omenti

teaching kids science outdoors

I've been following Ben Blonder for some time.  He's a young career ecologist at Berkeley. Along the way he's been involved in projects teaching kids science.  He's just published a new book on teaching science to kids outside.  Trust me - Ben knows what he's doing and has involved some of his collaborators in the book.  (I know his dad well ..  Greg describes this as a true labor of love, and it shows)

Place-Based Scientific Inquiry

The online/downloadable version is free.  If you buy a copy, profits will be donated to science education. 

It looks like the focus is grade 3 → 12.   It's probably good for those of you doing a bit of amateur science for fun.

recommended!!!

 

 

 

 

preview season

As many of you know I like to celebrate major accomplishments of friends.  This time I'll offer previews from two good friends as well as another that could have an impact on education.

 

The first is  Juliette Powell's second book.  The A.I. Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is the working title and it's a further development of her dissertation at Columbia.  I've been fortunate enough to have read the nearly-final draft.  Well balanced and accessible to non-specialists, it's going to be an excellent resource for people trying to sort out promises and pitfalls that can impact much of the future.  One person who had an advance look will be using it as required reading for a college course.  Be on the lookout!

 

The second is from Sarah Pavan.  One of the best beach volleyball players in the world, she's also a clear and deep thinker.  As I've aged I've learned to learn from those outside my area.  She's  been a source of ideas. At the elite level women's beach volleyball is a mental game with communication being one of the defining aspects.  A few months ago her teammate of five years decided to quit the team.  Sarah was faced with finding someone with the necessary complementary skill set as well as the drive, passion, ability to communicate and chemistry.  Canada only has a few candidates, but Sarah found the right one in Sophie Bukovec.  I expect to see them developing as a team over the next year as they focus on the Paris Olympics in 2024.

 

 

And finally potential news from what I consider the most important college course in the country. Sense & Sensibility & Science is a course at Berkeley developed and taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments.   Here's an overview:

 

This is a course on the ideas from science that are most widely useful for everyone. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for all kinds of reasoning, from reading the news critically to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

Every day we make decisions that can and should be informed by science. We make decisions as individuals, as voters, and as members of our various communities. We make decisions as students and parents and policy makers. The problem is, we don’t do it so well—a fact sadly apparent in political debates. It’s easy to blame poor decision-making on the greed, irresponsibility, ignorance, or incompetence of other people. But the problem seems to be more basic than that. It seems we face a paradox. Living in a democracy means that everyone’s view counts the same as everyone else’s. But to make decisions informed by science, we often need to defer to those with relevant expertise. Therefore, we shouldn't rely on a democratic system to make the best decisions. Or should we? This basic tension between science and democratic decision-making serves as a unifying theme for Sense & Sensibility & Science (SSS), a course that aims to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers. We will explore key aspects of scientific thinking that everyone should know, especially the many ways that we humans tend to fool ourselves, and how to avoid them—including how to differentiate signal from noise, evaluate causal claims, and avoid reasoning biases. We’ll then look at the best models for using science to guide decisions, since the rational and arational (e.g., values, fears, and goals) then have to be combined. We will explore these themes experientially, often with in-class activities and discussions, and we will culminate in two open-ended projects to design better methods of deliberation and decision making, first as groups, and then as individuals. Co-taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology, S&S&S fosters intellectual advancement for interdisciplinary knowledge seekers.

 

Browse through the topics and resources section.  You'll get something reading the recommended materials and thinking about the topics.  It's one of the few places outside the community where I've seen scientific optimism discussed. A book is being developed aimed at college students, although it should be widely applicable.  There's a serious need to put together something like this at the high school level even though many states would probably label thinking about the process of science as 'woke'..

feel free to comment!

an almost lost word from the dictionary

Reading an obscure paper from the 1880s a word stopped me - apricity.  It seemed like I had come across it before and there were hints from the context, but it was time for the OED.¹  I pulled out the first volume of my old compact edition - the one with the magnifying glass - and found it.  An obscure word dating to 1623 meaning the warmth of the Sun in the Winter.

 

The warmth of a bright Sun in on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't isn't perturbed by the cold air and can be quite comfortable.  Then it hit me I heard the word in a John McPhee lecture in Princeton.² A few decades had passed since he wrote Coming into the Country, but it was about three Alaskas including a look at the Winter.  A perfect word for some of the days.

 

A day of apricity can make snow melt in subzero air temperatures on  Southern-facing roofs only to freeze into beautifully clear long icicles at the edge.  This type of ice formation is often free of bubbles producing beautifully clear ice.  If you have wide enough icicles you might try making an ice lens and starting a fire.

