category: science
This image of “Nano-Explosions” won first prize in at the November 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) “Science As Art” competition.
“Nano-Explosions Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level. (Image: Fanny Beron, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)”
Quoted by Doron Swade in his book, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, this seems pretty much universally relevant:
Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
K.C. Cole has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Why editors must dare to be dumb, about how science editors tend to be uncomfortable with advanced science topics they do not understand. What it boils down to, in Cole’s opinion, is a fundamental discomfort with uncertainty and senselessness:
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
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So what is it about science that makes them [editors] uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
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Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
Embrace uncertainty, in science, in art and in life. As the Talking Heads sang, stop making sense.
Everything you ever wanted to know about gastropod respiration but were afraid to ask. This is expecially engrossing:
“If you watch a slug long enough, you will notice that its pneumostome rhythmically opens and closes, in other words, you will witness the slug breathing. The rate of breathing of a slug is probably determined by the metabolic rate and the state of hydration of the slug as well as the ambient temperature and humidity.”
If you watch a slug long enough.
Too much coffee today? The Wikipedia entry on caffeine has a great picture showing what can result from sharing your morning cup with a drowsy spider:
Think about this next time you reach for another pot of joe to help you muddle through a particularly complex problem.
Of course, people are different from spiders, so the worst you might experience from coffee is
…restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, cardiac arrhythmia or tachycardia, and psychomotor agitation, gastrointestinal complaints, increased blood pressure, rapid pulse, vasoconstriction (tightening or constricting of superficial blood vessels) sometimes resulting in cold hands or fingers, increased amounts of fatty acids in the blood, an increased production of gastric acid…mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, loss of social inhibition, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis….”
Then again, how bad can it be for you if your company brews it and your boss encourages you to consume all the free coffee you want?
Drink up!
“Tree of Life: the first-known sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organisms.”
From the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin exhibition, November 19, 2005 to May 29, 2006.
Beautiful visualizations by Benjamin Fry: “There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human genome.”
A game of Rashomon, anyone?
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In A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), Stephen Hawking tells the story of an elderly woman who confronted Bertrand Russell at the end of a lecture on orbital mechanics, claiming she had a theory superior to his. “We don’t live on a ball revolving around the Sun,” she said, “we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.” Wishing to humor the woman Russell asked, “And what does this turtle stand on?” “On the back of a second, still larger turtle,” was her confident answer. “But what holds up the second turtle?” he persisted, now in a slightly exasperated tone. “It’s no use, young man,” the old woman replied, “it’s turtles all the way down.”
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Stephen Hawking in BriefHistoryOfTime starts with the same anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a gianttortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What isthe tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,”said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”
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A Brief History of Time begins with a striking image and a wonderful true story: An elderly lady attended a public lecture given by an astrophysicist on how the Earth goes around the Sun and how the Sun circles about with countless other stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. During the question and answer session, the woman stood up and told the distinguished scientist that his lecture was nonsense, that the Earth is a flat disk supported on the back of an enormous tortoise. The scientist tried to outwit the lady by asking, “Well, my dear, what supports the tortoise?” To which she replied, “You’re a very clever young man, but not clever enough. It’s turtles all the way down!”
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 - 2:20pm |
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