Politics of Science

For the last few weeks there's a discussion in Poland, spurred by plans of the Ministry of Higher Education to abandon the "habilitation" part of the career path. The reason for this move is to speed up the possibilities of scientific career for your researchers (an make them stay in Poland!).

Shortly after the plans were revealed, 44 prominent professors from humanist departments of various institutes and universities have published a very strong letter, defending the current model, with its long advancement path, with a message:
in humanist disciplines it is the experience, not the talent, that decides on matureness and value of the research. Maybe in physics or mathematics young bright people may discover something interesting, but in the Polish literature studies or in history or in theory of theater it is the knowledge and experience - the age of the scientists that carries the weight. needless to say, the average age of the authors of the letter is, well, `experienced'.

Now, there are three trains of thought that this letter has stirred in my head.

First, that there must be a very strong difference between the humanities and `hard sciences'. Physics, biology or geology deal with external reality. The measure of a theory or experiment is in its power to show new phenomena in Nature or to explain them. No matter how venerable you are - if your work disagrees with observations it is invalid. It is no wonder that in the `Science Wars' between the postmodernist humanities in the US and the `reality' sciences the favourite weapon of the lit-crit crowd is to postulate that Science is but one of many alternative `world narratives'. This downgrade of Science would allow the humanists to claim their level of freedom from being accurate is generally applicable.
In Poland the Science Wars seem to have taken the additional conflict of generations flavour. Old professors defending their posts by claiming the `deep differences' between, for example, physics and literary criticism - well they might be right after all.

Which brings me to the second train of thought: are these disciplines different in Poland? In several aspects the answer is - yes. For one thing, despite very, very low level of funding for science in Poland, the hard sciences note some successes on the international scale. From astronomy to zoology. On the other hand, the humanities seem to boil in their own sauce, as the saying is. International publications? Who needs them! Certainly very few of international readers... Additionally, as there is no measuring stick of Nature, the Professors judge the validity of research by relationship to their own work. And thus the advancement of a young scientist is based on his social skills and on fitting into the existing trends, structures and cliques. I ask the international reader: do you know of any significant development of huninities originating from Poland in the past 20 years?

Lastly, a word on my personal history: as I have left the official path of active, institutionalized research some fifteen years ago I have no interest in supporting this or that model. In fact, my own career has been positively influenced by my tutors. They have not only encouraged me but also actively helped in my first publications. Without putting their name on the papers - situation very unusual in the master-apprentice model of humanist disciplines, where usually the Master becomes a co-author as a norm, without the real work done (sometimes automatically on the first place). Both my masters thesis and PhD tutors (Jan Blinowski and Jacek Kossut) have followed the rule "these are your calculations so it is your paper". Significantly on the papers with mixed experimental/theoretical content I was usually one of the last authors, which bears witness to the primacy of experiment over theory, at least the kind of theory I was involved with.
So I can say that I was lucky, up to a point, in my career. The relative freedom of research I enjoyed, constrained by the needs to find topics interesting enough for the experimentalists is a value, that I recognize fully today.

And thus, whatever the actual means are I would always support processes that promote young, enthusiastic scientists. This is the only way that our societies can manage to overcome the problems ahead of us. And the role of older, more experienced scientists should be to nurture and grow the talented younger colleagues, not to defend their positions via abstract hierarchies, closed grant applications and politics. Unless their disciplines would devolve to the geriatric obscurantism.

What pride is spelled by the words of Humphry Davy (who had quite a lot of achievements under his belt), who said that his greatest discovery was the discovery of Michael Faraday. Would every professor from the 44 list have something like this to say...

Right and Wrong in Science.

A very interesting and thought provoking paper has appeared at arXiv. Crime and punishment in scientific research by Mathieu Bouville attempts to show discrepancy between the current policies for scientific misconduct and the goals of promoting Science in its various aspects, including getting more knowledge about Reality.

Arguments against scientific misconduct one finds in the literature generally fail to support current policies on research fraud: they may not prove wrong what is typically considered research misconduct and they tend to make wrong things that are not usually seen as scientific fraud, in particular honest errors. I argue that society cannot set a rule enjoining scientists to be honest, so any such rule can only be internal to science. Therefore society cannot legitimately enforce it. Moreover, until an argument is provided to prove that lack of honesty is far worse than lack of technical competence, intentional deceit should not be punished much more harshly than technical errors

While the paper is short and for me just an intro to the subject, it is interesting and opened my eyes to the mismatch between the human side of doing Science and its general aims.

