Cocktail Party Physics

to infinity and beyond

A fictionalized Albert Einstein (portrayed by the late Walter Matthau) plays mischievous matchmaker between his egghead niece, Catherine Boyd, and a good-hearted auto mechanic named Ed Walters in the charming 1994 romantic comedy, I.Q. Some might object to the considerable liberties taken with historical fact and illustrious personages. After all, a key plot point turns on Einstein essentially committing a form of academic fraud by passing off his own work as Ed's, to help the latter impress his niece. But there's a lot to admire in the film, if for no other reason than its inclusion of Einstein's real-life cronies, Kurt Godel, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Liebknecht as supporting characters. And how could you not love this exchange, as Ed introduces Einstein to Frank, one of his co-workers at the garage: "This is Albert Einstein, the smartest man in the world!" Intones Frank (while shaking hands) in his best Joisey accent, "Hey, how they hangin'?"

This being a mainstream movie, there's very little actual science portrayed, despite the predominance of scientists in the cast. But there is a lovely little scene in a diner, where Catherine tries to explain to Ed the gist of Zeno's Paradox. She explains it thus: if she takes one step forward, and then halves the distance traveled with her next step, then halves it again, and so forth, such that the progression goes on for infinity, she will never be able to reach Ed. The distance between them will get smaller and smaller, but will never reach zero. The astute viewer will note that the subtext here is Catherine's belief that there is no way to bridge the gap between the couple's intellectual differences and social status. Which makes it all the more refreshing for us diehard romantics when the practical-minded Ed simply steps over the imaginary line to close the gap: "So how did I do that?" A confused Catherine stammers, "I... I don't know." But if she knows her calculus (and she should), the "mystery" should be easy to solve.

I've encountered numerous versions and variations on Zeno's Paradox over the years, but -- and it pains me to admit this publicly -- I did not realize it was tied to the essence of calculus. If I get nothing else out of my fledgling experiment in self-instruction regarding calculus, at least I have learned that much. For those who haven't encountered Zeno before, he was a Greek philosopher living in the 5th century B.C., who thought a great deal about motion. Some might argue he thought a bit too hard about motion; the guy was always playing devil's advocate, even with his own arguments, which is how he arrived at his eponymous paradox. He used an arrow flying through the air towards a target to illustrate his points, rather than a young couple in a diner, but the basic idea is the same: to reach the target, the arrow must first cover half the distance, then half the remaining distance, and so on, moving an infinite number of times. By that logic, the distance between the arrow and the target would keep getting smaller and smaller, and yet the arrow could never close the gap completely in order to actually reach the target.

There's an equally paradoxical corollary: At any given moment in time, the arrow has a specific fixed position -- it can only be in just one place at any given time -- which means it is technically "at rest" (not moving) at that particular instant, even though, taken all together, those individual points add up to an arrow in motion. Motion, after all, is basically the measure of how an object's position has changed over time. But break down motion into infinitely small increments, and you find yourself trying to determine how far it traveled in zero amount of time: instantaneous motion. Ergo, the paradox. Zeno stumbled on a new way of looking at the world. Alas, it would take a couple of millennia before mathematics developed sufficiently to make sense of his logical conundrum. (For starters, they needed the concept of zero.)

Calculus has a rather formidable reputation. I have always been among those non-mathematical sorts who viewed it with intense trepidation and preferred to keep a safe distance, despite my love for all that science-y stuff. But according to my new virtual instructor, Michael Starbird (University of Texas, Austin), the entire discipline is encapsulated in two fundamental ideas: (1) the derivative, which is a way of measuring instantaneous change (such as finding speed from position); and (2) the integral, which describes the accumulation of tiny pieces that add up to a whole (and can be used, for instance, to determine the distance traveled based on speed). Everything else involved in calculus is just variations on these two themes.

Naturally, any physicist reading this post already knows this stuff. But it wasn't always the case. Borrowing one of the central concepts of the discipline itself, one could argue that calculus was invented via tiny infinitesemal bits of accrued knowledge that, taken together, added up to a whole. (Isn't metaphor a marvelous thing?) The roots of calculus are usually traced back to ancient Greece and the Pythagorean theorem, a century or so before Zeno. A century after Zeno, Eudoxus  developed something called a "method of exhaustion," which made it possible to determine the area and volume of regions by breaking them into smaller shapes. Archimedes later adapted the method of exhaustion to determine the areas and volumes of geometric objects around 225 BC.

A lot of mathematicians over the subsequent centuries -- in lots of different geographic regions, including India and Japan -- made vital contributions, and a handful "almost" invented calculus, most notably Pierre de Fermat in 1629.  But ultimately, the credit for inventing calculus is given jointly to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who independently made their revolutionary discoveries in the 1660s and 1670s.

Newton hardly needs an introduction, being almost universally recognized as the father of modern physics via his work on gravity and the laws of motion (detailed in the massive Principia) and the nature of light (Opticks). Around 1666, Newton worked out his so-called "theory of fluxions." It's early days yet in my remedial calculus DVD course, and I have yet to find a good  lay person's explanation of what Newton's theory entailed, but it seems to correlate pretty well to the notion of differentials. At any rate, it's generally agreed that Newton was the first to state the fundamental theorem of calculus, and was also the first to apply derivatives and integrals in a single work (although he didn't use those terms).

