omenti

on communication

a minipost

Last night I was thinking about something a favorite teacher taught me about communication.  I was lucky enough to have had two excellent teachers in high school.  I had one of them, Joe Wolff, in three classes: world history, the history of religion, and western philosophy.  I visited him on my trips back to Great Falls when I was in college and would talk with him and his wife until the small hours of the morning. So many learnings, but one still keeps me thinking.

 

Widely read, he said there were any number of bad communicators. but you could break the good ones into three categories:

The explainers  The good ones make the subject clear and easy to understand. It's a high bar - something I think I can do every now and again.  It's the domain of very good textbooks.

The elucidators  Everything good explainers are, but they manage to transport the reader (or listener or viewer) to a much deeper place. An understanding.  They connect ideas and information from far and wide to illuminate the subject.  They challenge you to think and connect.  They inspire. They also happen to be rarer than good explainers and their value is much greater. I aspire to be one, but fall short.

The enchanters  They possess the skills of the first two have, but communicate with a brilliance that gives you a deep insight almost as if by magic while making it look easy. They provide a sense of what it is to think deeply and discover a bit of something both deep and exciting. They offer an integration of thought that goes beyond inspiration. They are so rare!

There are examples in many fields including (perhaps especially including) art and music.  All three require thought and work on the part of their audience, but they inspire you to dig in.

I'm not going to list examples - that's a task I leave for you to think about.

 

 

 

 

 

breadth and depth

His parents were Danish, hers Swedish.  By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities.  Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year.   He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week.  He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it.      We'd sit in his yard and listen.   Some were short, some took a half hour.  They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places.  They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections.  Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.

 

My sister is a visual storyteller.  It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder.  She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize.  I suspect my Dad was a big influence.  He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions.  He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple.  Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad. 

 

A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range).  He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:

Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:

“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”

Raducanu added this:

“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”

 

Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing.   Epstein goes into depth in both of his books.  Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs.  These people have built the tools they need to think creatively.  They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.

 

 I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again.  I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12.  I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life.  Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices.  The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular).   One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.

 

I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects.  Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work.   They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth.   There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia.  Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.

 

Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects.  Many of you have your own diverse lists.  My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports.  Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you!   It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later.  You find yourself becoming more creative with age.  Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres.  Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or...  the list goes on and on...   

 

Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.

 

 

very light narrative structures

I first heard about Norwegian Slow TV a decade after it began.  I watch a half hour of one of the rail trips. It didn't do anything for me.  Other than hearing about other hits like chopping wood and knitting, I almost forgot about it.  Two months into the pandemic I found my watching a semi-live train trip across Norway.  Much of the  scenery was similar to where I grew up and I found myself watching.   It wasn't long until I found myself daydreaming, creating my own narrative to match the flowing images.  Two hour later I stopped a dream-like story in my head.  

 

About four in the morning the next day I was jolted out of bed with an interesting approach to some physics that I had abandoned months before due to lack of process.    Having your mind work on something when you're not working on it is well known.  I suspect the neural connects I had was making in the narrative I was writing in my imagination had a good deal to do with it.   

 

This morning I caught an episode of Invisibilia that dives into the subject.  Recommended if you have an interest in narrative in any form.  Slow TV is an hours or days long TV show without plot, characters, or tension.  How Norwegians responded as a shared experience is the most fascinating part

I've done a bit of work in remote audio ambiances.   A few created serendipity.  Here's an excerpt from an old post on one:

 

5:25 am - excellent!

 

I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat.   few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds.  The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench.  A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine.  I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.

 

She's doing an excellent job until - rats.  Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around.  A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds.

 

sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!

 

She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly.  Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55.   Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.

 

And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.

 

A door opens and closes.  The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.

She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields.  A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime.  The bitstream made traveled eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the hall's sound space was created.  We had created a virtual acoustic reality.

 

stories and star support

Watching the latest Physicsgirl video made me think of a couple of things, but first take a look.

Combining her almost reckless enthusiasm with a serious work ethic, Dianna is my candidate for the best visual physics explainer around. It's one thing to describe something with high production videos or stories, but quite another to fun educational demos that actually work.  These days she has a couple of people working with her and perhaps a dozen physicists who volunteer suggestions, but these still take several weeks of hard work to get right.  Her brilliance is making them look easy while being clear.  Trust me - that's hard.