 

Such days are made for outdoor recreation if there isn't any wind.  Perhaps more importantly the basic principle - heat transfer by radiation - can keep heating expenses down.  Heating and moving air to fill rooms is enormously inefficient. If you aren't moving around much you might try a small radiant heater and point it at the area where you are. Heat what you need to heat with infrared light. Direct sunlight is the same...  sit in the Sun.  These measures, plus wearing warm indoor clothing and being somewhat active lets you get away with low thermostat settings.  And be on the lookout for aprocity as that can give a big psychological boost!

 

Another Winter word I like is tingilinde. It's a constructed word based on J.R.R. Tolkien's elfin language Quenya meaning the sparkle of the starlight reflecting on the snow on a dark moonless Winter night.  Such sights could be spectacular in Montana away from town when it was really cold and a bit of new snow had fallen as tiny ice crystals. Another great spot is Yellowstone .. super cold air forms the right kind of ice crystal snow near the hot springs and geysers.   Once it was magical - the cold starlight reflecting from millions of tiny diamonds along with the greens and reds of a bright aurora dancing overhead.   On such nights you don't notice that it's really cold.

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¹ The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the 1928 edition.  Devilishly small print that requires a magnifying glass, but the real OED and only about $80 (still a lot back then!) rather than the fortune the full dictionary went for.  There's a lovely bit of historical fiction on the dictionary and the people who made it happen:  The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  It's set in the time and place with many of the characters, but focuses on what was left out..  those who weren't white, male and of a certain class.  Recommended!

² McPhee is a great writer - a master of the creative non-fiction genre.   

 

 

 

low distortion rearview mirrors

 

History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

      -  Mark Twain

Except it wasn't him.  

His clever and prolific writing made people assume he said it even though he never did.  It turns out it first appears around 1970 in a poem by a Canadian artist named Robert Colombo.  When asked if he knew where it was from Colombo couldn't recall other than he might have seen it in a literary section of the New York Times a few years earlier.  In fact it appears with and without attribution several times around the time of Colombo's poem in the early 70s.   That said, a hundred years from now people will still think Twain said it.

 

The process of science is much messier than the simple order kids learn in school.   There are too many dependancies to list.  A few philosophers of science  - notably Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - have tried to describe how scientific revolutions and change happens.  The how, where and why of scientific change.  Kuhn and Popper are somewhat at odds.  Kuhn's ideas were popularized and are still taught as how scientific revolutions happen.  It turns out that both of the frameworks are deeply flawed and have fallen from favor with serious students of the history and philosophy of science.  I came to it late, but I'm more a fan of an earlier step - trying to understand some of the history of science. 

 

Unfortunately the history of science is often neglected in scientific training.  Students are told a few selective stories from the great revolutionaries without much context.  Experiments, theories and techniques are described with little background.  The struggle and small steps forward and backward are  missing.  The world seems much too messy when you start doing real science on your own.  (this is probably true in many fields!)

 

One gets bits and pieces of local history from the last generation or two in their subfield.  This can be very powerful. I learned a lot about the development of the atomic bomb as some of the people I studied with were parts of the Manhattan Project.  You need to learn the importance of failure as well as hunches and the need to distrust your own work.  

 

The history of science, like the history of art or music,  is a story of the development of ideas that can be appreciated by non-specialists.   There are some wonderful books out there.  The trigger for this post was one of them:  Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen.  I know the technical area well, but have big holes in my understanding of how all of this came about.  If you can follow articles in the New York Times science section, you'll learn a lot of what the physics is saying without the math and how it changed the world.  He gives a very simple, but accurate, description of entropy and has the best description of photosynthesis I've seen that doesn't get into biochemistry.  The historical motivations make it come alive.  I'm stealing some of his clear descriptions.

 

Most of this is probably true in many other fields.  About twenty years ago a friend invited me to dinner with Maurice Wilkes - his grand advisor.  Even though Maurice was in his late eighties the discussion went on late into the night and continued on two more occasions. I'm not a computer scientist or engineer, but Maurice is a physicist who happened to invent a good deal of the fundamentals of computing that's still in use.  Hearing him talk about the early history and the connections to our shared background made it all come alive.  The problems computers had to solve as well as the nuts and bolts of designing one - provided a wonderfully rich learning experience.  There was this hint of how the great mind of this humble person worked. A good history book can provide that kind of experience.

 

 

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

scribbler moon

Margaret Atwood

David Mitchell

Elif Shafak

Han Kang

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Ocean Vuong

 

Each of these authors has taken a walk through Nordmarka Forest in Norway to place a their manuscript in a special room in the Deichman Library.  Ninety four more will follow.  The authors are specially chosen for their imagination and the stories are to based on the themes of imagination and time.  No one other than the authors will see their words until 2114.   In that year someone who doesn't exist now will take each of the 100 manuscripts from their containers and prepare them for printing on paper made from 1,000 one hundred year old Norwegian spruces that were planted just before the Margret Atwood took the first walk through the forest. 

