Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

the fussy, blond, larcenous heroine of an English children’s story

Peacock near The Trout

For the vast majority of the four billion year history of the Earth, it would have been a very inhospitable place for human beings indeed. An atmosphere with oxygen in it, the existence of essential ecosystems (most of them composed of microorganisms), the presence of an ultraviolet-blocking ozone layer: all of these are essential to human life, and all are temporary and largely the product of random events. So too, a huge number of other considerations, from the ambient temperature to the level of volcanic activity. Of course, if the situation were different, beings would have evolved in a different way. There are, no doubt, other forms of metabolism; likewise, it is possible to endure all kinds of environments and ecological surroundings. This is where the anthropic principle and the Goldilocks fallacy collide.

The Goldilocks fallacy is to observe that if the conditions of the Earth were different, human beings as they are could not live here. The faulty conclusion drawn is that these ‘perfect’ conditions could not, or have not, arisen by accident. This is akin to seeing a large number of black moths sitting on black trees in England during the 19th century and stressing how perfectly matched they were. Of course they were, because soot from factories had blackened the trees, allowing black moths to hide from predators more effectively than their lighter brethren, who duly saw their numbers reduced. The situation establishes which beings will do well, and ensures that those who do not will disappear. This was Darwin’s great insight.

A broader version of the Goldilocks fallacy stresses how unlikely the development of life in the first place was, then uses that as evidence for divine creation. The first response to that is to wonder how unlikely life really is. Life, at the lowest level, is something that can take what is in the environment, then make copies of itself using those materials. Prions (the replicating molecules that cause mad cow disease) are a bit like crystals: they reproduce themselves on the basis of coming into contact with the right materials. Given millions of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy, and an unknown but massive number of planets, there is certainly a lot of chemistry going on. Given what chemists have cooked up using a few basic organic molecules and lightening in a closed environment, I would be personally astonished if at least single-celled life forms did not exist elsewhere in our galaxy, much less in the observable universe.

The last step in the logical chain is to consider the very real possibility that our universe is only one of an infinite number that could exist. It is also entirely possible that others do exist. Some universes will have life forms in them who can putter about and strangle each other and write blog entries. Others will not, but there is nobody reporting on them. As such, the puttering, strangling, blogging beings who marvel at their own existence may be rather missing the point.

Thesis literature review

Fallen tree in flooded Port Meadow

The first substantive chapter of my thesis is meant to be a review of the relevant literature. Actually, it would be more correct to say ‘relevant literatures’ since so many different ones touch upon the subject matter. While climate science, ecology, and biochemistry are all relevant to Kyoto and Stockholm, they are not directly relevant to the thesis. The point is to examine the roles played by expertise in policy formulation, not engage directly with the scientific issues at hand. As such, the primary sources of interest are not studies of global warming of POPs, in their own right, but the discussions that took place within the scientific and policy community about what is going on (to be analyzed in Chapter 3: Information and consensus issues) and then about what should be done about it ( Chapter 4: Normative and distributional issues).

Having a look at the conversations that took place within the scientific community about taking a political stake against nuclear testing might be one way of gaining insight into how scientists deliberate about political matters, and how the legitimate role of scientists and the scientific community is seen. Likewise, the whole debate that arose about Bjorn Lomborg’s controversial book. While the public perspective on these debates is largely outside the scope of the thesis, it might be worth touching upon the relationships between public, expert, and political opinion in the chapter on consensus and information issues.

The relevant secondary literatures are various. They obviously include political and international relations theory, especially as they concern questions about prudent decisionmaking, the welfare of future generations, and other normative concerns. (On the normative side, Henry Shue’s work is both highly topical and likely to be considered essential reading by his colleagues here). In general, I am a lot more interested in the core issues of political theory (legitimacy, justice, etc) than in those of international relations theory, though some discussion of the nature of cooperation between states and the formation of international regimes is required. To some extent, international law is relevant, insofar as it helps to define how science relates to the policy process and the practice of states. Elizabeth Fisher’s work on public administration has made me think that the Rationalist-Interventionist and Deliberative-Constitutive frameworks she describes can be applied to international environmental negotiations. It is also fairly clear that some understanding and discussion of the philosophy of science is necessary to prevent the thesis from being overly naive in that regard.