CERN's LHC to be stopped by Hawaiian court?

Some time ago I have found that two men have sued CERN (at a court in Hawaii!) and asked the court to stop the building and operations of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.
If you think that this is April Fools day - think again. It's deadly serious.
Especially when one looks at the `achievements' of one of the plaintiffs.

The way that the world turns away from Science, away from its ethics and the special position with respect to Reality that Science has is indeed frightening. I can only hope that the court would follow the previous decisions (as was the case of the heavy Ion Collider). But ... there is little chance of the judge giving a verdict of thoroughness of the Dover district intelligent design trial. Simply because we do not know, what to expect from the LHC. That's the purpose behind it!

Of course, the danger of being swallowed by a Black Hole or some other `strangelet' in very small. Yet - can we say it doesn't exist? But by that token, every action, from the first step our ancestors have taken, going down the trees, is dangerous. And if, indeed the scientists have to prove that what they would so would be absolutely safe, then I would ask the plaintiffs to prove, on similar absoluteness, that what they do in everyday actions (such as going to the toilet) is just as absolutely safe and Black Hole or `malignant fractal' free...

Global Warming and Social Warming

One of my favourite authors of sociophysics papers, Serge Galam, has published an interesting short analysis of social phenomena associated with the frenzy of words and resolutions (hardly a frenzy of real activities) that is called `response to the Global Warming threat'.

The paper, found on arXiv, Global Warming: the Sacrificial Temptation argues that the emotional side of the situation has led all research on the warming and conclusions of such research away from the scientific princliples.

Let me quote the abstract and conclusions of this paper:

The claimed unanimity of the scientific community about the human culpability for global warming is questioned. Up today there exists no scientific proof of human culpability. It is not the number of authors of a paper, which validates its scientific content. The use of probability to assert the degree of certainty with respect the global warming problem is shown to be misleading. The debate about global warming has taken on emotional tones driven by passion and irrationality while it should be a scientific debate. The degree of hostility used to mull any dissonance voice demonstrates that the current debate has acquired a quasi-religious nature. Scientists are behaving as priests in their will "to save the planet". We are facing a dangerous social phenomenon, which must be addressed from the social point of view. The current unanimity of citizens, scientists, journalists, intellectuals and politicians is intrinsically worrying. The calls to sacrifice our way of life to calm down the upset nature is an emotional ancestral reminiscence of archaic fears, which should be analyzed as such.

To sum up above analysis of the social and human aspects of global warming, most caution should be taken to prevent opportunistic politicians, more and
more numerous, to subscribe to the proposed temptation of a sacrifice frame in order to reinforce their power by canalizing these archaic fears that are reemerging. Let us keep in mind that in a paroxysm crisis of fear, opinions can be activated very quickly among millions of mobilized citizens, ready to act in the same direction, against the same enemy: it then enough to designate it.

Read it, even if you fear the global warming.

New Scientist and dark energy without dark energy

Some time ago I have decided to subscribe to New Scientist. My reactions are, on the average, rather mixed. Half o f the printed pages are taken by job postings for UK (which are rather uninteresting for me. And the general tabloid style, which I have already ridiculed here is a bit too tabloid.

But there is a positive side of the `hunt for the NEWS' approach, which, in summary more than compensated the shortcomings. It is exactly the tabloid style hunt for the man bites dog sensational news that allows to find scientific research that is off the beaten path.

The reason for this mention is the reference to works of David Wiltshire, especially his efforts to build alternative to the cosmology model. Ever since the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, I have felt that the acceptance of the Dark Energy/Dark Matter Universe, despite the 120 orders of magnitude discrepancy with the basic quantum `explanation', was a bit too fast.
My own experiences with solid state physics are that if anyone proposes an explanation that is off the data by, a single order of magnitude, it is `suspect', two orders make it useless. But hundred and twenty orders of magnitude? Yet the astrophysics community has accepted the 70%/25%/5% explanation so easily, without real understanding about what these 95% of the Universe are made of. Carroll's Preposterous Universe offers a good label for this quick understanding.