Leibniz is less well-known to non-scientists. He was born in Germany in 1646, and since his father died when he was 6, was largely raised by his mother. He taught himself Latin and Greek so he could read the great works of Aristotle and other philosophers. He entered the University of Leipzig at age 15, and left two years later with his degree in law (he eventually earned a doctorate in law).

A chance meeting with Christopher Huygens ignited Leibniz's interest in the study of geometry and the mathematics of motion; he described their meeting as "opening a whole new world" to him. He pursued these interests in his spare time, inventing (in 1671, well before Charles Babbage and his Difference Engines) a handy little machine called the step reckoner. A forerunner of the modern calculator, the device could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and even extract square roots. His reasoning: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation, which could be safely relegated to anyone else if machines were used."

But it was the problem of motion that most intrigued Leibniz, who published the first account of differential calculus in 1684, followed by a discussion of integral calculus two years later. Newton's work on the subject didn't appear in print until 1687. His procrastination led to one of the most bitter controversies in scientific history. Using present-day practices, Leibniz would have won credit for the discovery, simply because he published first, but at the time, Newton was by far the more famous scientist, and a prominent member of the Royal Society.  And he wasn't above using his considerable influence to crush the scientific competition. In addition to Leibniz, he fought with John Flamsteed, with Huygens , and with Robert Hooke, and each proved to be  an acrimonious battle. In short, Newton was not a "people person;" no wonder he purportedly died a virgin.

The Royal Society sided with Newton on the controversy, crediting him with the discovery of calculus in 1715 after a prolonged dispute. Leibniz wasn't given shared credit until after his death a year later, and even then, it was one of those never-ending controversies that occasionally plagues the physics profession. (Get a couple of physicists on opposite ends of the "does centrifugal force really exist" debate, then sit back and watch the fur fly.) Today, the consensus seems to be that the two men represent the two approaches that form the basis of the discipline they co-invented. Leibniz was the more abstract of the two, much like I.Q.'s  Catherine -- and it's his superior system of notation that modern scientists still use today -- while Newton focused on the more practical applications of calculus, like Ed the science-minded garage mechanic.

So that's the gist of what I learned this week. Calculus is fairly simple and straightforward in concept; the devil is in the details. But essentially it's a way of measuring change, whether that be a change in position, temperature, or what have you. Its power comes from its universality: the same basic concepts can be applied to systems as diverse as a car driving down a road, the stock market, even traffic flow.

Personally, the most striking thing about my first calculus lesson was the notion of the integral, because I hadn't considered the deeper implication of this seemingly obvious statement: viewing objects as being formed via the accumulation of infinitesimally small pieces enables us to see the world as a dynamic rather than static place. A simple medicine ball, viewed through the lens of the integral, can be seen as growing by accretion -- i.e., a form of motion -- rather than just sitting there complacently on the floor of my gym, waiting to be of some use.

It's a whole new way of thinking, but at least I've got the gist of the "What", in the broadest possible brushstrokes -- plus a useful historical context. All those devilish details will be filled in bit by bit in the coming weeks as I begin the hard part: working through the equations and learning how to apply the universal principle to a wide variety of applications. The biggest challenge, for my abstractly-challenged brain, will be grasping the over-arching "Why"  -- the contextual framework into which it all fits. Because ultimately, the "why" is everything. In this case, the "why" comes down to the function: the derivative and the integral are flip sides of the same coin, two different ways of looking at the same thing, and the function is the connection between them. Understanding how the two relate to each other, and the significance of that dependence, as expressed in a universal "Fundamental Theorem," is my ultimate goal.

In the meantime, my 14-year-old niece, Kathryn, sent me a little Internet meme in which one can determine one's age using "chocolate math." It's significantly easier than calculus:

1. Pick the number of times a week that you would like to eat chocolate. (This number must be more than 1 but less than 10, much to Jen-Luc Piquant's disappointment, as she would like to have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, 7 days a week -- provided it's gourmet, organic chocolate, that is; none of that cheap-o Hershey stuff.)

2. Multiply  this number by 2.

3. Add 5.

4. Multiply the total by 50.

5. If you have already had your birthday this year, add 1756. If you haven't, add 1755.

6. Now subtract the four-digit year in which you were born.

Ta-da! The result should be a three-digit number. The first digit is the original number you chose, pertaining to how often per week you would like to eat chocolate. And the next two numbers are your age (one assumes anyone capable of taking the quiz is aged 10 or older, otherwise they'd end up with a two-digit number). I can faithfully report that it really does work, a nice little example of "mathemagic," or hidden patterns in numbers. Apparently 2006 is the only year this particular trick will work, although I'd think that altering the numerical values in Step 5 might make it possible to adapt the meme to other years. That doesn't mean I understand to the nth degree why it works, of course, but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with any mysterious innately mathematical properties of chocolate (more's the pity). 