 

Some types of educational story telling are a team effort.

 

It made me think of my first chemistry class in college - the basic inorganic class most people take.  I was just sitting down in the large lecture room when we heard and felt a large bang coming from the front of the room.  A cloud of chalk dust rose from the slate black board and the right quarter of the board crashed to the floor. Dr Spicer, the chemistry prof, rushed towards an opening door to the left of the slate.  As it opened Jerry and a cloud of acrid smoke poured out.   Coughing, Jerry pointed to the exists.   Our dispatch wasn't exactly orderly.

 

Jerry was a lab tech and in charge of the department's demos.  He was preparing something for a pchem class when the explosion happened.  It convinced me that pchem must be interesting.  

 

Good demos are hard to get right.  A teacher usually isn't the right person to create one.  You need someone with the inclination and time to devote to what needs to be a memorable visual story that the professor can embellish with words and equations. Often you need a someone with serious maker skills. This is true for real experiments too.  

 

I learned my lesson a few years later teaching a lab section of a physics for premeds class.  Two of us co-taught  two sections with forty students each.  The lab was a third of their grade so they paid attention.  (I didn't realize it at the time, but having power over a grade in a competitive class gives the instructor an inflated opinion of their teaching skills as the students are overly attentive.)  We hauled out an old Van de Graff generator - something that must have been made in before WWII.   A big one can generate a formidable amount of static electricity. We had demonstrated how the charge was enough to burn a hole through a piece of cardboard. The other grad student had an insulated copper wire running from his finger tip, inside his shirt, down his pants and connected to the room's electrical ground.   Since the students were interested in medicine, we reasoned they'd see this as dangerous and pay attention and learn why grounding is important.

 

The generator was at maximum power as he approached the terminal.  What neither of us realized was his connection to ground had come off.  The spark jumped about twenty centimeters and knocked him over.  I realized what had happened and yelled in anyone knew CPR.  They thought it was a stunt and started applauding.  Fortunately he wasn't hurt badly.  The sparked burned him a bit, but mostly he was startled, causing him to fall over.  At least it was memorable.

 

Another path to is memorable storytelling.  Ideally it isn't a solo effort as the audience should be involved. That's what I aspire to these days, but I'm not very good at it.   The other day we were talking about patents when I remembered Feynman's patent story.  It was one of his favorites, so I checked to see if there was recording.  Note he has an audience.  My own experience is that this kind of story telling is much easier with an audience - for me a very small one. In an odd way it becomes a collaboration.

 

abigail van allen's layer cake - catalyst for the last half of the 20th century

I was in my second year of grad school and had gone to dinner at my advisor's house.  These dinners were always interesting and the deserts were a near match.  That night we had a wonderful homemade cake.  A layer cake rolled in the shape of a log, filled with fresh fruit and coated with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.  One of the guests - James Van Allen - yes the guy the Van Allen belts are named after - remarked on the cake and told us the story about Sputnik starting the space race was all wrong.  The real beginning came years earlier in his living room over his wife's excellent layer cake.  Reality is often more fascinating than the recent history we hear in school.

 

It was around 1953.  Van Allen and a group of physicists were at his home after a formal meeting.  This night a critical step was taken.  After talking about new learnings from balloon and sounding rocket explorations of the ionosphere.  Someone suggested maybe an Earth orbiting satellite would be possible soon.  After all - this von Braun guy was making a lot of noise about space travel being practical.

 

Indeed Wernher von Braun had been trying to popularize space travel.  He had teamed up with science fiction writers and later with Disney and Collier's trying to convince the public. Although von Braun was charismatic, he wasn't taken that seriously.  The only thing the government wanted him for was leading the Army's program to be rockets that could deliver nuclear weapons.

