I was asked by the Guardian to write an online story about the new ‘youth cream’ from L’Oreal. I think they were anticipating a debunking job, but I guess I learnt here the difference between skepticism and cynicism. I’m not really interested in whether these things work or not (whatever ‘work’ can mean in this instance), but I had to admit that there was some kind of science behind this stuff, even if I see no proof yet that it has any lasting effect on wrinkles. So I was overcome by an attack of fairness (who said "gullibility"?). This is what resulted.
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I don’t suppose I’m in the target group for Yves Saint Laurent’s new skin cream Forever Youth Liberator - but what if I did want to know it’s worth shelling out sixty quid for a 50 ml tub? I could be wowed by the (strangely similar) media reports. “It is likely to be one of the most sought after face creams ever”, says the Telegraph, “5,000 women have already pre-ordered a face cream using ingredients which scientists claimed would change the world.” Or as the Daily Mail puts it, the cream is “hailed as the ‘holy grail’ of anti-ageing.” (You have to read on to discover that it’s Amandine Ohayon, general manager of Yves Saint Laurent, who is doing the hailing here.)

But I’m hard to please. I want to know about the science supporting these claims. After all, cosmetics companies have been trying to blind us with science for years – perhaps ever since the white coats began to appear in the DuPont chemical company’s ads (“Better living through chemistry”) in the 1930s. Recently we’ve had skin creams loaded with nano-capsules, vitamins A, C and E, antioxidants and things with even longer names.

“The science behind the brand lies in the groundbreaking technology of Glycobiology”, one puff tells us. “It’s been noted as the future in the medical field, the fruit of more than 100 years of research and recognized by seven Nobel Prizes.” The Telegraph, meanwhile, parrots the PR that, “the cream has been 20 years in development, and has the backing of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.”

I rather wish that, as a chemist, I could say this is all tripe. But it’s not as simple as, say, claims by bottled-water companies to have a secret process that alters the molecular structure of water to assist hydration. For example, it’s true that glycobiology is a big deal. This field studies an undervalued and once unfashionable ingredient of living cells: sugars. Glycans are complicated sugar molecules that play many important biological roles. Attached to proteins at the surfaces of our cells, such sugars act as labels that distinguish different cell types – for example, they determine your blood group. Glycans and related biochemicals are an essential component of the way our cells recognise and communicate with one another.

Skin cells – essentially, tissue-generating cells called fibroblasts – produce glycans and other substances that form a surrounding extracellular matrix, Some of these glycans attract water and keep the skin plump and soft. But their production declines as fibroblasts age, and so the skin becomes dry and wrinkled. Skin creams routinely contain glycoproteins and glycans to redress this deficit.

Fine – but what’s so different about the new cream? It’s based on a combination of artificial glycans trademarked Glycanactif. Selfridges tells us that they “unlock the cells to reactivate their vital functions and liberate the youth potential at all levels of the skin”. Well, it would be nice if cells really were little boxes brimming with ‘youth potential’, just waiting to be ‘unlocked’, but this statement is basically voodoo.

So I contact YSL. And – what do you know? – they sent me some useful science. It’s surrounded by gloss and puff (“Youth is a state of mind that cannot live without science” – meaning what, exactly?), and exposed as the source of that garbled soundbite from Selfridges. But it also shows that YSL has enlisted some serious scientists, most notably Peter Seeberger, a specialist in glycan chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Berlin. And it explains that, instead of just supplying a source of glycans in the extracellular matrix to make up for their reduced production in ageing cells, Glycanactif apparently binds to glycan receptors on the cell surface and stimulates them to start making the molecules (including other glycans and related compounds) needed for healthy skin.

Tough-skinned cynic that I am about the claims of cosmetics manufacturers, I am nonetheless emolliated, if not exactly rejuvenated. True, there’s nothing in the leaflet which proves that FYL does a better job than other skin creams. The science remains very sketchy in places. And (this is true of any claims for cosmetics) we’d reserve judgement until the long-term clinical trials, if it were a drug. But I’m offered a troupe of serious scientists ready to talk about the work. I’m open to persuasion.

Still, it puzzles me. How many of the thousands of advance orders, or no doubt the millions to come, will have been based on examination of the technical data? I know we lack the time, and usually the expertise, for such rigour. So what instead informs our decision to shell out sixty quid on a tiny tub of youthfulness? And if the science was all nonsense, would it make a difference?

The truth about Einstein's wife

2012-01-16T02:14:00.000-08:00

Some weeks back I mentioned in passing in my Guardian column the far-fetched claim that Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric was partly or even primarily responsible for the ideas behind his theory of relativity. Allen Esterson has written to me to point out that this claim is still widely circulated and accepted as established fact by some people. Indeed, he says that “the 2008-2009 EU Europa Diary for secondary school children (print run 3 million) had the following: ‘Did you know? Mileva Marić, Einstein's first wife, confidant and colleague – and co-developer of his Theory of Relativity – was born in what is now Serbia’”. Seems to me that this sort of thing (and the concomitant notion that this ‘truth’ has been long suppressed) ultimately doesn’t do the feminist cause any good. Allen has also posted on the web site Butterflies and Wheels a critique of an independent short film that tries to promote the myth – you can find it here.

How big is yours?

2012-01-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

Here, then, is my column from last Saturday’s Guardian.

While writing this, I discovered that Google Scholar has an add-on that will tot up your citations to establish an h-index. From that, I gather that mine is around 29. One of the comments on the Guardian thread points out that Richard Feynman has an h of 23. As Nigel Tufnell famously said apropos Jimmy Page, “I think that says quite a lot.”

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Many scientists worry that theirs isn’t big enough. Even those who sniff that size isn’t everything probably can’t resist taking a peek to see how they compare with their rivals. The truly desperate can google for dodgy techniques to make theirs bigger.

I’m talking about the h-index, a number that supposedly measures the quality of a researcher’s output. And if the schoolboy double entendres seem puerile, there does seem to be something decidedly male about the notion of a number that rates your prowess and ranks you in a league table. Given that, say, the 100 chemists with the highest h-index are all male, whereas 1 in 4 postdoctoral chemists is female, the h-index does seem to be the academic equivalent of a stag’s antlers.

Few topics excite more controversy among scientists. When I spoke about the h-index to the German Physical Society a few years back, I was astonished to find the huge auditorium packed. Some deplore it; some find it useful. Some welcome it as a defence against the subjective capriciousness of review and tenure boards.

The h-index is named after its inventor, physicist Jorge Hirsch, who proposed it in 2005 precisely as a means of bringing some rigour to the slippery question of who is most deserving of a grant or a post. The index measures how many highly cited papers a scientist has written: your value of h is the number of your papers that have each been cited by (included in the reference lists of) at least h other papers. So a researcher with an h of 10 has written 10 papers that have received at least 10 citations each.

The idea is that citations are a measure of quality: if a paper reports something important, other scientists will refer to it. That’s a broadly a reasonable assumption, but not airtight. There’s evidence that some papers get highly cited by chance, because of a runaway copycat effect: people cite them just because others have, in the same way that some mediocre books and songs become unaccountably popular.

But to get a big h-index, it’s not enough to write a few influential papers. You have to write a lot of them. A single paper could transform a field of science and win its author a Nobel prize, while doing little for the author’s h-index if he or she doesn’t write anything else of note. Nobel laureate chemist Harry Kroto is ranked an apparently undistinguished 264th in the h-index list of chemists because his (deserved) fame rests largely on a single breakthrough paper in 1985.

That’s one of the criticisms of the h-index – it imposes a one-size-fits-all view of scientific impact. There are many other potential faults. Young scientists with few publications score lower, however brilliant they are. The value of h can be artificially boosted – slightly but significantly – by scientists repeatedly citing their own papers. It fails to distinguish the relative contributions to the work in many-author papers. The numbers can’t be compared across disciplines, because citation habits differ.

Many variants of the h-index have been proposed to get round these problems, but there’s no perfect answer, and one great virtue of the h-index is its simplicity, which means that its pros and cons are relative transparent. In any case, it’s here to stay. No one officially endorses the h-index for evaluation, but scientists confess that they use it all the time as an informal way of, say, assessing applicants for a job. The trouble is that it’s precisely for average scientists that the index works rather poorly: small differences in small h-indices don’t tell you very much.

The h-index is part of a wider trend in science to rely on metrics – numbers rather than opinions – for assessment. For some, that’s like assuming that book sales measure literary merit. It can distort priorities, encouraging researchers to publish all they can and follow fads (it would have served Darwin poorly). But numbers aren’t hostage to fickle whim, discrimination or favouritism. So there’s a place for the h-index, as long as we can keep it there.

No secret

2012-01-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

Before I post my last Guardian column, here’s one that got away: I’d planned to write about a paper in PNAS (not yet online) on blind testing of new and old violins, until – as I was half-expecting – Ian Sample wrote a regular story on it. So this had to be scrapped.

Radio 4's PM programme covered the story too, but in a somewhat silly way. They got a sceptical professor from the Royal College of Music to come on and play some Bach on a new and and old instrument, and asked listeners to see if they could identify which was which. A good demonstration, I suppose, of exactly why double-blind tests were invented.
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At last we now know Antonio Stradivari’s secret. Violinists and craftsmen have long speculated about what makes the legendary Italian luthier’s instruments sound so special. Does the magic lie in the forgotten recipe for the varnish, or in a chemical pre-treatment of the wood? Or perhaps it’s the sheer passage of time that mellows the tone into such richness?

Alas, none of these. A new study by French and US researchers suggests that the reason the sound of a Stradivari is so venerated is because it has never before been properly put to the test.

Twenty-one experienced violinists were asked to blind-test six violins – three new, two Stradivaris and one made by the equally esteemed eighteenth-century instrument-maker Guarneri del Gesù. Most of the players were unable to tell if an instrument was new or old, and their preferences bore no relation to cost or age. Although their opinions varied, the favourite choice was a modern instrument, and the least favourite, by a clear margin, was a Stradivari.

OK, it’s just a small-scale test – getting hold of even three old violins (combined value $10m) was no mean feat. And you’ll have to trust me that the researchers took all the right precautions. The tests were, for example, literally double-blind – both the researchers and the players wore welders’ goggles in dim lighting to make sure they couldn’t identify the type of instrument by eye. And in case you’re thinking they just hit on a dud Stradivari (which do exist), the one with the worst rating had been owned by several well-known violinists.

This is embarrassing for the experts, both scientists and musicians. In judging quality, “the opinions of different violinists would coincide absolutely”, one acoustics expert has previously said. “Any musician will tell you immediately whether an instrument he is playing on is an antique instrument or a modern one”, claimed another. And a distinguished violinist once insisted to me that the superior sound of the most expensive old instruments is “very real”.

But acoustic scientists have struggled to identify any clear differences between the tone of antique and (good) new instruments. And as for putting belief to the test, an acoustic scientist once told me that he doubted any musicians would risk exposing themselves to a blind test, preferring the safety of the myth.

That’s why the participants in the latest study deserve credit. They’re anonymous, but they must know how much fury they could bring down on their heads. If you’ve paid $3m for one of the 500 or so remaining Strads, you don’t want to be told that a modern instrument would sound as good at a hundredth of the price.

But that’s perhaps the problem in the first place. In a recent blind wine-testing study, the ‘quality’ was deemed greater when the subjects were told that the bottle cost more.

Is there a killjoy aspect to this demonstration that the mystique of the Strad evaporates under scientific scrutiny? Is it fair to tell violinists that their rapture at these instruments’ irreplaceable tone is a neural illusion? Is this an example of Keats’ famous criticism that science will “clip and Angel’s wings/Conquer all mysteries by rule and line”?

I suspect that depends on whether you want to patronize musicians or treat them as grown-ups – as well as whether you wish to deny modern luthiers the credit they are evidently due. In fact, musicians themselves sometimes chafe at the way their instruments are revered over their own skill. The famous violinist Jascha Heifetz, who played a Guarneri del Gesù, pointedly implied that it’s the player, not the instrument, who makes the difference between the sublime and the mediocre. A female fan once breathlessly complimented him after a performance on the “beautiful tone” of his violin. Heifetz turned around and bent to put his ear close to the violin lying in its case. “I don’t hear anything”, he said.

Science is a joke

2012-01-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

Belatedly, here is last Saturday’s Critical Scientist column for the Guardian.
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Is there something funny about science? Audiences at Robin Ince’s seasonal slice of rationalist revelry, Nine Carols and Songs for Godless People, just before Christmas seemed to think so. This annual event at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London is far more a celebration of the wonders of science than an exercise in atheistic God-baiting. In fact God gets a rather easy ride: the bad science of tabloids, fundamentalists, quacks and climate-change sceptics provides richer comic fodder.

Time was when London theatre audiences preferred to laugh at science rather than with it, most famously with Thomas Shadwell’s satire on the Royal Society, The Virtuoso, in 1676. Samuel Butler and Jonathan Swift followed suit in showering the Enlightenment rationalists with ridicule. In modern times, scientists (usually mad) remained the butt of such jokes as came their way.

They haven’t helped matters with a formerly rather feeble line in laughs. Even now there are popularizing scientists who imagine that another repetition of the ‘joke’ about spherical cows will prove them all to be jolly japers. And while allowing that much humour lies in the delivery, there are scant laughs still to be wrung from formulaic juxtapositions of the exotic with the mundane (“imagine looking for the yoghurt in an eleven-dimensional supermarket!”), or anthropomorphising the sexual habits of other animals.

Meanwhile, science has its in-jokes like any other profession. A typical example: A neutron goes into a bar and orders a drink. “How much?”, he asks the bartender, who replies: “For you, no charge”. Look, I’m just telling you. Occasionally the humour is so rarefied that its solipsism becomes virtually a part of the joke itself. Thomas Pynchon, for instance, provides a rare example of an equation gag, which I risk straining the Guardian’s typography to repeat: ∫1/cabin d(cabin) = log cabin + c = houseboat. This was the only calculus joke I’d ever seen until Matt Parker produced a better one at Nine Carols. Speaking of rates of flow (OK, it was flow of poo, d(poo)/dt – some things never fail), he admitted that this part of his material was a little derivative.

The rise of stand-up has changed everything. Not only do we now have stand-ups who specialize in science, but several, such as Timandra Harkness and Helen Keen, are women, diluting the relentless blokeishness of much science humour. Some aim to be informative as well as funny. At the Bloomsbury you could watch Dr Hula (Richard Vranch) and his assistant demonstrate atomic theory and chemical bonding with hula hoops (more fun than perhaps it sounds).

As Ben Goldacre’s readers know, good jokes often have serious intent. Perhaps the most notorious scientific example was not exactly a joke at all. Certainly, when in 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal got a completely spurious paper on ‘quantum hermeneutics’ published in the journal of postmodern criticism Social Text, the postmodernists weren’t laughing. And Sokal himself was more intent on proving a point than making us giggle. Arguably funnier was the epilogue: in the early 2000s, a group of papers on quantum cosmology published in physics journals by the French brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov was so incomprehensible that this was rumoured to be the postmodernists’ revenge – until the indignant Bogdanovs protested that they were perfectly serious.

But my favourite example of this sort of prank was a paper submitted by computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler to one of the ‘junk science’ conferences that plague their field with spammed solicitations. The paper had a title, abstract, text, figures and captions that all consisted solely of the phrase “Get me off your fucking email list”. Mazières was keen to present the paper at the conference but was never told if it was accepted or not. Reporting the incident made me probably the first and only person to say ‘fucking’ in the august pages of Nature* – not, I admit, the most distinguished achievement, but we must take our glory where we can find it.

*Apparently not, according to Adam Rutherford on the Guardian site...

The new history

2012-01-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

Here is the original draft of the end-of-year essay I published in the last 2011 issue of Nature.
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2011 shows that our highly networked society is ever more prone to abrupt change. The future of our complex world depends on building resilience to shocks.

In the 1990s, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, now at Stanford, predicted that the world was approaching the ‘end of history’ [1]. Like most smart ideas that prove to be wrong, Fukuyama’s was illuminating precisely for its errors. Events this year have helped to reveal why.

Fukuyama argued that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy could be seen as the logical and stable end point of civilization. Yet the prospect that the world will gradually replicate the US model of liberal democracy, as Fukuyama hoped, looks more remote today than it did at the end of the twentieth century.

This year we have seen proliferating protest movements in the fallout from the financial crisis – not just the cries of the marginalized and disaffected, but genuine challenges to the legitimacy of the economic system on which recent liberal democracies have been based. In the face of the grave debt crisis in Greece, the wisdom of deploying democracy’s ultimate tool – the national referendum – to solve it was questioned. The political situation in Russia and Turkey suggests that there is nothing inexorable or irreversible about a process of democratization, while North Africa and the Middle East demonstrate to politicians what political scientists could already have told them: that democratization can itself inflame conflict, especially when it is imposed in the absence of a strong pre-existing state [2,3]. Meanwhile, China continues to show that aggressive capitalism depends on neither liberalism nor democracy. As a recent report of the US National Intelligence Council admits, in the coming years “the Western model of economic liberalism, democracy, and secularism, which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its luster” [4].

The real shortcoming behind Fukuyama’s thesis, however, was not his faith democracy but that he considered history to be gradualist: tomorrow’s history is more (or less) of the same. The common talk among political analysts now is of ‘discontinuous change’, a notion raised by Irish philosopher Charles Handy 20 years ago [5], and alluded to by President Obama in his speech at the West Point Military Academy last year, when he spoke of ‘moments of change’. Sudden disruptive events, particularly wars, have of course always been a part of history. But they would come and go against a slowly evolving social, cultural and political backdrop. Now the potential for discontinuous social and political change is woven into the very fabric of global affairs.

Take the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in 2001. This was said by many to have proved Fukuyama wrong – but on this tenth anniversary of that event we can now see more clearly in what sense that was so. It was not simply that this was a significant historical event – Fukuyama was never claiming that those would cease. Rather, it was a harbinger of the new world order, which the subsequent ‘war on terror’ failed catastrophically to acknowledge. That was a war waged in the old way, by sending armies to battlegrounds (in Afghanistan and Iraq) according to Carl von Clausewitz’s old definition, in his classic 1832 work On War, of a continuation of international politics by other means. But not only were those wars in no sense ‘won, they were barely wars at all – illustrating the remark of American strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman that “one of the lessons of modern war is that war can no longer be called war” [6]. Rather, armed conflict is a diffuse, nebulous affair, no longer corralled from peacetime by declarations and treaties, no longer recognizing generals or even statehood. In its place is a network of insurgents, militias, terrorist cells, suicide bombers, overlapping and sometimes competing ‘enemy’ organizations [7]. Somewhere in this web we have had to say farewell to war and peace.

Network revolutions

The nature of discontinuous change is often misunderstood. It is sometimes said – this is literally the defence of traditional economists in their failure to predict the on-going financial and national-debt crises – that no one can be expected to foresee such radical departures from the previous quotidian. They come, like a hijacked aircraft, out of a clear blue sky. Yet social and political discontinuities are rarely if ever random in that sense, even if there is a certain arbitrary character to their immediate triggers. Rather, they are abrupt in the same way, and for the same reasons, that phase transitions are abrupt in physics. In complex systems, including social ones, discontinuities don’t reflect profound changes in the governing forces but instead derive from the interactions and feedbacks between the component parts. Thus, discontinuities in history are precisely what you'd expect if you start considering social phenomena from a complex-systems perspective.

Experience with natural and technological complex systems teaches us, for example, that highly connected networks of strong interactions create a propensity for avalanches, catastrophic failures, and systemic ruptures [8,9]: in short, for discontinuous change.

So it should come as no surprise that today’s highly networked, interconnected world, replete with cell phones, ipads and social media, is prone to abrupt changes in course. It is much more than idle analogy that connects the cascade of minor failures leading to the 2003 power blackout of eastern North America with the freezing of liquidity in the global banking network in 2007-8.

Some see the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt in this way too, dubbing them ‘Twitter revolutions’ because of the way unrest and news of demonstration were spread on social networks. Although this is an over-simplification, it is abundantly clear that networking supplied the possibility for a random event to trigger a major one. The Tunisian revolt was set in motion by the self-immolation of a street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, in Sidi Bouzid, in protest at harsh treatment by officials. Three months earlier there was a similar case in the city of Monastir – but no one knew about it because the news was not spread on Facebook.

It was surely not without reasons that Twitter and Facebook were shut down by both the Tunisian and Egyptian authorities. The issue is not so much whether they ‘caused’ the revolutions, but that their existence – and the concomitant potential for mobilizing the young, educated populations of these countries – can alter the way things happen in the Middle East and beyond. These same tools are now vital to the Occupy protests disrupting complacent financial districts worldwide, from New York to Taipei, drawing attention to issues of social and economic inequality.

Social media seem also to have the potential to facilitate qualitatively new collective behaviours, such as the riots during the summer in the UK. These brief, destructive paroxysms are still an enigma. Unlike previous riots, they were not confined either to particular demographic subsets of the population or to areas of serious social deprivation. They had no obvious agenda, not even a release of suppressed communal fury – although there was surely a link to post-financial-crash austerity policies. One might almost call them events that grew simply because they could. Some British politicians suggested that Twitter should be disabled in such circumstances, displaying not only a loss of perspective (some of the same people celebrated the power of networking in the Arab Spring) but also a failure to understand the new order. After all, police monitoring of Twitter in some UK cities provided information that helped suppress rioting.

What all these events really point towards is the profound impact of globalization. They show how deep and dense the interdependence of economies, cultures and institutions has become, in large part thanks to the pervasive nature of information and communication technologies. And with this transformation come new, spontaneous modes of social and political organization, from terrorist and protest networks to online consumerism – modes that are especially prone to discontinuous change. Nothing will work that fails to take this new interconnectedness into account: not the economy, not policing, not democracy.

The path forwards

Such extreme interdependence makes it hard to find, or even to meaningfully define, the causes of major events. The US subprime mortgage problem caused the financial collapse only in the way Bouazizi’s immolation caused the Arab Spring – it could equally have been something else that set events in motion. The real vulnerabilities were systemic: webs of dependence that became destabilized by, say, runaway profits in the US banking industry, or rising food prices in North Africa. This means that potential solutions must lie there too.

Complex systems can rarely if ever be controlled by top-down measures. Instead, they must be managed by guiding the trajectories from the bottom up [10]. In a much simpler but instructive example, traffic lights may direct flows more efficiently if they are given adaptive autonomy and allowed to self-organize their switching, rather than imposing a rigid, supposedly optimal sequence [11]. The robustness of the Internet to random server failures is precisely due to the fact that no one designed it – it grew its ‘small world’ topology spontaneously.

This does not imply that political interventions are doomed to fail, but just that they must take other forms from those often advanced today. “Complex systems cannot be steered like a bus”, says Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, a specialist on the understanding and management of complex social systems. “Attempts to control the systems from the top down may be strong enough to disturb its intrinsic self-organization but not strong enough to re-establish order. The result would be chaos and inefficiency. Modern governance typically changes the institutional framework too quickly to allow individuals and companies to adapt. This destroys the hierarchy of time scales needed to establish stable order.”

But these systems are nevertheless manageable, Helbing insists – not by imposing structures but by creating the rules needed to allow the system to find its own stable organization. “This can’t be ensured by a regulatory authority that monitors the system and tries to enforce specific individual action”, he says.

That’s why theories or ideologies are likely to be less effective at predicting or averting crises than scenario modelling. It’s why problems need to be considered at several hierarchical levels, probably with multiple, overlapping models, and why solutions must have scope for adaptation and flexibility. And although cascading crises and discontinuous changes may be unpredictable, the connections and vulnerabilities that permit them are not. Planning for the future, then, might not be so much a matter of foreseeing what could go wrong as of making our systems and institutions robust enough to withstand a variety of shocks. This is how the new history will work.

References
1. Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, London, 1992).
2. E. D. Mansfield & Snyder, J. Int. Secur. 20, 5–38 (1995).
3. Cederman, L.-E., Hug, S. & Wenger, A., in Democritization (eds Grimm, S. & Merkel, W.), 15, 509-524 (Routledge, London, 2008).
4. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (US Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 2008).
5. Handy, C., The Age of Unreason (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1990).
6. In H. Strachan, Europaeum Lecture, Geneva, 9 November 2006, p. 12.
7. J. C. Bohorquez, S. Gourley, A. R. Dixon, M. Spagat & N. F. Johnson, Nature 462, 911-914 (2009).
8. Barabási, A.-L. IEEE Control Syst. Mag. 27(4), 33-42 (2007).
9. Vespignani, A. Nature 464, 984-985 (2010).
10. Helbing, D. (ed.), Managing Complexity: Insights, Concepts, Applications (Springer, Berlin, 2008).
11. Lämmer, S. & Helbing, D., J. Stat. Mech. P04019 (2008).

400 years of snowflakes

2011-12-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

Here is the pre-edited version of my In Retrospect piece for Nature celebrating the 400th anniversary of Kepler’s seminal little treatise on snowflakes.
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Did anyone ever receive a more exquisite New Year’s gift than the German scholar Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels, four hundred years ago? It was a booklet of just 24 pages, written by his friend Johannes Kepler, court mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The title was De nive sexangula (On the Six-Cornered Snowflake), and herein Kepler attempted to explain why snowflakes have this striking hexagonal symmetry. Not only is the booklet charming and witty, but it seeded the notion from which all of crystallography blossomed: that the geometric shapes of crystals can be explained in terms of the packing of their constituent particles.

Like Kepler, Wackher was a self-made man of humble origins whose brilliance earned him a position in the imperial court. By 1611 he had risen to the position of privy councillor, and was a man of sufficient means to act as Kepler’s some-time patron. Sharing an interest in science, he was also godfather to Kepler’s son and in fact a distant relative of Kepler himself. It is sometimes said that Kepler’s booklet was in lieu of a regular gift which the straitened author, who frequently had to petition Rudolf’s treasury for his salary, could not afford. In his introduction, Kepler says he had recently noticed a snowflake on the lapel of his coat as he crossed the Charles Bridge in Prague, and had been moved to ponder on its remarkable geometry.

Kepler came to the imperial court in 1600 as an assistant to the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. When Tycho died the following year, Kepler became his successor, eagerly seizing the opportunity to use Tycho’s incomparable observational data to deduce the laws of planetary motion that Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory later explained.

Kepler’s analysis of the snowflake comes at an interesting juncture. It unites the older, Neoplatonic idea of a geometrically ordered universe that reflects God’s wisdom and design with the emerging mechanistic philosophy, in which natural phenomena are explained by proximate causes that, while they may be hidden or ‘occult’ (like gravity), are not mystical. In Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) Kepler famously concocted a model of the cosmos with the planetary orbits arranged on the surfaces of nested polyhedra, which looks now like sheer numerology. But unlike Tycho, he was a Copernican and came close to formulating the mechanistic gravitational model that Newton later developed.

Kepler was not by any means the first to notice that the snowflake is six-sided. This is recorded in Chinese documents dating back to the second century BCE, and in the Western world the snowflake’s ‘star-like’ forms were noted by Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century. René Descartes included drawings of sixfold stars and ice ‘flowers’ in his meteorological book Les Météores (1637), while Robert Hooke’s microscopic studies recorded in Micrographia (1665) revealed the elaborate, hierarchical branching patterns.

“There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet”, Kepler wrote. “It cannot be chance. Why always six? The cause is not to be looked for in the material, for vapour is formless and flows, but in an agent.” This ‘agent’, he suspected, might be mechanical, namely the orderly stacking of frozen ‘globules’ that represent “the smallest natural unit of a liquid like water” – not explicitly atoms, but as good as. Here he was indebted to the English mathematician Thomas Harriot, who acted as navigator for Walter Raleigh’s voyages to the New World in 1584-5. Raleigh sought Harriot’s expert advice on the most efficient way to stack cannonballs on the ship’s deck, prompting the ingenious Harriot to theorize about the close-packing of spheres. Around 1606-8 he communicated his thoughts to Kepler, who returned to the issue in De nive sexangula. Kepler asserted that hexagonal packing “will be the tightest possible, so that in no other arrangement could more pellets be stuffed into the same container.” This assertion about maximal close-packing became known as Kepler’s conjecture, which was proved using computational methods only in 1998 (published in 2005) [1].

Less commonly acknowledged as a source of inspiration is the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for cabinets of curiosities (Wunderkammern), collections of rare and marvelous objects from nature and art that were presented as microcosms of the entire universe. Rudolf II had one of the most extensive cabinets, to which Kepler would have had privileged access. The forerunners of museum collections, the cabinets have rarely been recognized as having any real influence on the nascent experimental science of the age. But Kepler mentions in his booklet having seen in the palace of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden “a panel inlaid with silver ore, from which a dodecahedron, like a small hazelnut in size, projected to half its depth, as if in flower” – a showy example of the metalsmith’s craft which may have stimulated his thinking about how an emergent order gives crystals their facets.

Yet despite his innovative ideas, in the end Kepler is defeated by the snowflake’s ornate form and its flat, plate-like shape. He realizes that although the packing of spheres creates regular patterns, they are not necessarily hexagonal, let alone as ramified and ornamented as that of the snowflake. He is forced to fall back on Neoplatonic occult forces: God, he suggests, has imbued the water vapour with a “formative faculty” that guides its form. There is no apparent purpose to the flake’s shape, he observes: the “formative reason” must be purely aesthetic or frivolous, nature being “in the habit of playing with the passing moment.” That delightful image, which touches on the late Renaissance debate about nature’s autonomy, remains resonant today in questions about the adaptive value (or not) of some complex patterns and forms in biological growth [2]. Towards the end of his inconclusive tract Kepler offers an incomparably beautiful variant of ‘more research is needed’: “As I write it has again begun to snow, and more thickly than a moment ago. I have been busily examining the little flakes.”

Kepler’s failure to explain the baroque regularity of the snowflake is no disgrace, for not until the 1980s was this understood as a consequence of branching growth instabilities biased by the hexagonal crystal symmetry of ice [3]. In the meantime, Kepler’s vision of crystals as stackings of particles informed the eighteenth-century mineralogical theory of René Just Haüy, the basis of all crystallographic understanding today.

But the influence of Kepler’s booklet goes further. It was in homage that crystallographer Alan Mackay called his seminal 1981 paper on quasicrystals ‘De nive quinquanglua’ [4]. Here, three years before the experimental work that won Dan Shechtman this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry, Mackay showed that a Penrose tiling could, if considered the basis of an atomic ‘quasi-lattice’, produce fivefold diffraction patterns. Quasicrystals showed up in metal alloys, not snow. But Mackay has indicated privately that it might indeed be possible to induce water molecules to pack this way, and quasicrystalline ice was recently reported in computer simulations of water confined between plates [5]. Whether it can furnish five-cornered snowflakes remains to be seen.