Teenagers today have unprecedented access to cutting-edge technology, but they rarely use email, cell phones, MP3 players, or computers for much more than entertainment. So I was thrilled to get a mathematical meme (however elementary) from my niece, and not, say, a giggly personality "quiz" or cautionary chain letter, which is more the norm for kids her age. Maybe she'll manage to enjoy her high school calculus class senior year -- unlike her recalcitrant aunt, who skipped out on it altogether. Then again, maybe I'm finally mature enough to appreciate why calculus is so seminal to science.

under my skin

A few weeks ago I went on a weekend bike ride along the Mount Vernon trail here in DC, braving the throngs of roller bladers, speed walkers, joggers, other bicyclists, and baby strollers. I should have just stayed home. The trail was even more crowded than usual, plus some bureaucratic meddler had put up metal crowd control barriers along the edges of the trail. Those barriers proved my undoing: I swerved to the side to avoid running down a jogger who looked like he was about to pass out from fatigue, and ran headlong into one. Failing to unclip from my pedals in time, I toppled over, skinning my knee.

A skinned knee is hardly a life-threatening injury, so I washed off the blood and bits of gravel with water and went on my merry way. When I got home, however, and did a more thorough cleaning, I discovered the wound was quite a bit deeper than I'd realized. Hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin were in order, along with a kneecap-sized adhesive bandage. (Jen-Luc Piquant recommended a honey and sugar paste, which supposedly has natural antimicrobial properties and reduces the chances of permanent scarring. Scientists aren't sure how the paste does the latter, but they suspect it curtails excess collagen production. Whatever. I'll stick with my tried and true Neosporin.) It was teetering on the border of the "cavity wound" category, in which a chunk of tissue is scraped away, leaving a cavity of some sort (mine barely qualified, but still...).

Be grateful I don't own a digital camera, otherwise you would have been treated to a series of photos detailing how this grotesque wound proceeded through the various healing stages. (What a great idea; I've got to break down and buy a digital camera so I'm prepared to document the next festering open wound I develop.) Those stages are very well documented, it turns out. Skin cells attach to a net-like mesh of proteins (an extracellular matrix) to orient themselves, a construction that some people have likened to eggs sitting in an egg carton. For cavity wounds, the body "fills in" the hole from bottom to top by building new tissue. I can verify that healing wounds appear bright red during this stage, as connective tissue cells multiply and form collagen, which in turn forms little red fleshy masses called granulation tissue, and this continues until the entire cavity is filled up and all that remains is a bit of scar tissue.

My biggest concern in the days immediately following my encounter with the metal barrier was staving off infection -- because don't you just hate the resulting pus-like seepage when that happens? I sure do. Fortunately, in addition to old standbys like Neosporin, you can now buy Band-Aids with antibiotics built into the protective gauze -- I have a box of them in a variety of bright fluorescent shades -- and last year researchers at the University of Florida took the concept one step further with the development of a new type of wound dressing to stem the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospitals. (Sobering statistic: Nearly two million Americans per year contract a staph infection while hospitalized, and of those, several thousand die.)  The University of Florida wound dressing features a microbial coating that can be chemically bonded not just to gauze bandages, but also to socks, hospital bedding and gowns. The anti-fungal coating makes the material super-absorbent so that it pulls excess moisture away from the healing wound, killing the most common and harmful bacteria in the process.

Getting rid of excess moisture is important not just to reduce infection; at some point the wound scabs over for protection to help expedite the healing process. I did what Mom always advised during my tomboy childhood: exposed the wound to air after a bit to let the telltale scab form. The problem is that it was right below the kneecap, a major joint, so every time I walked, or bent the knee in any way, the scabby covering would crack. Picking at scabs always makes it worse. That's because removing the scab also removes some of the newly regenerated tissues growing underneath, impeding the healing process. Scientists at Stanford University have been looking into why this might be the case by studying fruit fly larvae. 

Michael Galko and Mark Krasnow stabbed the helpless larvae with needles to create deep puncture wounds, then studied how they healed. The usual blood clotting and spreading of new skin cells occurred, and they noticed the similarity in this process to the fruitfly's developmental stages. So they looked more closely at the genes involved, and discovered that one particular cell signaling pathway kicked in during peak healing -- specifically, it controlled the regeneration of the epidermis (but not the scab formation stage). They concluded that each stage of wound healing is controlled by distinct genetic pathways triggered whenever the body suffers such a wound. And the same probably holds true for mammals, not just Drosophila melanogaster.

Of course, one could argue that I prolonged the healing process by refusing to give up my usual gym workouts, which only exacerbated the cracks in the scabby covering. But this must be balanced against the recent finding that exercise helps speed the healing process by as much as 25%. And the faster a wound heals, the less likely it will become infected. This is based on a recent study at Ohio State University involving 28 healthy "older adults" (ages 55 to 77, with an average age of 61), each of whom agreed to receive a small puncture wound and let the researchers document how it healed. None of the participants had exercised regularly for at least three months prior to the study. Half of them were told to exercise three times a week for three months, while the other half maintained their sedentary ways.