 

Enjoying the excellent cake was someone who could make a difference.  Lloyd Berkner was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  He had the ear of generals and even the President.  He made an interesting suggestion.  Maybe the way to learn more about near space would be a multination collaboration like one that explored Antarctica.   Given global tensions it could be useful for political reasons and would spread the costs. Larger sounding rockets could be built along with expeditions to the poles.  Maybe even a satellite.   Everyone at the dinner loved the idea and the International Geophysical Year was proposed soon afterwards.  Ultimately dozens of countries and hundreds of scientists were involved.  The target year would be 1957.

 

Van Allen and the other near space guys kept proposing satellites with no luck.  Then, a few years later, Berkner found the key.  President Eisenhower was focused on avoiding WWIII and countering the Soviets.  Something like a satellite for science was nothing but a distraction.  Berkner had used the "it will shock the other side" argument without luck.  Then he changed gears and suggested it could lead to spy satellites.

 

Eisenhower was a general.   Having great surveillance is deeply embedded in military DNA.  Spies on the ground, high altitude aircraft, code breakers .. whatever it took.  The only trick with a satellite, Berkner said, would be to establish Earth orbit as neutral territory.  A small scientific satellite could set a precedent.   Eisenhower agreed and the Navy ultimately won a competition to work on Project Vanguard - a satellite to be instrumented by Van Allen's team. 

 

The Soviet Union's ICBM project was led by a scientist more interested in space flight than ICBMs.  He realized an ICBM would make a dandy satellite launcher and when Khrushchev took power managed to convince him on an ICBM program and added an Earth orbiting satellite would have a great political impact.  Khrushchev agreed, but what he really wanted was a big ICBM.

 

Through the International Geophysical Year interactions it had become clear that the Soviets were building a satellite - indeed that it would launch in the Fall of 1957.  It seemed like a fantastic cap to the year, but the knowledge and excitement didn't go beyond far that group.

 

When Sputnik (fellow traveler) launched it was mostly ignored by the Americans - certainly the government.  The New York Times made a big announcement and people went out to look.  Satellite tracking became almost a hobby for some (that was the genesis for a global positioning system, but that's another story), but America wasn't quaking in fear.

 

The American government was happy - perhaps delighted.  They weren't first, but this little Soviet metal sphere orbited over American territory several times a day.  Precedent had been established. It would take time, but the Americans would get their spy satellites.

 

The story most of us know came from Texas.  Lyndon Banes Johnson worried whoever controlled space could control Earth - an old sci-fi trope.  LBJ also happened to be the Senate Majority Leader.  He gave impassioned speeches about falling behind.  His words resonated with the public and early American rocket failures only increased public anxiety.  

 

And what about Van Allen and the other scientists?  Johnson managed to open the serious money spigot.  It became clear that ICBMs made great satellite launchers with modest changes.  The scientific study of space was a dandy idea to help prove in new rocket technology.    STEM education in the public schools sprang up largely out of Berkeley and MIT.  The world was changing.

 

The Van Allen Belts?  They were discovered using the early Explorer series of satellites in 1958.  The interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind was beginning to sort out. 

 

So that's the secret .. really good layer cake.

 

the danger of over simplification

In the early 1990s Anders Ericsson of Florida State University went to a music school in Berlin to test an idea about deliberate practice.  The music school had high standards.  Ericsson suspected practice separated the best of the best from the average.  He asked the eighteen year old violin students to think back on how much practicing they did since they took up the instrument.  Then he had the music professors to divide them into three groups - great, good and average.  Those in the great group averaged about 10,000 hours of practice.  The good, about 8,000 and the average practiced around 5,000 hours.  It seemed like a neat result - practice more and you do better.  He published a paper that wasn't exactly rigorous - it lacked statistical measures like ranges and standard deviations and was more of a discussion than a formal paper.  

 

Prof. Ericsson didn't push the result was a bit to the side of his core work and he didn't heavily promote the result.  But others saw a compelling story around that lovely round hour and a work ethic.   One was Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he often oversimplifies and gets things wrong.  The 10,000 hour result has been disproven by more careful studies over and over, but his books and TED talks are enormously popular and have made the idea something of a cultural meme.  

 

Recently I was thinking about something else he said that was misleading. Great storytelling, but misleading.  The more I thought about it, the more damaging it seemed.  It's partly linked to the 10,000 hour story and some unhealthy forms of training. 