References
1. Hales, T. C. Ann. Math. 2nd ser. 162, 1065-1185 (2005).
2. Rothenberg, D. Survival of the Beautiful (Bloomsbury, New York, 2011).
3. Ben-Jacob, E., Goldenfeld, N., Langer, J. S. & Schön, G. Phys. Rev. Lett. 51, 1930-1932 (1983).
4. Mackay, A. L. Kristallografiya 26, 910-919 (1981); in English, Sov. Phys. Crystallogr. 26, 517-522 (1981).
5. Johnston, J. C., Kastelowitz, N. & Molinero, V. J. Chem. Phys. 133, 154516 (2010).

Reputations matter

2011-12-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

Rather a lot of posts all at once, I fear. Here is the first, which I meant to put up earlier – last Saturday’s column in the Guardian.
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Johannes Stark was a German physicist whose Nobel prize-winning discovery in 1913, the Stark effect (don’t ask), is still useful today. Just the sort of person, then, who you might expect to have scientific institutes or awards named after him.

The fact that there aren’t any is probably because Stark was a Nazi – a bitter and twisted anti-Semite who rejected relativity because Einstein was Jewish.

Scientists concur that, while your discovery should bear your name no matter how despicable (or just plain crazy) you are, you need a little virtue to be commemorated in other ways.

But how little? Everyone knows Isaac Newton was a grumpy and vindictive old sod, but that hardly seems reason to begrudge the naming of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. Yet when the Dutch Nobel laureate Peter Debye was accused in a 2006 book of collusion with the Nazis during his career in pre-war Germany, the Dutch government insisted that the Debye Institute at the University of Utrecht be renamed, and an annual Debye Prize awarded in his hometown of Maastricht was suspended.

Reputations matter, then. Two researchers have claimed this week to lay to rest the suggestion that Charles Darwin stole some of his ideas on natural selection from Alfred Russel Wallace, who sent Darwin a letter explaining his own theory in 1858. Darwin passed it on to other scientific authorities as Wallace requested, but it has been suggested that he first sat on it for weeks and revised his theory in the light of it.

No proper Darwin historian ever took that accusation seriously, not least because everything we know about Darwin’s character makes it highly implausible. But Wallace has admirers on the fringe who identify with his image of the wronged outsider and will stop at nothing to see him given priority. And knocking Darwin’s character is a favourite tactic of creationists for discrediting his science.

This isn’t the last word on that matter, not least because the dates of Wallace’s letter still aren’t airtight. Evolutionary geneticist Steve Jones has rightly said that “The real issue is the science and not who did it.” Oh, but we do care who did it. We do care if Einstein nicked his ideas from his first wife Mileva Maric (another silly notion), or if Gottfried Leibniz pilfered the calculus from Newton.

Partly we like the whiff of scandal. Partly we love seeing giants knocked off their pedestals. But in cases like Debye’s there are more profound questions. Debye finally left his physics institute in Berlin and moved to the US in 1940 because he refused to give up his Dutch citizenship and become German, as the Nazis demanded when they commandeered his institute for war research. Into the breach stepped Werner Heisenberg, among others, whose work on the nuclear programme still excites debate about whether or not he tried to make an atom bomb for Hitler.

After the war, Heisenberg encouraged the myth that he and his colleagues purposely delayed their research to deny Hitler such power. It’s more likely that they never in fact had to make the choice, since they weren’t given the resources of the Manhattan Project. In any event, Heisenberg began the war patriotically anticipating a quick victory. Yet he was never a Nazi, and today we have the Werner Heisenberg Institute and Prize.

Unlike Stark, Heisenberg and Debye weren’t terrible people – they behaved in the compromised, perhaps naïve way that most of us would in such circumstances. But engraving their names in stone and bronze creates difficulties. It forces us to make them unblemished icons, or conversely tempts us to demonize them. This rush to beatify brings down a weight of moral expectation that few of us could shoulder – even the deeply humane Einstein was no saint towards Maric. Why not give time more chance to weather and blur the images of great scientists, to produce enough distance for us to celebrate their achievements while overlooking their all-too-human foibles?

Happy Christmas to the Godless

2011-12-21T02:59:00.000-08:00

This week I had the pleasure of taking part in one of Robin Ince’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. Fending off the “I am not worthy” feeling amidst the likes of Simon Singh, Alexei Sayle and Mark Thomas, and knowing what a terrible idea it would be to try to make people laugh, I plucked a few things from my forthcoming book on curiosity, in particular Kepler’s treatise on snowflakes (on which, more shortly). But I couldn’t resist poking some fun at a few of the scientifically illiterate snowflakes we always get at Christmas, including the one above from dear Ed Milliband. I wanted to offer Ed a little get-out clause for his pentagonal snowflakes on the basis of quasicrystalline ice, but time did not permit.

Anyway, it’s a great show if you still have time to catch the last ones. I did a little interview for a podcast by New Humanist, which I mention mostly so that you can get a flavour of the other folk in the show.

Unweaving tangled relationships

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

Here’s the original text of my latest news story for Nature.
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A new statistical method discovers hidden correlations in complex data.

The American humorist Evan Esar once called statistics the science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures. A new technique now promises to make those facts a whole lot more dependable.

Brothers David Reshef of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Yakir Reshef of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and their coworkers have devised a method to extract from complex sets of data relationships and trends that are invisible to other types of statistical analysis. They describe their approach in a paper in Science today [1].

“This appears to be an outstanding achievement”, says statistician Douglas Simpson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It opens up whole new avenues of inquiry.”

Here’s the basic problem. You’ve collected lots of data on some property of a system that could depend on many governing factors. To figure out what depends on what, you plot them on a graph.

If you’re lucky, you might find that this property changes in some simple way as a function of some other factor: for example, people’s health gets steadily better as their wealth increases. There are well known statistical methods for assessing how reliable such correlations are.

But what if there are many simultaneous dependencies in the data? If, say, people are also healthier if they drive less, which might not bear any obvious relation to their wealth (or might even be more prevalent among the less wealthy)? The conflict might leave both relationships hidden from traditional searches for correlations.

The problems can be far worse. Suppose you’re looking at how genes interact in an organism. The activity of one gene could be correlated with that of another, but there could be hundreds of such relationships all mixed together. To a cursory ‘eyeball’ inspection, the data might then just look like random noise.

“If you have a data set with 22 million relationships, the 500 relationships in there that you care about are effectively invisible to a human”, says Yakir Reshef.

And the relationships are all the harder to tease out if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the first place – if you have no a priori reason to suspect that this depends on that.

The new statistical method that Reshef and his colleagues have devised aims to crack precisely those problems. It can spot many superimposed correlations between variables and measure exactly how tight each relationship is, according to a quantity they call the maximal information coefficient (MIC).

A MIC of 1 implies that two variables are perfectly correlated, but possibly according to two or more simultaneous and perhaps opposing relationships: a straight line and a parabola, say. A MIC of zero indicates that there is no relationship between the variables.

To demonstrate the power of their technique, the researchers applied it to a diverse range of problems. In one case they looked at factors that influence people’s health globally in data collected by the World Health Organization. Here they were able to tease out superimposed trends – for example, how female obesity increases with income in the Pacific Islands, where it is considered a sign of status, while in the rest of the world there is no such link.

In another example, the researchers identified genes that were expressed periodically, but with differing cycle times, during the cell cycle of yeast. And they uncovered groups of human gut bacteria that proliferate or decline when diet is altered, finding that some bacteria are abundant precisely when others are not. Finally, they identified which performance factors for baseball players are most strongly correlated to their salaries.

Reshef cautions that finding statistical correlations is only the start of understanding. “At the end of the day you'll need an expert to tell you what your data mean”, he says. “But filtering out the junk in a data set in order to allow someone to explore it is often a task that doesn't require much context or specialized knowledge.”

He adds that “our hope is that this tool will be useful in just about any field that is amassing large amounts of data.” He points to genomics, proteomics, epidemiology, particle physics, sociology, neuroscience, earth and atmospheric science as just some of the scientific fields that are “saturated with data”.

Beyond this, the method should be valuable for ‘data mining’ in sports statistics, social media and economics. “I could imagine financial companies using tools like this to mine the vast amounts of data that they surely keep, or their being used to track patterns in news, societal memes, or cultural trends”, says Reshef.

One of the big remaining questions is about what causes what: the familiar mantra of statisticians is that “correlation does not imply causality”. People who floss their teeth live longer, but that doesn’t mean that flossing increases your lifespan.

“We see the issue of causality as a potential follow-up”, says Reshef. “Inferring causality is an immensely complicated problem, but has been well studied previously.”

Biostatistician Raya Khanin of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York acknowledges the need for a technique like this but reserves judgement about whether we yet have the measure of MIC. “I’m not sure whether its performance is as good as and different from other measures”, she says.

For example, she questions the findings about the mutual exclusivity of some gut bacteria. “Having worked with this type of data, and judging from the figures, I'm quite certain that some basic correlation measures would have uncovered the same type of non-coexistence behavior,” she says.

Another bioinformatics specialist, Simon Rogers of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, also welcomes the method but cautions that the illustrative examples are preliminary at this stage. Of the yeast gene linkages, he says “one would have to do more evaluation to see if they are biologically significant.”

References
1. Reshef, D. N. et al. Science 334, 1518–1524 (2011).

Darwin not guilty: shock verdict

2011-12-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest news story for Nature. There’s somewhat more to it than can all be fitted in here, or indeed that I am at liberty to say. It seems that some may still find the authors’ reconstruction of the shipping route of Wallace’s letter open to question, even if they accept (as it seems all serious historians do) that the ‘conspiracy theory’ is bunk.

There was also more to Wallace’s letter to Hooker in September 1858 than I’ve quoted here. He said:
“I cannot but consider myself a favoured party in this matter, because it has hitherto been too much the practice in cases of this sort to impute all the merit to the first discoverer of a new fact or a new theory, & little or none to any other party who may, quite independently, have arrived at the same result a few years or a few hours later.
I also look upon it as a most fortunate circumstance that I had a short time ago commenced a correspondence with Mr. Darwin on the subject of “Varieties,” since it has led to the earlier publication of a portion of his researches & has secured to him a claim of priority which an independent publication either by myself or some other party might have injuriously affected, — for it is evident that the time has now arrived when these & similar views will be promulgated & must be fairly discussed.”

So whatever one thinks of the evidence put forward here, the notion that Darwin pilfered from Wallace really is a non-starter. Not that its advocates will take the slightest notice.
_____________________________________________________
Charles Darwin was not a plagiarist, according to two researchers who claim to have refuted the idea that he revised his own theory of evolution to fit in with that proposed in a letter Darwin received from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

This accusation has received little support from serious historians of Darwin’s life and work, who concur that Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently at more or less the same time. But it has proved hard to dispel, thanks to some vociferous advocates of Wallace’s claim to primacy of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

The charge rests largely on a suggestion that in 1858 Darwin sat on a letter sent from Indonesia by Wallace, including an essay in which he described his ideas, for about two weeks before passing it on to the geologist Charles Lyell as Wallace requested.

After inspecting historical shipping records, John van Wyhe and Kees Rookmaaker, curators of the archives Darwin Online and Wallace Online and historians of science at the National University of Singapore, claim that Wallace’s letter and essay could not in fact have arrived sooner than 18 June, the very day that Darwin told Lyell he had received it [1].

Darwin had begun work on the text that became On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, as early as the 1840s, but had dallied over it. In his letter to Lyell he admitted rueing his own dilatoriness. “I never saw a more striking coincidence”, he said. “If Wallace has my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better abstract.”

In the event – but not without misgivings about whether it was the honourable thing – Darwin followed the suggestion of Lyell and his friend Joseph Hooker that he write up his own views on evolution so that the papers could be presented side by side to the Linnaean Society in London. This took place on 1 July, but Darwin wasn’t present, for he was still devastated by the death of his youngest son from scarlet fever three days earlier.

The controversy about attribution would probably have mystified both Darwin and Wallace, who remained mutually respectful throughout their lives. Darwin was even ready to relinquish all priority to the idea of natural selection after seeing Wallace’s essay, until Lyell and Hooker persuaded him otherwise. And in September 1858 Wallace wrote to Hooker that “It would have caused me such pain & regret had Mr. Darwin’s excess of generosity led him to make public my paper unaccompanied by his own much earlier & I doubt not much more complete views on the same subject.”

Although most historians have accepted that Darwin’s account of the events was honest, others have argued that Wallace’s letter, sent from the island of Ternate in the Moluccas, arrived at Darwin’s house in Down in southern England, several weeks earlier than 18 June. They suggest that Darwin lied about the date of receipt because he used the intervening time to revise his own ideas in the light of Wallace’s.

The most extreme accusation came in a 2008 book The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime by the former BBC documentary-maker Roy Davies. “Ideas contained in Wallace’s Ternate paper were plagiarised by Charles Darwin”, wrote Davies, who called this “a deliberate and iniquitous case of intellectual theft, deceit and lies.” Others have claimed that Darwin wrote to Hooker on 8 June saying that he had found a ‘missing keystone’ to his theory, and allege that he took this from Wallace’s essay.

“Many conspiracy theorists have made hay because of this unexplained date mystery”, says van Wyhe. He and Rookmaaker have now painstakingly retraced the tracks of the letter. They have discovered the sailing schedules of mail boats operated by Dutch firms in what was then the Dutch East Indies, and claim that these indicate the letter could not have left Ternate sooner than about 5 April. It was carried via Jakarta, Singapore and Sri Lanka, and then overland from Suez to Alexandria. “We found that Wallace’s essay travelled across Egypt on camels”, says van Wyhe. “That was not known before, and it’s a rather charming image to think of this essay that will change the world swaying on the back of a camel for two days.”

The researchers say that the letter then passed on by boat to Gibraltar and Southampton in England, arriving on 16 June. It was taken by train to London and then on to Down to arrive on the morning of the 18th.

“I'm not sure there really ever has been a controversy over this within the history of science community”, says evolutionary biologist John Lynch of Arizona State University, who has written extensively on cultural responses to evolutionary theory. He says that the claims of plagiarism “have had marginal, if any, influence - the evidence has failed to convince most readers.”

The story “has always seemed unlikely to me given what we know about Darwin’s generally kind and tolerant personality”, agrees geneticist Steve Jones of University College, London, whose 1999 book Almost like a Whale was an updated version of the Origin of Species.

But van Wyhe says that “these conspiracy stories are very widely believed. Thousands of people have heard that something fishy happened between Darwin and Wallace. I hear these stories very often when I give popular lectures.”

Historian of science James Lennox of the University of Pittsburgh says that “this is an important piece of evidence for Davies’ claim of deceit on Darwin’s part. I think that claim has been undermined.”

But Lennox adds that he doesn’t think it will close the ‘controversy’. “For a variety of different motives, there will, I fear, always be people who see it as their mission to attack Darwin's character as a way of undermining his remarkable scientific achievements.”

References

1. Van Wyhe, J. & Rookmaaker, K. Biol. J. Linnaean Soc. 105, 249-252 (2012). See here.

Creativ thinking

2011-12-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

Here’s my latest Critical Scientist column in the Guardian, published today. It now seems that this back page of the Saturday issue is going to be reshuffled for various reasons, so it isn’t clear what the column’s fate will be in the New Year. Enjoy/criticize/excoriate it while you can.
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The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein’s grant applications in 1905. “I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits”, one might say. “I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up” goes another. Imagine what comments those would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a Technical Expert Third Class at the Bern Patent Office. And that’s how he invented quantum physics and relativity.

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don’t get funded – indeed, that the system is set up to exclude them. To wring research money from government agencies, you have to write a proposal that gets assessed by anonymous experts (“peer reviewers”). If its ambitions are too grand or its ideas too unconventional, there’s a strong chance it’ll be trashed. So does the money go only to only ‘safe’ proposals that plod down well-trodden avenues, timidly advancing the frontiers of knowledge a few nanometres?

There’s some truth in the accusation that grant mechanisms favour mediocrity. After all, your proposal has to specify exactly what you’re going to achieve. But how can you know the results before you’ve done the experiments, unless you’re aiming to prove the bleeding obvious?

To address this complaint, the US National Science Foundation has recently announced a new scheme for awarding grants. From next year – if Congress approves – the Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures (CREATIV – oh, I get it) will have $24 million to give to “unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals.” In other words, it’s looking for really new ideas that might not work, but which would be massive if they do.

As science funding goes, $24m is peanuts – the total NSF pot is $5.5 bn. And each application is limited to $1m. But this is just a pilot project; more might follow. The real point is that CREATIV has been created at all, because it could be interpreted as an admission of NSF’s failure to support innovation previously. Needless to say, that’s not how NSF would see it. They would argue that the usual funding mechanisms have blind spots, especially when it comes to supporting research that crosses disciplinary boundaries.

This is a notorious problem. Talking up the importance of “interdisciplinarity” is all the rage, but most funds are still marshaled into conventional boundaries – medicine, say, or particle physics – so that if you have an idea for how to apply particle physics to medicine, each agency directs your grant request to the other one.

The problem is all the worse if you want to tackle a really big problem. To make a new drug you need chemists; to tackle Africa’s AIDS epidemic you will require not only drugs but the expertise of epidemiologists, sociologists, virologists and much else. The buzzword for really big solutions and technologies is “transformative” – the Internet is transformative, Viagra is not. This big-picture thinking is in vogue; the European Commission’s Future Emerging Technologies programme is promising to award €1 bn (now you’re talking) next year for transformational projects under the so-called Flagship Initiative.

Are schemes like CREATIV the way forward? Because the funding will be allocated by individual project managers rather than risking the conservatism of review panels, it could fall prey to cronyism. And who’s to say that those project managers will be any more broad-minded or perceptive? In the end, it’s a Gordian knot: only experts can properly assess proposals, but by definition their vision tends to be narrow. It’s good that CREATIV acknowledges the problem, but it remains to be seen if it’s a solution. Like movie-making or publishing, it’ll need to accept that there will be some duds. It’s a shame there aren’t more scientific problems that can be solved with pen, paper, and a patent clerk’s pay packet.

Science criticism

2011-12-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

My first of an undisclosed number of columns in the Saturday Guardian has appeared today. And got a shedload of online feedback.

I’m grateful for all these comments, good and bad (and indifferent), for giving me some sense of how the aims of this column are being perceived. It would be as premature for me to tell you what it is going to do at this point, as it is for anyone else to judge it. This is an experiment. We don’t know yet quite where it will go (that’s how it is with experiments, right?). No doubt feedback will have an influence on that. But I think I’d better make a few things more clear than I could in the piece itself:

1. This isn’t going to be a science-knocking column. Wouldn’t that be bizarre? Like appointing a theatre critic who hates theatre. (Someone, I am sure, will now come up with a few candidates for that description.) Theatre, art and literary critics almost inevitably think that theatre, art and literature are the most wonderful things: essential, inspiring, and deeply life-affirming. It is precisely caring strongly about it their subject that constitutes a necessary (if not sufficient) qualification for the job. Well, ditto here.

2. I’m not going to be peer-reviewing anyone’s work. It’s interesting that some of the comments still seem to evince a notion that this is the full extent of the meaningful evaluation of a piece of scientific work. Look at what Dorothy Nelkin brought to the discussion about DNA and genetics – in my view, important questions that were pretty much off the radar screen of most scientists working on those things. Sadly, the Guardian hasn’t got Dorothy Nelkin, though – it’s got me. She would never have done it for this kind of money.

3. But it’s not necessarily about bringing scientists to task for what they do or don’t do or say – at least, not uniquely. I like the three definitions of “critic” in the Free Dictionary:
i. One who forms and expresses judgments of the merits, faults, value, or truth of a matter. [Mostly what peer reviewers are supposed to do, yes?]
ii. One who specializes especially professionally in the evaluation and appreciation of literary or artistic works: a film critic; a dance critic.
iii. One who tends to make harsh or carping judgments; a faultfinder. [Mostly bores and climate sceptics, yes?]

So (ii) then: I don’t see why it’s just ‘literary or artistic works’ that deserve ‘evaluation and appreciation’. Remember that critics praise as well as pillory (and in my view, the best ones always make an effort to find what is valuable in a work). The critic is also there to offer context, draw analogies and comparisons, point to predecessors. (The sceptic might here scoff “Oh yeah, very valuable in science – the predecessors of E=mc2?” To which my answer is here). I also feel that the best critics don’t try to tell you what to think, but just suggest things it might be worth thinking about.

4. Some of these folks will be disappointed – in particular, those who seem to think that the column is going to be concerned mainly with highlighting why science has lost its way, or ignores deep philosophical conundrums, or fails in its social duty. I really hope to be able to touch on some of those issues (that is, to consider whether they’re really true), and I have much sympathy with some of what Nicholas Maxwell has written. But my themes will generally be considerably less grand and more specific, perhaps even parochial. Weekly critics tend to review what’s just opened at the Royal Court, not the state of British theatre, right? Besides, it’s important that I’m realistic about what can be attempted (let alone achieved) in this format. Remember that this is a weekly column in a newspaper, not an academic thesis. I have 600 words, and then you get Lucy Mangan.

All we want to try for, really, is a somewhat different way of writing about science: not merely explaining who did what and why it will transform our lives (which of course it mostly doesn’t), but writing about science as something with its own internal social dynamics, methodological dilemmas, cultural pressures and drivers, and as something that reflects and is reflected by the broader culture. That’s what I have generally attempted to do in my books already. And I want to make it very clear that I don’t claim any great originality in taking this perspective. Many writers have done it before, and doubtless better. It’s just that there is rarely a chance to discuss science in this way in newspapers, where it is all too often given its own little geeks’ ghetto. Indeed, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science was one of the first efforts that successfully broke that mould. What’s new(ish) is not the idea but the opportunity.

Diamond vibrations neither here nor there

2011-12-02T02:53:00.000-08:00

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest news story for Nature online.
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Two objects big enough for the eye to see have been placed in a weirdly connected quantum state.

A pair of diamond crystals has been spookily linked by quantum entanglement by researchers working in Oxford, Canada and Singapore.

This means that vibrations detected in the crystals could not be meaningfully assigned to one or other of them: both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating.

Quantum entanglement is well established between quantum particles such as atoms at ultra-cold temperatures. But like most quantum effects, it doesn’t usually tend to survive either at room temperature or in objects large enough to see with the naked eye.

The team, led by Ian Walmsley of Oxford University, found a way to overcome both those limitations – demonstrating that the weird consequences of quantum theory don’t just apply at very small scales.

The result is “clever and convincing” according to Andrew Cleland, a specialist in the quantum behaviour of nanometre-scale objects at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Entanglement was first mooted by Albert Einstein and two of his coworkers in 1935, ironically as an illustration of why quantum theory could not tell the whole story about the microscopic world.
Einstein considered two quantum particles that interact with each other so that their quantum states become interdependent. If the first particle is in state A, say, then the other must be in state B, and vice versa. The particles are then said to be entangled.

Until a measurement is made on one of the particles, its state is undetermined: it can be regarded as being in both states A and B simultaneously, known as a superposition. But a measurement ‘collapses’ this superposition into just one state or the other.

The trouble is, Einstein said, that if the particles are entangled then this measurement determines which state the other particle is in too – even if they have become separated by a vast distance. The effect of the measurement is transmitted instantaneously to the other particle, via what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’. That can’t be right, he argued.

But it is, as countless experiments have since shown. Quantum entanglement is not only real but could be useful. Entangled photons of light have been used to transmit information in a way that cannot be intercepted and read without that being detectable – a technique called quantum cryptography.

And entangled quantum states of atoms or light can be used in quantum computing, where the superposition states allow much more information to be encoded in them than in conventional two-state bits.

But superpositions and entanglement are usually seen as delicate states, easily disrupted by random atomic jostling in a warm environment. This scrambling also tends to happen very quickly if the quantum states contain many interacting particles – in other words, for larger objects.

Walmsley and colleagues got round this by entangling synchronized atomic vibrations called phonons in diamond. Phonons – wavelike motions of many atoms, rather like sound waves in air – occur in all solids. But in diamond, the stiffness of the atomic lattice means that the phonons have very high frequencies and energy, and are therefore not usually active even at room temperature.

The researchers used a laser pulse to stimulate phonon vibrations in two crystals 3 mm across and 15 cm apart. They say that each phonon involves the coherent vibration of about 10**16 atoms, corresponding to a region of the crystal about 0.05 mm wide and 0.25 mm long – large enough to see with the naked eye.

There are three crucial conditions for getting entangled phonons in the two diamonds. First, a phonon must be excited with just one photon from the laser’s stream of photons. Second, this photon must be sent through a ‘beam splitter’ which directs it into one crystal or the other. If the path isn’t detected, then the photon can be considered to go both ways at once: to be in a superposition of trajectories. The resulting phonon is then in an entangled superposition too.

“If we can’t tell from which diamond the photon came, then we can’t determine in which diamond the phonon resides”, Walmsley explains. “Hence the phonon is ‘shared’ between the two diamonds.”

The third condition is that the photon must not only excite a phonon – also, part of its energy must be converted into a lower-energy photon, called a Stokes photon, that signals the presence of the phonon.

“When we detect the Stokes photon we know we have created a phonon, but we can’t know even in principle in which diamond it now resides”, says Walmsley. “This is the entangled state, for which neither the statement ‘this diamond is vibrating’ nor ‘this diamond is not vibrating’ is true.”

To verify that it’s been made, the researchers fire a second laser pulse into the two crystals to ‘read out’ the phonon, from which it draws extra energy. All the necessary conditions are satisfied only very rarely during the experiment. “They have to perform an astronomical number of attempts to get a very finite number of desired outcome”, says Cleland.

He doubts that there will be any immediate applications, partly because the entanglement is so short-lived. “I am not sure where this particular work will go from here”, he says. “I can’t think of a particular use for entanglement that lasts for only a few picoseconds [10**-12 s].”

But Walmsley is more optimistic. “Diamond could form the basis of a powerful technology for practical quantum information processing”, he says. “The optical properties of diamond make it ideal for producing tiny optical circuits on chips.”

1. K. C. Lee et al., Science 334, 1253-1256 (2011).

Beautiful labs

2011-12-01T04:13:00.000-08:00

Here is my latest Crucible column for the December issue of Chemistry World.
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Fresh from visiting some science departments in China, I figure that, in appearance, these places don’t vary much the world over. They have the same pale corridors lined with boxy offices or neutral-hued, cluttered lab spaces; the same wood-clad lecture theatres with their raked seating and projection screens (few sliding blackboards now survive); the same posters of recent research lining the walls. They are unambiguously work places: functional, undemonstrative, bland.

Yet people spend their working lives here, day after day and sometimes night after night. Doesn’t all this functionalist severity and gloom stifle creativity? Clearly it needn’t, but increasingly we seem to suspect that conducive surroundings can offer stimulus to the advancement of knowledge. When the Wellcome Wing of the biochemistry department at Cambridge was designed and built in the early 1960s, its rectilinear modernist simplicity realised in concrete and glass was merely the order of the day, and celebrated by some (notably the influential architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner) for its precision [1]. Today, stained and weathered, it fares less well, engendering that feeling I get from my old copy of Cotton & Wilkinson that learning chemistry is a dour affair.

Yet no longer are labs and scientific institutions built just to place walls around the benches and fume cupboards. Increasingly, for example, their design takes account of how best to encourage researchers to engage in informal discussions over coffee: comfy seating, daylight and blackboards are supplied to lubricate the exchanges. The notion that all serious work has to take place out of sight behind closed doors has yielded to the advent of open atria and glass walls, exemplified by the new biochemistry laboratory at Oxford, designed by Hawkins/Brown, which opened three years ago at a cost of nearly £50m. Not only does this space take its cue from the open-plan office, but it also follows the corporate habit of adorning the interior with expensive artworks, such as the flock of resin birds that hang suspended in the atrium. Some might grumble that the likes of Hans Krebs and Dorothy Hodgkin did not seem to need art around them to think big thoughts – but the department’s Mark Sansom has eloquently defended thus the value of the project’s artistic component: “if you have a greater degree of visual literacy, you reflect more on both the way you represent things, and also the way that may limit the way you think about them” [2]. Besides, where would you rather work?

The watchword for this new approach to laboratory design is accessibility: physically, visually, intellectually. Jonathan Hodgkin in Oxford’s biochemistry department explains that, in making art a part of the new building’s design, “part of our aim is to humanize the image of science for the public" [2]. Similarly, Terry Farrell, who was behind the dramatic (and controversial) redesign of the Royal Institution in London, says that his aim was to reconfigure the place “not as a museum but as a living, working, lively and engaging institution, which will inspire an enthusiasm for science in future generations” [3]. Even someone like me who loved the dusty, crammed warren that was the old RI has to admire the result, although the compromises to the research lab space contributed to the internal tensions of the project.

Or take the striking glass facades of the new Frick Chemistry Laboratory at Princeton, whose chief architect Michael Hopkins says that "We wanted to inspire the younger students by letting them see the workings of the department.” A common theme is to use the design to echo the science, as for example in the double-helical staircase of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg.

However, not all beautiful labs are new ones, a point illustrated in a recent list of “the 10 most beautiful college science labs” compiled by the US-based OnlineColleges.net. While some of these have been selected for their sleek contemporary feel – the Frick building is one, and the stunning new Physical Sciences Building that abuts Cornell’s neoclassical Baker Laboratory is another – others are more venerable. Who could quibble, for example, with the inclusion of Harvard’s Mallinckrodt Laboratory, an imposing neoclassical edifice built in the 1920s and home to the chemistry department? And then there is the Victorian gothic of the ‘Abbot’s kitchen’ in the Oxford inorganic chemistry labs, a delightful feature that I shamefully overlooked on many a tramp along South Parks Road to coax more crystals out of solution. Or the ivy-coated mock-gothic of Chicago’s Ryerson Physical Laboratory, where Robert Millikan deduced the electron’s charge.

Among these ‘beautiful labs’, chemistry seems to be represented disproportionately. Have we chemists perhaps a stronger aesthetic sensibility?

References
1. M. Kemp, Nature 395, 849 (1998).
2. G. Ferry, Nature 457, 541 (2009).
3. T. Farrell, Interiors and the Legacy of Postmodernism (Laurence King, London, 2011).

Building a better foam

2011-11-28T10:02:00.000-08:00

I have a story on Nature’s blog about a nice new paper on ‘minimal foams’, which finally reports evidence for the Weaire-Phelan foam reported several years ago to be a more energetically favourable structure than Kelvin’s, postulated in 1887. Denis Weaire has written a nice (but goodness me, pricey) account of this so-called Kelvin Problem. And I get to show last year’s holiday snaps in Beijing…
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Physicists working at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, have finally made the perfect foam. Whereas most Dubliners might consider that to be the head of a pint of Guinness, Denis Weaire and his coworkers have a more sophisticated answer.

‘Perfect’ here means the lowest-energy configuration of packed bubbles of equal size. This is a compromise. Making a soap film costs energy proportional to the film’s surface area. But the many interlocking faces of an array of polyhedral bubbles in a foam also have be mechanically stable. The Belgian scientist J. A. P. Plateau calculated in the nineteenth century that three soaps films are mechanically stable when they meet at angles of 120o, whereas four films meet at the tetrahedral angle of about 109.5o.