The results: the skin wounds healed an average of 10 days faster in those who exercised compared to those who didn't. The biggest surprise was finding sharply boosted levels of cortisol in the exercisers, a hormone typically associated with stress. Yet exercise is widely believed to reduce stress -- which is why I make such frequently gym excursions. (To quote Robert DeNiro's anxiety-ridden mobster in Analyze This, "I got stress!") The working hypothesis for this result was that the stress of exercise enhances the regulation of cortisol, indicating one of those crucial biological pathways in the complex healing process.

These are all examples of the kinds of cutting-edge research that will be conducted at the four new Centers for Innovative Wound Healing being established by the National Institutes of Health, to be located at the La Jolla Institute for Molecular Medicine in San Diego, California; the University of Illinois in Chicago; Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and Montana State University. It's a $13 million project intended to create more innovative therapies for things like burns, diabetic ulcers, gunshot wounds, and bedsores, not to mention cavity wounds and the odd skinned knee. And it's interdisciplinary in nature: the NIH seeks to bring together experts from fields as diverse as microbiology, dermatology, mathematics and engineering.

Math, you say? Well, bioinformatics and combinatoric methods, specifically. Andrew Baird is a molecular biologist who heads the new wound healing center at La Jolla. He plans to use these and other methods to evaluate simultaneously millions of individual molecules to determine which have the most potential for speeding up the usual healing process. Such molecules could be used to accelerate healing, deliver gene-based therapies to promote tissue repair, and perhaps even study how stem cells in bone marrow contribute to tissue regeneration. (Baird might be interested in the latest research by Brown University's Jay Tang and Jim Valles, who believe the physics of microtubules could hold an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to cell division and organism development.)

So mathematics can prove very useful in shedding light on the dynamics of wound healing, which is why it's been an active area of investigation since at least 1995, per this article unearthed from the New Scientist archives. More recently, Philip Maini is a professor at Oxford University in England who is applying mathematical modeling to study how cancer cells grow and woulds heal -- specifically, he's using the same equations used by engineers to model the stresses and strains in buildings to model human biological tissue. And equations describing diffusion -- "the process by which different substances mix through the random movements of their atoms and molecules" -- can also yield insights into chemical signaling in biological systems, including the chemical signals released by damaged tissue that turns on the generation of new cells to repair a wound.

In short, there's a lot we don't know yet about the underlying mechanisms beneath the skin that the body uses to heal itself. My knee has healed up nicely, for the most part, although there's still a pink patch where the wound used to be. Perhaps one day we can cover up such unsightly remnants as scars and pink patches with artificial skin. This is a very active area of research, particularly as it pertains to robots. For instance, a Japanese collaboration between cosmetics manufacturer Kao Corporation and Keio University  have developed a new artificial skin that feels almost as soft as the real thing, despite being made of elastic silicone and urethane. (Item found via Rod van Meter's Live From Tokyo blog.) Jen-Luc Piquant somewhat snidely observes that this should bring joy to socially maladjusted perverts everywhere who dream of realistic sex with synthetic robots. But hey, she's virtual -- what does she know about the glories of the sense of touch? That sort of thing can make or break a robotic sexual encounter... um, or so we've heard.

Scientists at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln might end up giving a whole new meaning to the term "afterglow" with their electroluminescent robot skin -- essentially a thin film sensor that glows in response to applied pressure. That light can be recorded by a digital camera to produce a very high-resolution image. The layers of gold and semiconducting nanoparticles (cadmium sulphide) -- separated by insulating layers of polymer -- self-assemble out of solution, making it easier to "build" such sensors to conform to complex shapes, like human body parts or surgical instruments. The result: a thin film just 100 nanometers thick.

The Nebraska researchers came up with a fun way of illustrating the power of their new sensor: they pressed a shiny new penny against the device, producing a detailed image of Abraham Lincoln -- so detailed, one can see the wrinkles in Honest Abe's clothing and the letters "TY" in "LIBERTY." In addition to robot skin, or skin for prosthetic devices, such sensors could also be used in medical instruments. For instance, place such a sensor over an endoscope, and a surgeon would be able to remotely "feel", as well as "see", tissues inside the body. It's similar in concept to the pressure-sensitive, flexible electronic skin developed last year by scientists at the University of Tokyo, who embedded sensors in a thin plastic film that could be wrapped around objects, such as eggs.

All of which demonstrates that sometimes scientific truth can be stranger than fiction. Or not, at least when it comes to science fiction. Technovelgy.com reminds us that Roger Zelazny's classic sci-fi novel, This Immortal, features Rolem, a wrestling robot with pressure-sensitive skin. So perhaps this is more a case of science fiction once again inspiring real-world science.

crouching tiger, bucking bronco

We're late getting around to blogging today because I spent yesterday evening writing my latest "Random Walks" column for 3 Quarks Daily, which you can read here if you feel so inclined. It's mostly about women, weight, and body image. But I managed to sneak in a wee bit of science, namely the development of spiffy 3D full-body scanners that can accurately take a person's measurements in seconds, transmitting that data to computers so that clothing can be tailor-made -- cheaply, too, so one day there will no excuse for ill-fitting clothing. On that great day, Jen-Luc Piquant fervently hopes we will have seen the last of pot bellies peeking out over waistlines, the infamous "plumber's crack," gaping blouses, and high-water pants. (If we could also see the last of those ugly baggy jeans hanging around the buttocks of young male bucks trying to be gangstas, our joy would be complete.)

