Noted with approval: the NASA Astrophoto challenge for Winter 2019 is my old friend Messier 82. See if you can create a press-release worthy image of M82 using either existing NASA images for different orbiting observatories and/or ground-based optical images taken at your request by Harvard's MicroObservatory service.
Dennis Overbye has a rather odd essay in the NYT: "The Joy of Physics Isn’t in the Results, but in the Search Itself ." It starts off reading as a conventional justification for pure research based on the unanticipated but fundamentally useful technological products it produces, products that applied scientific or technological research would not have produced. You know the things: hypertext and the WWW, digital camera sensors, MRI and PET scanners, Velcro, pens that write when upside down, memory foam beds.
But then it veers off to tackle, as far as I can tell, the slow and bumpy road along the path of scientific progress from Overbye's perspective as a science writer in 2009. The pre-servicing mission Hubble contrasted with post servicing mission glory, the Large Hadron Collider's commissioning woes, and the pre-announcement hype of CDMS-2's decidedly ambiguous one (or two, if you're generous) sigma pseudo result. This is more in line with the essay's title.
I presume that Overbye's point was to highlight that the scientific method is not all about predictable results that appear in a regular and preplanned way. That both the results and process of science are unpredictable, and that's where the "joy" of it lies.
Its all very well, admirable even, for a science writer to tackle societies naive and preconceived views of how science works, but I must say I think Overbye's essay veers to much in the opposite direction to ignore the many years of routine operation by telescopes (the result of careful planning and hard work) and particle colliders, where experiments are planned and go roughly as expected. Unanticipated surprises happen, but the surprise us because they're rare and contrast so vividly with the larger edifice of scientific progress built slow accumulation and refinement.
Returning to the title of Overbye essay, I'd agree that doing science is fun. Seeing or discovering things that no-one else has ever seen or thought is a thrill. The mental challenge itself is pleasurable, even when you're treading scientific ground where others have gone before. But getting a result - answering a question - even if it isn't the answer you expected, is the payoff and culmination of all the hard work. So some of the joy of physics is certainly in the search, but a lot of it is in getting results.
The popular science news is giving heavy coverage to the claims (pretty persuasive claims) of the first direct imaging of approximately Jupiter-mass exoplanet orbiting the young star Fomalhaut - see SciAm, Newswise or the NYT, or read the Hubble Space Telescope press release.
Of course, this is not the first claim of a direct image of an exoplanet - back in 1999 a team of British astronomers (including Dave James, a former PhD colleague of mine from Birmingham) claimed to detect a 8 Jupiter mass planet orbiting Tau Bootis (see their old press release here). The presence of a planet orbiting Tau Bootis had previously (Butler et al 1997) been inferred using radial velocity measurements, but the imaging detection turned out to be false.
By the way, SolStation.com is a pretty neat site if you're interested in nearby stars and planets.
For those interested in technical details, the team involved with the Fomalhaut imaging detection posted the following observational and theoretical papers on todays astro-ph:
Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light Years from Earth
Paul Kalas, James R. Graham, Eugene Chiang, Michael P. Fitzgerald, Mark Clampin, Edwin S. Kite, Karl Stapelfeldt, Christian Marois, John Krist,
Comments: 25 pages; 4 tables; 4 figures. To appear in Science November 13, 2008
Fomalhaut's Debris Disk and Planet: Constraining the Mass of Fomalhaut b From Disk Morphology
E. Chiang, E. Kite, P. Kalas, J. R. Graham, M. Clampin
The Hardvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is conducting a survey investigating the effects of the scientific and artistic choices made in processing astronomical images for public consumption.
Go help them out by completing the survey.
I doubt I can remember the names of all the classes I took in my undergraduate Physics with Astrophysics BSc at Birmingham in the early 90's, but I know for sure which classes I always wanted to take but were never offered.
We didn't have any class that dealt with the Philosophy of Science, and we didn't have any class that covered the History of Science. If you had any interest in those topics you had to go find a books in the library yourself. The closest we had was Introduction to Astronomy, which briefly covered some historical ideas in Astronomy (Olber's Paradox, etc). (Later, as a PhD student in the UK we didn't have classes at all unlike the US PhD system.)
There are some people who say "Why bother telling students about all the wrong things people believed in the past? And even things that are right, e.g. electromagnetism, are much more easily taught from a modern standpoint using modern mathematical techniques, and not in the tortuous and overly complicated ways they were originally derived."
There is some truth to this. Certainly we wouldn't teach the laws of motion and dynamics in the way Newton presented them in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It uses geometrical proofs that most modern students lack the training to appreciate, and that can be done much more cleanly and simply with more modern math (to understand Newton's Principia as it was written you really need another genius, Chandrasekhar, to explain it to you).