Histories and analyses of the meetings and agreements leading up to the Stockholm Convention and Kyoto Protocol are likewise important secondary sources. Rather than repeat lengthy summaries of what happened in the limited space that I have, I can further summarize it and refer the interested back to more comprehensive accounts. Similarly, other secondary discussions about the nature, causes, and implications of the two agreements should be mentioned.

The last section I mean to include in the literature review is a listing of recent theses, primarily at Oxford, that have addressed similar issues. While it is probably better to engage with more widely known scholars than debate the arguments of these theses directly, there will probably be a bit of the latter in the final version as well. In particular, it might be a good way of making reference to other potentially relevant case studies. Also, since these works have often led me to useful sources, it seems only courteous to give a nod to their authors. Also, they may appreciate knowing that at least one person has dug up the document they spent so much time and energy completing.

If people can think of any other literatures I need to address – or can think of any really stellar sources within the disciplines enumerated above – please leave a comment.

Science and external social needs

One major analytical component of the thesis is the consideration of why scientists are a special group, within the larger set of expert practitioners (a category that includes snipers, surgeons, and sinologists). Usually, the explanation given relates to the scientific method: the norms according to which scientists engage with information. I was interested to see that Kuhn offers a different perspective:

In the sciences (though not in fields like medicine, technology, and law, of which the principal raison d’etre is an external social need), the formation of specialized journals, and the foundation of specialists’ societies, and the claim for a special place in the curriculum have usually been associated with a group’s first reception of a single paradigm. (SoSR 19, italics in original)

Two bits of this are interesting. The first is the idea of emergence in the unbracketed text. When Robert Keohane explained how new disciplines peeled away from philosophy as their practitioners became good enough to specialize in them, he was describing something similar. The ways in which new sub-disciplines within science emerge is clearly of interest. There are those that emerge primarily from the emergence and application of new paradigms (say, quantum chemistry). There are those that emerge because aspects of other sub-disciplines can be usefully combined (say, biochemistry). There may be others that emerge or endure on the basis of other characteristics.

To me, the assertion in the bracketed text is the more interesting part of this quotation. Glancing through the Science and Technology section of this week’s Economist, I see an article on the bacteria in the human digestive tract, and the relationship between obesity and the ratio of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes found therein. Another describes a study on hypoxia (low oxygen in the blood) being carried out by shipping volunteers to different altitudes on Mount Everest. Another is on the use of linear temporal logic to address privacy concerns in computing. The last is about how wonderful bats are, when it comes to eating bugs that eat crops and helping to pollinate Agave plants critical to the manufacture of tequila. All four articles relate quite directly to “external social need[s].”

This is not to say that Kuhn is wrong; rather, the situation sheds light on the relationship between science and society. There may be reasons for studying bacteria or subatomic physics that are concerned purely with the development of further understanding of these things. These are now, however, the reasons that are generally presented to or accepted by budget committees. While it is obviously true that ‘useful’ science is easier to motivate people to fund, there is also the issue of verifying the superiority of new truth claims. When you can say that understanding nuclear physics allows us to generate thousands of megawatts of power and incinerate our wicked enemies, you can provide qualitative evidence for the superiority of information based on a modern nuclear conception of physics over a previous view that treated atoms as indivisible, or a still previous view that rested on the idea that everything in the universe is composed of a combination of water, fire, earth, and air.

Perhaps this linkage between scientific progress and social need can be set aside just by saying that the scientific ideal is unconcerned with “external social need,” while real world science operates under other constraints. What this doesn’t take into account is the possibility that science is part of a broader project: the kind of Enlightenment dream so shamelessly categorized on The Economist’s contents page as: “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” Is science separable from the myriad assertions in that phrasing (most importantly, that there is the possibility of progress, and that it can be evaluated by contrasting ‘intelligence’ with ‘ignorance’) or is the bubble of exclusion from external social needs that exists in the ideal case durable enough to isolate science from the historical context in which it arose, and the kinds of tasks that scientists are generally called upon (and often personally driven) to engage in? If not, we are returned to the question of what distinguishes science.