If MIT's Neil Gershenfeld has his way, consumers of the future will be able to design and build all their own products in commercial "fab labs." He calls it "personal fabrication," and outlines the concept in great detail in his book, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop -- From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. The concept grew out of Gershenfeld's MIT course, "How to Built (Almost) Anything," in which past students (many with no technical training) have devised such novel items as a Web browser for parrots, and a "defensible dress." The latter was inspired by how porcupines and blowfish respond to creatures that encroach on their personal territory. Sensors embedded in the fabric of the dress can detect when someone else gets too close to the wearer. They send signals to wires that stiffen and cause the dress to billow out, thereby protecting the wearer's personal space. If only we had possessed such a garment during our salad days in New York City.

Sensor technology is an amazing thing, with seemingly limitless practical applications. The little devices are everywhere these days, even if you aren't aware of their presence. Now a Tulsa-based company called Winnercomm -- the largest independent provider of programming for ESPN -- has developed an "X Power" graphics system that was used for the first time during ESPN's rodeo coverage.  Basically, microelectronic gadgets roughly the size of hockey pucks are glued to the backs of the bulls. Those gadgets contain lots of tiny sensors that measure the physical forces associated with bull-riding -- most notably, the g-forces. That data is transmitted to computers in real time, so stations like ESPN can quickly display accompanying graphics on the screen to help viewers visualize the finer points of a given ride. Specifically, they can see an animated bar chart that shows the acceleration and deceleration of the animal, concluding with an assessment of a particular bull's power.

"It's kind of like jamming a master's thesis on physics into each ride," Winnercomm's director of new technology, Steve Wharton, told the Associated Press. You'd need a bit more than a master's degree in physics to build such a system on your own, however. Achieving a workable system like this required precisely combining the latest physics advances in microelectronics, image processing, and high-speed data transfer, among other things.

Of course, given the right data and sufficient time, almost any PhD physicist would be able to calculate the velocity, acceleration, jerk and angular momentum associated with the average bull ride. The equations aren't difficult for a seasoned professional, but they are quite time-consuming, considering all the variables that come into play (and how difficult it is to measure values for those variables). What makes Winnercomm's system so unique is its ability to do this in real time. It could certainly add to the entertainment value of televised sporting events, much like hardcore baseball fans like to keep track of the radar guns recording the speeds of pitches throughout the game. Winnercomm eventually hopes to extend their X Power system to coverage of motorcycle stunts so viewers can get a visual depiction of the torque and g-forces the riders experience.

Personally, I'd like to see Winnercomm attach a few sensors to Chinese martial artist and action film star Jet Li, who is known for moving so quickly and precisely, that the director of his first US film had to ask him to slow down his techniques because the cameras couldn't quite capture them. Exactly how fast are we talking about? To what extent does he sacrifice force for speed? And how high would the guy really be able to leap without the aid of hidden cables and wires? Inquiring minds need to know, so hopefully Winnercomm will get right on that. They'd better be quick about it, too, since Jet Li has announced that his latest film, Fearless, will most likely be his last.

We took in a matinee screening of Fearless this afternoon, just to thrill to the lucidly violent grace of a man who might well be deemed one of China's national treasures. There was the usual gorgeous cinematography and breathtaking choreography, including one fight staged on a high platform. I must confess, when Li's opponent fell crashing to the ground from that great height, and rose virtually unharmed, my inner Geek Grrl whispered that the guy had to have suffered some internal injuries, or least a few cracked ribs. These details were not pertinent to the plot, however, so we decided to chalk it up to artistic license and enjoy the rest of the film.

My favorite scene was Huo Yuanjia's (the character Li plays) historic battle against a gigantic no-neck Western fighter, so strong he could pull a locomotive along the tracks all by himself. The Westerner represents the superiority of size and strength in the ring, and not surprisingly, has soundly defeated all of his smaller Chinese challengers to date, deriding them as "weak." No hero could take that insult lying down, and Huo steps in to defend his people's honor.

Of course, size really does matter in a fight: mass is a critical part of the relevant equations. And this becomes readily apparent as the two men battle it out. The Westerner has too much body mass for Huo's usually devastating punches and kicks to do much serious damage at first. At one point, Huo leaps into a flying kick, only to have all the resulting momentum reflected back because the other man has too much mass. Huo merely bounces off. But I'm fond of saying that sure, size matters -- but it's not the whole story. Speed, agility, and flawless technique can certainly help even the odds. What I loved about the scene is that Huo adapts his fighting style mid-fight, adjusting his moves to take the best advantage of his opponent's far-greater mass -- in essence, using his size and strength against him. It's the essence of tai chi, Jet Li's specialty, and this scene depicts it beautifully. (Yeah, I know it's a choreographed, staged fight in a movie. I still wouldn't want to fight Jet Li offscreen, for even a few meager seconds.)