But knowing what people once believed, why they believed it, and why they then moved on to believing what we now believe, is still valuable and is good scientific practice (its also intellectually interesting, which one would hope real scientists would appreciate for its own merit). Furthermore, understanding the method and philosophy of science is important to being a good scientist - you can go a long way just doing things they way you were trained to in grad school, but without being taught the Philosophy of Science you can easily get off in the wrong direction.
All of this becomes more important when scientists need to communicate clearly and accurately with the public, in particular in cases where science is struggling against anti-scientific social groups (e.g. creationist/ID, anti-vaccinationists, global-warming-denialists).
As evidence that even people trained as scientists often not understand the metaphysical foundations of science, James Williams of the University of Sussex has studied the perceived meaning of words such as fact, theory, hypothesis, etc, in graduate students with existing science degrees who plan on going on to become science educators.
From "Is Something Missing from Science Education" [io9.com]. The io9 article continues• 76% equated a fact with 'truth' and 'proven'
• 23% defined a theory as 'unproven ideas' with less than half (47%) recognizing a theory as a well evidenced exposition of a natural phenomenon
• 34% defined a law as a rule not to be broken, and forty-one percent defined it as an idea that science fully supports.
• Definitions of 'hypothesis' were the most consistent, with 61% recognizing the predictive, testable nature of hypotheses.
The results show a lack of understanding of what scientific theories and laws are. And the nature of a 'fact' in science was not commonly understood, with only 11% defining a fact as evidence or data. Here are just a few of their definitions of a scientific theory: "An idea based on a little evidence, not fact"; "an idea about something, not necessarily true"; "unproven ideas."
Although this survey is hardly proof of widespread epidemic of ignorance among recent science grads, it does suggest that many science programs educate students only in the technical aspects of their field, failing to provide them with the underlying context and purpose of scientific study.If people with science degrees have trouble using even the most basic and fundament words correctly then we have a problem - and there is little hope that the general public is going to learn if we can't explain it to them.
Williams fears that failing to educate science graduates in the history and philosophy of science, these grads are ill-equipped to educate a public whose lives increasingly depend on a basic understanding of how scientists operate and what scientific findings really mean. Both he and Gallagher believe that introducing such courses to undergraduate science curricula could go a long way toward making science education more complete.
In the final debate between the presidential candidates last night (10/15/2008) John McCain reiterated his ridiculous and factually-incorrect attack on Obama for being part of a bipartisan group that made appropriation requests for $3 million to upgrade the Adler Planetarium's 40-year old Zeiss mark VI projector.
Who has the best planetarium in the world? As Jotman notes, it looks like its the Chinese - the Beijing Planetarium has just installed a brand new Zeiss Mark IX optical projector with all the upgrades. Oh, and they'd like every middle or large city in China to have a planetarium too. China has many problems, but at least their politicians understand that scientific and technological literacy and progress is a vital part of improving their nation. Rather than dismissing knowledge and expertise as "elitism" they understand its value. Good for them.
The Adler planetarium has created a web page where you can donate to them for the purposes of upgrading their ancient projector. I'm not sure if the US is rich enough anymore to afford those fancy modern models that the Chinese get, but at least we should be able to afford something newer than the 40-year old version.
In the October 7th Presidential debate John McCain complained that Obama had voted for (among other things) $3 million in pork barrel funding for "an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?"
I try to avoid overt party politics on this blog, largely because these days you can never be sure if some frothing-at-the-mouth political hack will try to punish you for it, but sometimes you have to stand up for the truth.
As has lately become typical of McCain, his attack on Obama was not exactly true.
The Adler Planetarium has issued a press release to clarify the situation. It is (a) not an overhead projector, it the device [see image] that projects the stars on the planetarium dome as part of an educational presentation to the public, (b) their existing Zeiss projector is over 40 years old and Zeiss doesn't makes parts for it anymore, (c) the requested federal assistance was supported by a bipartisan selection of Illinois congressional people and Senators, (d) it never received the money in any case.
I don't have to mention that McCain, supposed opposer of Pork Barrel spending, has a campaign staff chock full of lobbyists for foreign governments and the financial institutions whose greed and incompetence caused the ongoing financial meltdown. Or that he chose a running mate known for truly excessive pork barrel spending ($300 million for bridges to nowhere that she supported before the outcry, money she still hasn't all given back).