 

In Outliers Gladwell talks about a relative age effect.  He uses sports, but it can apply to academics and other areas.  Say the calendar allowing kids to participate in a sport begins on January 1.  Kids born in the first quarter would be  January → March birthdays.  He noticed that ice hockey players born in the first quarter are over-represented and forth quarter kids are  under-represented.  The pattern appeared in several other sports so he set about writing a compelling sounding story.

 

What happens is when  kids are allowed to try out for a sport - say nine or ten years old - many of the first quarter kids are significantly more developed than forth quarter kids.  Most coaches can't tell the difference between maturity and ability and tend to select the kids who perform the task better.  The rate of change at that age is so great that the majority selected will be the older kids. 

 

A problem is the better players get moved to the better coaches and facilities. The talented ones in the chosen pack progress riding a premium training infrastructure.  There may be very talented kids who are later born who miss the advantages of this training and infrastructure who are lost to the system as they miss a chance to develop and are soon left far behind.

 

Combine this with the 10,000 target (as an exercise figure out how many hours a day you need between the age of nine and seventeen to become expert) and you realize specialization needs come early for the better athletes. I'll admit to oversimplification here - this is a fascinating area that has become something of an arms race as, at least in the US, the goal of a college scholarships can force specialization before a kid becomes a teenager.

 

The funny thing is when you look at more carefully you see sixty to seventy percent of the college age players in many sports are first quarter births, but for professional athletes in the same sports the relative age effect almost goes away.  Almost as at the very elite level there's a slight over abundance of third and forth quarter athletes. What appears to be going on is there's a great weeding of talent from college to pro. In many sports late bloomers - kids who got their growth spurt late for example - finally reached parity, but the fact that they had to work harder and learn the sport better ultimately made them better athletes.

 

There are other complexities I won't go into other than mentioning playing a variety of sports rather than concentrating tends to make better elite athletes.  We have a bias when we hear about prodigies like Tiger Woods and tend to assume they're the norm, but it's not. We also tend to forget about the prodigies that never make it.  One estimate is that only about one percent of sports prodigies identified by the media (written up in a magazine) by the time they're teenagers ever make it into the pros.  

 

So the American and some other systems do manage to train a number of elite athletes in many sports and show it internationally in the Olympics.  What about the potentially elite athletes that were never trained?   It turns out some systems cast a much wider net.  The Nordics, notably Norway, push universal recreation and sport for kids as a healthy way to provide fun and lower healthcare costs. Early specialization is discouraged and good facilities are made available to all.   It appears to work very well.

 

I'm far from athletic and am not recommending changing any system (although I think Norway's goal of a healthy population is excellent).  This is an illustration.  Similar issues of pipelining kids exist in music, art and academics.  Broadly speaking STEM education is an example of exclusion and producing a population that isn't as literate as it could be.

 

Back to the storytellers and  oversimplification.  If something isn't important and you just want to get a tough idea across, it might be appropriate, but anything of importance needs an appropriate level of depth. That places serious demands on the author, teacher - anyone trying to communicate.   It's something I struggle with a lot. 

 

 

 

moonshine

"Land sakes"

 

A hot Sunday afternoon almost exactly fifty years ago.  My sister and I were on the couch next to my Grandma King.  Walter Cronkite was out connection to the small spacecraft as it slipped towards touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility.  I was just a kid, but I knew this might be one of the most dramatic moments I'd witness.  About then she said those two words and I had another realization.

 

Spacings between the generations on my mother's side were large.  I never met my Grandfather - he died working as a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone System in Utah, Idaho and Montana years before I was born.  He was born a few weeks before Custer's Last Stand.  Grandma was born in 1889 in the Territorial Utah theocracy.  She would tell stories of the first motor car she saw, of a Butch Cassidy-like thug who ran a small business protection racket, when she read about the Wright Brothers a few years after they flew, and why moving pictures were awful (the batteries emitted a stink).  They didn't have indoor plumbing until 1940, but the big event was getting electricity around 1930 .. bigger than indoor plumbing, bigger than their Ford.  We couldn't get her on an airplane.  Airfares from Great Falls to Salt Lake City were cheaper than riding the dog, but she heard about crashes for much of her adult life .. in fact real air safety didn't begin until the mid fifties, so she wasn't that far off. 