So what bubble shape minimizes the total surface area while (more or less) satisfying Plateau’s rules? That’s essentially the same as asking what shape balloons, or any squashy spheres, will adopt when squeezed together. Scientists including the French zoologist Georges Buffon have pondered that, using lead shot and garden peas, for centuries. The Irish scientist Lord Kelvin thought he had the answer in 1887: the ‘perfect foam’ is one in which the cells are truncated octahedra, with eight hexagonal faces and six square ones – provided that the faces are a little curved to better fit Plateau’s rules.

Kelvin’s solution was thought to be optimal for a long time, but there was no formal proof. Then in 1994 Weaire and his colleague Robert Phelan found a better way. It wasn’t so elegant – the structure had a repeating unit of eight polyhedra, six of them with 14 faces and two with 12, all with hexagons and imperfect pentagons and again slight curved (see first pic above). This has 0.3 percent less surface area than Kelvin’s foam.

But does it really exist? The duo found no definitive evidence of their ideal foam in experiments (conducted with washing-up liquid). Now there is. The key was to find the right container. Normal containers have flat walls, which the Weaire-Phelan (WP) foam won’t sit comfortably against. But physicist Ruggero Gabbrielli from the University of Trento figured that a container with walls shaped to fit the WP foam might encourage it to form. He has collaborated with Weaire and his colleagues, along with mathematician Kenneth Brakke at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, to design and make one out of plastic.

When the researchers filled this container with equal sized bubbles, they found that the six layers of about 1500 bubbles were ordered into the WP structure (see second pic above). They describe their results in a paper to be published in the Philosophical Magazine Letters.

This isn’t actually the first time that the WP foam has been made. But the previous example was built by hand, one cell at a time, from girders and plastic sheets, to comprise the walls of the iconic Olympic Swimming Stadium in Beijing (see third pic above).

Christmas reading

2011-11-28T07:09:00.000-08:00

John Whitfield’s new book about reputation, People Will Talk, is out, and I am, to be honest, envious – and I haven’t even read it yet. First, John has picked such a great and timely topic. And second, I know that he will have covered it brilliantly. Yes, this is a shameless plug for my pals, but I really want John’s book to get the attention it deserves, and not get lost among all the pre-Christmas celebrity memoirs.

And while I’m plugging, look out for the debut novel Random Walk by Alexandra Claire, published by Gomer. I’m only part of the way through, but enjoying it for much more profound reasons than the fact that it quotes from my Critical Mass at the beginning (and not just because I’m a Cymruphile either).

The sun and moon in Italy

2011-11-24T06:03:00.000-08:00

Now that it’s happened, I can say that there’s definitely something uniquely challenging about having your fiction translated. The Sun and Moon Corrupted has become, in Italian, La Città del sole e della Luna (The City of the Sun and the Moon). I can live with that change, not least because I like the resonance with Tommaso Campanella’s visionary early seventeenth-century work The City of the Sun, which becomes somewhat apt. But how have the voices translated? In particular (this Italian illiterate wonders), how have they dealt with the eccentric English of Karl Neder and his fellow Eastern Europeans? How does one translate the Brixton riots and the Wapping news era – the whole oppressive gloom of the middle Thatcher years – to Italians?

Whatever the case, Edizioni Dedalo have done a nice job on the superficial level to which I am constrained: I like the faux-naif cover. I just hope there’s still enough disposable income in Italy for people to read it.

Surprise prize

2011-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

The Royal Society Winton Prize for science books was awarded last night. I have written a piece on it for Prospect’s blog. Here it is for convenience.
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Part of the pleasure of the presentation of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books on Thursday night was that it was happening at all. Having lost its corporate sponsor (Rhône-Poulenc, subsequently merged to Aventis) after 2006, the prize was nobly supported by the Royal Society alone for the past four years but looked increasingly in danger of folding. Now it has been rescued by the British investment firm Winton Capital Management, who have agreed to back it for five years. So popular science still has its Man Booker.

The winning title, Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Wavewatcher’s Companion (Bloomsbury), was a surprise. In both cover and content, it looks like a sequel to Pretor-Pinney’s previously successful The Cloudspotter’s Guide, but it won over the judges with what Richard Holmes, chair of the judging panel, called “old-fashioned charm and wit”. Like many of the best science books, it doesn’t at first seem to be about science at all, but is a celebration of the ubiquity of waves of all sorts, from sonar to football crowds.

‘Wit’ seems to have been a valuable feature. Holmes commented on how often humour was employed in the submitted books. That’s encouraging – not because science books have previously been dour, but because they have often had a tendency towards leaden adolescent humour of the “imagine finding that in your sandwich!” variety. This sort of thing wouldn’t have passed muster with the erudite Holmes, whose The Age of Wonder (2009 winner of the prize) was, among many other praiseworthy things, a model of the wry footnote.

But another issue bothered some of the attendees. As the six white male shortlisted authors sat on the stage, broadcaster Vivienne Parry asked “Where are all the girls?” (Tucked up in bed, one was tempted to reply, but you could see her point.) The (typically gender-balanced) judges confessed that this had been a serious concern, but one that they could do nothing about. It’s even worse when you look at the prize’s history: only one woman has ever won it (anthropologist Pat Shipman in 1997), and then as a co-author. Parry is herself one of the very few women to have been shortlisted.

A glib answer is that this just reflects the lack of women in science. But that isn’t the case for science journalism and publishing. It is mercifully free of the male-domination still evident in the lab: at least half of the editorial staff of Nature are women, and this is fairly representative. Plenty of female science writers and scientists have authored books. And the imbalance is all the more troubling when compared to the strong female showing in other non-fiction literary awards such as the Samuel Johnson. So “what’s that about?”, asked science journalist Ian Sample, also on the science book prize shortlist, in response to Parry’s question. No one seemed to know.

Identity crisis

2011-11-05T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is not me, though I kind of wish it was.

Everyone (except, I am willing to bet, my daughters) has namesakes, but there’s genuine scope for confusion here, as I’ve just discovered. There’s also a young medical writer called Philip Ball. I think someone should book us all to talk on the same platform.

PS Funnily enough, I've just discovered that it goes further. This nice discussion of my appearances at the Edinburgh Book Festival claims to direct the reader to my "surprising" web site - which is probably even more of a surprise when, with a double "l" in my name, it in fact takes you here.

Who is human?

2011-11-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Back from two weeks in China, with some things to catch up on. I have a feature article on graphene in the latest issue of the BBC's science magazine Focus - not available online, sadly. And an article on pattern and shape in the glossy lifestyle & sports magazine POC - also not (yet) available on the web, but I'll put the piece on my website shortly. And here is a book review I did for the Observer on 7 October.
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What It Means to be Human:
Reflections from 1791 to the Present
Joanna Bourke
Virago, 2011
ISBN 978-1-84408-644-3

“Are women animals?”, asked a correspondent to the Times in 1872 who described herself only as “An Earnest Englishwoman.” Her point was not that women should be regarded as less than fully human, but that they already were – to such a degree that they would have more rights if they could at least be granted the same status as cats, dogs and horses. The law could be more punitive to a man who ill-treated his horse than to one who murdered his wife.

Inmates at Guantánamo Bay made precisely the same case. Noticing a dog in an air-conditioned kennel next to Camp X-Ray, a British detainee said to the guards “I want his rights” – only to be told “That dog is a member of the US army.” Clive Stafford Smith, representing the inmates, declared that “it would be a huge step for mankind of the judges gave our clients the same rights as the animals.”

As these cases illustrate, historian Joanna Bourke’s survey is not so much about the boundaries of humankind as about the way in which some humans have systematically denied full personhood to others, particularly women, children and other (generally non-European) races and cultures. She would have helped her argument by keeping that distinction more clear. When for example she remarks apropos of slavery that it questions “who is truly human and who is merely ‘property’”, only to follow with the suggestion that “the claim that some humans are property rather than true ‘persons’ is still rampant”, the confusion muddies the point.

Although the forms of denigration that Bourke considers are certainly ‘dehumanizing’, they don’t usually challenge biological or species identity. Rather, they erect hierarchies of human worth, development, and supposed intellectual and spiritual capacity. All the same, her well-made thesis is that this tendency has commonly pushed the oppressed group towards the realm of beasts, whether via the bird-like ‘twittering’ of women or the ‘simian’ countenance of African slaves.

It is an ugly spectacle to see with what insufferable smugness and pseudoscientific justification these judgements have been repeatedly made by white Western males. And of course it would be nonsense to pretend that we all know better now. Yet there is something a little paralysing about this detailed exposé of the obviously pernicious. It is not to belittle the evils of slavery, racism, female oppression and the Holocaust to say that they are, in themselves, scarcely news.

There is also a strong risk of presentism in all this: judging the past as if it were the present. While it is no response to protest that no one knew any better in those days (not least because plenty of women and slaves certainly did), one is left wondering how to contextualize Darwin’s references to “savages… on [a] par with Monkeys” and his chauvinistic hierarchy of races relative to, say, Thackeray’s or Carlyle’s hysterical aversion to African-Americans. It is surely an oversight that nothing is made of Darwin’s anti-slavery motivation in showing that humankind is truly one species, given how thoroughly this was recently documented by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

The kind of exclusivity that Bourke explores is at least as old as slavery itself, which occasionally means that one feels the absence of the long view. The nastiness and bigotry on display here would be found in spades in the Middle Ages or ancient Greece, albeit differently nuanced. Bourke shows how fears of animalization in the use of animal tissue in medicine have remained more or less unchanged from Jenner’s cowpox vaccinations in 1796 to xenografts of animal organs today. But it seems a shame not to consider the same themes in Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676), where he satirized the animal-to-human transfusion experiments of the Royal Society. And when one critic of vaccination worried that it might induce ladies to “receive the embraces of the bull”, there are significant echoes of the legendary coupling of Pasiphae and Minos’s beautiful bull to produce the monstrous Minotaur.

But within the scope that Bourke has set herself, she has found some extraordinary material, such as the rejuvenation experiments of Serge Voronoff in the 1920s. These involved placing slices of simian testicle inside a man’s scrotum under local anaesthetic. An analogous anti-aging procedure for women was harder to arrange, but in any event deemed less important (not everything stays the same, then). Women did, however, worry about receiving the advances of septuagenarians whose renewed sexual vigour was said to be “abnormal both in degree and character”.

No wonder it is an embarrassment to endocrinologists that this is how their field began, although I didn’t need to be told that twice in the same chapter. Such repetition is not the only evidence of some loose editing. Lapses into the gnomic wink-wink traits of literary theory are mercifully rare, but to define molecular biologist James Watson as a “leading Darwin scholar” is eccentric at best. Perhaps that’s part and parcel with the neglect of modern genomics, the most egregious omission in the book.

Yet if the narrative is patchy, it is more than a collection of historical curiosities. Bourke’s critique of the concept of human rights opens an important debate on a complacent ideal, while her cross-examination of animal welfare should give all parties pause for thought. And she is quite right to say that modern biomedical science genuinely does now complicate the definition of humanity in ways that we are ill equipped, ethically and philosophically, to confront.

Quantum renaissance

2011-10-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

Here’s a piece I wrote for the latest issue of Prospect, where it is published with a few small changes. (At least, it started out along these lines - there were numerous iterations, and I somewhat lost track.)
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Quantum mechanics is more than a hundred years old, but we still don’t understand it. Recent years have, however, seen a fresh enthusiasm for exploring the questions about what quantum theory means that were swept under the rug by its founders. Advances in experimental methods make it possible to test ideas about weird and counter-intuitive quantum effects and how they give rise to an apparently different set of physical laws at the everyday scale—that is, to examine in what sense things exist.

In 1900 the German physicist Max Planck suggested that light – a form of electromagnetic waves – consist of tiny, indivisible packets of energy. These particles, called photons, are the “quanta” of light. Five years later Albert Einstein showed how this quantum hypothesis explained the way light kicks electrons out of metals — the photoelectric effect (it was for this, not the theory of relativity, that he won his Nobel). The early pioneers of quantum theory quickly discovered that the seemingly innocuous idea that energy is grainy has bizarre implications. Objects can be in many places at once. Particles behave like waves and vice versa. The mere act of witnessing an event alters what is witnessed. Perhaps the quantum world is constantly branching into multiple universes.

As long as you just accept these paradoxes, quantum theory works fine and so scientists routinely adopt the approach memorably described by Cornell physicist David Mermin, as “shut up and calculate.” They use quantum mechanics to calculate everything from the strength of metal alloys to the shapes of molecules. Routine application of the theory underpins the miniaturization of electronics, medical MRI imaging and the development of solar cells, to name just a few burgeoning new technologies. Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in all of science: its predictions of how light and matter interact match experimental measurements to the eighth decimal place.

But the question of how to interpret the theory — what it tells us about the physical universe—was never resolved by founders such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Famously, Einstein himself was unhappy about how quantum theory leaves so much to chance: it pronounces only on the relative probabilities of how the world is arranged, not on how things fundamentally are. Most physicists now accept something like Bohr and Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation: there is no essential reality beyond the quantum description, nothing more fundamental and definite than probabilities. Bohr coined the notion of “complementarity” to express this need to relinquish the expectation of a deeper reality beneath the equations. If you measure a quantum object, you might find it in a particular state. But it makes no sense to ask if it was in that state before you looked. All that can be said is that it had a particular probability of being so. It’s not that you don’t “know,” but rather that the question has no physical meaning.

Einstein attacked this idea in a thought experiment in which two quantum particles were arranged to have interdependent states, whereby if one were aligned in one direction, say, then the other had to be aligned in the opposite direction. Suppose these particles are allowed to move many light years apart, and then you measure the state of one of them. Quantum theory insists that this instantly determines the state of the other. Again, it’s not that you simply don’t know until you measure. It is that the state of the particles is literally undecided until then. But this implies that the effect of the measurement is transmitted instantly, and therefore faster than light, across cosmic distances to the other particle. Surely that’s absurd, Einstein argued. But it isn’t. Experiments have now established beyond doubt that this instantaneous action at a distance, called entanglement, is real—that’s just how quantum mechanics is.

This is not an abstruse oddity. Quantum entanglement is being exploited in quantum cryptography, where a message is encoded in entangled quantum particles so that it is impossible to intercept and read the message without the tampering being detected. Entanglement is also being used in quantum computing, where the ability of quantum particles to exist in many states at once allows huge numbers of calculations to be conducted simultaneously, greatly accelerating the solution of certain mathematical problems. Although these technologies are still in early development, already there are signs of commercial interest. Earlier this year the Canadian company D-Wave Systems announced the first sale of a quantum computer to Lockheed Martin, while fibre-optic-based quantum cryptography was used (admittedly more for publicity than for extra security) to transmit ballot information in the 2007 Swiss parliamentary elections. “Discussions of relations between information and physical reality are now of interest not just because of foundational motivation but because such questions can have practical implications,” says Wojciech Zurek, a quantum theorist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US.

The quantum renaissance hinges mostly on experimental innovations. Until the 1970s, experiments on quantum fundamentals relied mostly on indirect inference. But now it’s possible to make and probe individual quantum objects with great precision. Many technological advances have contributed to this, among them the advent of laser light composed of photons of identical, precise energy, the ability to make measurements with immense precision in time, space and mass, methods to hold individual atoms in electrical and magnetic traps (the subject of the 1997 Nobel prize in physics), and the manipulation of light with fibre optics (motivated by developments in optical telecommunications). These same techniques have made quantum information technology, such as quantum cryptography and computing, viable.

Even if you accept the paradoxical aspects of quantum theory and just use the maths, the fundamental questions won’t go away. For example, if the act of measurement turns probabilities into certainties, how exactly does it do that? Physicists have long spoken of measurements “collapsing the wavefunction,” which expresses how the smeared-out, wave-like mathematical entity encoding all possible quantum states (the wavefunction) becomes focused into a particular place or state. But this was seen largely as metaphor. The collapse had to be imposed by fiat, since it didn’t feature in the mathematical theory. Many physicists, such as Roger Penrose of Oxford University, now believe that this collapse is a real physical event, rather like the radioactive decay of an atom. If so, it requires an ingredient that lies outside current quantum theory. Penrose argues that the missing element is gravity, and that we’d understand wavefunction collapse if only we could marry quantum theory to general relativity, one of the major lacunae in contemporary physics.

Physicist Dik Bouwmeester of the University of California at San Diego and his coworkers hope to test that idea by placing tiny mirrors in quantum ‘superposition’ states in which they are in several places at once, and then watch their wavefunction collapse into a single location, triggered by a ‘measurement’ in which photons are reflected from them. Ignacio Cirac and Oriol Romero-Isart at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, recently outlined an experimental method for placing nano-sized objects of about a nanometre in size, containing thousands or millions of atoms, into superposition states using light to trap and probe them, which would allow tests of such wavefunction-collapse theories.

Wavefunction collapse is part of the reason why the world doesn’t follow quantum rules all the way up. If it did, they wouldn’t seem counter-intuitive at all. It’s only because we’re used to our coffee cups being on our desk or in the dishwasher, but not both at once, that it seems so unreasonable for photons or electrons not to behave that way. At some scale, the quantum-ness of the microscopic world gives way to classical, Newtonian physics. Why? The generally accepted answer is a process called decoherence: crudely speaking, interactions of a quantum entity with its teeming environment act rather like a measurement, collapsing superpositions into a well-defined state. In this view, large objects obey classical physics not because of their size as such but because they contain more particles and thus experience more interactions, so decohering instantly.

But that doesn’t fully resolve the issue—as shown by Schrödinger’s famous cat. In his thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger imagined a cat that is poisoned, or not, depending on the outcome of a single quantum event, all of which is concealed inside a box. Since the outcome of the event is undetermined until observation collapses the wavefunction, quantum theory seemed to insist that, until the box is opened, the cat would be both alive and dead. Physicists used to evade that absurdity by insisting that somehow the bigness of the cat would bring about decoherence even without any observation, so that it would be either alive or dead but not both.

Yet one can imagine suppressing decoherence by creating a Schrödinger cat experiment that is well isolated from its surroundings. Then what? Ask old-school “shut up and calculate” physicists if the cat can be simultaneously alive and dead, and they are likely to assert that this will still be censored somehow or other. But younger physicists may well answer “why not?”

Perhaps we can simply do the experiment. The size of a cat makes it still nigh impossible to suppress decoherence, but a microscopic “cat” is more amenable to isolation. Cirac and Romero-Isart have proposed an experiment in which the cat is replaced by a virus, held in a light trap and coaxed by laser light into a quantum superposition of states. They say it might even work for tiny aquatic animals called tardigrades or water bears, which, unlike viruses, are unambiguously living or dead. It’s not obvious how to set up an experiment like Schrödinger’s, but simply placing a living creature in two places at once would be mind-boggling enough.

For whatever reason, the fact is that everyday objects are always in a single state and we can make measurements on them without altering that state: we have never sighted a Schrödinger cat. Physicists Anthony Leggett, a Nobel laureate at the University of Illinois, and Anupam Garg of Northwestern University, also in Illinois, call these conditions macrorealism. But is our classical world truly macrorealistic, or does it just look that way? Leggett and Garg showed in theory how to distinguish a macrorealistic world from one that isn’t. Such tests are even tougher to conduct than those on wavefunction collapse, says Romero-Isart, but he thinks that his proposed experiment on nano-objects could make a start.

Zurek, meanwhile, has developed a theory of how a fundamentally quantum world can look classical without really being macrorealistic. Whereas measuring a quantum system will alter it, classical systems can be probed without changing them: fifty people can read this text without thereby spontaneously altering the words. But in Zurek’s scheme, this may be true of quantum systems too if they can leave many imprints on their environment (which is actually what we observe). Each observer comes along and sees an imprint, and because each is the same, they all agree on what properties the system has. But only certain quantum states have this ability to create many identical imprints—in a sense these robust states are thus “selected” in a quasi-darwinian way, and so out of all the possible quantum attributes of the system, these are the ones we ascribe to the object. It’s as though a ripe apple can create lots of redness imprints, which enable us to agree that it is red, while also possessing other quantum attributes that can’t be assigned a definite value in this way.

Zurek says this means that the environment of an object is not an “innocent bystander who simply reports what has happened”, but rather, “an accomplice in the ‘crime’, selecting and transforming some of the fragile quantum states into robust, objectively existing classical states.” Ideas like this, however strange they might sound at first, can be made consistent with current quantum theory precisely because that theory leaves so much unanswered. But perhaps not for much longer.

Two for the diary

2011-09-28T03:53:00.001-07:00

I wrote a couple of items for the Diary section of the October issue of Prospect. One was used in truncated form; the other wasn’t. Here are both of them.
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Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently outlined his vision for ‘Islamist-led democratic capitalism’: “Management of people, management of science and management of money.” It is becoming clear what ‘management’ means here. Erdoğan’s government has been steadily bringing various public bodies under direct state control, of which the latest are the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) and the scientific funding agency TÜBITAK. The move has appalled many Turkish scientists, who consider independent scientific research a basic democratic freedom. The government has claimed that TÜBA was functioning poorly. But the absence of any prior consultation adds to the impression that this is essentially a political move, perhaps to muzzle an organization seen as too secular and left-leaning. “Academics will be increasingly careful about what they say, and what topics they teach and research”, says Erol Gelenbe, an electronic engineer and TÜBA member working at Imperial College in London. One obvious concern is whether ‘Islamist-led’ science will suppress Darwinism. Turkey already has the lowest public acceptance of the theory of evolution in all of Europe, and TÜBA drew criticism on this issue during the 2009 Darwin Year celebrations. Stem-cell research is also unlikely to find governmental favour. But Gelenbe believes that religious considerations will “affect all areas of the sciences, especially the human and social sciences”. He suspects it is only a matter of time before TÜBA begins appointing theologians.

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Images of Americans boarding up in preparation for Hurricane Katia reminded Europeans of how little they need to fear extreme weather. The worst Katia could do was to rouse a blustery day in Scotland with a flick of her tail. But don’t count on it staying this way. Hurricane-like events similar to those that appear in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific have been occasionally seen in the Mediterranean. These so-called Medicanes have been predicted to multiply and intensify, possibly reaching full hurricane force, as global temperatures rise, since high sea surface temperatures are the engine of hurricanes. You might want to think twice before booking for Majorca in 2050.

Chemistry's Grand Challenges

2011-09-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

I have an article in the latest (October) issue of Scientific American that looks at ten big challenges for chemistry in the coming decades. It’s presented by the Sci Am editors as “big mysteries”, though I’m not too sure quite how well that fits: these are not issues about which we’re totally in the dark, but rather, ones that seem to present either challenges to our fundamental understanding or our technological capability. The topics were decided in collaboration with the editors – I’m happy that all justify inclusion, though left to my own devices I’d probably have a slightly different list. The article grew to huge proportions in preparation, before being trimmed severely. So here is the full original text – or rather, an unholy hybrid of that and some of the changes made during the editing process. It's a big post for a blog, but hopefully of some value. And it includes an intro which was snipped out in toto.
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Introduction

There aren’t many novels with chemistry in them, but one of the most famous has a Professor Waldman of the University of Ingolstadt say this: “Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made.” Waldman is the tutor of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s classic from 1818, and he inspires his student to make the discovery that triggers the book’s dark tale.

This association imputes a Faustian aspect to chemistry. But that, like Waldman’s optimism, was transferred in the twentieth century first to physics and then to biology. Chemistry seemed to be left behind as a ‘finished’ science, now just a matter of engineering and devoid of the grand questions that Shelley – a devotee of Humphry Davy – seemed to glimpse in chemistry two hundred years ago. What happened?

Perhaps the answer is that chemistry became too versatile for its own good. It inveigled its way into so many areas of study and production, from semiconductor manufacturing to biomedicine, that we lost sight of it. The core of chemistry remains in making molecules and materials, but these are so diverse – drugs, paints, plastics, microscopic machines – that it is hard to see them as parts of a united discipline.

In this Year of Chemistry, it’s good to take stock – not just to remind ourselves why chemistry is central to our lives, but to consider where it is headed. Here are ten of the key challenges that chemistry faces today. Needless to say, there is no definitive list of this sort, and while all of these ten directions are important, their main value here is perhaps to illustrate that Waldman’s words still remain true. Several of these challenges are concerned with practical applications, as befits chemistry’s role as the most applied and arguably the most useful of the central sciences. But there are also questions about foundations, for the popular idea that chemistry is now conceptually understood, and that all we have to do is use it, is false. It has been only in the past several decades, for example, that the centrality of the non-covalent bond in the chemistry of life has been appreciated, and this sort of ‘temporary stickiness’ of molecules has been recognized as a key aspect of any technological applications, from molecular machines and nanotechnology to the development of surface coatings. Chemistry retains deep intellectual as well as practical challenges.

The last word should also go to Shelley’s Professor Waldman, who tells Victor Frankenstein that “a man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone”. You could perhaps say the same for any branch of science, but it particularly true for chemistry, which depends not just on understanding the world but of finding creative expressions of that knowledge. The creative opportunities for chemists lie everywhere: in making vehicles cleaner, producing artificial leaves, inventing new colours for artists, altering the fate of cells and comprehending the fate of stars. Chemistry is as limitless as art, because it is one.

1. The origins of life, and how life could be different on other planets.

The chemical origin of life used to be a rather parochial topic. That’s not to diminish the profundity, or the difficulty, of the question of how life began on Earth. But now that we have a better view of some of the strange and potentially fertile environments in our solar system – the occasional flows of water on Mars, the petrochemical seas of Saturn’s moon Titan and the cold, salty oceans that seem to lurk under the ice of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede – the origin of terrestrial life seems only a part of a grander question: under what circumstances can life arise, and how widely can its chemical basis vary? That issue is made even more rich by the discovery over the past 16 years of more than 500 extrasolar planets orbiting other stars – worlds of bewildering variety, forcing us to broaden our imagination about the possible chemistries of life. For instance, while NASA has long pursued the view that liquid water is a prerequisite, now we’re not so sure. How about liquid ammonia, or formamide (CHONH2), or an oily solvent like liquid methane, or supercritical hydrogen on Jupiter? And why should life restrict itself to DNA and proteins – after all, several artificial chemical systems have now been made that exhibit a kind of replication from the component parts without relying on nucleic acids. All you need, it seems, is a molecular system that can serve as a template for making a copy, and then detach itself.

Fixating on terrestrial life is a hang-up, but if we don’t, it’s hard to know where to begin. Looking at life on Earth, says chemist Steven Benner of the University of Florida, “we have no way to decide whether the similarities [such as the use of DNA and proteins] reflect common ancestry or the needs of life universally.” But if we retreat into saying that we’ve got to stick with what we know, he says, “we have no fun.”

All the same, Earth is the only locus of life that we know of, and so it makes sense to start here in trying to understand how matter can come alive and, eventually, know itself. This process seems to have begun extremely quickly in geological terms: there are fossil signs of early life dating back almost to the time that the oceans first formed. On that basis, it looks easy – some suspect, even inevitable. The challenge is no longer to come up with vaguely plausible scenarios, for there are plenty – polymerization catalysed by minerals, chemical complexity fuelled by hydrothermal vents, the RNA world. No, the game is to figure out how to make these more than just suggestive reactions coddled in the test tube. Researchers have made conspicuous progress in recent years, showing for example that certain relatively simple chemicals can spontaneously react to form the more complex building blocks of living systems, such as amino acids and nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. In 2009, a team led by John Sutherland, now at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, was able to demonstrate the formation of nucleotides from molecules likely to have existed in the primordial broth. Other researchers have focused on the ability of some RNA strands to act as enzymes, providing evidence in support of the RNA world hypothesis. Through such steps, scientists may progressively bridge the gap from inanimate matter to self- replicating, self-sustaining systems.

Perhaps the dawn of synthetic biology, which includes the construction of primitive lifelike entities from scratch, will help to bridge the gap between the geological formation of simple organic ingredients, as demonstrated by Harold Urey and Stanley Miller in their famous ‘spark’ experiments more than 50 years ago, and the earliest cells.

2. Understanding the nature of the chemical bond and modeling chemistry on the computer.

“The chemistry of the future”, wrote the zoologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in 1917, “must deal with molecular mechanics by the methods and in the strict language of mathematics”. Just 10 years later that seemed possible: the physicists Walter Heitler and Fritz London showed how to describe a chemical bond using the equations of then nascent quantum theory, and the great American chemist Linus Pauling proposed that bonds form when the electron orbitals of different atoms can overlap in space. A competing theory by Robert Mulliken and Friedrich Hund suggested that bonds are the result of atomic orbitals merging into “molecular orbitals” that extend over more than one atom. Theoretical chemistry seemed about to become a branch of physics.

Nearly 100 years later the molecular-orbital picture has become the most common one, but there is still no consensus among chemists that it is always the best way to look at molecules. The reason is that this model of molecules and all others are based on simplifying assumptions and are thus approximate, partial descriptions. In reality, a molecule is a bunch of atomic nuclei in a cloud of electrons, with opposing electrostatic forces fighting a constant tug-of-war with one another, and all components constantly moving and reshuffling. Existing models of the molecule usually try to crystallize such a dynamic entity into a static one and may capture some of its salient properties but neglect others.

Quantum theory is unable to supply a unique definition of chemical bonds that accords with the intuition of chemists whose daily business it is to make and break them. There are now many ways of assigning bonds to the quantum description of molecules as electrons and nuclei. According to quantum chemist Dominik Marx of the University of Bochum in Germany, “some are useful in some cases but fail in others and vice versa”. As a result, he says, “there will always be a search, and thus controversy, for ‘the best method’”.

This is no obstacle to calculating the structures and properties of molecules from quantum first principles – something that can be done to great accuracy if the number of electrons is relatively small. “Computational chemistry can be pushed to the level of utmost realism and complexity”, says Marx. As a result, computer calculations can increasingly be regarded as a kind of virtual experiment that predicts the outcome of a reaction.

But the challenge is to extend these approaches to increasingly complex cases. On the one hand, that may mean simply modelling more molecules. Can a computer model capture the complicated environment inside cells, for example, where many molecules large and small interact, aggregate and react within the responsive, protean medium of salty water? At the moment, most descriptions of such processes use highly simplified descriptions of bonding in which atoms are little more than balls on springs. Can computational chemistry help us understand, say, the detailed workings of a vast biomolecular machine like the ribosome?

On the other hand, can computational methods capture complex chemical processes and behavior, such as catalysis? Attempts to do so tend at the moment to rely on ways of bridging the calculations to intuitive expectations. One promising approach, being developed by Jörg Behler at Bochum, uses neural networks to deduce the energy surfaces on which these reactions happen. It also remains hard to predict subtle behaviour such as superconductivity. But already new materials have been discovered by computation – perhaps in times to come that will become the norm.