 

The Future Library project was created to stir the imagination and give hope.  A century is a good time period - just outside an average human lifespan, but not so long as to be unimaginable. What will be around? Will people care?  

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors - Jonas Salk

 

We live with a number of legacies - a written language, medicine, science, religion, weapons, slavery, pollution. ... some good and some bad. Mostly we live in the present and don't think much about the leverage we have in creating future legacies. Some legacies happen by default.  Humans are one of the few species with a sense of the future.  Projects like the Future Library spark wonder and perhaps give us hope that maybe we can make a difference.  Perhaps a trick is to think about time scales and what we might accomplish.

 

You can do something for yourself on a smaller scale. Here's one of mine:   My thesis advisor gave me his favorite slide rule when I received my Ph.D. It had been given to him by his advisor when he received his.  It became my favorite.  I used it regularly and wondered about the legacy of calculations that were used to build conjectures and hypothesis through their careers.  Every now and again I wondered what I'd do with it.  About twenty years ago a very unusual Summer student came along.  Art and computer science, she ended up at an animation company.  In slide rule had been used for a certain type of story telling..  small corners of the fundamentals of Nature.  I gave it to her some time ago so I could enjoy the link between the past and the future.  One type of story telling changing into another.  She says it's very special to her and gets use for calculations used in making films that tell stories.  Wondering who she gives it to and what path and stories it might inspire gives me pleasure and hope.

 

In my work I have to think of a variety of time scales.  Some events at the subatomic level take place in a under a billionth of a billionth of a second.  At the scale of the Universe some things have been around for billions of years and will be around much much longer.  These times so foreign as to be abstract.  A few weeks ago one of you sent a note from the Grand Canyon that was filled with wonder inspired by that slow geological process that created it.  Wonderful experiences to stir the imagination.  We should seek out these experiences, but I find staying in human time scales and thinking about and building legacies lets me live in a slightly better future and gives me hope.    Set your mind some distance in the future and think of something good you'd like to see there or something bad you'd like to change.  With a target maybe you can imagine a path and help work towards it.  It gives us a way to not discount future people and their world.

 

Scribbler Moon?  That's the title of Margaret Atwood's book you won't read, but maybe your great great grandkid will..

 

an ecology posed by a children's song and multidisciplinary problems

Last week I read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.  David writes well  I've recommended The Sports Gene as another excellent read.   In Range he talks about real world messy problems that often poorly defined and open-ended.  The really interesting ones usually require a range of backgrounds.  Experts often do worse than generalists.  If you have a group of people, you want a range of expertise and backgrounds.   

 

You've probably heard of Fermi calculations.  Enrico Fermi liked to frame problems in such a way that you might be able to approximate an answer using common sense and a few bits of information.  Things like "how much water flows through the Mississippi River in a year?"  or "how many piano tuners work in New York City?"  They're extremely common in physics and are used to think about how good or bad a conjecture is.  The type of question you can get a handle on in your head or on the blackboard.

 

There are many other approaches to problems. The school where I did my undergrad work has a course that teaches multidisciplinary thinking.  Although it's a physics class, it really isn't about physics - or at least it doesn't have to be.  People get together a couple of times a week for a few hours and a problem is posed to talk about.  Students come from a variety of backgrounds.  What is common is serious motivation and curiosity.  There aren't midterms or finals, but there is a project each student proposes and works on.  They're given some funding and access to other class members, professors and grad students.  And each week they're immersed in the two hour sessions each featuring something that is best approached as a cross-disciplinary problem.  They learn to sort out the various strengths and weaknesses of the other students and the professor.

 

Getting into the course is difficult. About a hundred apply and maybe six are accepted  You have to pass a couple hurdles - problems you spend about four weeks each on showing you can bring a range of thought to the table.  You must show they're capable of cross-disciplinary thinking.¹  A hurdle problem I'm familiar with was  posed as a line from a children's song:²

Mares eat oats, and does eat oaks, and little lambs eat ivy.

The question is:

Considered in an ecological sense, we have three species each of plant and animal life that interact in a finite geographical area. Supposing that we start out this system with roughly equal numbers of the six species, determine the way the system changes with time.

You have four weeks to come up with something clever and compelling.  Then on to the next hurdle.  The class has had extraordinary success over the years and is something of a legend.,

 

Very few people have a great range of background and expertise.  At least in the US we seem to value those who are broad less than those with a very narrow deep expertise.  One of my favorite thinkers was a mathematician some of you knew - Norm. He would sit and listen to ideas coming from a variety of backgrounds.  Later .. a few minutes to a week or two .. he'd stop you and say "Let me see if I understand what you were saying"  Then he'd proceed to give a much deeper and better thought-out version of what everyone had been trying to say, adding his own bit in the process.  Not always, but often enough history or art might be part of the framing.   These sessions were marked by deep play as well as chocolate coated coffee beans.  Play is the glue that allows communication across disciplines .. even if it's in your own head.