 

And here she was watching glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, listening to a human voices coming from thousands of miles away along with two that had traveled by radio requiring about one and a quarter seconds to find antennas on Earth..

 

What happened in the next few minute was breathtaking, but I found myself wondering if her life spanned greater fundamental change than any other time in history.  Would she see more fundamental change than I would?   You start thinking about what fundamental means,.  It still keeps me up at night.

 

Now there is talk about going back - sending people to the Moon and to Mars.  I'm afraid I don't see it as a big deal and consider it wasteful.

 

Others have articulated what Apollo did for America and the world.  So much was spent - nearly 4.5% of the federal budget was NASA in the mid 60s - that technologies advanced at a much more rapid pace than we'd normally see.   The computer and semiconductor industries were jumpstarted.   Secondary school science education changed and a large STEM pipeline to Universities was created.¹ There was a morale boost for a few years, but it faded against an awful war and dramatic social change on several fronts.  A moon landing, iconic as it was, faded to insignificance in a few years.  The last three Apollo missions were cancelled largely because the public lost interest and politicians responded. 

 

I'm a big proponent of space exploration and the unmanned space program has been brilliant.  Putting people into space is not only expensive, but probably wrong biologically.  We didn't evolve to live in such harsh environments.  Most of the people who have flown in space have orbited in a region where the Earth's magnetic field shields them (and us!) from radiation.   Without Earth's magnetic field it is unlikely life could have evoled on the surface or in shallow water.  Anyone who stays on the Moon or Mars will have to live underground or in elaborate radiation shields.  There are issues of water, air, food, human psychology, low gravity muscle and bone degradation and so on.   We're the wrong tool for the job.

 

People, life support systems and rockets didn't scale by Moore's Law, but computation has.  What a non-human kilogram in space or on another body in the Solar System can do has made leaps opening and now we have commercial businesses exploiting near Earth orbit and students orbiting satellites.  We can build increasingly intelligent probes that are space faring.  Plucky (I've wanted to use that word) robot explorers  are getting better and better and do almost all of the meaningful exploration of the Solar System.  We're really good at building and flying them as well as analyzing and wondering about what they tell us.  

 

There are those who sayt we have to leave Earth - that it's our destiny and we've ruined the Earth.  That strikes me as defeatist and driven by more by science fiction than logic and science.  A failure of the imagination.   Another explanation is adventure.  Adventure is fine, but you can't call it real exploration at this point.   My vote is for learning about the Solar System and beyond in a cost effective way as we work on repairing the damage we've done here.  

 

We can always look up and admire the Woman in the Moon.

 

 

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Grandma King swore in Irish Gaelic.  Sadly I never learned.

__________

¹ I've written quite a bit about the good and bad of the approach.  Arguably it's created an over-supply of scientists at the cost of ignoring and even alienating the majority of students. It's sad it hasn't changed much since.

finding a voice

On those clear and moonless nights stars would suddenly rise from the edge of the butte marking its shape and size.  Besides the stars the only other lights were a distant aircraft beacon and a flashlight modified to give off a faint red light to protect your night vision and to look around for sleeping cows.   Montana is this magical place.

 

There were three places Brian and I would haul our little telescopes. North of town near Benton Lake on the Bootlegger Trail.  East of town there was a  turnoff near the O'Day farm on the way to the Highwoods,.  And to the West was a little farm near the butte just South of Fort Shaw.  Mary was the owner of the last place and a family friend.  She had two conditions.  First you had  to be careful at the gate to make sure her cows didn't get out and second was was letting her look through the telescopes and sharing stories about the stars. 

 

Her stories were more interesting. They came some an elderly Assiniboine man she knew when she worked as a public health nurse at the Fort Belknap Reservation. It seems wrong I can't remember his name.    His people had named constellations to orient themselves at night, but they weren't those I knew.  The idea that someone could look at Orion or the Big Dipper and not see those shapes was delicious.  One night she casually mentioned there were "medicine wheels"  - astronomical calculators of sorts to track cosmic cycles - equinoxes, solstices, planetary motions and sacred days.  North American Stonehenges.  It shouldn't have surprised me. There is order and regularity in the sky.  There are people who observe and try to make order. It is only natural to make clocks and calendars.