Citable citation

Tree and blue sky

My congratulations go out to my friend Lindi Cassel: the first person who I know personally (as in ‘used to make stick figures out of kneadable eraser while in biology class with’) to get cited on Google Scholar:

Cassel, Lindi and Peter Suedfeld. “Salutogenesis and autobiographical disclosure among Holocaust survivors.” The Journal of Positive Psychology. Volume 1, Number 4 / October 2006. p.212-225.

While the subject matter is certainly sobering, the publication is extremely impressive, like so much else about Lindi. Bravo.

Kuhn on research

Thomas Kuhn defines research as “a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.” To me, it seems a fairly reasonable, if somewhat cynical, way of looking at it.

There are two implications within the statement that strike me as interesting. The first is the assertion of nature. The idea that it is something out there, to which research is applied, is more empiricist than I expected from a book that Tristan recommended to me (that said, I am only halfway done, and all manner of complexities could yet emerge). All that said, here are a number of different ways in which you could interpret ‘nature’ in the above sentence.

Most obviously, you could take it to mean the external world of atoms and galaxies and ocelots. Naturally, ‘atom,’ ‘galaxy,’ or ‘ocelot’ is just a description, but it is not unreasonable to assert that there is something out there that can be reasonably assigned a term. There is a problem akin to the naming of constellations – it is arbitrary which stars you include in which grouping – but any possible set of constellations is at least a valid description of the orientation of stars in the sky. You might group them by proximity and geometric patterns, or you might group them according to their spectral profiles or any of myriad characteristics, but it should be possible to go back from whatever model is created to either re-create or at least recognize the phenomenon being described.

Another possible meaning for ‘nature’ is just experience. When we look at the stars (or anything else), our brains are performing a massive amount of signal processing. What you see is not, in many important ways, an accurate reflection of what is actually there. Details that evolution has determined to be unimportant are given little or no attention, whereas ones that natural selection has marked out as important are highlighted. This is the inevitable product of how genes that do a good job of sorting important data out from trivial data will tend to find themselves copied more often than those that do the same task badly. Very bright things are dimmed beside darker ones, and vice versa. Learning to undo a lot of this trickery is an important step towards becoming a good photographer. If we take ‘nature’ in this way, the object of our research is our own experiences of a natural world, rather than that world itself.

The second is the implication that we could somehow deal with nature in a more meaningful or comprehensive way. This is an assertion that comes into conflict with limitations in human cognitive power, and the time that can be applied to problems. We can, for instance, only really think in three spatial dimensions. We can only remember so much, and only grasp connections of certain types and complexities between phenomena and ideas. As such, the choice is not between modelling through categorization and some some of ideal holistic understanding of the universe; it is between modelling through categorization and some alternative form of modelling that is still bounded by human cognitive limits.

To me, the evident success of category-based modelling (as manifest most obviously in technology) demonstrates that it is clearly the world comprehension system to beat. Believing that light is a quantum phenomenon as described by certain equations is demonstrably better than believing it is the result of some kind of active broadcasting from the eyes. The most obvious way to show that is that you can build fibre optic cables and fancy lenses and optical disc drives on the basis of the former conception, but not the latter. One day, we will probably have an even better understanding of light, as demonstrated by a greater ability to do things that we want to do using it. Research, as Kuhn defines it above, is an essential activity and a worthwhile application of time and effort. While there is every reason to question and refine our methods, they are not worthy of outright denigration, as I am sure he would agree.

A variety of spices in life

Deities and guns, Pitt Rivers Museum

Two things that I did not know previously about spices, but learned while eating white peppercorns purchased at the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, during a break from reading this evening:

The difference between black and white peppercorns is somewhat similar to the differing means by which white and red wine are produced. Black peppercorns are the dried fruit of Piper nigrum, a flowering vine. The colour is the product of browning enzymes released from the fruit’s flesh through the application of heat, after picking and before drying. The important odour-contributing chemicals present in black pepper are part of a class of molecules called terpenes. White peppercorns, by contrast, are the product of fruit that has been soaked, decomposed, or otherwise removed – leaving only the seed to be dried.