 

My own range isn't that great, but Norm and others - friends who have very different backgrounds - have changed the way I think.   I have this habit of "tithing" my time to the projects of friends.  I'm particularly interesting in areas outside of physics and math as I end up learning something and find myself in Norm's shoes at times.   This broader approach of posing and approaching questions strikes me as richer than the traditional expert deep dive as you can always add expertise where you have it when it's useful.

 

I've had a bit of serious insight on a very difficult problem that changed how I saw the world.  Insights came from a forestry program, a couple of sociologists and a professional volleyball player who has a degree in microbiology.  There are dozens of other problems where outside insight has combined with my own contribution to be a bit out of the box. And who would have thought thinking about bats would be just the right analogy for what turned out to be a neurology problem I didn't realize I needed to know about...

 

I don't know if I manage to help others.  If I do it's probably by offering a bit of thinking that might seem novel as their background is different.  At the same time I'm often lost as an outsider in their world until I start working in it for awhile.  I probably don't get very good at it, but it's the diversity that might be useful.

 

I'm very much against the hyper-specialization in STEM focused education we seem to be moving towards.  There's enough change in the world that the humanities, liberal arts and just practical skills are increasingly necessary. There has been some work on teaching cross disciplinary thinking. That strikes me as having great potential. 

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¹ As these are freshmen when they work on the hurdles it's interesting to look at their backgrounds. It's a bit of a problem as so few have taken the course, but it's been around for decades.   I won't go into that here, but it's very different from those of kids who focus on standardized tests and assigned activities.  A really interesting question is how much of the ability to acquire cross disciplinary thinking is wired in and how much is learned. I have suspicions, but that's beyond this post.

² Not to be confused with the song "Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats" from the late 40s:-)  It's sort of a homonymic phrase. 

 

 

reflecting on the moon in the pursuit of truth

It was the beginning of Spring in 2014 and there was electricity in the air. I've only seen scientific drama at that level a few times.  First the leaks and then a well-known team made a dramatic announcement.  These dramatic events can be confirmation of a radical hypothesis or sometimes it's Nature proclaiming how limited human imagination really is with something completely unexpected.  This time it appeared to be confirmation of a beautiful idea.  If it held up it would signal the potential of a new chapter in physics and cosmology.   A few people thought about shopping for suits that would be appropriate at a formal event in Stockholm.

 

For about fifty years we've known the Big Bang couldn't be the primordial event.  It was not the beginning of our Universe.   There were a conjectures ..  the most interesting came from Alan Guth who proposed an enormous mind-blowing-even-by-the-standards-of-cosmology inflation that took the Universe from something unimaginably small to something more the size of a baseball in a tiny sliver of time.  Over the years it was modified and tweaked and, although unconfirmed, many of us fell back on it to think about the pre-Big Bang because it nicely predicated what followed.  It had become a standard bias - one that people would abandon if proven wrong - but a bias nonetheless.

 

The conjecture was developed into a testable hypothesis by a few groups.¹  The first report came from an experiment at the South Pole called BICEP2 in 2014.  They saw a high quality signal that implied cosmic inflation. I noted my own excitement at the time. 

 

During the year that followed the serious skepticism of science took hold.  The team was known to be careful.  There are several things you do in any physics experiment to check your apparatus, how you handle information, biases and errors.  Ultimately you hope that someone else has a similar result with a different approach and apparatus.

 

There's a lot of preparatory work.  You need to understand what processes might mimic what you might be looking for.  Usually it's not a blind hunt..  you're guided by theory looking for something quite specific.  Discovery is finding it or finding the unexpected. It's fun to make theorists go back to the drawing board.  Most of them agree.

 

A good deal of thought and computer modeling goes into designing the experiment and understanding exactly what you should see - rediscovering well-known and agreed upon experiments.  If you can't get this foundational piece right, no one will believe you.  It turns out this step is where many of the data analysis paths are fleshed out.  This part, by the way, is where playfulness is essential.

 

You need to understand what are known as "backgrounds"  - events that mimic what you might be looking for.    There are null tests where you put a detector in a shielded box and understand the noise it produces.  These can get sophisticated.  Then there are calibrations where you see if you can measure known signals with all parts of your experiment.  Currently a hot topic in astrophysics is understanding what went on in the Universe when the first stars formed.  Unfortunately there wasn't any light - it was a dark age.  But there's a signal from hydrogen atoms that can be detected.  The process is well-known in radio astronomy and regularly used, but tuning into the dark age is leading edge work.  To sort out the background noise astronomers pointed a radio telescope at the Moon during the last lunar eclipse.  The noise component from the Sun would be missing and they'd be able to calibrate their apparatus and computational approach.  The signal was beautiful - the reflection of the rest of the Universe from the Moon.  Most of it turned out to be the Milky Way and the animated gif shows the result.