 

We're funny about time.  We build instruments to measure it, but our senses can't dealt with very short or long periods.   It flies when we're having fun and drags when we're not.  A bit over a hundred years ago we learned that it doesn't exist by itself, but it is part of something deeper called space-time. At the deepest level it's still a mystery  What we do know is Universe is always changing.  As people we look backwards and forwards. We wonder what will happen - where we've been and where we might be going.  

 

Science is a tool for sorting out things that happen in Nature - and this is one of my frustrations. For two decades we've known that human activity is responsible for the increase in global temperature and increasing accurate forecasts have been made since.  We even know steps we can take to reduce the impact of the problem.  This is settled science with better confidence levels than almost anything in - say - medicine. But there's this problem. How do you get people to take action?

 

Scientists are generally poor public communicators and the basic story of global warming isn't exactly a riveting story with a feel good ending.  There's guilt with blame to go around and the problems are mostly cast as something future generations will bear.  Furthermore people in wealthy countries will be able to afford to minimize the problems it causes locally.  It's easy to forget, Even if it wasn't politically contested, it's not on the top ten list of many who want to take action.  

 

I've been thinking a lot about the role of the scientist as a communicator.  There's a tendency to feel like you need to provide a full story even though the subject is complex and no single person is up to the task.  It's different when you go to the doctor.  Your primary care physician lacks specific knowledge but that isn't seen as a problem.  She can refer you to a specialist.  A generalist's high level knowledge and connections to more complex understandings happen to be one of her specialities.  There are questions that you can ask both a medical doctor and a scientist and learn something deep.  A few years ago I was on the train with a heart surgeon.  I asked him what he thought about mortality - his own as well as his patients.  It sparked a conversation that was fascinating for both of us.  The train stopped at Penn Station and we spent the next hour at a coffee shop talking. His answers were undoubtely unique to him. They were his stories that motivated him and his telling made an impact on me. 

 

People seem to be wired for story telling. They sometimes go deep - even to our identity.

 

Maybe this is a way forward.  Michelle Alexander offered an interesting thought experiment - what if reincarnation existed and we came back to live in a world we helped make?  If it was random chances are we'd be poor living somewhere that wouldn't be able to respond to the problems like a wealthy nation.  Thinking along these lines may be an exercise in empathy.  You could ask questions about other religious traditions - say those that ask people to be stewards of the Earth.  There may be conversations lurking that could help people find common ground.

 

Conventional storytelling doesn't have  many storylines.  Think of the Lord of the Rings - a heroic effort to save the Earth against seemingly impossible odds.  Are there ways to create stories that might lead to deeper thought?  These are much more natural channels to a person's heart than a PowerPoint presentation.  I've made a few attempts, but I'm not a good at this sort of thing.  I'm open to ideas and some of you might be brilliant.  

 

A really neat idea is the global warming fairy tale. Fairy tales can be short, but powerful approximations for larger ideas. Kate Marvel is a climate scientist who has taken that path.  Give her  Slaying the Climate Dragon fairy tale a spin - it fits on a single page and touches many ideas.

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The call came about fifteen years ago.  It was Mary's family.  She had left a note asking for a favor.  She wondered if monuments could be placed on their property to mark the dates she came to the world and left it as well as noting the rise of Sirius and the Peliedes .. two of her favorite objects...  as well as the seasons.  She also wanted to know where North would be at one of periods H.G. Wells described in The Time Machine.

 

Designing a medicine wheel is a learning experience.  How accurate should it be?  How long should it be valid?  The Earth's axis wobbles and precesses.  Our orbit varies a bit year to year.  The ground moves.  There is constant change .. often too slow for us to notice, but the Earth - Nature - is always moving on.  It filled me with optimism thinking about those that will follow.

 

communication

 

It's almost Christmas and the candles are coming out.