3. Graphene and carbon nanotechnology: sculpting with carbon.

The discovery of fullerenes – hollow, cagelike molecules made entirely of carbon – in 1985 was literally the start of something much bigger. The polyhedral shells of these molecules showed how the flat sheets of carbon atoms that make up graphite – where they are joined into hexagonal rings tiled side by side, like chicken wire – can be curved by including some pentagonal rings. With precisely 12 pentagons, the structure curls up into a closed shell. Six years later tubes of graphite-like carbon just a few nanometers in diameter, called carbon nanotubes, fostered the idea that this sort of carbon can be moulded into all manner of curved nanoscale structures. Being hollow, extremely strong and stiff, and electrically conducting, carbon nanotubes promised applications ranging from high-strength carbon composites to tiny wires and electronic devices, miniature molecular capsules and water-filtration membranes.

Now graphite itself has moved centre stage, thanks to the discovery that it can be separated into individual sheets, called graphene, that could supply the fabric for ultra-miniaturized, cheap and robust electronic circuitry. Graphene garnered the 2010 Nobel prize in physics, but the success of this and other forms of carbon nanotechnology might ultimately depend on chemistry. For one thing, ‘wet’ chemical methods may prove the cheapest and simplest for separating graphite into its component sheets. “Graphene can be patterned so that the interconnect and placement problems of carbon nanotubes are overcome”, says carbon specialist Walt de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Some feel, however, that graphene has so far been over-hyped in a way that plays down the hurdles to making it a viable technology. “The hype is extreme”, says de Heer. “Many of the newly claimed superlative graphene properties are really graphite properties ‘under new management’ and were known and used for a very long time.” He believes graphitic electronics has not yet been shown to be viable. “The best that has been done to date is to show that ultrathin graphite (including graphene) can be gated [switched electronically, as in transistors]. But the gating is quite poor, since you cannot turn it completely off. Most people would not consider this to be even a starting point for electronics.” And he says that existing methods of graphene patterning are so crude that the edges undo any advantage that graphene nanoribbons have to offer. However, narrow ribbons and networks can be made to measure with atomic precision by using the techniques of organic chemistry to build them up from ‘polyaromatic’ molecules, in which several hexagonal carbon rings are linked together like little fragments of a graphene sheet. It seems quite possible that graphene technology will depend on clever chemistry.

[Watch this space: I’ve just written a piece on graphene for BBC’s pop-sci magazine Focus, which explores all these things in greater depth.]

4. Artificial photosynthesis.

Of all the sources of ‘clean energy’ available to us, sunlight seems the most tantalizing. With every sunrise comes a reminder of the vast resource of which we currently tap only a pitiful fraction. The main problem is cost: the expense of conventional photovoltaic panels made of silicon still restricts their use. But life on Earth, almost all of which is ultimately solar-powered by photosynthesis, shows that solar cells don’t have to be terribly efficient if, like leaves, they can be made abundantly and cheaply enough.

Yet ‘artificial photosynthesis’ and the ‘artificial leaf’ are slippery concepts. Do they entail converting solar to chemical energy, just as the leaf uses absorbed sunlight to make the biological ‘energy molecule’ ATP? Or must the ‘artificial leaf’ mimic photosynthesis by splitting water to make hydrogen – a fuel – and oxygen?

“Artificial photosynthesis means different things to different people”, says photochemist Devens Gust of Arizona State University. “Some people call virtually any sort of solar energy conversion that involves electricity or fuels artificial photosynthesis.” Gust himself reserves the term for photochemical systems that make fuels using sunlight: “I like to define it as the use of the fundamental scientific principles underlying natural photosynthesis for the design of technological solar-energy conversion systems.”

“One of the holy grails of solar energy research is using sunlight to produce fuels”, Gust explains. “In order to make a fuel, we need not only energy from sunlight, but a source of electrons, and some material to reduce to a fuel with those electrons. The source of electrons has to be water, if the process is to be carried out on a scale anything like that of human energy usage. The easiest way to make a fuel from this is to use the electrons to reduce the protons to hydrogen gas.” Nathan S. Lewis and his collaborators at Caltech are developing an artificial leaf that would do just that using silicon nanowires.

MIT chemist Daniel Nocera and his coworkers have recently announced an ‘artificial leaf’: a device the size of a credit card in which silicon solar cells and a photocatalyst of metals such as nickel and cobalt split water into hydrogen and oxygen which can then be used to drive fuel cells. Nocera estimates that a gallon of water would provide enough fuel to power a home in developing countries for a day. “Our goal is to make each home its own power station”, he says. His start-up company Sun Catalytix aims to take the technology to a commercial level.

But “water oxidation is not a solved problem, even at a fundamental level”, according to Gust. “Cobalt catalysts such as the one that Nocera uses, and newly-discovered catalysts based on other common metals are promising”, he says, but there is still no potentially inexpensive, ideal catalyst. “We don’t know how the natural photosynthetic catalyst, which is based on four manganese atoms and a calcium atom, works”, Gust adds.

Carbon-based fuels are easier than hydrogen to transport, store and integrate with current technologies. Photosynthesis makes carbon-based fuels (sugars, ATP) using sunlight. Gust and his colleagues have been working on making molecular assemblies for artificial photosynthesis that more closely mimic their biological inspiration. “We know how to make artificial antenna systems and photosynthetic reaction centers that work in the lab, but questions about stability remain, as they are usually based at least in part on organic molecules.” He admits that “we are not very close to a technologically useful catalyst for converting carbon dioxide to a useful liquid fuel.” On the other hand, he says, “the recent increase in funding, worldwide for solar fuels has meant that many more researchers have gotten into the game.” If this funding can be preserved, he anticipates “really significant advances.” Let’s hope so, since as Gust says, “we desperately need a fuel or energy source that is abundant, inexpensive, environmentally benign, and readily available.”

5. Devising catalysts for making biofuels.

The demand for biofuels – fuels made by conversion of organic matter, primarily plants – isn’t driven just by concern for the environment. While it’s true that a biofuel economy is notionally sustainable – carbon emissions from burning the fuels are balanced by the carbon dioxide taken up to grow the fuel crops – the truth is that it’s increasingly hard to find any good alternatives. Organic liquids (oil and petroleum) remain the main energy source globally, and are forecast to do so at least until the mid-century. But several estimates say that, at current production rates, we have only about 50 years worth of oil reserves left. What’s more, most of these are in politically unstable parts of the world. And currently soaring prices are expected to continue – the days of cheap oil are over.

There’s nothing new about biofuels: time was when there was only wood to burn in winter, or peat or dried animal dung. But that’s a very inefficient way to use the energy bound up in carbon-based molecules. Today’s biofuels are mostly ethanol made from fermenting corn, sugar-cane or switchgrass, or biodiesel, an ester made from the lipids in rapeseed or soybean oils. The case for biofuels seems easy to make – as well as being potentially greener and offering energy security, they can come from crops grown on land unsuitable for food agriculture, and can boost rural economies.

But the initial optimism about biofuels cooled quickly. For one thing, they threaten to displace food crops, particularly in developing countries where selling biofuels abroad can be more lucrative than feeding people at home. And the numbers are daunting: meeting current oil demand will mean requisitioning huge areas of arable land. But these figures depend crucially on how efficiently the carbon is used. Some parts of plants, particularly the resinous lignin, can’t easily be turned into biofuel, especially by biological fermentation. Finding new chemical catalysts to assist this process looks essential if biofuels are to fly.

One of the challenges of breaking down lignin – cracking open ‘aromatic C-O bonds’: benzene rings bridged by an oxygen – was recently met by John Hartwig and Alexey Sergeev of the University of Illinois, who found a nickel-based catalyst that will do the trick. Hartwig points out that, if biomass is to supply non-fossil-fuel chemical feedstocks as well as fuels, it will need to offer aromatic compounds – of which lignin is the only major potential source.

It’s a small part of a huge list of challenges: “There are issues at every level”, says Hartwig. Some of these are political – a carbon tax, for example, could decide the economical viability of biofuels. But many are chemical. The changes in infrastructure and engineering needed for an entirely new liquid fuel (more or less pure alcohol) are so vast that it seems likely the biofuels will need to be compatible with existing technology – in other words, to be hydrocarbons. That means converting the oxidized compounds in plant matter to reduced ones. Not only does this require catalysts, but it also demands a source of hydrogen – either from fossil fuels or ideally, but dauntingly, from splitting of water.

And fuels will need to be liquid for easy transportation along pipelines. But biomass is primarily solid. Liquefaction would need to happen on site where the plant is harvested. And one of the difficulties for catalytic conversion is the extreme impurity of the reagent – classical chemical synthesis does not tend to allow for reagents such as ‘wood’. “There’s no consensus on how all this will be done in the end”, says Hartwig. But an awful lot of any solution lies with the chemistry, especially with finding the right catalysts. “Almost every industrial reaction on a large scale has a catalyst associated”, Hartwig points out.

6. Understanding the chemical basis of thought and memory.

The brain is a chemical computer. Interactions between the neurons that form its circuitry are mediated by molecules: neurotransmitters that pass across the synaptic spaces where one neural cell wires up to another. This chemistry of the mind is perhaps at its most impressive in the operation of memory, in which abstract principles and concepts – a telephone number, say – are imprinted in states of the neural network by sustained chemical signals. How does chemistry create a memory that is at the same time both persistent and dynamic: susceptible to recall, revision and forgetting?

We now know that a cascade of biochemical processes, leading to a change in production of neurotransmitter molecules at the synapse, triggers ‘learning’ for habitual reflexes. But even this ‘simple’ aspect of learning has short- and long-term stages. Meanwhile, more complex so-called ‘declarative’ memory (of people, places and so on) has a different mechanism and location in the brain, involving the activation by the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate of a protein called the NMDA receptor. Blocking these receptors with drugs prevents memory retention for many types of declarative memory.

Our everyday declarative memories are often encoded in a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), which involves NMDA receptors and in accompanied by an expansion of the synapse, the region of a neuron involved in its communication with others. As the synapse grows, so does the ‘strength’ of its connection with neighbours. The biochemistry of this process has been clarified in the past several years. It involves stimulation of the formation of filaments within the neuron made from the protein actin – the basic scaffolding of the cell, which determine its size and shape. But that process can be undone during a short period before the change is consolidated by biochemical agents that block the newly formed filaments.

Once encoded, long-term memory for both simple and complex learning is actively maintained by switching on genes that produce proteins. It now appears that this can involve a self-perpetuating chemical reaction of a prion, a protein molecule that can switch between two different conformations. This switching process was first discovered for its role in neurodegenerative disease, but prion mechanisms have now been found to have normal, beneficial functions too. The prion protein is switched from a soluble to an insoluble, aggregated state that can then perpetuate itself autocatalytically, and which ‘marks’ a particular synapse to retain a memory.

There are still big gaps in the story of how memory works, many of which await filling with the chemical details. How, for example, is memory recalled once it has been stored? “This is a deep problem whose analysis is just beginning”, says neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel of Columbia University. It may involve the neurotransmitters dopamine and acetylcholine. And what happens at the molecular level when things go wrong, for example in Alzheimer’s-related memory loss and other cognitive disorders that affect memory? Addressing and perhaps even reversing such problems will require a deeper understanding of the many biochemical processes in memory storage, including a better understanding of the chemistry of prions – which in turn seems to point us increasingly towards a more fundamental grasp of protein structure and how it is shaped by evolution.

Getting to grips with the chemistry of memory offers the enticing, and controversial, prospect of pharmacological enhancement. Some memory-boosting substances are already known: neuropeptides, sex steroids and chemicals that act on receptors for nicotine, glutamate, serotonin and other neurotransmitters and their mimics have all been shown to enhance memory. In fact, according to neurobiologist Gary Lynch at the University of California at Irvine, the complex sequence of steps leading to long-term learning and memory means that there are a large number of potential targets for such ‘memory drugs’. However, there’s so far little evidence that known memory boosters improve cognitive processing more generally – that’s to say, it’s not clear that they actually make you smarter. Moreover, just about all studies so far have been on rodents and monkeys, not humans.

Yet it seems entirely possible that effective memory enhancers will be found. Naturally, such possibilities raise a host of ethical and social questions. One might argue that using such drugs is not so different from taking vitamins to improve health, or sleeping pills to get a much-needed good rest, and that it can’t be a bad thing to allow people to become brighter. But can it be right for cognitive enhancement to be available only for those who can afford it? In manipulating the brain’s chemistry, are we modifying the self? As our knowledge and capabilities advance, such ethical questions will become unavoidable.

7. Understanding the chemical basis of epigenetics.

Cells, like humans, become less versatile and more narrowly focused as they age. Pluripotent stem cells present in the early embryo can develop into any tissue type; but as the embryo grows, cells ‘differentiate’, acquiring specific roles (such as blood, muscle or nerve cells) that remain fixed in their progeny. One of the revolutionary discoveries in research on cloning and stem cells, however, is that this process isn’t irreversible. Cells don’t lose genes as they differentiate, retaining only those they need. Rather, the genes are switched off but remain latent – and can be reactivated. The recent discovery that a cocktail of just four proteins is sufficient to cause mature differentiated cells to revert to stem-cell-like status, becoming induced pluripotent cells, might not only transform regenerative medicine but also alters our view of how the human body grows from a fertilized egg.

Like all of biology, this issue has chemistry at its core. It’s slowly becoming clear that the versatility of stem cells, and its gradual loss during differentiation, results from the chemical changes taking place in the chromosomes. Whereas the old idea of biology makes it a question of which genes you have, it is now clear that an equally important issue is which genes you use. The formation of the human body is a matter of chemically modifying the stem cells’ initial complement of genes to turn them on and off.

What is particularly exciting and challenging for chemists is that this process seems to involve chemical events happening at size scales greater than those of atoms and molecules: at the so-called mesoscale, involving the interaction and organization of large molecular groups and assemblies. Chromatin, the mixture of DNA and proteins that makes up chromosomes, has a hierarchical structure. The double helix is wound around cylindrical particles made from proteins called histones, and this ‘string of beads’ is then bundled up into higher-order structures that are poorly understood. Yet it seems that cells exert great control over this packing – how and where a gene is packed into chromatin may determine whether it is ‘active’ or not. Cells have specialized enzymes for reshaping chromatin structure, and these have a central role in cell maturation and differentiation. Chromatin in embryonic stem cells seems to have a much looser, open structure: as some genes fall inactive, the chromatin becomes increasingly lumpy and organized. “The chromatin seems to fix and maintain or stabilize the cells’ state”, says pathologist Bradley Bernstein of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

What’s more, this process is accompanied by chemical modification of both DNA and histones. Small-molecule tags become attached to them, acting as labels that modify or silence the activity of genes. The question of to what extent mature cells can be returned to pluripotency – whether iPS cells are as good as true stem cells, which is a vital issue for their use in regenerative medicine – seems to hinge largely on how far this so-called epigenetic marking can be reset. If iPS cells remember their heritage (as it seems they partly do), their versatility and value could be compromised. On the other hand, some histone marks seem actually to preserve the pluripotent state.

It is now clear that there is another entire chemical language of genetics – or rather, of epigenetics – beyond the genetic code of the primary DNA sequence, in which some of the cell’s key instructions are written. “The concept that the genome and epigenome form an integrated system is crucial”, says geneticist Bryan Turner of the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The chemistry of chromatin and particularly of histone modifications may be central to how the influence of our genes gets modified by environmental factors. “It provides a platform through which environmental components such as toxins and foodstuffs can influence gene expression”, says Turner. “We are now beginning to understand how environmental factors influence gene function and how they contribute to human disease. Whether or not a genetic predisposition to disease manifests itself will often depend on environmental factors operating through these epigenetic pathways. Switching a gene on or off at the wrong time or in the wrong tissue can have effects on cell function that are just as devastating as a genetic mutation, so it’s hardly surprising that epigenetic processes are increasingly implicated in human diseases, including cancer.”

8. Finding new ways to make complex molecules.

The core business of chemistry is a practical, creative one: making molecules. But the reasons for doing that have changed. Once the purpose of constructing a large natural molecule such as vitamin B12 by painstaking atom-by-atom assembly was to check the molecular structure. If what you build, knowing were each atom is going, is the same as what nature makes, it presumably has the same structure. But we’re now good enough at deducing structures from methods such as X-ray crystallography – often for molecules that it would be immensely hard to make anyway – that this justification is hard to sustain.

Maybe it’s worth making a molecule because it is useful – as a drug, say. That’s true, but the more complicated the molecule, the less useful its synthesis from scratch (‘total synthesis’) tends to be, because of the cost and the small yield of the product after dozens of individual steps. Better, often, to extract the molecule from natural sources, or to use living organisms to make it or part of it, for example by equipping bacteria or yeast with the necessary enzymes.

And total synthesis is typically slow – even if rarely as slow as the 11-year project to make vitamin B12 that began in 1961. Yet new molecules and drugs are often needed very fast – for example, new antibiotics to outstrip the rise of resistant microorganisms.

As a result, total synthesis is “a lot harder to justify than it once was”, according to industrial chemist Derek Lowe. It’s a great training ground for chemists, but are there now more practical ways to make molecules? One big hope was combinatorial chemistry, in which new and potentially useful molecules were made by a random assembly of building blocks followed by screening to identify those that do a job well. Once hailed as the future of medicinal chemistry, ‘combi-chem’ fell from favour as it failed to generate anything useful.

But after the initial disappointments, combi-chem may enjoy a brighter second phase. It seems likely to work only if you can make a wide enough range of molecules and find good ways of picking out the minuscule amounts of successful ones. Biotechnology might help here – for example, each molecule could be linked to a DNA-based ‘barcode’ that both identifies it and aids its extraction. Or cell-based methods might coax combinatorial schemes towards products with particular functions using guided (‘directed’) evolution in the test tube.

There are other new approaches to bond-making too, which draw on nature’s mastery of uniting fragments in highly selective yet mild ways. Proteins, for example, have a precise sequence of amino acids determined by the base sequence of the messenger RNA molecule on which they are assembled in the ribosome. Using this model, future chemists might program molecular fragments to assemble autonomously in highly selective ways, rather than relying on the standard approach of total synthesis that involves many independent steps, including cumbersome methods for protecting the growing molecule from undesirable side reactions. For example, David Liu at Harvard University and his coworkers have devised a molecule-making strategy inspired by nature’s use of nucleic-acid templates to specify the order in which units are linked together. They tagged small molecules with short DNA strands that ‘programme’ them for linkage on a DNA template. And they have created a ‘DNA walker’ which can step along a template strand sequentially attaching small molecules dangling from the strand to produce a macromolecular chain – a process highly analogous to protein synthesis on the ribosome, essentially free from undesirable side reactions. This could be a handy way to tailor new drugs. “Many molecular life scientists believe that macromolecules will play an increasingly central, if not dominant, role in the future of therapeutics”, says Liu.

9. Integrating chemistry: creating a chemical information technology.

Increasingly, chemists don’t simply want to make molecules but also to communicate with them: to make chemistry an information technology that will interface with anything from living cells to conventional computers and fibre-optic telecommunications. In part, this is an old idea: biosensors in which chemical reactions are used to report on concentrations of glucose in the blood date back to the 1960s, although only recently has their use for monitoring diabetes been cheap, portable and widespread. Chemical sensing has countless applications – to detect contaminants in food and water at very low concentrations, say, or to monitor pollutants and trace gases in the atmosphere.

But it is in biomedicine that chemical sensors have the most dramatic potential. Some of the products of cancer genes circulate in the bloodstream long before the condition becomes apparent to regular clinical tests – if they could be detected early, prognoses would be vastly improved. Rapid genomic profiling would enable drug regimes to be tailored to individual patients, reducing risks of side-effects and allowing some medicines to be used that today are hampered by their dangers to a genetic minority. Some chemists foresee continuous, unobtrusive monitoring of all manner of biochemical markers of health and disease, perhaps in a way that is coupled remotely to alarm systems in doctors’ surgeries or to automated systems for delivering remedial drug treatments. All of this depends on developing chemical methods for sensing and signaling with high selectivity and often at very low concentrations. “Advances are needed in improving the sensitivity of such systems so that biological intermediates can be detected a much lower levels”, says chemist Allen Bard of the University of Texas at Austin. “This raises a lot of challenges. But such analyses could help in the early detection of disease.”

Integrated chemical information systems might go much further still. Prototype ‘DNA computers’ have been developed in which strands of bespoke DNA in the blood can detect, diagnose and respond to disease-related changes in gene activity. Clever chemistry can also couple biological processes to electronic circuitry, for example so that nerve cells can ‘speak’ to computers. Information processing and logic operations can be conducted between individual molecules. The photosynthetic molecular apparatus of some organisms even seems able to manipulate energy using the quantum rules that physicists are hoping to exploit in super-powerful quantum computers. It is conceivable that mixtures of molecules might act as super-fast quantum computers to simulate the quantum behavior of other molecules, in ways that are too computationally intensive on current machines. According to chemistry Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn of the University of Strasbourg, this move of chemistry towards what he calls a science of informed (and informative) matter “will profoundly influence our perception of chemistry, how we think about it, how we perform it.”

10. Exploring the limits of applicability of the periodic table, and new forms of matter that lie outside it.

The periodic tables that adorn the walls of classrooms are now having to be constantly revised, because the number of elements keeps growing. Using particle accelerators to crash atomic nuclei together, scientists can create new ‘superheavy’ elements, with more protons and neutrons than the 92 or so elements found in nature. These engorged nuclei are not very stable – they decay radioactively, often within a tiny fraction of a second. But while they exist, the new ‘synthetic’ elements such as seaborgium (element 106) and hassium (108) are like any other insofar as they have well defined chemical properties. In dazzling experiments, the properties of both of these synthetic elements have been investigated from just a handful of the elusive atoms in the instant before they fall apart.

Such studies probe not just the physical but the conceptual limits of the periodic table: do these superheavy elements continue to display the trends and regularities in chemical behavior that make the table periodic in the first place? Some do, and some don’t. In particular, such massive nuclei hold on to the atoms’ innermost electrons so tightly that they move at close to the speed of light. Then the effects of special relativity increase their mass and play havoc with the quantum energy states on which their chemistry – and thus the table’s periodicity – depends.

Because nuclei are thought to be stabilized by particular ‘magic numbers’ of protons and neutrons, some researchers hope to find an ‘island of stability’, a little beyond the current capabilities of element synthesis, in which these superheavies live for longer. But is there any fundamental limit to their size? A simple calculation suggests that relativity prohibits electrons from being bound to nuclei of more than 137 protons. But more sophisticated calculations defy that limit. “The periodic system will not end at 137; in fact it will never end”, insists nuclear physicist Walter Greiner of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The experimental test of that claim remains a long way off.

Besides extending the periodic table, chemists are stepping outside it. Conventional wisdom has it that the table enumerates all the ingredients that chemists have at their disposal. But that’s not quite true. For one thing, it has been found that small clusters of atoms can act collectively like single ‘giant’ atoms of other elements. A so-called ‘superatom’ of aluminum containing precisely 13 atoms will behave like a giant iodine atom, while an Al14 cluster behaves like an alkaline earth metal. “We can take one element and have it mimic several different elements in the Periodic Table”, says Shiv Khanna of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. It’s not yet clear how far this superatom concept can be pushed, but according to one of its main advocates, A. Welford Castleman of Pennsylvania State University, it potentially makes the periodic table three-dimensional, each element being capable of mimicking several others in suitably sized clusters. There’s no fundamental reason why such superatoms have to contain just one element either, nor why the ‘elements’ they mimic need be analogues of others in the table.

Furthermore, physicists have made synthetic atoms that are not like traditional ones at all, with nuclei of protons (and perhaps neutrons) surrounded by electrons. The electron’s heavier cousin the muon can replace the electron in ‘muonium’, a kind of heavy hydrogen. And the anti-electron, or positron, can act as the positive nucleus of ‘positronium’, a super-light analogue of hydrogen. A slightly heftier version of ‘light hydrogen’ has been made that substitutes the central proton for a positively charged muon. These synthetic atoms have been used to test aspects of the quantum theory of chemical reactions. And by comparing the spectrum of muonium with that of ordinary hydrogen, researchers have been able to obtain a new, more accurate value for the mass of the proton.

Talking to Yo-Yo Ma

2011-09-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

I recently interviewed Yo-Yo Ma for the Financial Times. The article is now published, but here is the original version. It goes without saying that this was an honour to do, but it turned out also to be a huge pleasure, as Yo-Yo is so engaging, unaffected and thoughtful – it’s easy to see why the UN selected him as a Peace Ambassador. From what I’ve heard so far, his new CD is pretty fabulous too. Forgive me if I’m sounding too much the fanboy here – he’s just a very nice bloke.
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When Yo-Yo Ma was asked to identify a private passion for this article, Sony sent back the message ‘Yo-Yo Ma is interested in everything.’ I’d have happily discussed Everything with Ma, and initially he seems determined to make that happen. His first question to me (were we doing this thing the right way round?) is about the latest technology for splitting water to make hydrogen as a fuel, a trick borrowed from photosynthesis in plants. This turns out to be an offshoot of his interest in water and rivers, a topic that could evidently have engaged us throughout the short time I was allotted in Ma’s frantic schedule during his visit to London for a performance at the Proms.

In view of all this, it comes as no surprise to discover that Ma’s fascination with neuroscience – this is what I’m allegedly there to discuss – is not a hobby like jam-making or long-distance running, but is merely one of the many facets of what begins to emerge as his grand vision: to foster a creative society. One might even be forgiven for suspecting that the music-making for which Ma enjoys world renown happens almost by chance to be the avenue through which he pursues this goal. It could equally, perhaps, have been anthropology, which Ma studied at university.

As Ma began playing the cello at age 4, however, it seems unlikely that his musical career left much to chance. A child prodigy, he performed before Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and was conducted by Leonard Bernstein. He then studied at the renowned Juilliard School in New York City before completing a liberal arts degree at Harvard. What followed is the kind of glittering career that all too readily becomes a numbing litany of awards and accolades that have left Ma described as ‘one of the most recognizable classical musicians on the planet’. He was the natural choice to take Pablo Casals’ part when the concert for Kennedy’s inauguration, at which Casals performed, was restaged for its 50th anniversary last January.

So far, so conventionally awe-inspiring. But the stereotype of the stratospheric virtuoso doesn’t last a moment once Ma appears, fresh from premiering Graham Fitkin’s intense Cello Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall – written for Ma – the night before. Isn’t he too young, for starters? (56 in October, since you ask.) And instead of gravitas or world-weariness, he has a boyish enthusiasm for, well, everything.

But I shouldn’t be surprised that Ma is no remote creature of the highbrow concert circuit. He has appeared on Sesame Street and (in cartoon form) on The Simpsons, he can be heard on the soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and he is a UN Peace Ambassador. He has performed with Sting and Bobby McFerrin, and his latest CD is a bluegrass collaboration, The Goat Rodeo Sessions.

I’m not meant to be talking about any of that, though – the topic on the table is neuroscience. We’ll get there, but there’s a broader agenda: to unite the notorious Two Cultures of C. P. Snow. Ma has been reading Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, which describes how Keats, Coleridge and Shelley shared with Humphry Davy and William Herschel a passion for the marvels and mysteries of the natural world. “This is what happened in the 1800s”, Ma says. “Maybe we’re in another point in time where we actually need both specialists and generalists. The word amateur used to be a positive term. Nowadays if you’re an amateur, you’re a dilettante, you’re not serious.”

I profess my own exhilaration at Holmes’ demand that we should be impatient with “the old, rigid debates and boundaries” – that we need “a wider, more generous, more imaginative” way of writing about science that can locate it within the rest of culture. “That’s exactly what I’d hope for,” Ma agrees. “I love quoting [Nobel laureate physicist Richard] Feynman, who said that nature has a much greater imagination than humans, but she guards her secrets jealously. So his job as a scientist is to unlock some of those secrets, and interpret them for you. That’s what music tries to do. If I’m trying to describe something that someone else wrote, I have to get into that world and then I have to find a way to ensure that what I think is there lives in you also.”

Perhaps neuroscience can create bridges because the brain is the crucible within which art, science and all of culture are forged, presumably with the same tools. This is the seat of the creativity that we channel into discovery and expression: looking out and looking in. For Ma, the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on homeostasis expresses something of where these creative impulses come from. Homeostasis is the tendency of all living things to maintain the internal conditions necessary for their continuation, and Damasio considers all non-conscious aspects of this self-preservation to be forms of emotion, whether they are basic reflexes, immune responses or ‘emotions-proper’ such as joy. “Life forms are always looking for homeostasis, equilibrium”, says Ma. So behaviours that promote it are responding to a need. “That made a lot of sense to me.”

His experiences among the Kalahari bushmen of southern Africa, who he visited for a documentary 15 years after he had studied them in his anthropology courses, convinced him that music can perform that function in many ways. “They do these trance dances that are for spiritual and religious purposes, it’s for medicine, it’s their art form, it’s everything. That matches all I’ve learnt about what music should be or could do.” It’s there because it fulfils fundamental needs. “Sound is one of our basic senses, so everyone uses sound to its maximum advantage: to promotes things that lead to homeostasis.”

But how does that magic work? I suggest that music is exploiting our instincts to make sense of our environment, to look for patterns, to develop hypotheses about our environment. It’s setting us puzzles. Ma is fascinated by how the brain’s plasticity ensures we have the capacity to solve them, to convert sensory data into a viable model of the world. “A newborn sees everything essentially upside down. But its brain is constantly interpreting what is being received, and at some stage it will just decide to turn all the information around.”

I mention Damasio’s insistence, in Descartes’ Error (1994), on the somatic component of the brain – that we are not Descartes’ disembodied mental homunculus directing a physical body, but that instead the self cannot be meaningfully imagined without being embedded in a body. This must be resonant for a musician? He concurs and suggests that the role of tactility in our mental well-being is under-appreciated. “That’s our largest organ.”

Ma sees this separation of intellect and mechanism, of the self and the body, as pernicious. “We’ve based so much of our educational system on it. At the music conservatory there’s a focus on the plumbing, not psychology. It’s about the engineering of sound, how to play accurately. But then going to university, the music professor would say ‘you can play very well, but why do you want to do it?’ Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.”

And this is about much more than intellectual transmission. It has to be packaged with emotion. “Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.” According to Damasio, there’s a deeper function of passion too. He challenged decades if not centuries of preconception about rationality by showing that emotion plays a vital part in it. Far from being a distraction, emotion is often the lubricant of good decision-making: when it is lacking, as in some people with mental impairments or deficits, the ability to make sound choices – or any choices at all – can evaporate.

He doesn’t want to stop. With his manager giving a gentle yet determined signal that our time is up, he exhorts me to ask one more question. So – how can music be made central to education, rather than an option at the periphery? His response makes the big vision a little more concrete: it is about finding ways to communicate ideas in a manner that yields the greatest harvest of creativity. “There is nothing more important today than to find a way to be knowledge-based creative societies. My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it’s memorable. It’s great if a person buys the CD or a ticket to the concert, but its only when the ideas are passed on that your job is done. If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there’s really not much point in you having been there – or me, for that matter. Now, isn’t that the purpose of education too? That’s when I realised that education and culture are the same. Once something is memorable, it’s living and you’re using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.”