 

There are also jack-knife tests to remove regular occurring biases.   If you were studying car traffic flow you'd note rush hours are busy and weekends aren't.  So you break up the data into chunks and examine them separately to see how they compare.  The need for good enough random numbers often turns up here.

 

You constantly have to check the state of your apparatus and filters.  In an experiment of any size there's always something broken and something malfunction.  These have to be noted and accounted for.  It's not uncommon to spend a significant amount of time looking for problems.

 

Then there's the human problem.  How broad and deep is the team?  In the case of BICEP2 there wasn't any communication with people who did observational galactic astronomy.  When the results were published they noted there was a background that hadn't been accounted for.  It seemed obscure to the team and to most of us, but in the end it was nearly fatal.  The probability of discovery and confirmation dropped dramatically.  About a year later another experiment drove the nail home.  Inflation wasn't dead, but their experimental approach couldn't detect it.

 

And then there are dragons.  If someone asks you what's in your driveway and you tell them a car, both of you are generally satisfied.  But if you tell them it's a dragon ...  well then you have some explaining to do.  Reporting dragons can color fields.  A classic example came during the 60s.

 

Joe Webber was an outstanding experimental physicist who thought he had come up with a way to detect what Einstein predicted, but said would never be detected ... gravity waves.  He carefully eliminated many sources of noise and ended up seeing a signal.  He didn't have much in the way of theoretical guidance to know how big the signal was and he thought he was careful enough, so he published.

 

The problem was no one else was able to find a signal. For the next few decades no one saw anything and the field was nearly dead quiet for about thirty years.  There were theoretical hints that big advances in detector technology might find a signal and, through luck and enormous work, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory - LIGO - was born.  About twenty years later it bore fruit and an advance as important as Galileo's telescope was made.  But people had to be careful... very careful.  How do you deal with human sociology?  What if people expect something to be there - or not - and these biases get built into data taking, algorithms and the final results.  

 

They had a neat idea

 

The LIGO physicists, astrophysicists and engineers got the signal they were looking for.  About four hundred people went to work trying to prove or disprove it.  About six months later they knew they had something.  The team leaders gave their thumbs up,  champagne came out and several lengthy papers were written.   As they were getting ready to send the papers for peer review a senior researcher held a town meeting.   They had been working on a faked signal - a devilishly clever faked signal.  

 

They needed to go back and understand what they were doing at a much deeper level. They had too many biases. Since then there have been several false alarms and about a half dozen real signals.  They have developed one of the most careful cultures on the planet using their blind injection technique.

 

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Carl Sagan wrote extensively on critical thinking. Perhaps his best non-technical piece on the subject is a chapter in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  The specific chapter is The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.   The type of skepticism is useful far beyond science...  I'm thinking of advertising, social media, politics...

 

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

 

he offers nine tools - read the chapter for the detail

 

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

 

He goes on and notes we are vulnerable to common pitfalls of common sense and lists twenty common ones... the list is excellent and exceptionally appropriate these days.

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¹ In the physical science rough ideas are conjectures..  If you can test them they are elevated to hypothesis.  Theory usually refers to something that is well understood and tested by several approaches. It is a fairly high bar.  In particle physics it means being observed with an uncertainty lower than one part in three million - preferably by multiple approaches.  This is one of those differences in definitions that causes confusion when communicating with the public where 'theory' usually means someone's idea -no matter how good or bad.  I'll be a bit more specific as these ideas can be used to one degree or another outside of science.

I'll add that cosmology and astrophysics produce the most mind blowing graphs I've encountered.  Math can be more dramatic, but these are trying to find a visual vocabulary to describe Nature.  

 

the crystal palace's new expansion wing

 

What is a ruby and why is it red?  Why is the friction so low on a sled? On a plot of P versus T, plot out the the phases of helium-three....

 

A favorite professor loved to craft simply stated preliminary exam questions  that happened rhyme.  Parts were often difficult - here the second question is still not fully answered.  The ruby question is good as there are layers of depth to show how much you have thought about it.