But apart from the rank hypocrisy there is a deeper point, as explained by University of Chicago astronomer Andrey Kravtsov in a post at TPM ("$3 Million Overhead Projector? McCain Lie Shows No Understanding of Science or Technology"):
I saw a planetarium show at the Adler Planetarium in 1999, and even speaking as an astronomer I found it spectacular and awe-inspiring (familiarity breeds contempt: I normally find TV shows on astronomy to be dull).I find it appalling that Sen. McCain would call a science education tool for public (largely children) for a historic planetarium with millions of visitors a year a wasteful earmark. The planetarium's focus, as stated on their website (http://adlerplanetarium.org) is "on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science." Is an investment in such public facility at the time when US competitiveness in math and sciences is a constant source of alarm a waste?
"American's ability to compete in a 21st Century economy rests on our continued investments in math and science education," said Rep. Brian Baird, Chairman of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee in Congress, after the passage of The 21st Century Competitiveness Act of 2007.
Considering such investments "wasteful earmarks" today, even in the face of the financial crisis, will severely cripple US economic competitiveness in the increasingly high-tech world down the road.
Being in galaxy in the path of a jet emanating from a supermassive black hole in a neighboring galaxy might be quite catastrophic:
A powerful jet from a super massive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy, according to new findings from NASA observatories. This never-before witnessed galactic violence may have a profound effect on planets in the jet's path and trigger a burst of star formation in its destructive wake
Known as 3C321, the system contains two galaxies in orbit around each other. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show both galaxies contain super massive black holes at their centers, but the larger galaxy has a jet emanating from the vicinity of its black hole. The smaller galaxy apparently has swung into the path of this jet.
The combined effects of this radiation and particles travelling at almost the speed of light could have disastrous consequences for the atmospheres of any Earth-like planets lying in the path of the jet.From the Yahoo news article:
For example, protective layers of ozone in the planet's upper atmosphere could be destroyed, which could result in the mass extinction of any life that had evolved on the planet.
The larger galaxy has a multi-digit name but is called the "death star galaxy" by one of the researchers who discovered the galactic bullying, Daniel Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.However, the actual scientific paper (by Evans et al, still undergoing peer review but available here: astro-ph/0712.2669) wisely ignores the stuff that gets the press excited. None of the speculation regarding zapping planets or star formation in the press stories is in the scientific paper at all. Indeed, its rather sad that the straight facts are not considered exciting enough for the press stories, and instead the speculative stuff gets pushed to the top.
Tens of millions of stars, including those with orbiting planets, are likely in the path of the deadly jet, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
If Earth were in the way — and it's not — the high-energy particles and radiation of the jet would in a matter of months strip away the planet's protective ozone layer and compress the protective magnetosphere, said Evans. That would then allow the sun and the jet itself to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.
And what would that do life on the planet?
"Decompose it," Tyson said.
"Sterilize it," Evans piped in.
This composite image shows the jet from a black hole at the center of a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy, the first time such an interaction has been found. In the image, data from several wavelengths have been combined. X-rays from Chandra (colored purple), optical and ultraviolet (UV) data from Hubble (red and orange), and radio emission from the Very Large Array (VLA) and MERLIN (blue) show how the jet from the main galaxy on the lower left is striking its companion galaxy to the upper right. The jet impacts the companion galaxy at its edge and is then disrupted and deflected, much like how a stream of water from a hose will splay out after hitting a wall at an angle.
Speaking of the Templeton Foundation, it is claimed that the TF(*) was one of the few sources of funding that Guillermo Gonzalez managed to obtain. Indeed, it seems he only managed to bring in $170,000 spread over 5 years, compared to the average of $1,300,000 other ISU physics and astronomy faculty had brought in while they were on tenure track!
GG's failure to bring in normal levels of funding, in addition to a dramatic drop in publication rate and lack of grad student/postdocs, were major factors in him being denied tenure. These are, along with undergraduate teaching, major aspects of being a professional scientist in tenure-track although tenure is not based on a fixed set of rules.
Many good scientists do not get tenure (e.g. Rob Knob of the Galactic Interactions blog), and many good scientists never even get onto tenure-track in the first place. Given that GG appears to have failed to satisfy the requirements in many ways it is totally unsurprising that he was denied tenure at Iowa State University.
That he espoused an unscientific astronomical version of Intelligent Design and had close links to the Discovery Institute was also, quite rightly and quite fairly, another aspect of concern for the the faculty in the Physics department he was attempting to get tenure from. The Discovery Institutes's anti-secular and anti-scientific agenda, coupled with its manifest dishonesty is no secret. The recently revealed emails clearly show that GG's DI/ID links were known and were (entirely fairly) viewed negatively but were not used as a litmus test to "discriminate" against him. Of course, this will not stop Gonzalez and the DI is hijacking a routine and just decision in order to play politics.