For these reasons I am grateful to the New Scientist for pointing out the work of Wiltshire. His papers, on Dark Energy without Dark Energy and Cosmic clocks, cosmic variance and cosmic averages, available on the WEB, are rather difficult in their mathematical part, but they are also very pedagogical.
In the words of the author:

An overview is presented of a recently proposed "radically conservative" solution to the problem of dark energy in cosmology. The proposal yields a model universe which appears to be quantitatively viable, in terms of its fit to supernovae luminosity distances, the angular scale of the sound horizon in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy spectrum, and the baryon acoustic oscillation scale. It may simultaneously resolve key anomalies relating to primordial lithium abundances, CMB ellipticity, the expansion age of the universe and the Hubble bubble feature. The model uses only general relativity, and matter obeying the strong energy condition, but revisits operational issues in interpreting average measurements in our presently inhomogeneous universe, from first principles. The present overview examines both the foundational issues concerning the definition of gravitational energy in a dynamically expanding space, the quantitative predictions of the new model and its best-fit cosmological parameters, and the prospects for an era of new observational tests in cosmology.

While the calculations are rather intricate (too intricate for this amateur), the background physics and assumptions used are physical common sense and with much closer links to reality (such as observations of inhomogeneity of the Universe) that the Dark Energy models.

Why is then Wiltshire's work not the hot topic of astrophysics conferences?

Cultural Natural Selection

An interesting paper by Rogers and Ehrlich, titled Natural selection and cultural rates of change, published in a recent edition of PNAS, has brought my attention to the issue if some principles of the Darwinian evolutionary theory might be applicable to cultural transmission. The findings document the intuitive reasoning that it should be so.

It has been claimed that a meaningful theory of cultural evolution
is not possible because human beliefs and behaviors do not follow
predictable patterns. However, theoretical models of cultural
transmission and observations of the development of societies
suggest that patterns in cultural evolution do occur. Here, we
analyze whether two sets of related cultural traits, one tested
against the environment and the other not, evolve at different
rates in the same populations. Using functional and symbolic
design features for Polynesian canoes, we show that natural
selection apparently slows the evolution of functional structures,
whereas symbolic designs differentiate more rapidly. This finding
indicates that cultural change, like genetic evolution, can follow
theoretically derived patterns.

Of course the mechanisms of change are different: in place of biological mutations we have innovation and cultural drift. But the stabilizing (or destabilizing) effects of selection on those traits that have strong link with reality which may influence the survivability of individuals and societies (canoe design, but also obviously, building design, food preparation etc.) are the same in mechanisms in biology and cultural change. The difference between the observed rates of change in functional and decorative design elements of canoes provide not only beautiful observational example of such differentiating process in action, but also are reminiscent of the `Spandrels of San Marco' discussion. Is it possible that a functional (i.e. selective) element in canoe design could come from a decorative change?
What was the origin of the high bows of the Viking boats? Was it technical/functional when conceived? I guess that yes, but perhaps there is more to the story?

In any case, this is a short but quite interesting paper.

Crowd Behaviour, continued

Following the topic of the previous post: fortunately, the search through references has been possible, and thus I have been lucky enough to read four of the key papers related to the field under discussion.

It seems that indeed, animals and humans alike may be led by relatively small groups of informed individuals, and that in most cases such non-democratic methods do have an advantage (for example in choosing when/where to feed, or in choice of the new location for a bee swarm). Whether the selective advantages of such a method of being led by small `informed' minority are applicable to human societies is an interesting question, both from scientific and from political point of view.

The paper mentioned in the previous post, Consensus decision making in human crowds, by Dyer at. al. depicts a very interesting experiment, where conditions reduce humans to `animal' status, by careful choice of setting where verbal and sign communications are prohibited. Despite the limitations, strong correlations were observed.

For those interested in following the trail deeper, I suggest the following papers:

Evolutionary Origins of Leadership and Followership, by Van Vugt

Consensus decision making in animals, by Conradt and Roper
Group decision-making in animals by Conradt and Roper

and

Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move by Couzin et. al.