 

 Sapphire, ruby and corundum are all very stable crystalline forms of Al₂O_{3 -} aluminum oxide.¹ In ruby and sapphire a percent or so of the aluminum atoms are replaced by something else - chromium in the case of ruby.  Chromium is a bit larger  and has a different shape than aluminum.  The result is a small distortion of the arrangement of oxygens around the chromiums.  The most obvious visual difference is how the  two crystals absorb light.  The distortions change how visual light is absorbed.  Pure corundum doesn't strongly absorb, ruby absorbs in the violet and yellow-green making it appear red.² 

 

Structure is one of the features used to categorize solids.  A crystal is a solid with a structure of atoms or molecules that repeat in three dimensions with a regular pattern called a lattice - single crystal snowflakes, table salt, diamonds... Groupings of smaller crystals form polycrystals - most metals, large snowflakes, ice and ceramics are polycrystals.   Amorphous solids lack such order .. glass and almost anything organic for example.

 

Impurities in crystals lead to changes in physical properties like the colors of gem stones. But there are many ways to disrupt a pure crystal lattice.  Some locations can be empty, filled with some impurity or dislocations to the pattern of the crystal can lead to strong steel. Impurities create different electrical properties that allow semiconductors to exist - without ongoing theoretical and experimental work from the 40s, the integrated circuit wouldn't exist.  

 

Steel is largely iron with a few other things thrown in. Carbon turned out to be a big winner, but you have to get the recipe right and there are tens of thousands of variations giving a wide range of properties.  Successful recipes were carefully guarded secrets .. the special steels used in Japanese swords, steels from Toledo and Damascus became legendary.  Sometimes there was a bit of odd baggage - one recipe involved adding the urine from red-haired boys.  Serious progress had to wait for real science.  

 

It is possible to have two dimensional structures with regular repeating patterns - graphene is a single layer of hexagonally packed carbon atoms. Amazing properties that lead in a recent Nobel prize in physics.  You can easily make some yourself with a pencil and a bit of scotch tape.³

 

But it gets stranger...

 

It is natural for a physicist to think in more than three dimensions.  Space-time, the structure of space and time  we live in, has four dimensions.  Other more abstract  hypotheses have eight, nine, eleven, twenty six. Calculations can have large numbers of dimensions. Sometimes this is practical in the real world - cryptology and cellphone modulation schemes both make use of higher dimensionalities.

 

So it is natural to think of a four dimensional crystal -- one in space and time.  And usually, for a variety of reasons, you quickly rule it out as non-physical.  Afew years ago Frank Wilczek didn't throw it away and presented the idea of a time crystal that exists in four dimensions.  The physical pattern is be stable, but a property of it repeats in time. Instead of regularly repeating atoms there would be a regularly repeating internal motion.

 

It was very controversial - it looked like a perpetual motion machine, but  loophole was spotted.  Properties like electron spin might  bunch up in direction at regular intervals in time ..  a repeating lattice in time.  As crazy as it sounds a few groups tried to make their own time crystals and two appear to have succeeded with papers passing peer review and due out in the near future.   Here's one of the early papers and a high level  description.  Much more is likely to emerge in the next few months.

 

Apart from being beautiful it has the potential to be incredibly useful.  Quantum computing has the fundamental challenge of maintaining entanglement over time in a macroscopic object.  It could be that time crystals are a mechanism to successfully address the problem and who knows what else... perhaps years, perhaps decades, perhaps never...

 

ah the frontier

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¹ In pure corundum three electrons from each aluminum join with six O^2- ions in an octahedral group.  The aluminums are left without unpaired electrons and their energy levels are filled.  This configuration is exceptionally stable and strong and is also colorless.

² There is also a fluorescent emission in the red making the crystals beautifully red.  This emission property is central to making lasers out of rubies.  

³ rather than tell you, just watch this:)

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Not a recipe, but a bit of technique.  It's Winter and that means reasoning with hard Winter squashes.  I find it's much easier if you par-cook (not boil) them for a few minutes.  Find a big enough pot and let it simmer for two or three minutes.  If the squash is larger than the pot, just turn it over.

That's it.  Now it should slice easily.  Something frustrating becomes easy.

aim down from the mind and go for the heart

 

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet — this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts… Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.

The three facets of the great writer — magic, story, lesson — are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

- from Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

 

Seven years ago I gave the first of what became a series of about fifteen public talks about energy.  I had been worrying about global warming since the mid 90s and was at the point where speaking in public felt necessary. I'm not a good public speaker, but  improved with time with the question and answer sessions often taking more than an hour.  Most of the questions centered on what could be done at the individual level.  It became clear that many people lacked the background to sort out the costs and rewards of their actions.    

 

I thought a short energy primer would make a difference.  People seemed interested and some good conclusions could be made with a bit of a toolkit.  The talk shifted more towards energy education, but still had global warming as the main draw. I thought I was making progress - there wasn't any rotten fruit and a few places even invited me back for a second talk.

 

It is probably true that you can get one or two concepts across in a one hour talk.  The idea of a book written for the intelligent non-STEM reader began to gel.   I partnered with a smart friend who could write, but had no background in science or engineering.  Between the two of us perhaps we could find the right level.  