Among the several intertwined themes of Fearless is that of fighting with honor, even if one's opponents are the sort to, say, [SPOILER ALERT!] slip deadly poison into one's tea between rounds to ensure that one loses the fight, thereby crushing an entire nation's spirit. Coincidentally, it is also officially Banned Books Week, which the American Library Association celebrates in part by listing the Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books. Usually, I take the opportunity to re-read one of my all-time favorites, To Kill a Mockingbird, which features another nobly uncompromising hero, Atticus Finch, the small-time Southern lawyer who defends an innocent black man in a rape case (against a white woman) -- knowing full well the outcome is predetermined and he is almost certain to lose. Nonetheless, he fights with honor and integrity, just like Huo Yuanjia.

The least we can do in return is to read a banned book for Atticus. You've the list link right there.

i could be mathier

There's a nice little moment in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Buffy and her brainy sidekick, Willow, are wondering if Giles (the stuffy British librarian who also acts as Buffy's Watcher) had ever rebelled in high school. "Are you kidding?" a skeptical Buffy exclaims. "His diapers were tweed. He probably sat in math class thinking, 'You know, this could be mathier!'"

As it turns out, Giles was a bit of a hellraiser in his youth, which just goes to prove that it's never too late for someone to reform and stage an intellectual comeback -- even if you're a math-phobic English major turned science writer like me. Last night I was browsing the Website of The Teaching Company, which specializes in videotaping courses for the general public on everything from economics and history, to philosophy, literature and, yes, science and math. In a moment of temporary insanity, I ordered the DVD course on "Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear," taught by Michael Starbird, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He swears  I can grasp the two deep concepts underlying calculus without the usual technical jargon and rigmarole. Plus, the set was on sale at less than half the original price. Apparently there's not much demand for remedial calculus courses these days.

Okay, my motivation wasn't really an insane lapse of judgment on a par with falling victim to late-night infomercials ("Now how much would you pay?"). We all have gaps in our broad base of knowledge, and while I am far more scientifically literate than the average American, I am functionally innumerate when it comes to math. Sure, I can balance my checkbook and manage my personal finances, even figure out basic percentages, but -- at the risk of sounding like a physicist talking about algebra -- that's not "real" math, just basic arithmetic. According to the course description, calculus is "one of the greatest achievements of the human mind," and an integral part of our intellectual heritage, since it lies at the core of how we see economics, astronomy, population growth, engineering, even baseball.

So I admit it: I could be mathier. A lot mathier. What I know about calculus could fit on the head of a pin, because I skipped my senior year of high school and went straight to college, where I was enrolled in an honors program and therefore exempted from the usual general requirements. (In retrospect, I can't believe I was allowed to get away with this.) While this certainly meant I could focus almost exclusively on my fortes -- literature and writing/journalism -- it meant my mathematical skills atrophied at an alarming rate from then on.

I think scientists have a valid point when they bemoan the fact that it's okay in our culture to be ignorant of math, whereas it's not okay to be illiterate. It shouldn't be okay. We don't all need to be math whizzes, but we should have some understanding of where math (including calculus) fits into the intellectual framework-- context is everything, people! -- why it's important, what the basic underlying concepts are, and, if possible, be able to struggle through the odd simple equation in a pinch. Per Bertrand Russell: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty... such as only the greatest art can show." (In other words: Math is pretty!) People do understand this at some level: witness the enormous success of the TV series Numb3rs, which ought not to have survived past the pilot episode if people truly didn't care about math. Most of us just don't resonate well to how the subject is traditionally taught. Our brains don't work that way.

Over the course of many years as a science writer, I've focused mostly on concepts, hands-on experiments, and the like in much of my work -- and rightly so, since this is a tried and true approach to succeeding at broader communication of science. I'm a big fan of concept-based physics courses for non-majors -- probably because I don't have unrealistic expectations about what students can and cannot gain from them. But I must confess that on the rare occasions when I've bothered to put in the effort to understand a basic equation or two -- and they must be basic, given my functional innumeracy -- it has deepened my grasp of the essential concepts in ways I don't entirely understand, yet can't deny. It's like some final piece clicked into place that I never even knew was missing.

The first step is admitting you have a problem. But just owning up to one's ignorance doesn't solve the problem. At some point, one has to confront one's weaknesses head-on. So I ordered Starbird's DVD lecture series. And to hold myself accountable, I'm going public with my little endeavor, to ensure I work through all 24 30-minute lectures. My goal is to cover two lectures per week, although I do have to work for a living, so this might be overly optimistic. I'll report on my progress every Friday, so you can all laugh and mock accordingly -- or even offer your own thoughts on the week's lecture topics.

Compared to a 24-lecture DVD course, here's something much, much easier: Declan Butler and the editors at Nature magazine have issued a call to arms regarding the "Tripoli Six," five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician who have been sentenced to death in Libya for purportedly infecting patients in their clinic with AIDS. This kind of thing has apparently been going on for years, but has been largely ignored by the scientific community. Nature thinks this needs to change. I think they're probably right, and a vast majority of the science blogosphere agrees as well. For tips on what you can do, go here.