Why chemistry is good for you

2011-09-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

This is really just for the record (mine): I have a book review in Chemistry World here. It’s a challenge to get to the nub of a big, multi-author volume in 300 words or so…

Here is the political weather forecast

2011-09-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest story for Nature’s online news, with added bonus boxes. There was far too much interesting stuff in this paper to cram into 700 words or so. And more on the way from others working in this field: watch this space.
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Signs of impending social and political change may lie hidden in a sea of data.

You could have foreseen the Arab spring if only you’d been paying enough attention to the news. That’s the claim of a new study which shows how ‘data mining’ of news reportage can reveal the possibility of future crises well before they happen.

Computer scientist Kalev Leetaru at the University of Illinois in Champaign has trawled through a vast collection of open-access news reporting and examined the ‘tone’ of the news about Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where long-established dictatorial political leaders have been deposed by public uprisings in the so-called Arab spring. In all cases, he says, there was a clear, steady trend towards a negative tone for about a decade before the revolts [1].

While this doesn’t predict either the course or the timing of the events during last spring and summer, Leetaru argues that it provided a clear indicator of an impending crisis. “I strongly doubt we'll ever get to the point where we can say ‘at 5:05PM next July 2nd there will be a riot of 20 people at such and such street corner’”, he says. “Rather, the value of this class of work lies in warning of changing moods and environments, and increased vulnerability to a sudden shock”.

Erez Lieberman Aiden of Harvard University, who has explored the mining of digitized literary texts for linguistic and historical trends, agrees. “Leetaru’s work is interesting not so much because it makes predictions, but because it points to the power and the opportunity latent in new ways of analyzing large-scale news databases”, he says.

Political scientist Thomas Chadefaux of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, calls the paper “a welcome addition to a field – political science – that has cared very little about finding early warning signals for war, or making predictions at all.”

Long-term trends can be subtle and hard to spot by subjective and partial monitoring of the news. But they might presage crises more reliably than does a focus on the short term. For example, while there was talk during the spring of the possibility of similar public uprisings in Saudi Arabia, reflected in a rather negative tone in the news there during March 2011, the long-term data showed that spell to be no worse than other fluctuations in recent years – there was no worsening trend. On this basis, one would have predicted the failure of the Arab spring to unseat the Saudi rulers.

“If we think of the vast array of digital information around us today as an ocean of information, up to this point we've largely been studying the surface”, says Leetaru. “The idea behind this work is to poke our heads beneath the water for a moment to show that there's a vast world down there that we've been missing”. He thinks that automated news analysis that looks for information about mood, tone or spatial references could supply something like a political weather forecast, “offering updated assessments every few minutes for the entire planet and pointing out emerging patterns that might warrant further investigation.”

Leetaru has used the immense collection of news reports in the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), a monitoring service set up by the British intelligence service just before World War II to assess world opinion. The SWB now includes newspaper articles, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals and a variety of other online resources from over 130 countries.

Previous efforts to extract ‘buried’ information from vast literary resources – an approach dubbed ‘culturomics’ – have tended to focus on quantifying the occurrence of certain key words [2]. In contrast, Leeratu conducted ‘sentiment mining’ of the sources by assessing their positive or negative tone, looking for evaluation words such as ‘terrible’, ‘awful’ or ‘good’. He used computer algorithms to convert these data trawls into a single parameter that quantified the tone of the news, normalized so that the long-term average value is zero.

For Egypt, the tone in early 2011 fell to a negative value seen only once before in the past three decades. What’s more, at that same time the tone of the coverage specifically mentioning the (now deposed) president Hosni Mubarak reached its lowest ever level for his almost 30-year rule. Similar falls to highly unusual low points were found for Tunisia and Libya.

This didn’t in itself predict when those crises would happen – it seems likely, for example, that rocketing food prices helped to trigger the Arab spring revolts [3]. But it might reveal when a region or state is ripe for unrest. Dirk Helbing, a specialist in modeling of social systems at ETH, compares it to the case of traffic flow: computer models can help to spot when traffic is in a potentially unstable state, but the actual triggers for jams may be random and unpredictable.

By the same token, it remains to be seen whether this approach can spot signs of trouble in advance, rather than retrospectively finding them foreshadowed in the media. “It is obviously much easier to find precursory signs when you know where to look than to do it blindly”, says Chadefaux.

But if news mining does turn out to offer a crystal ball, “the question is what kinds of use we’ll make of this information”, says Helbing. “Will governments act in a responsive way to avoid crises, say by improving people’s living conditions, or will they use it to police dissatisfied people in a preventative way?”

References
1. Leeratu, K. First Monday 16(9) (online only), 5 September 2011. Available here.
2. Michel, J. B. et al., Science 331, 176-182 (2010).
3. Lagi, M., Betrand, K. Z. & Bar-Yam, Y. http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2455 (2011).

Read all about it

Where is Osama bin Laden?

Leetaru also looked at whether the sources of news reports might provide information about the spatial location of events. He analysed all media references to Osama bin Laden since 1979 to look for co-occurrences of geographical places. Between bin Laden’s rise to media prominence in the 1990s and his capture and killing in 2011, the most common associations were with northern Pakistan, within a 200-km radius of the cities of Islamabad and Peshawar – the region in which he was finally found.

How the world looks from here

News sources are often criticized for being too parochial. That turns out to be a valid complaint, at least for the US news: Leetaru found that even the New York Times, a relatively ‘internationalist’ newspaper, constantly refers reports in other countries back to the US. “Nearly every foreign location it covers is mentioned alongside a US city, usually Washington DC”, he says.

By looking for such co-references to specific cities or other geographical landmarks throughout the world, Leetaru extracted a map of how the global news links nations into ‘world civilizations’. For SWB these correspond largely to the recognized geographical affiliations: Australasia, the Middle East (including much of northeast Africa), the Americas and so forth. But there are anomalies: Spain is linked to South America, and France and Portugal to southern Africa, showing that the imprint of imperial history is still felt in the world. Strikingly, however, the ‘map’ derived from the New York Times alone is rather different: on this measure, the US has its own distinctive view of the world. That matters, says Leetaru. “Understanding how a given country groups the rest of the world gives you critical information on how to approach that country in terms of shaping policy”, he says.

Here’s some more bad news

If you’ve been feeling that the news is always bad these days, you’ve got a point. It has been getting steadily worse for the past 30 years, according to the trend in the tone of the entire data set in the SWB since 1979.

Welcome to the Futur(ICT)

2011-09-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

I am at a meeting in Italy that is thrashing out the proposal for the FuturICT project, a leading contender for the EU’s Flagship Initiatives scheme which seeks to provide huge funding over ten years for ‘transformative’ initiatives in information and communications technologies. FuturICT is to my mind the most potentially transformative of all the shortlisted candidates, but we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, it is very exciting to see what is being planned. It is in the light of this initiative, and after discussion with its leader Dirk Helbing, that I put down the thoughts below a week or two ago. It seems that events like this one are now almost daily adding to the arguments for why we need something like FuturICT. But Lord knows if we can wait ten years for it.

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This must be said first: no one really understands what is going on. It’s generally acknowledged that Twitter didn’t cause the Arab Spring – but what did? Labour has been right to avoid pinning the riots on the government cuts – but then, what do we pin them on? Every economist has an explanation for the financial crisis, different to a greater or lesser degree than the others. But it happened somehow.

Can you imagine these things happening two decades ago? The riots in Croydon, Beckenham and Bromley, were not like those in Toxteth and Brixton in the 1980s, not least precisely because of their location, but also because there was no forewarning: the police were justified in saying that they’d had no precedent to prepare them. For all that it looks superficially like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring too was something new. And if the financial crisis was like the Great Depression, we’d know what to do. It was partly about risk hidden so deeply as to cause paralytic fear; it was also about instruments too complicated for users to understand, and about legal and financial systems labyrinthine enough to permit deception, stupidity and knavishness to thrive.

What is qualitatively new about these events is the crucial role of interdependence and interaction and the almost instantaneous transmission of information through social, economic and political networks. That novelty does not by itself explain why they happened, much less help us to identify solutions or ameliorate the unwelcome consequences. But it points to something perhaps even more important: the world has changed. And it is not going to change back. The poverty of the political response to the riots is understandable, because, although they do not like to admit it, politicians are faced with uncharted territory and they do not know how to navigate it. This is a dangerous situation, because it means that the pressure to be seen to be responding may force political leaders to improvise solutions that fail entirely to acknowledge the nature of the problem and therefore stand a good chance of making things worse. Harsh sentencing and housing evictions might conceivably reassure the public that there are strong hands at the helm, but there is no credible, objective evidence that they will prevent recurrences in the future. That we can one moment celebrate the power of social-network technologies to instil change and mobilize crowd movements, and the next demand that these technologies be shut down in times of civil unrest shows that we have no idea how to manage these things, or even what to think about them except that somehow they matter.

In retrospect, the significance of the terrorist attacks almost exactly ten years ago now looks to be that they marked the advent of this new world order – one of decentralization, of fears and dangers so diffuse and distributed as to be impossible to vanquish and perhaps even to define. And what was the response on that occasion? Old-fashioned declarations of war between nations, which are now revealed to be not just ineffective but disastrous. The assassination of Hitler would have probably halted a war; in assassinating Osama bin Laden, there was no war to stop.

This is why politicians and decision makers need to learn a new language, or they will simply lose the capacity to govern, to manage economies, to create stable societies, to keep the world worth living in. Here are some of the words they must come to terms with: complexity, network theory, phase transitions, critical points, emergence, agent-based modelling, social ecology. And they will need to learn the key lesson of the management of complex, interacting systems: solutions cannot be imposed, but must be coaxed out of the dynamic system itself. Earthquakes may never be exactly predictable, but it is possible that they can be managed by mapping out in great detail the accumulating strains that give rise to them, and applying local nudges and shocks to relieve the stressed and minimize the danger and costs of crises. There is no political discourse yet that permits analogous answers, not least because they require investment in such things as unglamorous data-gathering techniques and long-term research that carries no guarantee of quick fixes.

Aspirations towards a science of society date back to the Enlightenment. But not only have they never been fulfilled, they now need to recognize that they must describe a different society from the one in which Adam Smith or even John Maynard Keynes lived. There is some good news in all this: we now have the conceptual and computational tools to create a science that can model the state we’re in – not just politically and socially but environmentally, for no answer to the global crises of environment and ecosystems will work if it is not embedded in a credible socioeconomic context. We cannot, in all honesty, yet know how much any of this will help. Perhaps some ills of the world will always elude rational prediction or solution. But if we don’t even try, it is hard to avoid concluding that we’ll deserve all we get.

In search of a third culture

2011-09-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest Crucible column for Chemistry World. I’ve also written a Chem World blog about the ASCI exhibition, which shows some of the images.
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Sciart – the clumsy label commonly attached to collaborations between scientists and artists – means many things to many people. Some, like the physicist Arthur I. Miller who has written about the conceptual connections between relativity and cubism, see it as a way of bridging the Two Cultures divide that might ultimately produce a ‘third culture’ in which art and science are not separate endeavours. Others, such as biologist Lewis Wolpert, are sceptical that it is more than just a fad that allows artists to misappropriate scientific ideas, and that science stands to gain nothing from it.

Recently the French physicist Jean Marc Levy-Leblond, who has a deep appreciation of contemporary arts, launched a stinging attack on the whole genre in a book pointedly titled La science (n’)e(s)t (pas) l’art (Editions Hermann, Paris, 2010), in which he criticizes the naivety of most sciart discourse and argues that the most artists and scientists can realistically hope for are platonic ‘brief encounters’. Although not intended as a riposte, a forthcoming book called Survival of the Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2011) by musician and animal-song specialist David Rothenberg certainly offers one. Rothenberg argues that we should take seriously the possibility that there is an aesthetic sense at play in nature – for example in the way female peacocks and bower birds react to the elaborate displays of males – and that this can speak to our own artistic sensibilities. He asserts that, despite Wolpert’s claim, it is possible to find cases of science having benefitted from art. And he devotes considerable space to a discussion of chemists’ visual language, instincts and aesthetics by Roald Hoffmann, who developed these themes in his book The Same and Not the Same (Columbia University Press, 1995).

The arguments will doubtless continue. Levy-Leblond is right to ridicule some claims of finding ‘art in science’ – he calls fractal imagery ‘techno-kitsch’, and is critical of scientists’ attachment to an old-fashioned notion of beauty, which for chemists seems archaically tied up with Platonic ideas about symmetry. And it’s true that some of the most successful interactions of art and science, such as Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, did not arise from any self-conscious process of enticing artists and scientists into the same room. But if we let a thousand flowers bloom, some are likely to smell good.

That’s evident from a new exhibition of digital art organized by the New York-based Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI), a veteran of the sciart (or as they prefer, art-science) field which was formed by artist Cynthia Pannucci in 1988 to ‘raise public awareness about artists and scientists using science and technology to explore new forms of creative expression’. This is ASCI’s thirteenth annual digital-art competition, and this year it celebrates the International Year of Chemistry. ‘Digital2011: The Alchemy of Change’ called for submissions from artists and scientists to ‘show us their vision of this deeply fundamental, magical enabler of life called chemistry’. A selection of the entries will be displayed at the New York Hall of Science from September to next February.

The results are nothing if not eclectic. All of the images have been created by digital manipulation – sometimes of photographic images, sometimes purely computer-generated. Their occasionally colourful, ‘decorative’ quality would doubtless be dismissed by Levy-Leblond as more ‘digital kitsch’. Others place gleaming ball-and-stick models of molecules against images of supernovae and other cosmic phenomena in a way that puts me in mind of the graphical abstracts of JACS and Angewandte Chemie – not by any means unpleasant, but hardly inspiring art. Still others explore the artificially enhanced textures and colours of crystals, flows, precipitates, decay – images that have intrigued many artists in the past, and which raise again Rothenberg’s question of whether nature ‘is more beautiful than it needs to be’.

I enjoyed most of all the images that seem to push up against the limits of what is knowable, expressible and visualizable in chemistry. The alchemists felt those limits keenly and resorted to allegory and metaphor, as Andrew Krasnow does with his bizarre ‘bartender’ mixing up the coloured oxidation states of vanadium. Robbin Juris uses cellular automata to conjure up collages of ‘i(c)onic bonds’ that look simultaneously like pages from a quantum-theory textbook and cubist abstractions. David Hylton’s pearlescent forms put me in mind of the surrealist Roberto Matta, who was himself interested in quantum physics. And Julie Newdoll’s schematic ‘molecules’, developed in association with biochemist Robert Stroud, are like strange symbolic machines whose workings remain obscure.

It’s a shame to have to single out just these few. The exhibition should offer a thought-provoking view of how chemistry looks from outside, and why it is still a rich stimulus to the imagination.

Dude looks like a lady

2011-08-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

When I was talking recently in Barcelona at a music conference, I was interviewed by a Spanish newspaper, which has now published the piece. From what I can tell (courtesy of Google Translate), it is I think best described as a loose improvisation based around our conversation. And perhaps the better for it, who knows? But I like best one of the reader comments:
“Language is very intellectual, good photo, but looks like a woman, perhaps the combination has made the smart person.”
In my experience, however, that is a little unfair to Spanish women.

Did Einstein discover E=mc2?

2011-08-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have strong opinions about that, as is clear from the comments that have followed on from my article of this title for Physics World. (I particularly liked "For an objective account, see Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist." Yup, sounds like an objective book to me.) The piece is here, but the pre-edited version is below. There's a fair bit more that I'd have liked to explore here - it's a deeply interesting issue. The biggest revelation for me was not so much seeing that there were several well-founded precursors for the equivalence of mass and energy, but finding that this equivalence seems to have virtually nothing to do with special relativity. Tony Rothman said to me that "I've long maintained that the conventional history of science, as presented in the media, textbooks and by the stories scientists tell themselves is basically a collection of fairy tales." I'd concur with that.
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Who discovered that E=mc2? It’s not as easy a question as you might think. Scientists ranging from James Clerk Maxwell and Max von Laue to a string of now obscure early twentieth-century physicists have been proposed as the true discovers of the mass-energy equivalence now popularly credited to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. These claims have spawned headlines accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but many are spurious or barely supported. Yet two physicists have now shown that Einstein’s famous formula does have a complicated and somewhat ambiguous genesis – which has little to do with relativity.

One of the more plausible precursors to E=mc2 is attributed to Fritz Hasenörhl, a physics professor at the University of Vienna. In a 1904 paper, Hasenörhl clearly wrote down the equation E=3/8mc2. Where did he get it from, and why is the constant of proportionality wrong? Stephen Boughn of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Tony Rothman of Princeton University examine this question in a preprint.

“I had run across Hasenöhrl's name a number of times with no real explanation as to what he did”, Rothman explains. “One of my old professors, E.C.G. Sudarshan, once remarked that he gave Hasenöhrl credit for mass-energy equivalence. So around Christmas time last year, I said to Steve, ‘why don't we spend a couple hours after lunch one day looking at Hasenöhrl's papers and see what he did wrong?’ Well, two hours turned into eight months, because the problem ended up being extremely difficult.”

Hasenöhrl’s name has a certain notoriety now, as he is commonly invoked by anti-Einstein cranks. His reputation as the man who really discovered E=mc2 owes much to the efforts of the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi physics Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, who sought to separate Einstein’s name from the theory of relativity so that it was not seen as a product of ‘Jewish science’.

Yet all this does Hasenörhl a disservice. He was Ludwig Boltzmann’s student and successor at Vienna, and was lauded by Erwin Schrödinger among others. “Hasenohrl was probably the leading Austrian physicist of his day”, says Rothman. He might have achieved much more if he had not been killed in the First World War.

The relationship of energy and mass was already widely discussed by the time Hasenörhl considered the matter. Henri Poincaré had stated that electromagnetic radiation had a momentum and thus effectively a mass according to E=mc2. German physicist Max Abraham argued that a moving electron interacts with its own field E0 to acquire an apparent mass given by E0=3/4mc2. All this was based on classical electrodynamics, assuming an ether theory. “Hasenöhrl, Poincaré, Abraham and others suggested that there must be an inertial mass associated with electromagnetic energy, even though they may have disagreed on the constant of proportionality”, says Boughn.

Robert Crease, a philosopher and historian of science at Stony Brook University in New York, agrees. “Historians often say that, had there been no Einstein, the community would have converged on special relativity shortly”, he says. “Events were pushing them kicking and screaming in that direction.” Boughn and Rothman’s work, he says, shows that Hasenöhrl was among those headed this way.

Hasenörhl approached the problem by asking whether a black body emitting radiation changes in mass when it is moving relative to the observer. He calculated that the motion adds a mass of 3/8c2 times the radiant energy. The following year he corrected this to 3/4c2.

However, no-one has properly studied Hasenörhl’s derivation to understand his reasoning or why the prefactor is wrong, say Bough and Rothman. That’s not easy, they admit. “The papers are by today’s standards presented in a cumbersome manner and are not free of error. The greatest hindrance is that they are written from an obsolete world view, which can only confuse the reader steeped in relativistic physics.” Even Enrico Fermi apparently did not bother to read Hasenörhl’s papers properly before concluding wrongly that the discrepant 3/4 prefactor was due to the electron self-energy identified by Abraham.

“What Hasenörhl really missed in his calculation was the idea that if the radiators in his cavity are emitting radiation, they must be losing mass, so his calculation wasn't consistent”, says Rothman. “Nevertheless, he got half of it right. If he had merely said that E is proportional to m, history would probably have been kinder to him.”

But if that’s the case, where does relativity come into it? Actually, it doesn’t. While Einstein’s celebrated 1905 paper ‘On the electrodynamics of moving bodies’ clearly laid down the foundations of relativity by abandoning the ether and making the speed of light invariant, his derivation of E=mc2 did not depend on those assumptions. You can get the right answer with classical physics, says Rothman, all in an ether theory without c being either constant or the limiting speed. “Although Einstein begins relativistically, he approximates away all the relativistic bits, and you are left with what is basically a classical calculation."

Physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St Louis, a specialist on relativity, considers the preprint “very interesting”. Boughn and Rothman “are well regarded physicists”, he says, and as a result he “tend[s] to trust their analysis”. However, the controversies that have been previously aroused over the issue of priority perhaps accounts for some of the reluctance of historians of physics to comment when contacted by Physics World.

Did Einstein know of Hasenörhl’s work? “I can't prove it, but I am reasonably certain that Einstein must done, and just decided to do it better”, says Rothman. But failure to cite it was not inconsistent with the conventions of the time. In any event, Einstein asserted his priority for the mass-energy relationship when this was challenged by Johannes Stark (who credited it in 1907 to Max Planck). Both Hasenörhl and Einstein were at the famous first Solvay conference in 1911, along with most of the other illustrious physicists of the time. “One can only imagine the conversations”, say Boughn and Rothman.

A philosophical question

2011-08-02T04:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s my latest Crucible column for Chemistry World.
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“Philosophy is dead” is an assertion that, coming from most people, would be dismissed as idle, unconsidered, even meaningless. (What, all of it? Political philosophy? Moral philosophy? The philosophy of music?) But when Stephen Hawking announced this in his recent book with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, it was greeted as the devastating judgement of a sage and sent philosophers scurrying to the discussion boards to defend their subject (more properly, to defend Hawking’s presumed target of metaphysics).

Yet many chemists may be unaware that a philosophy of chemistry existed in the first place. Isn’t chemistry about practical, tangible matters, or – when theoretical issues are concerned – questions of right and wrong, not the fuzzy and abstract issues popularly associated with philosophy? On the contrary, at least two journals (Hyle and Foundations of Chemistry) and the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry have insisted for some years that there are profound chemical questions of a philosophical nature.

These questions might not seem quite as urgent as how to make stereoselective carbon-carbon bonds, but they should at the very least make chemists reflect about the nature of their daily craft. What is the ontological status of ‘laws’ of chemistry? To what extent are molecular structures metaphorical? What’s more, the philosophy of chemistry impinges directly on chemistry’s public image. As Eric Scerri, editor-in-chief of Foundations of Chemistry, says, “Most philosophers of science believe that chemistry has been reduced to physics and is therefore of no fundamental interest. They believe that chemistry has no ‘big ideas’ to compare with quantum mechanics and relativity in physics and Darwin’s theory in biology” [1].

The philosophy of chemistry excites lively, often impassioned debate. Those unquiet waters have recently been agitated by an extensive overview of the topic published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a widely used online reference source, by Michael Weisberg, Paul Needham and Robin Hendry, all three respected philosophers of science [2]. It’s an ambitious affair, accommodating everything from the evolution since ancient times of theories of matter to the nature of the chemical bond and interpretations of quantum theory. The piece has proved controversial because the authors have presented points of view on several of these issues that are not universally shared.

Much of the debate hinges on the fact that the concepts and principles used by chemists – the notion of elements, molecules, bonds, structure, or the idea much debated by these philosophers that ‘water is H2O’ – lack philosophical rigour. Arguments about whether gaseous helium contains atoms or molecules, or whether the element sodium refers to a grey metal or to atoms with 11 protons, are frequently rehearsed in lab coffee rooms. That these hardly affect the practicalities of chemical synthesis doesn’t detract from their validity as philosophical conundrums.

Take, for example, Needham’s claim that isotopes of the ‘same’ element should in fact be considered different elements [3]. Clearly there is rather little difference between 35Cl and 37Cl, but if ‘element’ is pinned to chemical identity, are H and D really the ‘same’? Indeed, does not even the tiniest isotope effect blur any strict definition based on chemical behaviour rather than proton number? Perhaps the Austrian chemist Friedrich Paneth was right to regard the notion of an element as something ‘transcendental’.

Even more controversially, Hendry takes a view long developed by him and others such as Guy Woolley that the concept of molecular structure is mere metaphor, rendered logically incoherent by quantum mechanics. To distinguish methanol from dimethyl ether, we need to first put the nuclei in position by hand and then apply the Born-Oppenheimer approximation to the quantum equations so that only the electrons move. Without this approximation, the raw Hamiltonian for nuclei and electrons is identical for both isomers.

Hendry asserts that the isomers exist as quantum superpositions, from which a particular isomer emerges only when the wavefunction is collapsed by observation. Scerri argues [4], in contrast, that this collapse happens naturally and inevitably because of environment-induced decoherence. Even if so, the image is disconcerting: molecular structures exist because of their environment, not as intrinsic entities. What of molecules isolated in interstellar space, almost a closed system? Regardless of the position one takes, it remains unclear how, or if, molecular structure can be extracted directly from quantum theory, as opposed to being rationalized post hoc – relative energies can be computed, for sure, but that’s not the same. Ultimately these questions might have answers in physics; at least for the moment, they are philosophical.

References
1. E. R. Scerri, J. Chem. Ed. 77, 522-526 (2000).
2. M. Weisberg, P. Needham & R. Hendry, ‘Philosophy of Chemistry’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
3. P. Needham, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 39, 66–77 (2008).
4. E. R. Scerri, Found. Chem. 13, 1-7 (2011).

The reason why not

2011-07-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that this book review I wrote recently for The National, a UAE newspaper, was published back in early June. It doesn’t seem to have altered much in the editing, but here it is anyway.
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The Reason Why:
The Miracle of Life of Earth
by John Gribbin
Allen Lane, 2011; ISBN 978 1 846 14327 4
219 pages
£20.00

In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was walking to lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory with his colleagues from the Manhattan Project. They were discussing a recent spate of UFO reports, and as they sat down to eat, Fermi challenged the company. If the cosmos is full of space-faring aliens, he said, “Where is everybody?”

In The Reason Why, veteran science writer John Gribbin answers Fermi’s ‘paradox’ by saying that we have seen no sign of aliens because they don’t exist. Not, at least, in our Milky Way Galaxy – and beyond that, the distances are so vast that it is hardly worth asking. “We are alone, and we had better get used to the idea”, he concludes.

The likelihood of intelligent life on other planets has been conditioned since the 1960s by the thinking of Cornell astronomer Frank Drake, whose eponymous equation divides the question into its component parts, the probabilities of each of which one might conceivably hope to quantify or at least estimate: how many stars have planets, how many are Earth-like, and so on.

Depending on your taste, the Drake equation is either a logical way of getting purchase on a profound question, or an attempt to manufacture knowledge from ignorance. In trying to get a meaningful number by multiplying very big ones, very small ones, and very uncertain ones, the Drake equation seems more like guesswork disguised as maths.

Gribbin, however, asserts that just about every one of the necessary conditions for intelligent life to emerge has a low, perhaps minuscule, probability. Their combination then makes it highly unlikely that we have any galactic neighbours eagerly trying to make contact. For instance, only a relatively small part of our galaxy is inhabitable – the crowded interior is bathed in sterilizing radiation from black holes and supernovae. Only stars of a certain age have enough heavy chemical elements to make Earth-like planets and dwellers thereon. Only a few such stars lack partners that pull planetary orbits into extreme shapes, making climate variations unendurably extreme.

The specialness of the Earth is particularly apparent in the make-up of our solar system. For example, we are protected from more frequent impacts of asteroids and comets, like the one that seems to have sent the dinosaurs to extinction 65 million years ago, by the immense size of Jupiter, more a failed star than a planet, whose gravity sucks up these stray objects. One such, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, ploughed into the giant planet in 1994, leaving a scar the size of the Earth.

Gribbin is especially good on the benign effect of the Moon. The Earth is unusual in having a moon so large in relation to the planet itself, which is now believed to have been created when a proto-Earth stumbled into another planet-like object called Theia with which it shared an orbit 4.5 billion years ago. The rocky debris clumped to form the Moon, while the traumatized, molten Earth swallowed Theia’s iron core to give it an unusually large core today, the source of the strong geomagnetic field that deflects harmful particles streaming from the Sun. This impact probably left the Earth spinning fast (a Venusian day lasts the best part of an Earthly year) and tilted on its axis, from which our seasons ensue. What’s more, the Moon’s gravity stops this tilt from being righted by the influence of Jupiter. Before the debris coalesced into the lunar globe, its gravity created awesome tides on the more rapidly spinning Earth that rose and fell several kilometres every two hours or so. Even though the barren Moon was too light to hold an atmosphere of its own, life on Earth would be very different – perhaps impossible – without it.

This ‘rare Earth’ case has been made before, but Gribbin gives the arguments a fresh shine. Yet he assembles them in a legalistic rather than strictly scientific manner. That’s to say, he marshals (generally impeccable) science to argue his case rather than objectively to investigate the possibilities. For example, he predicates a discussion of the ‘habitable zone’ of the solar system – a crucial part of the argument – on the claim that “it is reasonable to assume that ‘life as we know it’ does require the presence of liquid water.” That Trekkie-inspired ‘as we know it’ is back-covering, and reminds me of a conference I once attended that was convened to ask if life in the cosmos could exist without water. Speaker after speaker insisted that it could not, since that never happens on Earth, which was of course merely a statement that life adapted to water can’t do without it. Now, there are arguments why water might be essential for life anywhere, but they are subtle and not the ones Gribbin casually gives. More to the point, they are still arm-waving and do nothing to dent a counter-claim that it is reasonable to suggest that non-aqueous life is possible.

Such solipsism pervades the book, and is implicit in Fermi’s paradox to begin with. It supposes that intelligent life will think as we do now, with a determination to find and populate other inhabited worlds – and moreover, will have already done so in a way that leaves a mark so prominent that we’ll find it within the first 50 years (a comically short span in cosmic terms) of looking. Are even we so determined? If it would be unwise to conclude from the parlous state of human space exploration that this is just a phase civilizations quickly grow out of, the current situation is nonetheless even less suggestive of the opposite. Worse, since spaceflight seems increasingly likely to be a private enterprise, Gribbin implies that mega-rich philanthropists with a penchant for spaceflight like Virgin’s Richard Branson and Microsoft’s Paul Allen follow inexorably from the laws of physics.

The same historical determinism colours his belief that space-faring civilizations are a one-shot affair on inhabitable planets. If we foul up after having used all of the surface deposits of fossil fuels, he says, we’ll never again be able to claw our way out of a state of barbarism. But this assumes that apocalypse comes only after the oil and coal are exhausted, and moreover that a re-emergent civilization would stall not at the Stone Age but at the pre-industrial enlightenment. In this definition, a civilization capable of producing Aristotle, let alone Newton, doesn’t qualify as intelligent. The challenge of getting from Newton to Neil Armstrong without plentiful oil is a good pretext for a science-fiction novel, but it hardly proves anything else.

Gribbin’s account of the chance events that allowed humans to evolve from slime is particularly unpersuasive of any broader conclusions. It sounds increasingly like the kind of enumeration of contingency and coincidence that invites us to marvel at how ‘unlikely’ it is that we ever met our spouses. Once Gribbin starts invoking a highly speculative cometary impact on Venus to explain the Cambrian explosion in which complex life diversified about 540 million years ago, one senses that he is determinedly picking out a precarious path to a foregone conclusion.

None of this is to say that The Reason Why is a bad book. On the contrary, it is as lucid, well researched and enjoyable as Gribbin always is, and supplies a peerless guide to the way stars and planets are formed. And as a polemic, it is entirely justified in being selective with the evidence. Besides, many of Gribbin’s astrophysical arguments for the rarity of life are robust, and as such they make a convincing case that the Galaxy is not teeming with life that is loftily or mischievously ignoring us.