 

Early on she made a very important observation about how people perceived energy. It struck her that no one thinks in terms of energy, but most of us have an intuitive understanding of power - the rate at which energy is being converted from one form to another.¹  It was a great observation and gave us a foundation. Ask much as possible we would frame energy use in terms of power - something people often have control over - and we would try to keep as close to the human scale as possible rather than trying to impress people with the enormous scale of the system.  After all, we were hoping to speak to individual actions.

 

I have the bad habit of tending towards fundamental explanations where a quick paragraph would probably do. It was difficult finding the right level and still be different from a hundred other good books.  Not only was it difficult to find the right level, but it was also becoming clear that energy education, at least what happens in a book, wasn't going to have much impact.  Another friend kept reminding us that anything aimed at a mass general audience probably had to be video - and probably short youtube pieces at that.

 

This was difficult for someone like me to grapple with.  Putting together videos is far beyond what I could do.  It was also a bit depressing seeing the growing pushback against science.  There was  overwhelming evidence.  But that isn't important in a climate of unscientific doubt.  Asking people to recognize the risk and make a change requires much more than understanding what has been learned. We dropped work on the book.   A new journey was necessary.  She proceeded down her path of working with people at the individual level and I continued to speak, but now I was spending a lot of time talking to social scientists, science educators and film makers.  There was much to understand, but a few issues stood out:

 

Why do people ignore solid scientific evidence? 

How do you communicate something this important that is also technical?  

How does change happen?

How badly will we fail?²

 

The rejection of climate science appears to be cultural.  Concern is  high in sea level countries like Bangladesh and island nations that are impoverished and poorly shielded from disaster. Change is happening now.  A few bad crops or a bad storm and that's it.  But the abundance in wealthy nations allows us to distance ourselves from the immediate impact of Nature. A bad hurricane may kill a few people and destroy a billion dollars worth of property and raise prices by a tiny amount, but for the average citizen its something forgotten in a week or two.  People living in a wealthy climate change conflicted nation like the US have several issues to deal with:

 

distance in time, space and psychology Many of the predictions are distilled to a sound-bite:  sea level will rise by one or two meters by 2100.  Even 2050 seems a huge step into the far future.   Most new parents aren't thinking about their children's college education, let alone their retirement - events on a much shorter scale.  Change is taking place in the Antarctica and Arctic, but they're physically far away and we don't see dramatic changes happening locally.  We think of the others who are responsible as groups and ourselves as individuals.  The distance between us and the problem has several dimensions and each component seems too large to be important in our lifetimes.

 

gloom and doom Most global warming communication aimed at the citizen is gloom and doom.  The last polar bear standing on a shrinking piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean...  It is well known that fear inducing communication instills makes people more passive.  If you're feeling guilty you often compartmentalize and ignore problems.  

 

cognitive dissonance  Most of us are aware that that the use of fossil fuel is at the root of the problem, but we go about our lives flying, driving, cooking, eating meat and so on.  When we try to think of solutions we have to deal with this cognitive dissonance and the default is often weakening the link ....  It's mostly the Chinese who use so much coal. I don't drive much, but my neighbor has two SUVs,  I know someone who flies 50,000 miles a year...  Fox News tells me there is doubt among scientists that CO₂ even causes global warming...  It is so cold this Winter...  We can ignore the problem because science will solve the problem without any effort from us...

 

If people intellectually partner with the doubters and minimizers, they have created a way to ignore their cognitive dissonance.  Some political and corporate forces are skilled at exploiting this bit of human psychology. 

 

denial It is convenient for some to outright deny the problem.  In some ways this is a deepening of our psychological mechanism for dealing with cognitive dissonance.  We are defining ares that we've chosen not to deal with.   Curiously those who are well educated are often more skilled when it comes to denying something outside of their expertise than less educated people.  

 

Another interesting bit of psychology is at work.  If you try to get people to change by criticizing them, they often build a stronger resistance as part of their denial.  I admire them. but I've come to believe a good deal of the messaging from self described greens has been extremely counterproductive^.3  

  

At one point I was speaking to a group of several hundred animators.  I was expecting a lot of good questions and had some good examples on changing a lifestyle at the personal level and politics above.  I thought I was communicating.  Halfway through the talk it struck me I was in one of storytelling's sacred places.  The entrance of the building had a three story soccer's hat.  This was the place that produced Bambi.  I didn't have anything important to say to these storytellers. I stopped with words and emotion took over.  I hadn't thought about that film for years.   Suddenly it was back.  I had seen at a special time and, against all odds, my heart told me I could no longer eat meat.  It wasn't logic, it wasn't science, it was just a flight my mind had taken while I was part of the story.  It took about two minutes to regain my composure and I thanked them for changing my life and wondered out loud if they could do it again - this time on a more pressing problem.