Jen-Luc Piquant and I are off to fire off some angry letters and emails to join in the fight for justice. And UPS just delivered the DVDs from The Teaching Company. It's gonna be a busy week....

 

figures of speech

Arrrr! Shiver me timbers! We weren't going to post anything today, but it's Talk Like a Pirate Day! How can we resist? Jen-Luc Piquant has donned her best pirate garb in honor of the occasion, and has been boning up on her piratical syntax via this handy online training video. Everyone who's anyone is linking to it like crazy, because, in case you haven't heard, there's a bona fide pirate movement sweeping the land. We have waxed poetical about the science of pirates in a prior post, enthusing over Gideon DeFoe's whimsical Pirates! series, and recently stumbled across this handy reference tool listing famous pirates throughout the ages..

Every holiday needs a commercial tie-in, and manufacturers of fine pirate gear and other related products are no doubt making a capitalist killing, all in the name legal plunder. However, there's no excuse for crass marketing ploys like this one, found courtesy of the twisted piratical mind of P.Z. Myers. So, so wrong, in so many different ways.... And yet, Jen-Luc Piquant points out that said "feminine products" would most likely have been welcomed by the notorious Anne Bonney, the most famous female pirate in history. It's tough to live day in and day out onboard a ship with a bunch of swarthy swabbies, and no doubt there were days when Anne felt "less than fresh."

Needless to say, Jen-Luc Piquant greatly admires Anne Bonney, and considers her something of a kindred spirit for her rebellious independence. (Although bear in mind that Jen-Luc suffers from an acute narcissistic personality disorder; it's unlikely Bonney was anything like her.) It's a rip-roaring yarn: Born sometime between 1697 and 1705, Anne was the daughter of an Irish attorney who revealed her wild side early on, purportedly stabbing a servant girl in the belly with a table knife at the tender age of 13. Small wonder she eloped three years later with a sailor and small-time pirate named James Bonney, thereby embarking on a life filled with adventure and unsavory companions.

Eventually she left her husband to go a-pirating with her lover, Calico Jack Rackham, disguised (at least at first) as a man. She even had a best friend in fellow female plunderer Mary Read. According to Wikipedia, Anne "was by all accounts competent, good in combat, and respected within pirate ranks." In fact, when their ship was attacked by Jamaican troops in October 1720, Anne and Mary fought better, and more fiercely, than their male compatriots -- in part because the men were too sloshed to put up much resistance.

Everyone ended up in a stank Jamaican prison, and sentenced to hanging. (Far from being supportive, Anne apparently told Calico Jack, when he asked to see her one last time, that while she was sorry for his ultimate fate, "If you had fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog." Ouch!) Anne and Mary tried to plead pregnancy (apparently they really were pregnant), but this only bought them temporary reprieve until they gave birth. Mary died of fever shortly after giving birth (so did her baby), but Anne disappeared from historical record, and most historians believe she must have set up a new life somewhere under an assumed name. There is no record of her death. She hardly seems the sort who would have faded into quiet obscurity, but for all we know, she ended her days by a cozy hearth fire, knitting baby booties for her score of grandkids. We'd like to think that if nothing else, she continued to indulge occasionally in salty pirate speech.

While we don't have a built-in pirate mode here at Cocktail Party Physics, you can translate this, and any other blog post, into Pirate Speak from here. The day's festivities got us to thinking about what it would take to institute an annual Talk Like a Physicist Day. I think we need one. C'mon, let's pillage the concept and make it our own. How cool would it be to have physics-mania sweep the nation, with everyone going crazy for scientific gear, competing for the wildest demos, and vying over who can best mimic that inimitable Physicist-Speak? Here's a few rudimentary, off-the-cuff pointers for daring neophytes willing to take the plunge.

1. Never say anything in clear, direct English if you can obfuscate it with technical jargon. (This also works beautifully in literary criticism; just check out the writings of Jacques Lacan.) For instance, if someone asks you how, exactly, radio signals are encoded, toss off this jaunty phrase: "Oh, you just modulate the amplitude of the sine wave!" All the scientists out there understand this immediately, but trust me, to the average American, the sentence conveys no actual meaning, even though they listen to their radios every day.

2. Use terms like "orders of magnitude" to describe significant differences of scale.

3. A particularly challenging task is not "difficult"; rather, the problems to be overcome are "nontrivial," probably because of large (and therefore difficult to predict/calculate) "perturbations."

4. It's not that the course of true love never runs smooth; it is filled with turbulence and bifurcations.

That's just a random sampling of some of the most common physicist turns of phrase; you get the idea. Feel free to suggest your own favorite examples of impenetrable Physics Speak. We can collect them into a handy Talk Like a Physicist lexicon, maintained on its very own Website (somebody reserve that domain name, stat!). And can a training film on YouTube be far behind?

the write stuff

Those SEED-y ScienceBloggers are at it again. Late last week, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles and Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily threw down the gauntlet by announcing a Blogger SAT Challenge. They were inspired by a New York Times article that included sample top-scoring essays from the new written component of every high schooler's favorite standardized test (not).  The writing was not particularly inspired or compelling. The Times was a bit snarky about that fact; even Dave M. lamented the unfortunate students' abilities (or lack thereof). Chad argues that the students only have 25 minutes or so to produce their literary masterpieces, or roughly the length of the average TV sitcom. And this, says Chad, is harder to pull off than one might think.