 

Candles.    And Michael Faraday's remarkable gift to young people.  He's way up on my own list of favorite scientists.  In addition to making fundamental contributions to physics (like field theory even though he was poorly schooled in math), he happened to be an excellent public speaker.  Every year there would be Christmas lectures for children.  A legendary set of six lectures on the chemistry and physics of candle flames was given in 1848. While a good deal of deeper understanding has taken place, much of the lecture is still relevant.  Watch a modern performance!¹  Here's a Project Gutenberg link to the text.

 

My advisor believed his students should be able to describe their Ph.D.thesis work to a group of smart high school students.  That proved to be one of the most difficult and poorly received talks I've given.  (I've improved over the years:-)  This sort of challenge is becoming more common ..  Alan Alda's Flame Challenge is wonderful..  A question is presented every year and people attempt to explain it to groups of eleven year old students from around the world who then select a winner.    There is the five level challenge..  try explain your work to a grade school, high school, undergrad, and graduate students along with having a meaningful chat with another expert in the field.  My favorite is Neville Sanjana talking about CRISPR.  I think Faraday would have been thrilled.

And finally there's the Dance your Ph.D. competition open to STEM Ph.D.s...  This year's winner was Nancy Scherich with a focus on braid theory - a brach of topology that looks at knots in higher dimensional spaces.  Hula hoops, linear algebra and murder! 

I'm a terrible dancer, but I guess something could have been done with infrared freedom and ultraviolet slavery and the production of charm quarks...  Then again...

 

Now a few questions:

 

How important is it to communicate the beauty of what you are interested in to non-specialists?  How is it usually done and how would you improve it?  And how do you spark and sustain an interest in some?  

 

By the way.  The Christmas Lectures have continued to this day.

 

Lessons and Carols

 

And a late (10^th of December) addition

Music

 

I think songs would be great for science communication.  Although They Might Be Giants have a few good ones, pickings are sparse.  Sadly most scientists are not good singer songwriters and coming up with lyrics that communicate real science is not easy.  

 

There are exceptions.  Henry Reich put some nice lyrics to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that are sound and current.  They work across ages and levels of astronomy experience.  The first time I heard it I thought I found something wrong, but another listen and some physics told me it was ok.²

 

twinkle twinkle little star
you look small cause you are far
lightyears out from here to there
your light is distorted by the air
so you twinkle twinkle little star
adaptive optics shows you as you are

twinkle twinkle little star
you must be a small pulsar
out away from earth you drift
this is known from you red shift
twinkle twinkle spinning star
degenerate neutrons are what you are

twinkle twinkle little star
supernova, au revoir
you got so big to big perhaps
electron capture core collapse
twinkle twinkle former star
a black holes all you now are

twinkle twinkle little star
wait actually no you’re a meteor
breaking up in the atmosphere
i wish id known you’d end up here
twinkle twinkle shooting star
became a meteorite that hit my car

 

Maybe it is enough to get people thinking and asking questions.    So in addition to dance your Ph.D., I'd love to see a sing your Ph.D. - or just sing your research.   Collaboration with a real singer is ok... witness this version of Howie Day's Collide sung by... Howie Day. The physics is quite up to date - get in touch if you want anything decoded.

 

Just don't get me started on the Big Bang Theory show...

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¹  The Faraday Candle Lectures

Introduction to Michael Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candle

Lecture One: A Candle: Sources of its Flame 

Lecture Two: Brightness of the Flame

Lecture Three: Products of Combustion

Lecture Four: The Nature of the Atmosphere

Lecture Five: Respiration & its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle

 

They've also produced a version with commentary if you want more after watching the remade lecture

Lecture One: A Candle: Sources of its Flame (Commentary version)

Lecture Two: Brightness of the Flame (Commentary version)

Lecture Three: Products of Combustion (Commentary version) 

Lecture Four: The Nature of the Atmosphere (Commentary version) 

Lecture Five: Respiration & its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle (Commentary version) 

 

²  Using redshift only works for distant galaxies and pulsars are observed in our galaxy (they're in other galaxies, but are too faint to measure a redshift, let alone detect).  Re-reading 

you must be a small pulsar
out away from earth you drift
this is known from you red shift

It is becomes clear that it is drifting away and we know that by it's redshift..  so the song is correct.  

it's stories all the way down

The phone rang on Sunday afternoon...

 

"Hi, Steve?  Syd has a question..."