Yet the book fails to offer any philosophical perspective. The specialness of humanity has in history been asserted almost always as a theological issue, whether to counter Copernicus or Darwin. If Gribbin is right and we just got phenomenally lucky – that the laws of physics are so miserly about allowing matter to become self-aware – this is sufficiently peculiar to warrant more comment. Even atheists might then forgive theologians from taking an interest, just as they do in the ‘fine-tuning’ that seemingly makes physical laws exquisitely geared to support matter and life in the first place. Gribbin can suggest only that, if we’re alone in the galaxy, we have an even greater responsibility to our planet. It would be nice to think so, but see how far that gets you at the next climate summit.

No fit state

2011-07-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a piece in the latest issue of Prospect (not yet online) about the recent report on the state of the oceans from the IPSO project. Here’s what the full draft looked like.
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“Unprecedented… shocking… what we face is a globally significant extinction event.” These judgements on the state of the global oceans, pronounced by the scientists who attended a recent workshop of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), sound truly scary. The future of the ocean’s ecosystem look “far worse than we had realised”, says IPSO’s director, Oxford zoologist Alex Rogers. “If the ocean goes down, it’s game over.”

When the IPSO report was released in June, it made apocalyptic headlines. But such is the prevailing public mood on climate and environmental change that strong words may do little to alter opinions. Sceptics will dismiss them as scaremongering in a bid for research funding, while they will fuel righteous indignation among those already convinced of impending catastrophe. And if you haven’t already made up your mind, this seems an invitation to paralysing despair.

So how seriously should we take the IPSO report? According to Hugh Ducklow, director of the Ecosystems Center at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, one of the US’s most prestigious marine biology laboratories, it isn’t exaggerating. “If anything”, says Ducklow (who is not a part of IPSO), “the true state of the ocean is likely worse than the report indicates.”

The IPSO workshop, held in Oxford in April, brought together leading marine scientists, legal experts and NGO representatives. They considered threats to ocean ecosystems ranging from over-exploitation of fish stocks to acidification of the waters, caused by increased amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) as atmospheric levels of this greenhouse gas rise. Many fish populations have been literally decimated – even since the report was released, a paper in Science says that the state of some species of high commercial value, such as bluefin tuna, is worse than thought. Almost half of the world’s coral reefs, the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, have disappeared in the past 50 years, and the rest are now under severe threat because of overfishing, global warming and ocean acidification. But perhaps the greatest concern rests with the unglamorous plankton on which the entire the food chain depends. The microscopic plants (phytoplankton) that bloom seasonally in the upper ocean dictate the cycling of carbon, particularly CO2, between the ocean and atmosphere. But some phytoplankton are toxic, and when their growth is artificially stimulated by nutrients in fertilizers and sewage (a process called eutrophication), they can poison their environment. Worse, bacteria feeding on the decaying phytoplankton may use up all the available oxygen in the water, turning it into a dead zone for other life. In the longer term oxygen depletion (hypoxia or, if total, anoxia) is also caused in deep water by warming of the upper ocean, which suppresses the circulation of oxygen-rich surface water to the depths.

It’s not just marine biology that stands at risk. The melting of Arctic sea ice has been far faster than expected – summer at the North Pole could be essentially ice-free within 30-40 years. This doesn’t affect sea level, but is disastrous for Arctic life and the influx of fresh water could change patterns of ocean circulation. The melting of grounded ice from Antarctica and Greenland, however, is also proceeding apace – at least as quickly as the worst-case predictions of climate models. Coupled to expansion of water caused by warming, this means that sea-level rise is also tracking worst-case models: it could reach four feet or so by 2100, which will redraw the map of many coastlines.

Perhaps most troubling of all, the IPSO group concluded that these individual processes seem to exacerbate one another. For example, coral reefs damaged by ocean warming are further weakened by pollution and the overfishing of reef populations, making them even more fragile. The worry is that the combination of stresses could push ecosystems to a tipping point at which they collapse catastrophically.

Such things have happened naturally several times in the distant past. The geological record clearly shows at least five global mass extinctions, in which most species all around the planet vanished, as well as many more minor extinction events. The reasons for them are still not fully understood, but the prevailing ocean conditions in which they occurred are similar in some ways – warming, anoxia and acidification – to those we are seeing now. “We now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, in a single generation”, the IPSO report avers. “Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at high risk of causing the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean.”

Sounds bad? Ducklow thinks that feedbacks and synergies could make things even worse. “Working in Antarctica, we’re seeing profound changes rippling through the food chain and affecting biogeochemical processes such as CO2 uptake.” Ducklow admits that any conclusions he and his colleagues have drawn so far, like those of the IPSO team, are based on inadequate observations – over too small a spatial scale, and for too short a time. But his informed hunch is that this merely means we’re not seeing the worst of it. “I expect that as we pass through another decade, with increased concern and surveillance, we will discover things are worse, not better, than we think.”

Ducklow isn’t alone in confirming that the IPSO report’s warnings are not exaggerated. “I agree that the oceans have been greatly impacted by human activity”, says Andrew Watson at the University of East Anglia, one of the foremost UK experts on the interactions of oceans and climate. “They have changed enormously and alarmingly fast over the past 100 years or so.” In Watson’s view, analogies with past mass extinctions are appropriate. “We suspect that at past crises, the real killer was widespread ocean anoxia. This is something that eventually the changes brought about by humans, particularly increased eutrophication and global warming, could bring on.”

But has IPSO pitched its warning wisely? The team seems to have sided with the view of some climatologists, such as NASA scientist James Hansen, that concerns will be heeded only if voiced forcefully, even stridently. Watson isn’t convinced. “In human terms such a change to the life-support systems of the Earth is still a long way in the future. Such disasters unfold over very long time scales compared to a human life: thousands or tens of thousands of years.” So while Watson feels that “the report authors state their case that way with the best of intentions” and agrees on the urgent need for action, he feels uncomfortable with some of the alarming statements. “We create a false impression if we say that we have to act tomorrow to save the Earth or ‘it will be game over’. I don’t find that kind of environmental catastrophism very helpful because it simply fuels a bad-tempered ideological and political argument instead of a well-informed scientific one.”

It’s an irresolvable dilemma forced on the scientists by manufactured controversy and political inaction: risk either being ignored or damned as alarmists. However, the tone of the report is a side issue; all agree on the necessary response. “What’s really needed is a long-term plan to reduce our impact on the oceans,” says Watson. Ducklow insists that this must include not just serious and immediate regulation of fishing, pollution and carbon emissions, but “a comprehensive, global ocean observation system, including ecological and biogeochemical measurements, to determine the current and evolving state of the ocean’s health.” Any suggestion that this is merely a gambit for more research funds now deserves nothing but scorn.

Body shock

2011-07-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month I went to a discussion about SciArt – more specifically, BioArt – at the GV Art gallery in London. Debates about science and art can all too readily become exercises in navel gazing, but this one wasn’t, thanks to the interesting folks involved. I’ve written a piece about it for the Prospect blog, and since it is available essentially unedited and for free, I won’t copy the text here.

Arsenic and old wallpaper

2011-07-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

Here’s my Crucible column for the July issue of Chemistry World. We haven’t heard the end of this story, I’m sure.
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Was William Morris, socialist and utopian prophet of environmentalism, a hypocrite? That uncomfortable possibility was raised in 2003 by biochemist Andrew Meharg of the University of Aberdeen [1]. Meharg described chemical analysis of one of the famous floral wallpapers produced by Morris’s company in the mid-nineteenth century, which showed the foliage to be printed using an arsenic-containing green pigment - either Scheele’s Green (copper arsenite) or Emerald Green (copper acetoarsenite). A rather more incriminating fact was that the arsenic surely came from the Devon Great Consols mines (originally copper mines) owned by Morris’s family in a business of which Morris himself was a director until 1876. Morris’s immense wealth came partly from these mines, whose operations polluted the surrounding land and left derelict flues that are still hazardous today.

The clincher seemed to be that Morris knew of the claims by physicians that arsenic was toxic, but casually dismissed them. “As to the arsenic scare”, he wrote to the dyer Thomas Wardle in 1885, “a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine… My belief about it all is that the doctors find their patients ailing, don’t know what’s the matter with them, and in despair put it down to the wall papers.”

Once Meharg expanded on this story in a book [2], it seemed that Morris’s reputation was tarnished irreparably. But now the accusations have been challenged by Patrick O’Sullivan of the William Morris Society, who asserts that the situation is by no means so clear-cut [3].

You might wonder if the William Morris Society offers an unbiased voice. But who else would be sufficiently motivated, not to mention well placed, to re-examine what is now widely assumed to be a cut-and-dried conviction? In any event, let’s consider the facts. O’Sullivan points out that the ‘arsenic scare’ of the nineteenth century by no means reflected the consensus of the medical community. Not until 1892 was the odour of arsenic wallpapers linked to the formation of a volatile arsenic compound by the action of a mould that grows in damp conditions. The gas was correctly identified as trimethylarsine only in the 1930s. And a recent review states that this gas is not highly toxic if inhaled, and is unlikely to be produced in significant quantities by the mould anyway [4]. So it isn’t clear that poisoning from arsenic-printed wallpapers was at all common in the nineteenth century – Morris may have been right to suggest that this was a convenient explanation for the multitude of ailments that afflicted people, especially children, during that age.

This, however, does not really absolve Morris. One might expect a man of his espoused principles to have taken seriously any suggestion that his company was making poisonous products, especially considering that the toxicity of arsenic itself was well established – Carl Wilhelm Scheele had felt obliged to reveal this ingredient of his green pigment in the 1770s for that very reason. O’Sullivan points out that Morris resigned as director of Devon Great Consols and sold his shares in the business two years before becoming politically active and six years before putting forward his socialist views. Perhaps, then, he was no hypocrite but realised that his position was no longer consistent with his new ideals?

But that remains a generous interpretation. That Morris was still so confidently denying the dangers of arsenic greens in 1885, without any sound scientific basis either way, somewhat suggests a determination to deny responsibility. And while Morris seems to have treated his workers well, the letter O’Sullivan quotes to justify why he did not make the company a socialist collective is an all-too-familiar refrain from hard-line socialists and Marxists: that such ‘palliatives’ merely delay the revolution. Quite aside from the conditions of workers in the wallpaper works, those in the mines (where arsenic was collected as the white trioxide, condensed from vapour) were undoubtedly awful: the safety precautions were crude in the extreme, and arsenic poisoning in copper mines had been known since at least the Middle Ages.

Most troubling of all is Morris’s silence on the matter. If he changed his mind about his business activities, should one not expect some sign of, if not remorse, then at least reflection? O’Sullivan has made a good argument for re-opening the case, but the suspicion lingers that Morris was no more scrupulous than most of us in examining his conscience.

References

1. A. Meharg, Nature 423, 688 (2003).
2. A. Meharg, Venomous Earth (Macmillan, London, 2005).
3. P. O’Sullivan, William Morris Society Newsletter, Spring 2011. Available here.
4. W. R. Cullen & R. Bentley, J. Envir. Monit. 7, 11-15 (2005).

The (digital) art of chemistry

2011-07-05T01:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s a bit of naked advertising, because it’s for a good cause. The competition below, organized by ASCI in New York, should be fun if it can draw the right caliber of entries. And since I am a judge, that’s clearly what I hope. ASCI has been described to me by a very reliable witness in the following terms: “they are the largest and most active group of SciArt people and have been doing wonderful work for 20 or so years now.” So go on: give it a shot, and/or spread the word.
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Announcing the Open Call for...

"DIGITAL2011: The Alchemy of Change"
An international digital print competition/exhibition to be held at the New York Hall of Science, September 3, 2011 - February 5, 2012

Organized by Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)

DEADLINE: July 17, 2011
GUIDELINES here

CO-JURORS:
Robert Devcic, owner-director of GV Art London gallery
Philip Ball, writer and noted author of popular science books

INTRODUCTION
Humans, animals, insects, trees, plants, oceans, and air -- indeed, all that we see, taste, smell, touch, and breathe, contain molecular processes of physical transformation; a dynamic dance of change. This magic of transition, called alchemy by our earliest scientists, became the science of chemistry. It describes both the physical structure and characteristic actions of matter. It allows for all organic and inorganic change to take place -- brain synapses to fire, oxygen to be formed from carbon dioxide and water during photosynthesis; the transformation of gases in our solar system; along with the ability of proteins to turn our genes on/off. If you extend your imagination beyond the epithelial surface of your body, or into the ether that carries cosmic dust, or even into your kitchen, chemistry can inspire wonder. Like a fabulous menu of concocted primordial soups, when exposed to changes in temperature, pressure, or speed, chemistry can create a stick of dynamite or a magnificent soufflé!

For this exhibition, we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry by inviting artists and scientists to show us their vision of this deeply fundamental, magical enabler of life called chemistry.

Movie characters mimic each other's speech patterns

2011-06-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Here’s my latest news story for Nature News.
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Script writers have internalized the unconscious social habits of everyday conversations.

Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction is packed with memorable dialogue — 'Le Big Mac', say, or Samuel L. Jackson's biblical quotations. But remember this exchange between the two hitmen, played by Jackson and John Travolta?

Vincent (Travolta): "Antwan probably didn't expect Marsellus to react like he did, but he had to expect a reaction".
Jules: "It was a foot massage, a foot massage is nothing, I give my mother a foot massage."

Computer scientists Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, see the way Jules repeats the word 'a' used by Vincent as a key example of 'convergence' in language. "Jules could have just as naturally not used an article," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. "For instance, he could have said: 'He just massaged her feet, massaging someone's feet is nothing, I massage my mother's feet.'"

The duo show in a new study that such convergence, which is thought to arise from an unconscious urge to gain social approval and to negotiate status, is common in movie dialogue. It "has become so deeply embedded into our ideas of what conversations 'sound like' that the phenomenon occurs even when the person generating the dialogue [the scriptwriter] is not the recipient of the social benefits", they say.

“For the last forty years, researchers have been actively debating the mechanism behind this phenomenon”, says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. His study, soon to be published in a workshop proceedings [1], cannot yet say if the ‘mirroring’ tendency is hard-wired or learnt, but it shows that it does not rely on the spontaneous prompting of another individual and the genuine desire for his or her approval.

“This is a convincing and important piece of work, and offers valuable support for the notion of convergence”, says philologist Lukas Bleichenbacher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, a specialist on language use in the movies.

The result is all the more surprising given that movie dialogue is generally recognized to be a stylized, over-polished version of real speech, serving needs such as character and plot development that don’t feature in everyday life. “The method is innovative, and kudos to the authors for going there”, says Howie Giles, a specialist in communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"Fiction is really a treasure trove of information about perspective-taking that hasn't yet been fully explored," agrees Molly Ireland, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "I think it will play an important role in language research over the next few years."

But, Giles adds, "I see no reason to have doubted that one would find the effect here, given that screenwriters mine everyday discourse to make their dialogues appear authentic to audiences".

That socially conditioned speech becomes an automatic reflex has long been recognized. “People say ‘oops’ when they drop something”, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil explains. “This probably arose as a way to signal to other people that you didn't do it intentionally. But people still say ‘oops’ even when they are alone! So the presence of other people is no longer necessary for the ‘oops’ behaviour to occur – it has become an embedded behavior, a reflex.”

He and Lee wanted to see if the same was true for conversational convergence. To do that, they needed the seemingly unlikely situation in which the person generating the conversation could not expect any of the supposed social advantages of mirroring speech patterns. But that’s precisely the case for movie script-writers.

So the duo looked at the original scripts of about 250,000 conversational exchanges in movies, and analysed them to identify nine previously recognized classes of convergence.

They found that such convergence is common in the movie dialogues, although less so than in real life – or, standing proxy for that here, in actual conversational exchanges held on Twitter. In other words, the writers have internalized the notion that convergence is needed to make dialogue ‘sound real’. “The work makes a valid case for the use of ‘fictional’ data”, says Bleichenbacher.

Not all movies showed the effect to the same extent. “We find that in Woody Allen movies the characters exhibit very low convergence”, says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil – a reminder, he adds, that “a movie does not have to be completely natural to be good.”

Giles remarks that, rather than simply showing that movies absorb the unconscious linguistic habits of real life, there is probably a two-way interaction. “Audiences use language devices seen regularly in the movies to shape their own discourse”, he points out. In particular, people are likely to see what types of speech ‘work well’ in the movies in enabling characters to gain their objectives, and copy that. “One might surmise that movies are the marketplace for seeing what’s on offer, what works, and what needs purchasing and avoiding in buyers own communicative lives”, Giles says.

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil hopes to explore another aspect of this blurring of fact and fiction. “We are currently exploring using these differences to detect ‘faked’ conversations”, he says. “For example, I am curious to see whether some of the supposedly spontaneous dialogs in so-called ‘reality shows’ are in fact all that real.”

1. C. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil & L. Lee, Proc. ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, 76-87 (Association for Computing Machinery Press, New York, 2011). Available as a preprint here.

I received some interesting further comments on the work from Molly Ireland, which I had no space to include fully. They include some important caveats, so here they are:

I think it's important to keep in mind, as the authors point out, that fiction can't necessarily tell us much about real-life dialog. Scripts can tell us quite a bit about how people think about real-life dialog though. Fiction is really a treasure trove of information about perspective-taking that hasn't been fully explored in the past. Between Google books and other computer science advances (like the ones showcased in this paper), it's become much easier to gain access to millions of words of dialog in novels, movies, and plays. I think fiction will play an important role in language and perspective-taking research over the next few years.

Onto their findings: I'm not surprised that the authors found convergence between fictional characters, for a couple of reasons. They mention Martin Pickering and Simon Garrod's interaction alignment model in passing. Pickering and Garrod basically argue that people match a conversation partner's language use because it's easier to reuse language patterns that you've just processed than it is to generate a completely novel utterance. Their argument is partly based on syntactic priming research that shows that people match the grammatical structures of sentences they've recently been presented with – even when they're alone in a room with nothing but a computer. So first of all, we know that people match recently processed language use in the absence of the social incentives that the authors mention (e.g., affection or approval).

Second, all characters were written by the same author (or the same 2-3 authors in some scripts). People have fairly stable speaking styles. So even in the context of scriptwriting, where authors are trying to write distinct characters with different speaking styles, you would expect two characters written by one author with one relatively stable function word fingerprint to use function words similarly (although not identically, if the author is any good).

The authors argue that self-convergence would be no greater than other-convergence if these cold, cognitive features of language processing [the facts that people tend to (a) reuse function words from previous utterances and (b) consistently sound sort of like themselves, even when writing dialog for distinct characters] were driving their findings. That would only be true if authors failed to alter their writing style at all between characters. Adjusting one's own language style when imagining what another person might say probably isn't conscious. It's probably an automatic consequence of taking another person's perspective. An author would have to be a pretty poor perspective-taker for all of his characters to sound exactly like he sounds in his everyday life.

Clearly I'm skeptical about some of the paper's claims, but I would be just as skeptical about any exploration into a new area of research using an untested measure of language convergence (including my own research). I think that the paper's findings regarding sex differences in convergence and differences between contentious and neutral conversations could turn out to be very interesting and should be looked at more closely – possibly in studies involving non-experts. I would just like to look into alternate explanations for their findings before making any assumptions about their results.

Einstein and his precursors

2011-06-23T06:41:00.000-07:00

From time to time, Nature used to receive (and doubtless still does) crank letters claiming that Einstein was not the first to derive E=mc2, but that this equation was first written down, after a fashion, by one Friedrich Hasenörhl, an Austrian physicist with a perfectly respectable, if unremarkable, pedigree and career who was killed in the First World War. This was a favourite ploy of those cranks whose mission in life was to discredit Einstein’s theory of relativity – so much so that I had two such folks discuss it in my novel The Sun and Moon Corrupted. But not until now, while reading Alan Beyerchen’s Scientists Under Hitler (Yale University Press, 1977), did I realise where this notion originated. The idea was put about by Philipp Lenard, the Nobel prizewinner and virulently anti-Semitic German physicist and member of the Nazi party. Lenard put forward the argument in his 1929 book Grosse Naturforscher (Great Natural Researchers), in which he sought to establish that all the great scientific discoveries had been made by people of Aryan-Germanic stock (including Galileo and Newton). Lenard was deeply jealous of Einstein’s international fame, and as a militaristic, Anglophobic nationalist Lenard found Einstein’s pacifism and internationalism abhorrent. It’s a little comical that this nasty little man felt the need to find an alternative to Einstein at all, given that he was violently (literally) opposed to relativity and a staunch believer in the aether. In virtually all respects Lenard fits the profile of the scientific crank (bitter, jealous, socially inadequate, feeling excluded), and he offers a stark (that’s a pun) reminder that a Nobel prize is no guarantee even of scientific wisdom, let alone any other sort. So there we are: all those crank citations of the hapless Hasenöhrl – this is a popular device of the devotees of Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian forest warden whose bizarre ideas about water and vortices led him to be conscripted by the Nazis to make a ‘secret weapon’ – have their basis in Nazi ‘Aryan physics’.

Quantum life

2011-06-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

I have a feature in this week’s Nature on quantum biology, and more specifically, on the phenomenon of quantum coherence in photosynthesis. Inevitably, lots of material from the draft had to be cut, and it was a shame not to be able to make the point (though I’m sure I won’t be the first to have made it) that ‘quantum biology’ properly begins with Schrödinger’s 1944 book What is Life? (Actually one can take it back still further, to Niels Bohr: see here.) Let me, though, just add here the full version of the box on Ian McEwan’s Solar, since I found it very interesting to hear from McEwan about the genesis of the scientific themes in the novel.
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The fact is, no one understands in detail how plants work, though they pretend they do… How your average leaf transfers energy from one molecular system to another is nothing short of a miracle… Quantum coherence is key to the efficiency, you see, with the system sampling all the energy pathways at once. And the way nanotechnology is heading, we could copy this with the right materials… Quantum coherence in photosynthesis is nothing new, but now we know where to look and what to look at.

These words are lifted not from a talk by any of the leaders in this nascent field but from the pages of Solar, a 2010 novel by the British writer Ian McEwan. A keen observer of science, who has previously scattered it through his novels Enduring Love and Saturday and has spoken passionately about the dangers of global warming, McEwan likes to do his homework. Solar describes the tragicomic exploits of quantum physicist, Nobel laureate and philanderer Michael Beard as he misappropriates an idea to develop a solar-driven method to split water into its elements. The key, as the young researcher who came up with the notion explains, is quantum coherence.

“I wanted to give him a technology still on the lab bench”, says McEwan. He came across Fleming’s research in Nature or Science (he forgets which, but looks regularly at both), and decided that this was what he needed. After ‘rooting around’, he felt there was justification for supposing that a bright postdoc might have had the idea in 2000. It remained to fit that in with Beard’s supposed work in quantum physics. This task was performed with the help of Cambridge physicist Graham Mitchison, who ‘reverse-engineered’ Beard’s Nobel citation which appears in Solar’s appendix: “Beard’s theory revealed that the events that take place when radiation interacts with matter propagate coherently over a large scale compared to the size of atoms.”

The Anglican atheist

2011-06-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I already suspected that Philip Pullman, literary darling of militant atheists (no doubt to his chagrin), is more religious than me, a feeble weak-tea religious apologist. But it is nice to have that confirmed in the New Statesman. Actually, ‘religious’ is not the right word, since Pullman is indeed (like me) an atheist. I had thought that ‘religiose’ would do it, but it does not – it means excessively and sentimentally religious, which Pullman emphatically isn’t. The word I want would mean ‘inclined to a religious sensibility’. Any candidates?

Pullman is writing is response to a request from Rowan Williams to explain what he means in calling himself a ‘Church of England atheist’. Pullman does so splendidly. Religion was clearly a formative part of his upbringing, and he considers that he cannot simply abandon that – he is attached to what Martin Rees has called the customs of his tribe, that being the C of E. But Pullman is an atheist because he sees no sign of God in the world. He admits that he can’t be sure about this, in which case he should strictly call himself an agnostic. But I’ve always been unhappy with that view of agnosticism, even though it is why Jim Lovelock considers atheism logically untenable (nobody really knows!). To me, atheism is an expression of belief, or if you like, disbelief, not a claim to have hard evidence to back it up. (I’m not sure what such evidence would even look like…)

What makes Pullman so thoughtful and unusual among atheists (and clearly this is why Rowan Williams feels an affinity with him) is that he is interested in religion: “Religion is something that human beings do and human activity is fascinating.” I agree totally, and that is one reason why I wrote Universe of Stone: I found it interesting how religious thought influenced and even motivated other modes of thought, particularly philosophical enquiry about the world. And this is what is so bleak about the view of people like Sam Harris and Harry Kroto, both of whom have essentially told me that they are utterly uninterested in why and how people are religious. They just wish people weren’t. They see religion as a collection of erroneous or unsupported beliefs about the physical world, and have no apparent interest in the human sensibilities that sometimes find expression in religious terms. This is a barren view, yes, but also a dangerous one, because it seems to instil a lack of interest in how religions arise and function in society. For Harris, it seems, there would be peace in the Middle East if there were no religion in the world. I am afraid I can find that view nothing other than childish, and it puzzles me the Richard Dawkins, who I think shares some of Pullman’s ‘in spite of himself’ attraction to religion and has a more nuanced position, is happy to keep company with such views.

Pullman is wonderfully forthright in condemning the stupidities and bigotries that exist in the Anglican Church – its sexism and no doubt (though he doesn’t mention it) its homophobia. “These demented barbarians”, he says, “driven by their single idea that God is obsessed by sex as they are themselves, are doing their best to destroy what used to be one of the great characteristics of the Church of England, namely a sort of humane liberal tolerance.” Well yes, though one might argue that this was a sadly brief phase. And of course, for the idea that God is as obsessed with sex as we are, one must ultimately go back to St Augustine, whose loathing of the body was a strong factor in his more or less single-handed erection (sorry) of original sin at the centre of the Christian faith. But according to some religious readers of Universe of Stone, I lack the religious sensibility to appreciate what Augustine and his imitators, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, were trying to express with their bigotry.

Elsewhere in the same issue of New Statesman, Terry Eagleton implies that it is wrong to harp on about such things because religion (well, Christianity) must be judged on the basis of its most sophisticated theology rather than on how it is practised. Eagleton would doubtless consider Pullman’s vision of a God who might be usurped and exiled, or gone to focus on another corner of the universe, or old and senile, theologically laughable. For God is not some bloke with a cosmic crown and a wand, wandering around the galaxies. I’m in the middle here (again?). Certainly, insisting as Harris does that you are only going to pick fights with the religious literalists who take the Bible as a set of rules and a description of cosmic history, and have never given a moment’s thought to the kind of theology Rowan Williams reads, is the easy option. But so, in a way, is insisting that religion can’t be blamed for the masses who practise a debased form of it. That would be my criticism of Karen Armstrong too, who presents a reasonable and benign, indeed even a wise view of Christianity that probably the majority of its adherents wouldn’t recognize as their own belief system. Religion must be judged by what it does, not just what it says. But the same is true, I fear, of science.

Oh dear, and you know, I was being so good in keeping silent as Sam Harris’s book was getting resoundingly trashed all over the place.

Go with the Flow

2011-06-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Lezard has always struck me as a man with the catholic but highly selective tastes (in literature if not in standards of accommodation) that distinguish the true connoisseur. Does my saying this have anything to do with the fact that he has just singled out my trilogy on pattern formation in the Guardian? How can you even think such a thing? But truly, it is gratifying to have this modest little trio of books noticed in such a manner. I can even live with the fact that Nicholas quotes a somewhat ungrammatical use of the word “prone” from Flow (he is surely literary enough to have noticed, but too gentlemanly to mention it).

Musical intelligence

2011-06-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of Nature I have interviewed the composer Eduardo Reck Miranda about his experimental soundscapes, pinned to a forthcoming performance of one of them at London’s South Bank Centre. Here’s the longer version of the exchange.
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Eduardo Reck Miranda is a composer based at the University of Plymouth in England, where he heads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research. He studied computer science as well as music composition, and is a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence in music. He also worked on phonetics and phonology at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. He is currently developing human-machine interfaces that can enable musical performance and composition for therapeutic use with people with extreme physical disability.

Miranda’s compositions combine conventional instruments with electronically manipulated sound and voice. His piece Sacra Conversazione, composed between 2000 and 2003, consists of five movements in which string ensemble pieces are combined with pre-recorded ‘artificial vocalizations’ and percussion. A newly revised version will be performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 9 June as part of a programme of electronic music, Electronica III. Nature spoke to him about the way his work combines music with neurology, psychology and bioacoustics.

In Sacra Conversazione you are aiming to synthesize voice-like utterances without semantic content, by using physical modelling and computer algorithms to splice sounds from different languages in physiologically plausible ways. What inspired this work?

The human voice is a wonderfully sophisticated musical instrument. But in Sacra Conversazione I focused on the non-semantic communicative power of the human voice, which is conveyed mostly by the timbre and prosody of utterances. (Prosody refers to the acoustical traits of vocal utterances characterized by their melodic contour, rhythm, speed and loudness.)

Humans seem to have evolved some sort of ‘prosodic fast lane’ for non-semantic vocal information in the auditory pathways of the brain, from the ears to regions that processes emotion, such as the amygdala. There is evidence that non-semantic content of speech is processed considerably faster than semantic content. We can very often infer the emotional content and intent of utterances before we process their semantic, or linguistic, meaning. I believe that this aspect of our mind is one of the pillars of our capacity for music.

You say that some of the sounds you used would be impossible to produce physiologically, and yet retain an inherent vocal quality. Do you know why that is?

Let me begin by explaining how I began to work on this piece. I started by combining single utterances from a number of different languages – over a dozen, as diverse as Japanese, English, Spanish, Farsi, Thai and Croatian – to form hundreds of composite utterances, or ‘words’, as if I were creating the lexicon for a new artificial language. I carefully combined utterances by speakers of similar voice and gender and I used sophisticated speech-synthesis methods to synthesise these new utterances. It was a painstaking job.

I was surprised that only about 1 in 5 of these new ‘words’ sounded natural to me. The problem was in the transitions between the original utterances. For example, whereas the transition from say Thai utterance A to Japanese utterance B did not sound right, the transition of the former to Japanese utterance C was acceptable. I came to believe that the main reason is physiological. When we speak, our vocal mechanism needs to articulate a number of different muscles simultaneously. I suspect that even though we may be able to synthesise physiologically implausible utterances artificially, the brain would be reluctant to accept them.

Then I moved on to synthesize voice using a physical model of the vocal tract. I used a model with over 20 variables, each of which roughly represents a muscle of the vocal tract (see E. R. Miranda, Leonardo Music Journal 15, 8-16 (2005)). I found it extremely difficult to co-articulate the variables of the model to produce decent utterances, which explains why speech technology for machines is still is very much reliant on splicing and smoothing methods. On the other hand, I was able to produce surreal vocalizations that, while implausible for humans to produce, retain a certain degree of coherence because of the physiological constraints embedded in the model.