This strikes me as somewhat similar to how red wine is produced from juice that includes skins, seeds, and stems – whereas white wine has such elements filtered out. The chemical result of their inclusion (called maceration) produces the tannins that give flavour to red wine. Those who are restricted to the appreciation of the cheaper examples of both varieties might find it useful to know that red wines contain more congeners than whites, and thus are more likely to leave you feeling rotten the next day (though the relevance of these molecules to the situation seems to be disputed; some argue that hypoglycemia, dehydration, and vitamin B12 deficiency are more to blame). Red wines also include tyramine, an additional metabolic toxin absent in whites.

One molecule mentioned frequently on this blog is capsaicin: the hydrophobic, colorless, odorless that makes chili peppers spicy. It does this by virtue of stimulating vanilloid receptors of subtype 1, normally sensitive to heat and abrasion. I thought that normal table pepper relied upon the same substance, but it actually depends on a molecule called Piperine, potentially notable for the fact that it interferes with biochemical pathways relevant to drug metabolism.

Thinking about social roles

Flooded field near the Port Meadow

While sitting in Starbucks and walking home – the cold seems to have frozen my bicycle lock – I have been thinking about three social roles relevant to my thesis; I shall call them the ‘Pure Advocate’, the ‘Pure Expert’, and the ‘Hybrid’ roles. Each type of actor has an important part to play, in the determination of policy, and each treats information and preferences in ways conditioned by their social role. For the purposes of this discussion, they are ideal characters who reflect only their assumed or assigned roles and not their own interests in any other way.

Continue reading “Thinking about social roles”

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996)

Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan: an American astronomer, author, and popularizer of science. Like Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, he is among those authors of science fiction who have also made a contribution to the accumulation of scientific fact, and to the development of the social role of science within society.

He has been quoted here before.

Nuclear fusion as a power source

Staircase in New College

At dinner, this evening, I was speaking with one of the Wadham College fellows about nuclear fusion. He highlighted an element that I hadn’t previously heard discussed: namely the fact that you need to build truly enormous reactors so as to have a surface area to volume ratio low enough that fusion can be sustained. He spoke of the possibility that two or three gargantuan power plants could serve areas as vast as Europe or North America, but that enormous technical hurdles remain, most of them relating to plasma control.

Remember that, once atoms form a plasma, they have been stripped of their electrons. As such, the positive charges of all protons cause them to repel one another with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Imagine trying to push the north poles of two powerful bar magnets together, and you will begin to appreciate the kind of force dynamics at work. For fusion to be attained, that repulsion needs to be overcome. In the kind of reactors being experimentally constructed now, that is generally achieved through containment using extremely powerful electromagnets.

Under construction now, in France, is the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER). Construction will finish around 2016 and the device will hopefully provide the information and experience required to develop fusion reactors commercially. If they could be deployed, they would offer the benefits of existing fission plants (reliable and substantial electrical generation), with relatively few issues relating to radiactivity (though, as the fellow pointed out, the gamma rays generated in hydrogen fusion would cause the reactors themselves to become quite radioactive, over time).

The possibility of a deus ex machina stepping in to deal with energy security and climate change is certainly an alluring one. With enough power, it would be possible to produce as much hydrogen as you could desire from water. If gargantuan plants are the mechanism to make fusion feasible, energy from them could be partially distributed in that way. Even if fusion were not a panacea, it could be an important component in a response that also includes conservation, the development of renewables, and technical mechanisms to make fossil fuel use carbon neutral.

I don’t know nearly enough about nuclear physics to be able to comment on the viability of fusion as a power source. One thing you hear constantly in journalistic coverage of it is that it has been twenty years or so off for ages now. Hopefully, with the lessons learned from ITER, it will be a real twenty years this time. If that did come to pass, it would certainly not be too soon. On a political note, it is probably a good thing it is being built in France. When it (inevitably) goes way over-budget, the government is reasonably unlikely to scrap the project. By way of comparison, recall how the US government cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, after the expected cost tripled to US$12 billion.