After all, the faculty must have been aware of his views when they offered him tenure-track in the first place - they were no secret in the astronomical community - yet he did get a tenure track position. I have no doubt that while the faculty may have viewed GG's views with distaste they would have given him tenure had he satisfied the standard requirements of all tenure track faculty: bring in funding, mentor students and postdocs, be scientifically productive. Guillermo Gonzalez has only himself to blame for his current position.
Gonzalez could have used those tenure track years to engage in peer-reviewed research to develop the concept of galactic habitability and turn it from a poorly-constrained hypothesis into a robust theory. He could easily have applied for grants to pay for several grad students and postdocs to to work with him to expand our knowledge of the role galaxies play in habitable planet formation and evolution.
But Guillermo Gonzalez didn't attempt to further science. Instead he decided to present his speculative and religiously-distorted views of Galactic Habitability to the unsuspecting public as scientific fact through his book "The Privileged Planet", bypassing peer review altogether.
In the mean time real science, done by real scientists, went ahead and left Guillermo Gonzalez behind. The ADS abstract service records 440 astronomy-related abstracts with the word habitable in 2006-2007 alone. If we repeat the search requiring the surname Gonzalez be one of the authors we get 1 abstract, and its a M. Gonzalez, not Guillermo. I have to expand the search to 2000-2007 before the Guillermo Gonzalez(**) appears, and then only in three abstracts, two of which are reviews rather than new work. Again, by way of comparison 107 abstracts contained "Galactic" and "Habitable" in the abstract between 2000 and 2007 (1353 with the word Habitable alone).
If Guillermo Gonzalez really believed that astrophysics did indeed provide convincing evidence of a Designer (specifically a Christian God) why would he have abandoned actual research?
(*) I am informed that the TF fund many good studies the interaction between science and religion, and that the TF is opposed to the "culture war" spin presented by fundamentalists such as the DI. Some of the people they occasionally fund are less rational though.
(**) There is also another Guillermo Gonzalez in professional astronomy.
Anyway, all this politics is tiring. In my next post we'll be back to discussing really interesting stuff. Yup, more on galactic winds!
Paul Davies, best known for exploiting anthropic arguments in the service of religious apologetica and presenting the results to the unsuspecting public as popular "science" books, is at it again: a November 24th Op-Ed piece in the NYT that trots out the old canard that science is based on faith in the same way religion is.
Of course, almost none of this is true, as almost any scientist at any type will quickly tell you.
When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
Davies recently made his commitment to deism clear in his New York Times Op-Ed, Science on Faith, 24 November, 2007 going so far as to write:
Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.
While coyly refusing to name or identify a particular candidate monotheistic religion, equating faith in the supernatural with a faith that the universe is itself real, testable and knowable is essentially a reductio ad absurdum where science can be faulted for not knowing anything if it can't explain absolutely everything. The only motive for making such an absurd argument is to open a crack where the wedge of deism can be inserted into scientific reason, to divide and dominate it. It is essentially a political, not scientific argument, one that advocates deism in exactly the same way as the "intelligent design" religious movement.
[image source: Gonzalo Giribet / NY times]
Carl Zimmer has produced yet another fascinating article in the science section of the NYT, featuring Dr Gonzalo Giribet and his group's research on the evolution of mite harvestmen (a relative of the daddy longlegs).
In short, as any species of mite harvestmen has a small physical range (apparently of order 50 miles or so) and hence do not spread or disperse much on their own, they provide a great way of tracing continental motion on time scales of hundreds of millions of years.
To get beyond the somewhat distorted press accounts regarding the Spoor et al letter in Nature on "Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya" you should read this post at John Hawk's anthropology web log.
As with much press coverage of scientific issues something that has been known about for many decades: that multiple species of Homo coexisted at the same time, and that the evolutionary tree of genus Homo is quite bushy and complicated, and not a simple linear ladder of "progress"; is being presented as a new discovery, and furthermore the actual issues discussed in the Spoor letter aren't covered in the press coverage.
The image is a to-scale superposition of the skulls of the young adult (or late subadult) Homo Erectus (KNM-ER 42700, one of the subjects of the Spoor et al letter, cranial volume about 700 ml) on top of the skull of the largest known Homo Erectus skull (OH 9). A cool image that illustrates the diversity within Homo Erectus.
Just FYI, 90% of modern humans have cranial volumes in the range 1040 to 1595 ml [talk.origins FAQ], with volumes less than 1000 ml being extremely uncommon.
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