Much of the research in music cognition uses the methods of neuroscience to understand the perception of music. You appear to be more or less reversing this approach, using music to try to understand processes of speech production and cognition. What makes you think this is possible?

The choice of research methodology depends on the aims to the research. The methods of cognitive neuroscience are largely aimed at proving hypotheses. One formulates a hypothesis to explain a certain aspect of cognition and then designs experiments aimed at proving it.

My research, however, is not aimed at a describing how music perception works. Rather, I am interested in creating new approaches to musical composition informed by research into speech production and cognition. This requires a different methodology, which is more exploratory: do it first and reflect upon the outcomes later.

I feel that cognitive neuroscience research methods force scientists to narrow the concept of music, whereas I am looking for the opposite: my work is aimed at broadening the concept of music. I should not think that both approaches are incompatible: one could certainly inform and complement the other.

What have you learnt from your work about how we make and perceive sound?

One of the things I’ve learnt is that perception of voice – and, I suspect, auditory perception in general – seems to be very much influenced by the physiology of vocal production.

Much of your work has been concerned with the synthesis and manipulation of voice. Where does music enter into it, and why?

Metaphorically speaking, synthesis and manipulation of voice are only the cogs, nuts and bolts. Music really happens when one starts to assemble the machine. It is extremely hard to describe how I composed Sacra Conversazione, but inspiration played a big role. Creative inspiration is beyond the capability of computers, yet finding its origin is the Holy Grail of the neurosciences. How can the brain draw and execute plans on our behalf implicitly, without telling us?

What are you working on now?

Right now I am orchestrating raster plots of spiking neurons and the behaviour of artificial life models for Sound to Sea, a large-scale symphonic piece for orchestra, church organ, percussion, choir and mezzo soprano soloist. The piece was commissioned by my university, and will be premiered in 2012 at the Minster Church of St Andrew in Plymouth.

Do you feel that the evolving understanding of music cognition is opening up new possibilities in music composition?

Yes, to a limited extent. Progress will probably emerge from the reverse: new possibilities in musical composition contributing to the development of such understanding.

What do you hope audiences might feel when listening to your work? Are you trying to create an experience that is primarily aesthetic, or one that challenges listeners to think about the relationship of sound to language? Or something else?

I would say both. But my primary aim is to compose music that is interesting to listen to and catches the imagination of the audience. I would prefer my music to be appreciated as a piece of art rather than as a challenging auditory experiment. However, if the music makes people think about, say, the relationship of sound to language, I would be even happier. After all, music is not merely entertainment.

Although many would regard your work as avant-garde, do you feel part of a tradition that explores the boundaries of sound, voice and music? Arnold Schoenberg, for example, aimed to find a form of vocalization pitched between song and speech, and indeed the entire operatic form of recitative is predicated on a musical version of speech.

Absolutely. The notion of avant-garde disconnected from tradition is too naïve. If anything, to be at the forefront of something you need the stuff in the background. Interesting discoveries and innovations do not happen in a void.

Are we all doomed?

2011-06-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

That’s the question that New Statesman put to a range of folks, including me. My answer was truncated in the magazine, which is fair enough but somewhat gave the impression that I fully bought into Richard Gott’s Copernican principle. In fact I consider it to be an amusing as well as a thought-provoking idea, but not obviously more than what I depict it as in the second paragraph of my full answer below. So here, for what it’s worth, is the complete answer.
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There is a statistical answer to this. If you assume, as common sense suggests you should, that there is nothing special about us as humans, then it is unlikely we are among the first or last people ever to exist. A conservative guess at the trajectory of future population growth then implies that humanity has between 5,000 and 8 million years left. Whether that’s a sentence of doom or a reprieve is a matter of taste.

Alternatively, you might choose to say that we know absolutely nothing about our ‘specialness’ in this respect, and so this is just an argument that manufactures apparent knowledge out of ignorance. If you prefer this point of view, it forces us to confront our current apocalyptic nightmares. Will nuclear war, global warming, superbugs, or a rogue asteroid finish us off within the century? The last of these, at least, can be assigned fairly secure (and long) odds. As for the others, prediction is a mug’s game (which isn’t to say that all those who’ve played are mugs). I’d recommend enough pessimism to take seriously the tremendous challenges we face today, and enough optimism to think it’s worth the effort.

Steve Jones gets unnatural

2011-05-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve just discovered a review of Unnatural in the Lancet by Steve Jones. As one might expect, he has an interesting and quite particular take on it. It’s one with which, happily, I agree.

Belated Prospect

2011-05-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

I realise that I meant to put up earlier my May column from Prospect. Almost time for the June column now, but here goes.
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The notion that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles, credited to the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, retains a whiff of solipsism. For beetles are not so unlike us: multicellular, big enough to see, and legged. But God surely favours single-celled organisms far more. Beetles and humans occupy two nearby tips on the tree of life, while single-celled life forms have two of the three fundamental branches all to themselves: bacteria and archaea, so alike that it was only in the 1970s that the latter were awarded their own branch. Archaea have a different biochemistry to bacteria – their metabolism usually produces methane – and they are found everywhere, including the human gut.

Our place on the ‘tree of life’ now looks like it may be even more insignificant, for a team at the University of California, working with genomics pioneer Craig Venter, claims to have found hints of a fourth major branch in the tree, again populated only by single-celled organisms. These branches, called domains, are the most basic divisions in the Linnaean system of biological classification. We share our domain, the eukaryotes (distinguished by the way their cells are structured), with plants, fungi and yet more monocellular species.

Like most things Venter is involved in, the work is controversial. But perhaps not half so controversial as Venter’s belief, expressed in a panel debate titled ‘What is life?’ in Arizona in February, that all life on Earth might not even have a common origin. “I think the tree of life is an artefact of some early scientific studies, which are not really holding up”, he said, to the alarm of fellow panellist Richard Dawkins. His suggestion that there may be merely a “bush of life” only made matters worse.

Drop in the ocean

Despite the glee of creationists, there was nothing in Venter’s speculative remark that need undermine the case for Darwinian evolution. The claim of a fourth domain is backed by a little more evidence, but remains highly tentative. The data were gathered on a now famous round-the-world cruise that Venter undertook between 2003 and 2007 on his yacht to gather genomic information about the host of unknown microorganisms in the oceans. The rapid gene-analysing techniques that he helped to develop allow the genes of different organisms to be rapidly compared in order to identify evolutionary relationships between them. By looking at the same group of genes in two different organisms, one can deduce where in the tree of life they shared a common ancestor.

Using Venter’s data, Jonathan Eisen in California discovered that two families of genes in these marine microbes each seem to show a branch that doesn’t fit on the conventional tree of life. It’s possible that these genes might have been acquired from some unknown forms of virus (viruses are excluded from the tree altogether). The more exciting alternative is that they flag up a new domain. If so, its inhabitants would seem so far to be quite rare – a minor anomaly, like the Basque language, that has persisted quietly for billions of years. But since we are ignorant about perhaps 99 per cent of species on the planet, who knows?

Thinking big

The European Union is looking for big ideas. Really big ones. Its Flagship programme offers to fund two scientific projects to the tune of €1 bn over the next ten years. These must be “ambitious large-scale, science-driven, visionary research initiatives that aim to achieve a scientific breakthrough, provid[ing] a strong and broad basis for future technological innovation and economic exploitation in a variety of areas, as well as novel benefits for society.” In other words, they’ve got to achieve a heck of a lot, and will have truckloads of money to do so.

Six of the applications – all of them highly collaborative, international and interdisciplinary – have now been selected for a year of pilot funding, starting in May. They range from the highly technical to the borders of science fiction.

One promises to develop graphene, the carbon material that won last year’s physics Nobel prize, into a practical fabric for information technologies. Another proposes to truly figure out how the brain works; a third will integrate information technology with medicine to realise the much-advertised ‘personalized medicine’. But these things will all be pursued regardless of the Flagship scheme. More extraordinary, and therefore both more enticing and more risky, are two proposals to develop intelligent, sensitive artificial agents – characterized here as Guardian Angels or Robot Companions – that will help us individually throughout our lives. The sixth proposal (which received the highest rating) is to develop massive computer-simulation systems to model the entire ‘living Earth’, offering a ‘crisis observatory’ that will forecast global problems ranging from wars to economic meltdowns to natural disasters – the latter now all too vivid. The two initiatives to receive full funding will be selected in mid-2012 for launch in 2013.

The chief designer

2011-05-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

I have a review of the RSC’s play Little Eagles in Nature this week. Here it is. Too late now to catch the play, I fear, but I thought it was impressive – even though Andrew Billen has some fair criticisms in the New Statesman.
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Little Eagles
A play by Rona Munro, directed by Roxana Silbert
Hampstead Theatre, London, until 7 May

It is a curious year of anniversaries for the former Soviet military-industrial complex. Fifty years ago the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, orbiting the world for 108 minutes in the Vostok spacecraft. And 25 years ago, Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded and sent a cloud of radioactive debris across northern Europe.

One triumph, one failure; each has been marked independently. But while Little Eagles, Rona Munro’s play commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the Gagarin anniversary, understandably makes no mention of the disaster in Ukraine a quarter of a century later, the connections assert themselves throughout. Most obviously, both events were the fruits of the Cold War nuclear age. The rockets made by Sergei Korolyov, the chief architect of the Soviet space programme and the play’s central character, armed President Khrushchev with intercontinental ballistic missiles before they took Gagarin to the stars.

But more strikingly, we see the space programme degenerate along the same lines that have now made an exclusion zone of Chernobyl. Impossible demands from technically clueless officials and terror at the consequences of neglecting them eventually compromise the technologies fatally – most notably here in the crash of Soyuz 1 in 1967, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Gagarin was the backup pilot for that mission, but it was clear that he was by then too valuable a trophy ever to be risked in another spaceflight. All the same, he died a year later during the routine training flight of a jet fighter.

Callous disregard for life marks Munro’s play from beginning to end. We first see Korolyov in the Siberian labour camp where he was sent during Stalin’s purge of the officer class just before the Second World War. As the Soviets developed their military rocket programme, the stupidity of sending someone so brilliant to a virtual death sentence dawned on the regime, and he was freed to resume work several years later. During the 1950s Korolyov wrested control of the whole enterprise, becoming known as the Chief Designer.

Munro’s Korolyov seems to offer an accurate portrait of the man, if the testimony of one of his chief scientists is anything to go by: “He was a king, a strong-willed purposeful person who knew exactly what he wanted… he swore at you, but he never insulted you. The truth is, everybody loved him.” As magnetically played by Darrell D’Silva, you can see why: he is a swaggering, cunning, charming force of nature, playing the system only to realise his dream of reaching the stars. He clearly reciprocates the love of his ‘little eagles’, the cosmonauts chosen with an eye on the Vostok capsule’s height restrictions.

But for his leaders, rocketry was merely weaponry, or a way of demonstrating superiority over their foes in the West. Korolyov becomes a hero for beating the Americans with Sputnik, and then with Vostok. But when the thuggish, foul-mouthed Khrushchev (a terrifying Brian Doherty) is retired in 1964 in favour of the icily efficient Leonid Brezhnev, the game changes. The new leader sees no virtue in Korolyov’s dream of a Mars mission, and is worried instead that the Americans will beat them to the moon. The rushed and bungled Soyuz 1, launched after Korolyov’s death in 1966, was the result.

Out of this fascinating but chewy material, Munro has worked wonders to weave a tale that is intensely human and, aided by the impressive staging, often beautiful and moving. Gagarin’s own story is here a subplot, and not fully worked through – we start to see his sad descent into the vodka bottle, grounded as a toy of the Politburo, but not his ignominious end. There is just a little too much material here for Munro to shoehorn in. But that is the only small complaint in this satisfying and wise production.

What it becomes in the end is a grotesque inversion of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s account of the US space programme made into an exhilarating movie in 1983. Wolfe’s celebration was a fitting tribute to the courage and ingenuity that ultimately took humans to the moon, but an exposure of the other side of the coin was long overdue. There is something not just awful but also grand and awesome in the grinding resolve of the Soviets to win the space race relying on just the Chief Engineer “and convicts and some university students”, as Korolyov’s doctor puts it.

Little Eagles shows us the mix of both noble and ignoble impulses in the space race that the US programme, with its Columbus rhetoric, still cannot afford to acknowledge. It recognizes the eye-watering glory of seeing the stars and the earth from beyond the atmosphere, but at the same time reveals the human spaceflight programmes as utterly a product of their tense, cheat-beating times, a nationalistic black hole for dollars and roubles (and now, of yuan too). Crucially, it leaves the final judgement to us. “They say you changed the whole sky and everything under it”, Korolyov’s doctor (and conscience) says to him at the end. “What does that mean?”

The Achilles' heel of biological complexity

2011-05-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest news story for Nature. This is such an interesting issue that I plan to write a more detailed piece on it for Chemistry World soon.
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The complex web of protein interactions in our cells may be masking an ever-worsening problem.

Why are we so complicated? You might imagine that we’ve evolved that way because it conveys adaptive benefits. But a new study in Nature [1] suggests that the complexity in the molecular ‘wiring’ of our genome – the way our proteins talk to each other – may be simply a side effect of a desperate attempt to stave off problematic random mutations in the proteins’ structure.

Ariel Fernández, working at Chicago University and now at the Mathematics Institute of Argentina in Buenos Aires, and Michael Lynch of Indiana University in Bloomington argue that complexity in the network of our protein interactions arises because our relatively small population size, compared with single-celled organisms, makes us especially vulnerable to ‘genetic drift’: changes in the gene pool due to the reproductive success of certain individuals by chance rather than by superior fitness.

Whereas natural selection tends to weed out harmful mutations in genes and their related proteins, genetic drift does not. Fernández and Lynch argue that the large number of physical interactions between our proteins – now a crucial component of how information is transmitted in our cells – compensates for the reduction in protein stability wrought by drift. But this response comes at a cost.

It might mask the accumulation of structural weaknesses in proteins to a point where the problem can no longer be contained. Then, say Fernández and Lynch, proteins might be liable to misfold spontaneously – as they do in so-called diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and prion diseases, caused by misfolded proteins in the brain.

If so, this means we may be fighting a losing race. Genetic drift may eat away at the stability of our proteins until they are overwhelmed, leaving us a sickly species.

This would imply that Darwinian evolution isn’t necessary benign in the long run. By finding a short-term solution to drift, it might merely be creating a time-bomb. “Species with low population are ultimately doomed by nature’s strategy of evolving complexity”, says Fernández.

The work provides “interesting and important news”, according to William Martin, a specialist in molecular evolution at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany. Martin says it shows that evolution of eukaryotes – relatively complex organisms like us, with a cellular ‘nucleus’ that houses the chromosomes – “can be substantially affected by drift.”

Drift is a bigger problem for small populations – those of multicelled eukaryotic organisms – than for large ones, because survival by chance rather than by fitness is statistically more likely for small numbers. Many random mutations in a gene, and thus in the protein made from it, will harm the protein’s resistance to unfolding: the protein’s folded-up shape becomes more apt to loosen as water molecules intrude into it. This loss of shape weakens the protein’s ability to function.

Such problems can be avoided if proteins stick loosely to one another so as to shelter the regions vulnerable to water. Fernández and Lynch say that these associations between proteins – a key feature of the cell biology of eukaryotes – may have therefore initially been a passive response to genetic drift. Over time, certain protein-protein interactions may be selected by evolution for useful functions, such as sending molecular signals across cell membranes.

Using protein structures reported in the Protein Data Bank, the two researchers verified that disruption of the interface between proteins and water, caused mostly by exposure of ‘sticky’ parts of the folded peptide chain [full disclosure: these are actually parts of the chain that hydrogen-bond to one another; exposure to water enables the water molecules to compete for the hydrogen bonding. Ariel Fernández has previously explored how such regions may be ‘wrapped’ in hydrophobic chain segments to keep water away], leads to a greater propensity for a protein to associate with others. They also showed that drift could account for this ‘poor wrapping’ of proteins.

On this view, genome complexity doesn’t offer intrinsic evolutionary advantages, but is a kind of knee-jerk response to the chance appearance of ‘needy proteins’ – which ends up exposing us to serious risks.

“I believe prions are indicators of this gambit gone too far”, says Fernandez. “The proteins with the largest accumulation of structural defects are the prions, soluble proteins so poorly wrapped that they relinquish their functional fold and aggregate”. Prions cause disease by triggering the misfolding of other proteins.

“If genetic variability resulting from random drift keeps increasing, we as a species may end up facing more and more fitness catastrophes of the type that prions represent”, Fernandez adds. “Perhaps the evolutionary cost of our complexity is too high a price to pay in the long run.”

However, Martin doubts that drift alone can account for the difference in complexity between prokaryotes (single-celled organisms without a cell nucleus) and eukaryotes. His previous work has indicated that bioenergetics also plays a strong role [2]. For example, says Martin, prokaryotes with small population sizes are symbiotic, which tend to degenerate, not to become complex. “Population genetics is just one aspect of the complexity issue”, he says.

References
1. Fernandez, A. & Lynch, M. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09992 (2011).
2. Lane, N. & Martin, W. Nature 467, 929-934 (2010).

Unnatural happenings

2011-05-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

There is a smart review of Unnatural in The Age by Damon Young. I don’t just say it is smart because it is positive – he engages intelligently with the issues. This bit made me smile: “Because he's neither a religious nor scientific fundamentalist, Ball's ideas may draw flak from both.” Well, indeed.

And I recently spoke to David Lemberg about the book for a podcast on the very nice Alden Bioethics blog run out of Albany Medical Center in New York. It’s available here.

Are scientific reputations boosted artificially?

2011-05-08T15:34:00.000-07:00

Here’s my latest Muse for Nature News.
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Scientific reputations emerge in a collective manner. But does this guarantee that fame rests on merit?

Does everyone in science get the recognition they deserve? Well obviously, your work hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated by your peers, but what about everyone else? Yes, I know he is vastly over-rated, and it’s a mystery why she gets invited to give so many keynote lectures, but that aside – is science a meritocracy?

How would you judge? Reputation is often a word-of-mouth affair; grants, awards and prizes offer a rather more concrete measure of success. But increasingly, scientific excellence is measured by citation statistics, not least by the ubiquitous h-index [1], which seeks to quantify the impact of your total oeuvre. Do all or any of these things truly reflect the worth of one’s scientific output?

Many would probably say: sort of. Most good work gets recognized eventually, and most Nobel prizes are applauded and deemed long overdue, rather than denounced as undeserved. But not always. Sometimes important work doesn’t get noticed in the author’s lifetime, and it’s a fair bet that some never comes to light at all. There’s surely an element of chance and luck in the establishment of reputations.

A new paper in PLoS ONE by Santo Fortunato of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, Dirk Helbing of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and coworkers aims to shed some light on the mechanism by which citations are accrued [2]. They have found that some landmark papers of Nobel laureates quite quickly give their authors a sudden boost in citation rate – and that this boost extends to the author’s earlier papers too, even if they were in unrelated areas.

For example, citations to a pivotal 1989 paper by chemistry Nobel laureate John Fenn on electrospray ionization mass spectrometry [3] took off exponentially, but also raised the citation profile of at least six of Fenn’s older papers. These peaks in citation rate stand out remarkably clearly for several laureates (some of whom have more than one peak), and might be a useful indicator both of important breakthroughs and of scientific performance.

This behaviour could seem reassuring or disturbing, depending on your inclination. On the one hand, some of these researchers were not particularly well known before they published their landmark papers – and yet the value of the work does seem to have been recognized, overcoming the rich-get-richer effect by which those already famous tend more easily to accrue more fame [4]. This boost could help innovative new ideas to take root. On the other hand, such a rise to prominence brings a new rich-get-richer effect, for it awards ‘unearned’ citations to the researcher’s other papers.

And the findings seem to imply that citations are sometimes selected not because they are necessarily the best or most appropriate but to capitalize on the prestige and presumed authority of the person cited. This further distorts a picture that already contains a rich-get-richer element among citations themselves. An earlier analysis suggested that some citations become common largely by chance, benefitting from a feedback effect in which they are chosen simply because others have chosen them before [5].

But at root, what this finding underscores is that science is a social enterprise, with all the consequent quirks and nonlinearities. That has potential advantages, but also drawbacks. In an ideal world, every researchers would reach an independent judgement about the value of a paper or a body of work, and the sum of these judgements should then reflect something fundamental about its worth.

That, however, is no longer an option, not least because there is simply too much to read – no one can hope to keep up with all that happens in their field, let alone in related ones. As a result, the scientific community must act as a collective search engine that hopefully alights on the most promising material. The question is whether this social network is harnessed efficiently, avoiding blind alleys while not overlooking gems.

No one really knows the answer to that. But some social-science studies highlight the possible consequences. For example, it seems that selections made ostensibly on merit are somewhat capricious when others’ choices are taken into account: objectively ‘good’ and ‘bad’ material still tends on average to be seen as such, but feedbacks can create a degree of randomness in what succeeds and fails [6]. Doubtless the same effects operate in the political sphere – so that democracy is a somewhat compromised meritocracy – and also in economics, which is why prices frequently deviate from their ‘fundamental’ value.

But Helbing suggests that there is probably an optimal balance between independence and group-think. A computer model of people exiting a crowded room in an emergency shows that it empties most efficiently when there is just the right amount of follow-the-crowd herding [7]. Are scientific reputations forged in this optimal regime? And if not, what would it take to engineer more wisdom into this particular crowd?

References
1. Hirsch, J. E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 102, 16569-16572 (2005).
2. Mazloumian, A., Eom, Y.-H., Helbing, D., Lozano, S. & Fortunato, S. PLoS ONE 6(5), e18975 (2011).
3. Fenn, J. B., Mann, M., Meng, C. K., Wong, S. F. & Whitehouse, C. M., Science 246, 64-71 (1989).
4. Merton, R. K. Science 159, 56-63 (1968).
5. Simkin, M. V. & Roychowdhury, V. P. Ann. Improb. Res. 11, 24-27 (2005).
6. Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S. & Watts, D. J. Science 311, 854-856 (2006).
7. Helbing, D., Farkas, I. & Vicsek, T. Nature 407, 487-490 (2000).

A discourse on method

2011-05-06T01:15:00.000-07:00

Actually (to pick up from the previous post), I’d meant to put my last Crucible column up here too. So here it is now.
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What’s wrong with this claim? “Replication of results is a crucial part of the scientific method. Experimental errors come rapidly to light when researchers prove unable to reproduce the claims of others. In this way, science has a built-in mechanism for self-correction.”

The insistence on replication – as the motto of the Royal Society puts it, ‘take no one’s word for it’ (Nullius in verba) – has indeed long been one of science’s great strengths. It explains why pathological science such as cold fusion and polywater was rather quickly consigned to the dustbin while equally striking claims such as high-temperature superconductivity have entered the textbooks.

But too often this view of the ‘scientific method’ – itself a slippery concept – is regarded as a regular aspect of science in action, rather than an expression of the ideal. Rather few experiments are replicated verbatim, as it were, not least because science is too competitive and busy to spend one’s time doing what someone has already done. Important claims are bound to get checked as others rush to follow up on the work, but mundane stuff will probably never be tested – it will simply sink unheeded into the literature.

No one should be surprised or unduly alarmed at that – if work isn’t important enough to warrant replication, it matters little if it is flawed. And although the difficulty of publishing negative results probably hinders the correction process and favours exaggerated claims, information technologies might now offer solutions.1 What matters more is that replication isn’t just a problem in practice; it’s a problem in theory.

The concept emerged along with experimental science itself in the late sixteenth century. Before that, experiments – when they were done at all – were typically considered not a test of your hypothesis but a demonstration that it was right. If ‘experience’ didn’t fit with theory, no one felt a compelling urge to modify the theory, not least because the world was not considered law-bound it quite the same way it is today. Even though the early experimentalists, often working outside the academic mainstream, decided they needed to filter recipes and reports by attempting to verify them before recording them as fact, the tradition of experiment-as-demonstration persisted for a long time. Many of the celebrated trials shown to the Fellows of the Royal Society were like that.

But in any case, it would be wrong to suppose that the failure of an experiment to verify a hypothesis or to replicate a prior claim should be grounds for their rejection. Robert Boyle appreciated this in his ‘Two Essays, concerning the Unsuccessfulness of Experiments’ (1661). There are many reasons, he wrote, why an experiment might not work as anticipated: the equipment might be faulty, or the reagents not fresh, for example. That was amply borne out (albeit in reverse) by the recent discovery that a crucial step (first reported in 1918) in the alleged total synthesis of quinine by Robert Woodward and William Doering in 1944 depended on a catalyst being aged.2 The very fact that it took 90 years to test that step is itself a comment on how replication really functions in science.

The problem of replication was highlighted by Boyle’s own famous experiments with the air pump. By raising the possibility of a vacuum, these studies posed a serious challenge to the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy. So the stakes were very high. But because of the imperfections of the apparatus, it was no easy matter even for Boyle to reproduce some of his findings. And because the air pump was a hugely sophisticated piece of scientific kit– it has been dubbed the cyclotron of its age – it was very expensive, so very few others were in a position to try the experiments. Even if they did, the designs differed, so one couldn’t be sure that the same procedures were being followed.3 That essentially no replications could be attempted without first-hand experience of Boyle’s instrument reflects today’s situation, in which hardly any complicated experimental procedure can be replicated reliably without direct contact between the labs involved. Even then, the only way to calibrate your apparatus may be against that whose results you’re trying to test.

Which raises the question: if your attempted replication ‘fails’, where is the error? Have you neglected something? Or was the original claim wrong? Or was it right for the wrong reasons? The possibilities are endless. Indeed, the philosophers Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine have independently pointed out that, from a strictly logical perspective, no hypothesis can ever be tested or an experimental replication assayed, because the problem is under-determined: discrepancies can never be logically localized to a particular cause. Science makes progress regardless, and what is perhaps surprising is that the ‘scientific method’ remains so effective when it is in truth ramshackle, makeshift and logically shaky.

These issues seem more pertinent than ever. Who, for example, is going to check the findings from the Large Hadron Collider?

References
1. J. Schooler, Nature 470, 437 (2011).
2. A. C. Smith & R. M. Williams, Angew. Chem. Int. Edn 47, 1736–1740 (2008).
3. S. Shapin & S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985).

Science and religion - even chemists aren't immune

2011-05-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

Oh, it’s risky, I know. But I offer the following mild observations about the recent Templeton Prize in my Crucible column in Chemistry World. When I wrote it, on the day of the announcement, I didn’t realise quite what a lot of shrieking the award would elicit. There is, by the way, a sentence in the final para, omitted in the published version, that makes the meaning of my final sentence a little more apparent. Herein lies a tale.
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The astronomer Martin Rees, until recently President of the Royal Society, seems nonchalant, even bemused, about receiving this year’s Templeton Prize for work at the interface of science and religion. Not only has he seemingly little idea to what to do with the £1m prize money, but he confesses to knowing little about the Templeton Foundation beyond what appeared in a recent Nature article [1], and wasn’t sure why he had been selected.

According to the Pennsylvania-based Templeton Foundation, set up by the late billionaire John Templeton to develop links between science and spirituality, the prize is awarded to people who have “expanded our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality”. In giving it to Rees, the foundation says that his “profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears”.

One thing Rees must have known, however, is that his award would be controversial. Some scientists see it as an attempt to buy respectability for the Foundation through the names of illustrious scientists. In its early days the award went to religious figures such as Billy Graham and Mother Teresa. But Rees joins a list of winners that now includes cosmologists George Ellis and John Barrow, physicists Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson and Charles Townes, and biologist Francisco Ayala. This reflects the Foundation’s energetic determination over the past two decades to focus on interactions between science and religion – topics that some sceptics say have no shared ground. Chemistry Nobel laureate Harry Kroto, one of those who has condemned Rees’ acceptance of the prize, suggests that to qualify you just have to be an eminent scientist prepared to be nice – or at least not rude – about religion.

Rees is no stranger to this disputed territory. He presided over the sacking of the Royal Society’s director of education Michael Riess, an ordained Church of England minister, after remarks that were construed as defending the teaching of creationism in schools. Rees also drew fire from the inclusion of a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations last year. Rees has said publicly that he has no religious beliefs but occasionally attends church services and recognizes their social role. He takes the pragmatic view that, in battling the anti-scientific extremes of religious fundamentalism, he’d rather have the Archbishop and other moderates on his side. For others, the distance between evidence-based science and faith-based religion is too great to make common cause.

Chemistry might seem too remote from the Templeton Foundation’s goals for the issue of whether to accept its ‘tainted’ money ever to arise. Historically, of course, many chemists were profoundly religious. For Robert Boyle, investigating all aspects of nature was a holy duty that deepens our reverence for God’s works. Michael Faraday had to juggle his science and his profound non-conformist Christian beliefs.

Yet surely chemical research can’t directly speak to religious questions today? Don’t be so sure. In 2005 I took part in a Templeton-funded symposium called “Water of Life: Counterfactual Chemistry and Fine-Tuning in Biochemistry”. While I won’t pretend to have been indifferent to the venue on the shore of Lake Como, I would have declined were it not for the stellar list of other delegates. The meeting was motivated by Harvard biologist Lawrence Henderson’s 1913 book The Fitness of the Environment, in which he suggested that water is ‘biophilic’, with physical and chemical properties remarkably fine-tuned to support life. The question put to the gathering was: are they really?

Among the many contributions, Ruth Lynden-Bell and Pablo Debenedetti described computer simulations of ‘counterfactual water’ in which the properties of the molecule were slightly altered to see if it retained its unique liquid properties [2]. For example, the tetrahedral hydrogen-bonded motif remains, in distorted form, if the H-O-H bond angle is changed from 109.5 degrees to 90 degrees, but the structure becomes more like that of a ‘normal’ liquid as the hydrogen-bond strength is decreased. This notion of a ‘modified chemistry’ thus may probe how far the chemical world is contingent and how far it is inevitable. Of course, one could say that there is no contingence: things are as they are and not otherwise. But fine-tuning arguments in cosmology confront the mystery of why the laws of nature seem geared to enable our existence. If there’s plenty of slack, there’s no mystery to explain. Counterfactual scenarios can also explore the supposed uniqueness of water as life’s solvent, irrespective of any metaphysical implications.

If you want to know what the meeting concluded, you’ll have to read the book [3]. It has only recently been published, in part because some university presses seemed nervous of the association with the Templeton Foundation. Wary at the outset of an underlying agenda, I saw no evidence of it at the meeting: it was good science all the way. Sceptics are right to ask questions about the Foundation’s motives, but they need to be open-minded about the answers. When such scepticism stands in the way of solid science, we are all the losers.