 

 If there is to be change we need great stories. Positive messages that go directly to the heart.  I'm not a good storyteller, so I try and partner with those who are.  Not everything we tried worked - making a film is expensive and can fail at many steps.  But it is clear to me now that you must speak to someone's heart than their head.  

 

Nabokov continues...

 

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.

 

I can encourage and partner with the storytellers, but there is another path.  What if impactful change can be had by encouraging new behaviors that don't address global warming directly?  Consider meat eating.  

 

Making meat is enormously inefficient - corn to cow, under ideal conditions, is about ten percent efficient and that doesn't count the energy inefficiency and environmental impact of intense corn cultivation.  A few people have meatless Mondays and a vanishingly small percent are vegan or vegetarian, but these are non-trivial behavioral shift.  What if less impactful food was more appealing?

 

Worldwide it we rely on about 150 plants for food with about 70% of food energy coming from three crops - rice, corn and wheat.  Nature offers much more - about 50,000 crops are edible.  It would take time, but moving further into the space of the 150 known and beginning to experiment with what may be amazing flavor combinations in the great unknown may shift a non-trivial percentage of meat based meals back to something with a smaller impact on global warming.  Maybe it makes sense to encourage outstanding chefs to experiment and create a desire...

 

There are so many other ways.  In California a program of subsidized low income housing incorporates solar arrays.  The power is not quite enough to cover internal use, but conservation is encouraged by a box with a few colors of light.  If you are close to being a net exporter of power, your utility bill is $5 a month - otherwise you pay the full rate.  People quickly become expert at conservation.  It may not be cost effective now and there are questions about home solar arrays, but it is an example...  You can say the same about automatic thermostats and those with utility overrides.

 

There is active transportation ... and so many other possibilities.  You can probably sit down and make a different list on your own.  It may be that serious opportunity for the environment as well as business lurk in such lists and some of it may not be technical.  I remain very hopeful that change will occur, but have come to believe much of it will be done for reasons other than 'being green'...

 

In the meantime I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to talk about power and energy.  Education isn't the direct path to change in the short term, but it is still useful.  Every once and awhile I'll probably write a bit here.  Who knows.  Perhaps there should be a podcast or a series of videos.  Maybe it is worth trying...

 __________

¹ Her analogy is energy is the gas in your car, power is what happens when you push down on the accelerator.  A more technical explanation is power is the rate at which energy is converted from one form to another.  In any event her point was we physically sense power by how we use our muscles.  How much we need to eat is less immediate and more abstract.

² Given the amount of carbon that has been burned and the fact it stays in the atmosphere for so long guarantees a temperature rise, and more importantly a swift rise, that we are guaranteed some pain.  How much depends on mitigation.   At the same time we need to sort out how to adapt.  Wealthy nations will be able to afford some adaptation - think of it as a tax on our children based on our non-action.  It will be much more expensive than a successful mitigation effort, but we're not paying.  There will also be a lot of companies that get rich from the work.   At the same time there will be hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people who will lose.  As we've learned in the past 20 years that may have consequences far beyond their local hardship.

³ It would be hypocritical for me to claim to be green.  My personal rate of energy use is 6.5 to 7.0 kW.  While this is low for an American, it is far from what is needed given the current energy mix I use.  It was as far as I could easily go given my financial resources and resolve.  I have a young friend in Cameroon who is probably under 0.5 kW.  That would be green in my book, although she'd never call herself that.  It is also an unfortunate way to be green.

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Recipe Corner

 

There are many ways to go on this potato salad.  It goes for olive oil rather than mayo and picks up much of its salt from olives.  

 

Potato Salad

 

Ingredients

 

° about a pound of waxy potatoes cut into inch-ish cubes - I like the skin, but peel them if you don't

° 1/2 pound of trimmed green beans cut into inch long pieces

° 1/2 cup of olive oil

° 2 tbl red wine vinegar

° 1 mined shallot

° 1 tsp minced garlic

° 1 tsp Dijon mustard

° 1/2 cup pitted olives, chopped.  I used cheap black olives, but fancy olives would be better

° 1 pt of cherry tomatoes, halved

° salt

° freshly ground pepper

 

Technique 

 

° Bring the potatoes to boil in a large pot with enough water to cover them by about an inch.  Throw in a pinch of salt (1/4 tsp?) Lower the heat to just below boiling and cook for about 6 or 7 minutes until just tender.  

° Add the green beans and cook until potatoes are somewhat tender and the beans are brightly colored - another 4 or 5 minutes.  Drain and rinse in cold water in a colander for about a minute

° Combine the oil, vinegar, garlic, shallot and mustard in a large bowl with some ground pepper and a bit of salt.  Mix in the potatoes and beans along with the tomatoes and olives.  Adjust the seasoning as necessary