(Syd is about ten)

"Hi Steve.  Why is the sky blue?"

 

She probably has heard a few explanations - most of us have over the years.  In fact the common explanation you are shown in high school and college isn't very good. We set up an iChat link for the sketches and facial expressions.  Words and sketches appeared that were a bit richer than the standard explanation.  No equations, but there was enough to branch off into color perception, colors that exist only in your mind, why the Sun looks yellowish and some experiments to try and so on until my battery was down to about ten percent. Her parents are probably annoyed.

 

We tend to describe reality as layers of stories.  Take your smartphone.  You push regions on it's screen and things happen.   A video chat with a dear friend thousands of miles away, a map, photos from Iceland, music from a huge library or directly from a concert, someone's heartbeat.  All of us know how to make these things happen - the incantations we make with our fingers and voices to interact with a real and virtual world.  But that's just one layer.

 

Far below is the fundamental physics of the atoms the phone is made of.  Quantum field theory provides a rich description of the subatomic particles and fields and we have general relativity to describe how it's mass interacts with spacetime and visa versa..  A story I know well - perhaps better than how to use my iPhone, but it's pretty useless when I'm trying to find directions on a map.

 

There are many layers in between.  The story of materials - metals, semiconductors, plastics, battery chemistries .. the things that make the physical device.  A bit deeper is how semiconductors work .. a bit above is how electrical circuits work.  And then there's the rich layer where artificial language meets circuitry - the programming of the device.  This story is told in code at a variety of levels.  I know some of these stories well and can use them creatively and author in their language.  And above it all are human interactions - an area we all know a bit about. There are many layers where I'm clueless.  That's probably true of most of us, but I've noticed telling stories at one level while thinking about another can lead to new ideas.    

 

It is quite possible to deeply understand how to use an iPhone or Android phone and think the Earth is flat and riding on elephants on the back of huge turtles.  In a rich real world each of these layers must be locally valid and the layers must be constant with each other.  Fake science -  global warming denial, anti-vaxing, homeopathy and so on are modern versions of the flat earth.

 

Most of these layers have incomplete stories - works in progress.  Our understanding needs improvement and that is wonderful.   As an aside it is remarkable that the lowest layer .. basic physics .. turns out to be completely understood in the part of the Universe humans inhabit.¹

 

The poet said the world is made of stories..  At least the real world can be described by them.  It makes me think of the upcoming scientist's march on Washington.  I'm torn about attending.  It probably won't have much impact and will be ridiculed an misreported by the those who need to hear it's message.  At the same time science is incredibly import to society - more now than ever in the past - and it's under direct attack.  Unfortunately scientists are mostly lousy story tellers ..  I know I am.  Scientists live in a world of coded jargon.  We don't take the time to talk about the astonishing surprise and beauty of Nature often enough.  

 

I have serious shortcomings as a storyteller. Writers, musicians, poets, artists, actors and athletes are much better.  I'm trying to get better and think it is important for more people to develop skills.  Some of them are showing real promise.   Alan Alda set up an excellent program at Stony Brook that is slowly spreading.  A bit of hope.

 

a line I offered to Syd  

 

The sky is mostly transparent and colorless, but it happens to be the stage on which the colors dance... 

 

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¹ We know this to a very high confidence level .. much deeper than in most of science.  You can even write down an expression for it ...  here's a very compact dense form.  Some call it Core Theory .. basically it's just the Standard Model with General Relativity nailed on.  You can imagine places and situations where it breaks down .. in some collisions in particle accelerators and in some of the most violent events in the Universe.  Then you need to unify gravity and quantum mechanics and more,  but we don't directly interact with them as humans.  This is probably one of the deepest advances in science and it really has only come together with a high degree of certainty in the past decade.

Just because we know what the interactions are and how they work, the details of real world problems can make them too difficult to calculate. We just know, to an astonishing level of confidence, there isn't anything other type of interaction that impacts our world.

(this may look like gibberish, but it describes the physics that we experience on Earth and most of the Universe.    Not often seen on tshirts outside the boundaries of Caltech, but one of the great intellectual achievements.  It is a capstone on a small corner of understanding Nature, but it just marks a beginning.)