1. M. M. Waldorp, Nature 470, 323 (2011).
2. R. M. Lynden-Bell & P. G. Debenedetti, J. Phys. Chem. B 109, 6527 (2005).
3. R. M. Lynden-Bell, S. Conway Morris, J. D. Barrow, J. L. Finney & C. L. Harper (eds). Water and Life: the Unique Properties of H2O. CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2010.

The Information - a review

2011-04-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

I have a review of James Gleick's new book in the Observer today. Here it is. He does an enviable job, on the whole - this is better than Chaos.

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick
Fourth Estate, 2011
ISBN 978-0-00-722573-6

Too much information: the complaint du jour, but also toujours. Alexander Pope quipped that the printing press, “a scourge for the sins of the learned”, would lead to “a deluge of Authors [that] covered the land”. Robert Burton, the Oxford anatomist of melancholy, confessed in 1621 that he was drowning in books, pamphlets, news and opinions. All the twittering and tweeting today, the blogs and wikis and apparent determination to archive even the most ephemeral and trivial thought has, as James Gleick observes in this magisterial survey, something of the Borgesian about it. Nothing is forgotten; the world imprints itself on the informatosphere at a scale approaching 1:1, each moment of reality creating an indelible replica.

But do we gain from it, or was T. S. Eliot right to say that “all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance”? Gleick is refreshingly upbeat. In the face of the information flood that David Foster Wallace called Total Noise, he says, “we veer from elation to dismay and back”. But he is confident that we can navigate it, challenging the view of techno-philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy that “ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning”. Yet this relationship between information and meaning is the crux of the matter, and it is one that Gleick juggles but does not quite get to grips with. I’ll come back to that.

This is not, however, a book that merely charts the rising tide of information, from the invention of writing to the age of Google. To grasp what information truly means – to explain why it is shaping up as a unifying principle of science – he has to embrace linguistics, logic, telecommunications, codes, computing, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, quantum theory and genetics. He must call as witnesses not only Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, but also Borges, Poe and Lewis Carroll. There are few writers who could accomplish this with such panache and authority. Gleick, whose Chaos in 1987 helped to kick-start the era of modern popular science and who has also written acclaimed biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, is one.

At the heart of the story is Claude Shannon, whose eclectic interests defy categorization today and were positively bizarre in the mid twentieth century. Having written a visionary but ignored doctoral thesis on genetics, Shannon wound up in the labs of the Bell Telephone Company, where electrical logic circuitry was being invented. There he worked (like Turing, who he met in 1943) on code-breaking during the Second World War. And in 1948 he published in Bell’s obscure house journal a theory of how to measure information – not just in a phone-line signal but in a random number, a book, a genome. Shannon’s information theory looms over everything that followed.

Shannon’s real point was that information is a physical entity, like energy or matter. The implications of this are profound. For one thing, manipulating information in a computer then has a minimum energy cost set by the laws of physics. This is what rescues the second law of thermodynamics (entropy or disorder always increases) from the hypothetical ‘demon’ invoked by James Clerk Maxwell in the nineteenth century to undermine it. By observing the behaviour of individual molecules, Maxwell’s demon seemed able to engineer a ‘forbidden’ decrease in entropy. But that doesn’t undo the sacrosanct second law, since processing the necessary information (more precisely, having to discard some of it – forgetting is the hard part) incurs a compensating entropic toll. In effect the demon instead turns information to energy, something demonstrated last year by a group of Japanese physicists – sadly too late for Gleick.

In quantum physics the role of information goes even deeper: at the level of fundamental particles, every event can be considered a transaction in information, and our familiar classical world emerges from the quantum by the process of erasing information. In quantum terms, Gleick says, “the universe is computing its own destiny.” By this point we are a long way from cuneiform and Morse code, though he makes the path commendably clear.

Moreover, Gleick does so with tremendous verve, which is mostly exhilarating, sometimes exhausting and occasionally coy. He is bracingly ready to use technical terms without definition – nonlinear, thermodynamic equilibrium – rightly refusing any infantilizing hand-holding. What impresses most is how he delves beneath the surface narrative to pull out the conceptual core. Written language, he explains, did not simply permit us to make thoughts permanent – it changed thinking itself, enabling abstraction and logical reasoning. Language is a negotiation whose currency is information. A child learning to read is not simply turning letters into words but is learning how to exploit (often recklessly) the redundancies in the system. She reads ‘this’ as ‘that’ not because she confuses the phonemes but because she knows that only a few of them may follow ‘th’, and it’s less effort to guess. Read the whole word, we tell her, but we don’t do it ourselves. That’s why we fail to spot typos: we’ve got the message already. Language elaborates to no informational purpose; the ‘u’ after ‘q’ could be ditched wholesale. Text messaging now lays bare this redundancy: we dnt nd hlf of wht we wrt.

Shannon’s take on language is disconcerting. From the outset he was determined to divorce information from meaning, making it equivalent to something like surprise or unpredictability. That’s why a random string of letters is more information-rich, in Shannon’s sense, than a coherent sentence. There is a definite value in his measure, not just in computing but in linguistics. Yet to broach information in the colloquial sense, somewhere meaning must be admitted back into all the statistics and correlations.

Gleick acknowledges the tension between information as Shannon’s permutation of bits and information as agent of meaning, but a reconciliation eludes him. When he explains the gene with reference to a Beethoven sonata, he says that the music resides neither in acoustic waves nor annotations on paper: ‘the music is the information’. But where and what is that information? Shannon might say, and Gleick implies, that it is in the pattern of notes that Beethoven conceived. But that’s wrong. The notes become music only in the mind of a listener primed with the cognitive, statistical and cultural apparatus to weave them into coherent and emotive forms. This means there is no bounded information set that is the music – it is different for every listener (and every performance), sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly. The same for literature.

Lest you imagine that this applies only to information impinging on human cognition, it is equally true of the gene. Gleick too readily accepts the standard trope that genes – the abstract symbolic sequence – contain the information needed to build an organism. That information is highly incomplete. Genes don’t need to supply it all, because they act in a molecular milieu that fills in the gaps. It’s not that the music, or the gene, needs the right context to deliver its message – without that context, there is no message, no music, no gene. An information theory that considers just the signal and neglects the receiver is limited, even misleading.

It is the only serious complaint about what is otherwise a deeply impressive and rather beautiful book.

Universal blues

2011-04-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

I have written a news story and a leader for Nature on a new paper examining the notion that there are universal grammatical principles in language. Here they are, in that order. But I must say that, much as the results reported by Dunn et al. chime with my instinctive resistance to universal theories of anything, the comments I’ve received on the paper make me a little sceptical that it does what it claims. Time will tell, I suppose.
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Linguists debate whether languages share universal grammatical features.

Languages evolve in their own idiosyncratic fashion, rather than being governed by universal rules. That’s the conclusion of a new study which compares the grammar of several hundred languages in the light of their evolutionary trees.

Psychologist Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand and his coworkers examine the relationships between traits such as the ordering of verbs and nouns in four families representing more than 2,000 languages, and find no sign of any persistent, universal guiding principles [1].

It’s already proving to be a controversial claim. “There is nothing in the paper that brings into question the views that they are arguing against”, says linguist Matthew Dryer of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

There is thought to be around 7,000 languages in the world, which show tremendous diversity in structure. Some have complex ways of making composite words (such as Finnish), others have simple, short and invariant words (such as Mandarin Chinese). Some put verbs first in a sentence, others in the middle and others at the end.

But many linguists suspect there be some universal logic behind this bewildering variety – common cognitive factors that underpin grammatical structures. Two of the most prominent ‘universalist’ theories of language have been proposed by American linguists Noam Chomsky and Joseph Greenberg.

Chomsky tried to account for the astonishing rapidity with which children assimilate complicated and subtle grammatical rules by supposing that we are all born with an innate capacity for language, presumably housed in brain modules specialized for language. He suggested that this makes children able to generalize the grammatical principles of their native tongue from a small set of ‘generative rules’.

Chomsky supposed that languages change and evolve when children reset the parameters of these rules. A single change should induce switches in several related traits in the language.

Greenberg took a more empirical approach, enumerating many observed shared traits between languages. Many of these concerned word order. For example, a conditional clause normally precedes its conclusion: “if he’s right, he’ll be famous.” Greenberg argued that these universals reflect fundamental biases, probably for cognitive reasons. “The Greenbergian word order universals have the strongest claim to empirical validity of any universalist claim about language”, says Gray’s coauthor Michael Dunn of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen.

Both of these ideas have implications for the family tree of language evolution. In Chomsky’s case, as languages evolve, certain features should co-vary because they are products of the same underlying parameter. Greenberg’s idea also implies co-dependencies between certain grammatical features of a language but not others. For example, the word order for verb-subject pairs shouldn’t depend on that for object-verb pairs.

To test these predictions, Gray and colleagues used the methods of phylogenetic analysis developed for evolutionary biology to reconstruct four family trees representative of more than 2,000 languages: Austronesian, Indo-European, Bantu and Uto-Aztecan. For each family they looked at eight word-order features and used statistical methods to calculate the changes that each pair of features had evolved independently or in a correlated way. This allowed them to deduce the webs of co-dependence among the features and compare them to what the theories of Chomsky and Greenberg predict.

They found that neither of these two models matched the evidence. Not only do the co-dependencies differ from those expected from Greenberg’s word-order ‘universals’, but they are different for each family. In other words, the deep grammatical structure of each family is different from that of each of the others: each family has evolved its own rules, so there is no reason to suppose that these are governed by universal cognitive factors.

What’s more, even when a particular co-dependency of traits was shared by two families, the researchers could show that it came about in different ways for each – that the commonality may be coincidental. They conclude that the languages – at least in their word-order grammar – have been shaped in culture-specific ways and not by universals.

Other experts express some skepticism about the new results, albeit for rather different reasons. Martin Haspelmath at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says he agrees with the conclusions but that “for specialists they are nothing new”. “It’s long been known that grammatical properties and dependencies are lineage-specific”, he says.

Meanwhile, Dryer, who has previously presented evidence that supports Greenberg’s position, is not persuaded that the results make a convincing case. “There are over a hundred language families that the authors ignore but which provide strong support for the views they are arguing against”, he says. There is no reason to expect a consistent pattern of word-order relationships within families, he adds, regardless of whether they are shaped by universal constraints.

Haspelmath feels it may be more valuable to look for what languages share in common than how they (inevitably) differ. Even if cultural evolution is the primary factor in shaping them, he says, “it would be very hard to deny that cognitive biases play no role at all.”

“Comparative linguists have focused on the universals and cognitive explanations because they wanted to explain something”, he adds. “Saying that cultural evolution is at play basically means that we can’t explain why languages are the way they are – which is largely true, but it’s not the whole truth.”

1. Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Levinson, S. C & Gray, R. D. Nature 10.1038/nature089923 (2011).
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A search for universals has characterized the scientific enterprise at least since Aristotle. In some ways, this quest for common principles underlying the diversity of the universe defines science: without it there is no order and pattern, but merely as many explanations as there are things in the world. Newton’s laws of motion, the oxygen theory of combustion and Darwinian evolution each united a host of different phenomena in a single explicatory framework.

One view takes this impulse for unification to its extreme: to find a Theory of Everything that offers a single generative equation for all we see. It is becoming ever less clear, however, that such a theory – if it exists – can be considered a simplification, given the proliferation of dimensions and universes it might entail. Nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.

This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. Darwinism seems to offer justification: if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity must also be traceable to more constrained origins. Just as the bewildering variety of courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual selection, so perhaps the world’s languages, music, social and religious customs and even history could be governed by universal features. Filtering out what is contingent and unique from what is shared in common might enable us to understand how complex cultural behaviours arose and what ultimately guides them in evolutionary or cognitive terms.

That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits by Dunn et al. (online publication doi:10.1038/nature09923) supplies a sharp reality check on efforts to find universality in the global spectrum of languages. The most famous of these was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who postulated that humans are born with an innate language-acquisition capacity – a brain module or modules specialized for language – that dictates a universal grammar. Just a few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly. Languages would diversify through changes to the ‘parameter settings’ of the generative rules.

In contrast, Joseph Greenberg took a more empirical approach to universality, identifying a long list of traits (particularly in word order) shared by many languages, which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints. Chomsky’s and Greenberg’s are not by any means the only theories on the table for how languages evolve, but they make the strongest predictions about universals. Dunn et al. have put them to the test by using phylogenetic methods to examine the four family trees that between them represent over 2,000 languages. A generative grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, while Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations (and not others). Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lineage-specific and not governed by universals.

This doesn’t mean that cognitive constraints are irrelevant, nor that there are no other universals dictated by communication efficiency. It’s surely inevitable that cognition sets limits on, say, word length or the total number of phonemes. But such ‘universals’ seem likely to be relatively trivial features of languages, just as may be the case for putative universals in music and other aspects of culture. We should perhaps learn the lesson of Darwinism: a ‘universal’ mechanism of adaptation says little of interest, in itself, about how a particular feature got to be the way it is, or how it works. This truth has dawned on physicists too: universal equations are all very well, but particular solutions are what the world actually consists of, and those particulars are generally the result of contingent history.

Newton's Rainbow

2011-04-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s the pre-edited text of my review for Nature of a new play about Isaac Newton, which I saw recently at the Royal Society and enjoyed more than I thought I might. But you’ll only catch it now if you’re in Toronto or Boston, I believe.
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Let Newton Be!
A play by Craig Baxter, directed by Patrick Morris and produced by the Menagerie Theatre Company
Touring until 30 April

Isaac Newton perplexes and fascinates not just because he was a transitional figure in the history of science but because he was a very odd man. The difficulty has been in distinguishing those two things. The temptation to portray him as a man torn between science and religion, or flitting from mathematical physics to superstitious alchemy, is the modern legacy of a tradition of positivistic science history that today’s historians are still working to dispel. In his passion for none of these things was Newton particularly unusual in his time. What made him odd was not so much what he believed but how he lived: isolated from intimate relationships, sensitive to every slight, at the same time vain and yet so indifferent to adulation that he could barely be persuaded to write the Principia.

All that, quite apart from his towering status in science, naturally makes him an attractive figure for biographers. Among those who have grappled with his story are the leading science historians Richard Westfall (whose 1980 biography is still the standard reference) and A. Rupert Hall, and the science writer James Gleick. It also supplies fertile soil for more inventive explorations of his life, of which Let Newton Be! is one. This new play by Craig Baxter was commissioned by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University, and has benefited from the input of, among others, Rob Iliffe, the head of the Newton Project to place all of Newton's writings online, and the astrophysicist John Barrow.

To conjure up this mercurial man, Baxter elected to use almost entirely Newton’s own words, or those of some of his contemporaries, such as his rival and critic Gottfried Leibniz. Moreover, Newton – the only character in the piece, apart from brief appearances by the likes of Leibniz and Edmond Halley – is played here simultaneously by three actors, one of them a woman. It sounds like a gimmick, but isn’t: the device allows us to see different facets of the man, though happily not as reductively conflicting voices.

The play’s structure is largely chronological. We see Newton as a boy in the family home at Woolsthorpe, an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge, then as Lucasian professor of mathematics (appointed in 1669 at the age of 27). We see him take his retractable telescope to the Royal Society and, stung by what he perceived as the antagonism of the London virtuosi, retreat into religious exegesis, until Halley cajoles him to write down his proof of elliptical planetary orbits – a treatise that expands into the Principia. Feted and now somewhat pompous, he becomes Warden of the Royal Mint and the President of the Royal Society.

The original material is well used. There is a reconstruction of Newton’s famous prism experiment (or roughly so – his experimentum crucis of around 1666, when he reconstituted white light from the spectrum, is notoriously difficult to reproduce). But we also get Newton’s sometimes surreal, obsessive lists of sins committed (“I lied about a Louse”), and the only time we are lectured to is in one of the real lectures on optics that Newton was obliged to provide in the Lucasian chair, at which he proves to be hilariously inept.

In such ways, the play delivers an impressive quantity of Newton’s thought. In particular, it sets out to emphasize just how much of his work was religious – as Iliffe confirmed in a post-performance panel discussion, Newton considered this his central mission, with the seminal scientific works on light, motion and gravity being almost tossed off before breakfast. The natural theology that motivated much of the science – the idea that by exploring the natural world we deepen our appreciation of God’s wisdom and power – was the conventional position of most seventeenth-century scientists, most notably Robert Boyle, and was their defence against accusations of materialistic atheism. Newton was anything but a materialist: that his gravity was an occult force acting at a distance was precisely what Leibniz considered wrong with it, while for Newton this force was actively God’s doing.

But I’m not sure how much would be comprehensible to anyone coming new to Newton. It is characteristic of the play’s intelligence that we don’t get any nonsense with falling apples, but neither are we really told what distinguished Newton’s ideas on gravity from the many that went before (especially Descartes’ vortices and the belief that it is a form of magnetism, both of which ideas Newton shared at some point). His work on the additive colour mixing of light is beautifully illustrated but not actually alluded to; likewise his laws of motion. Moreover, the play lacks a real narrative – there is no tension, nothing to be resolved, for in the end it is a biography, however inventively told. But that was, after all, its brief, and it is probably a more enjoyable hour and a half with Newton than anyone ever had in his lifetime.

The Naked Oceans

2011-04-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

The Naked Scientists is (are?) running a series of podcasts called The Naked Oceans. The latest one has an interview with me about Ernst Haeckel and his images of radiolarians.

Chaos promotes prejudice

2011-04-11T03:02:00.000-07:00

Here’s my latest news story for Nature, pre-editing.

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A disorderly environment makes people more inclined to put others in boxes.

Messy surroundings make us more apt to stereotype people, according to a new study by a pair of social scientists in the Netherlands.

Diederik Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg of Tilburg University asked subjects to complete questionnaires that probed their judgements about certain social groups while in everyday environments (a street and a railway station) that were either messy or clean and orderly. They found small but significant and systematic differences in the responses: there was more stereotyping in the former cases than the latter.

The researchers say that social discrimination could therefore be counteracted by diagnosing and removing signs of disorder and decay in public environments. They report their findings in Science today [1].

Psychologist David Schneider of Rice University in Houston, Texas, a specialist in stereotyping, calls this “an excellent piece of work which speaks not only to a possibly important environmental cause, but also supports a major potential theoretical explanation for some forms of prejudice.”

The influence of environment on behaviour has long been suspected by social scientists and criminologists. The ‘broken windows’ hypothesis of sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling supposes that people are more likely to commit criminal and anti-social acts when they see evidence of others having done so – for example, in public places with signs of decay and neglect.

This idea motivated the famous zero-tolerance policy on graffiti on the New York subway in the late 1980s (on which Kelling acted as a consultant), which is credited with a role in improving the safety of the network. Lindenberg and his coworkers conducted experiments in Dutch urban settings in 2008 that supported an influence of the surroundings on people’s readiness to act unlawfully or antisocially [2].

But could evidence of social decay, even at the mild level of littering, also affect our unconscious discriminatory attitudes towards other people? To test that possibility, Stapel and Lindenberg devised a variety of disorderly environments in which to test these attitudes.

In their questionnaires, participants were asked for example to rate Muslims, homosexuals and Dutch people according to various positive, negative and unrelated stereotypes. For example, the respective stereotypes for homosexuals were (creative, sweet), (strange, feminine) and (impatient, intelligent).

In one experiment, passers-by in the busy Utrecht railway station were asked to participate by coming to sit in a row of chairs, for the reward of a candy bar or an apple. The researchers took advantage of a cleaners’ strike, which had left the station dirty and litter-strewn. They then returned to do the same testing after the strike was over and the station was clean.

As well as probing these responses, the experiment examined unconscious negative responses to race. All the participants were white, while one place at the end of the row of chairs was already taken by a black or white Dutch person. In the messy station, people sat on average further from the black person than the white one, while in the clean station there was no statistical difference in these distances.

In another experiment, the researchers aimed to eliminate differences in cleanliness of the environments while preserving the disorder. The participants were approached on a street in an affluent Dutch city. But in one case the street had been made more disorderly by the removal of a few paving slabs and the addition of a badly parked car and an ‘abandoned’ bicycle. Again, disorder boosted stereotyping.

Stapel and Lindenberg suspect that stereotyping may be an attempt to compensate for mess: it could be, they say, “a way to cope with chaos, a mental cleaning device” that partitions other people neatly into predefined categories.

In support of that idea, they showed participants pictures of disorderly and orderly situations, such as a bookcase with dishevelled and regularly stacked books, before asking them to complete both the stereotyping survey and another one that probed their perceived need for structure, including questions such as “I do not like situations that are uncertain”. Both stereotyping and the need for structure were higher in people viewing the disorderly pictures.

Sociologist Robert Sampson of Harvard University says that the study is “clever and well done”, but is cautious about how to interpret the results. “Disorder is not necessarily chaotic’, he says, “and is subject to different social meanings in ongoing or non-manipulated environments. There are considerable subjective variations within the same residential environment on how disorder is rated – the social context matters.”

Therefore, Sampson says, “once we get out of the lab or temporarily induced settings and consider the everyday contexts in which people live and interact, we cannot simply assume that interventions to clean up disorder will have invariant effects.”

Schneider agrees that the implications of the work for public policy are not yet clear. “One question we’d need to answer is how long these kinds of effects last”, he says. “There is a possibility that people may quickly adapt to disorder. So I would be very wary of concluding that people who live in unclean and disordered areas are more prejudiced because of that.” Stapel acknowledges this: “people who constantly live in disorder get used to it and will not show the effects we find. Disorder in our definition is something that is unexpected.”

References

1. D. A. Stapel & S. Lindenberg, Science 332, 251-253 (2011).

2. K. Keizer, S. Lindenberg & L. Steg, Science 322, 1681 (2008).

Fattening up Schrödinger's cats

2011-04-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Here’s my latest story for Nature News.

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Huge molecules can show the wave-particle duality of quantum theory.

Researchers in Austria have made what they call the “fattest Schrödiner cats realized to date”. They have demonstrated quantum superpositions – objects in two or more states simultaneously – of molecules with up to 430 atoms each, several times larger than those used in previous experiments of this sort [1].

In the famous thought experiment conceived by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate the apparent paradoxes of quantum theory, a cat will be poisoned or not depending on the state of an atom, governed by quantum rules. Because the recently developed quantum theory insisted that these rules allowed for superpositions, it seemed that Schrödinger’s cat could itself be placed in a superposition of ‘live’ and ‘dead’ states.

The paradox highlights the question of how the rules of the quantum world – where objects like atoms can be in several positions at once – give way to the ‘classical’ mechanics that governs the macroscopic world of our everyday experience, in which things must be one way or the other but not both at the same time. This is called the quantum-to-classical transition.

It is now generally thought that the ‘quantumness’ is lost in a process called decoherence, where disturbances from the surrounding environment make the quantum wavefunction describing many-state superpositions appear to collapse [note to subs: we have to keep this ‘appear to’. The precise relationship between decoherence and wavefunction collapse is complicated and too tricky fully get into here] into a well-defined and unique classical state. This decoherence tends to become more pronounced as objects get bigger and the opportunities for interacting with the environment multiply.

There is still no consensus on how Schrödinger’s thought experiment will play out if the cat-and-atom system could be perfectly protected from decoherence. Some physicists are happy to believe that in that case the cat could indeed be in a live-dead superposition. But we couldn’t see it directly because the act of looking would destroy the superposition.

One manifestation of quantum superpositions is the interference that can occur between quantum particles passing through two or more narrow slits. In the classical world the particles just pass through with their trajectories unchanged, like footballs rolling through a doorway.

But quantum particles can behave like waves, which interfere with one another as they pass through the slits, either enhancing or cancelling to produce a series of bright and dark bands. This interference of quantum particles, first seen for electrons in 1927, is effectively the result of each particles passing through more than one slit: a quantum superposition.

At some point as the experiment is scaled up in size, quantum behaviour (interference) should give way to classical behaviour (no interference). But how big can the particles be before that happens?

In 1999 a team at the University of Vienna in Austria demonstrated interference in a many-slit experiment using beams of 60-atom carbon molecules (C₆₀) shaped like hollow spheres [2]. Now Markus Arndt, one of the researchers in that experiment, and his colleagues in Austria, Germany and Switzerland have shown much the same effect for considerably larger molecules tailor-made for the purpose, up to 6 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) across and composed of up to 430 atoms. These are bigger than some small protein molecules in the body, such as insulin.

In their experiment, the beams of molecules are passed through three sets of slits. The first of them, made from a slice of the hard material silicon nitride patterned with a grating of 90-nm-wide slits, prepares the molecular beam in a coherent state, in which the matter waves are all in step. The second, a ‘virtual grating’ made from laser light formed by mirrors into a standing wave of light and dark, causes the inference pattern. The third grating, also of silicon nitride, acts as a mask to admit parts of the interference pattern to an instrument called a mass spectrometer, which counts the number of molecules that pass through.

The researchers report in Nature Communications that this number rises and falls periodically as the outgoing beam is scanned from left to right, showing that interference, and therefore superposition, is present.

Although this might not sound like a Schrödinger cat experiment, it probes the same quantum effects. It is essentially like firing the cats themselves at the interference grating, rather than making a single cat’s fate contingent on an atomic-scale event.

Quantum physicist Martin Plenio of the University of Ulm in Germany calls the study part of an important line of research. “We have perhaps not gained deep new insights into the nature of quantum superposition from this specific experiment”, he admits, “but there is hope that with increasing refinement of the experimental technique we will eventually discover something new.”

Arndt says that such experiments might eventually enable tests of fundamental aspects of quantum theory, such as how wavefunctions are collapsed by observation. “Predictions such as that gravity might induce wavefunction collapse beyond a certain mass limit should become testable at significantly higher masses in far-future experiments”, he says.

Can living organisms – perhaps not cats, but maybe microscopic ones such as bacteria – be placed in superpositions? That has been proposed for viruses [3], the smallest of which are just a few nanometres across – although there is no consensus about whether viruses should be considered truly alive. “Tailored molecules are much easier to handle in such experiments than viruses”, says Arndt. But he adds that if various technical issues can be addressed, “I don’t see why it should not work.”

References

1. Gerlich, S. et al., Nat. Commun. online publication doi:10.1038/ncomms1263.

2. Arndt, M. et al., Nature 401, 680-682 (1999).

3. Romero-Isart, O., Juan, M. L., Quidant, R. & Cirac, J. I. New J. Phys. 12, 033105 (2010).

Who's (still) afraid of MMR?

2011-03-28T01:50:00.000-07:00

With the fallout from the MMR scare still with us, this programme on BBC Radio 4 is a timely reminder of the issues. “Science betrayed” indeed, but by whom? The full story is societal as much as it is biomedical. Anyway, listen while you still can.

More monster myths

2011-03-25T02:14:00.000-07:00

I have reviewed the National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein in the latest issue of Nature. Worth seeing (though if you haven’t got a ticket already, you don’t stand much chance), but I was slightly disappointed in the end, having seen some glowing reviews. There’s another perspective here.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted since it was first published, anonymously, in 1818. Aside from the iconic screen version by James Whale in 1931, there have been sequels, parodies (Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and postmodern interpolations (Brain Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound). Victor Frankenstein has become the archetypal mad scientist, unleashing powers he cannot control – in one recent remake, he became a female biologist experimenting on organ regeneration with stems cells. The ‘Franken’ label is attached to every new technology that appears to intervene in life, from genetic modification of crops to Craig Venter’s ‘synthetic’ microbe.

This reinvention is no recent phenomenon. Shelley’s book was little known until the first stage adaptations began in the 1820s, in which Frankenstein’s creature was already transformed into a mute, shambling brute based on the stock theatrical character of the Wild Man. This personification continued in the first film adaptation in 1910, simply called Frankenstein.

Some might lament how the original novel has been distorted and vulgarized. But literary critic Chris Baldick has a wiser perspective:

The truth of a myth… is not to be established by authorizing its earliest versions, but by considering all its versions… That series of adaptations allusions, accretions, analogues, parodies and plain misreadings which follows up on Mary Shelley’s novel is not just a supplementary component of the myth; it is the myth.

After all, there isn’t even a definitive version of Shelley’s story. She made small but significant changes in the third edition (1831), in particular emphasizing the Faustian themes of presumption and retribution on which the early stage versions insisted.

Besides, critics still dispute what Shelley’s message was meant to be – probably she was not fully conscious of all the themes herself. Far from offering a simplistic critique of scientific hubris, the story might instead echo Shelley’s troubled family life. Her mother, the feminist and political radical Mary Wollstonecraft, died from complications after Mary’s birth, and her father William Godwin all but disowned her after she eloped to Europe with Percy Shelley in 1814. She lost her first child, named William, that year, subsequently describing a dream in which the boy was reanimated. There is ample reason to believe Percy Shelley’s statement of the central moral of Frankenstein: ‘Treat a person ill, and he becomes wicked’.

If so, Nick Dear’s adaptation of the story for the National Theatre in London, directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame, has returned to the essence of the tale. For it focuses on the plight of the creature, whose lone and awkward ‘birth’ begins the play. We see how this mumbling wretch, spurned as a hideous thing by Victor, is reviled by society until finding refuge with the blind peasant De Lacey. The kindly old man teaches the creature how to speak and read using Milton’s Paradise Lost, the story of Satan’s Promethean challenge to heaven.

Eventually De Lacey’s son and daughter-in-law return from the fields and drive out the creature in horror, whereupon he burns them in their cottage. These scenes are the moral core of Shelley’s novel, and in placing them so early Dear signals that this is very much the monster’s show.

In fact, perhaps too much. For while the creature is the most fully realised, most sympathetic and inventive incarnation I have seen, Victor Frankenstein is left with little to do but recoil from him and neglect all his other duties, martial, filial and moral. It is very clear from the outset who is the real monster.

In this production the two lead actors – Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller – alternate the roles of Victor and his creature. This Doppelgänger theme is not a new idea: in the stage adaptation by Peggy Webling that formed the basis of Whale’s movie, the creature appeared dressed like Victor (there renamed Henry), who foreshadows the later confusion of creator and creature by saying ‘I call him by my own name – he is Frankenstein.’ It motivates Dear’s decision to leave the duo locked in mutual torment at the end: a vision more true to their relationship than that of the novel itself.

The scientific elements of the tale are skated over. Mary Shelley provided just enough hints for the informed reader to make the connection with Luigi Galvani’s recent work on electrophysiology; Dear has Frankenstein mention galvanism and electrochemistry (somewhat anachronistically), but that is as far as it goes. There is no serious attempt, therefore, to make the play a comment on the ‘Promethean ambitions’ of modern science (as Pope John Paul II called them in 2002) – a relief not because modern science is unblemished but because the alchemical trope of a solitary experimenter exceeding the bounds of God and nature is no longer the relevant vehicle for a critique.

The staging of this production is spectacular, and intelligent choices were made in the structure (if not always in the dialogue). Miller was extraordinary as the creature on the night I saw it; by all accounts Cumberbatch is equally so. Whether Dear adds anything new to the legend – as Whale and even Mel Brooks did – is debatable. But it is well to be reminded that the novel may be read not so much as a Gothic tale of monstrosity and presumption but as a comment on the consequences of how we treat one another.