Well, duh. Writing is, like, totally hard. Even for those of us who work with words for a living. It's not just about stringing words and phrases together to form a workable, decently organized essay -- at least anywhere else besides the SATs. Chad and Dave decided to settle the debate in "the modern way": via a science blogger's pissing Internet contest. We're taking a pass, ourselves, mostly because we write all day, every day, in addition to blogging, and already possess a deep appreciation for the difficulty of the task at hand. But we eagerly await the contest results.

I'm occasionally asked for tips and advice on becoming a science writer, usually by scientific grad students casting about for less traditional career options. A couple of months ago, I began collecting my scattered thoughts on the subject into today's Monster Post, just because I thought it might prove to be a useful online resource. Or not. My kneejerk bit of advice is usually, "Don't be like me." That's not false modesty. The subtitle to the story of my bizarre career trajectory could best be summed up thusly: "How I Did Everything Wrong and Still Managed To Become A Successful Freelance Science Writer."

For starters, it's usually helpful to have at least an undergraduate degree in a scientific field. Even a minor would be better than nothing; you'll struggle less to grasp essential concepts if you have a solid background in the sciences. There's a handful of others like me out there, but by and large, former English/humanities majors don't drift into writing about physics for a living. Just because I did things the hard way, doesn't mean that you should. (Although it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea to get more English majors writing about science... which means getting them interested in, and excited about, science in the first place.)

[UPDATE: Commenter Annie has revealed herself as another former English major who's gone into science. Huzzah! Ditto for the Intersection's Chris Mooney, who has just issued a call for all of us to "come out of the closet," as it were, in light of the recent shameful attacks on his credentials by the Discovery Institute. So let's hear from all you lurking science/humanities sorts out there. And Jen-Luc Piquant gives a belated shout-out of solidarity to Chris; we, too, have had our credentials publicly questioned by those who had little business doing so.]

Then there was my personal style, or pronounced lack thereof. I stumbled into science writing at the tail end of my East Village Punk/Goth/Biker Girl phase. It's probably not a good idea to show up for editorial meetings, or physics conferences, with purple hair, leggings (one pair had a cobweb motif), studded boots, and a black leather jacket. Forget this weekend's heated brouhaha over what I fondly term BosomGate: Jessica Valenti looks like the epitome of respectability in that infamous picture compared to my 25-year-old self. I was a walking demonstration of What Not To Wear to be taken seriously as a professional science writer. Really, it's a miracle the physicists let me past the front door; perhaps they thought I'd at least be decorative. But I'm pretty sure they let me stay because I was smart, focused, disciplined, hard-working, and very good at my job. And I'm very glad they did. (Ironically, that black leather jacket became a bit of a trademark. I still wear it to physics conferences. And sometimes to Central Park.) 

So, if you're going to dress unconventionally on the job, do so around PhD physicists, who are more tolerant of eccentricity. No doubt there was a sniggering Ann Althouse or two saying nasty things behind my back, and making unfair assumptions about my perceived morality based on my manner of dress, but I was blissfully unaware of such things. I had work to do, after all -- work that, for the first time in my life, I truly loved. So when someone asks me about whether they should consider science writing as a career, my response is "Hell yeah!" And while I wouldn't offer myself as a role model, I have learned a few useful things. Admittedly, some of them are fairly obvious. Such as...

Learn the basics of journalism. (We'll assume you learned the basics of composition long before now.) Take a course in Journalism 101, just to acquaint yourself with the structure, types of stories, and terminology. Being a good writer is paramount, but it doesn't hurt to be able to throw around terms like "lede" and "nut graph" if you're looking to break into the profession. If you feel you need more guidance or skill development, there are also a growing number of one- or two-year science writing programs cropping up at universities across the country. These are excellent places to get some basic training (specifically in science writing, which has its quirks) and make valuable future contacts. However...

Don't confuse taking a lot of classes with acquiring "expertise." Writing is first and foremost a craft; you get better by doing it, not by studying it ad infinitum. By all means learn the fundamentals, but there's no substitute for just jumping right in and knocking out a few query letters and/or articles. To that end, you might want to seek out media fellowships -- the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society are among the organizations that offer such fellowships -- or apply for internships with leading science publications.

Okay, so you've done your homework and gotten a bit of experience under your belt. Now it's time to hit the mean streets and find that first freelance assignment or writing position. Frankly, unless you've got some killer connections, you probably won't vault from your science writing program or internship directly to the New York Times. A friend of mine at a major newspaper routinely complains about the fresh crop of budding journalists who arrive for internships or entry level positions, convinced they're going to springboard straight to writing full-length features for The New Yorker, and therefore consider writing obits or local news items beneath them. Editors understandably find such attitudes irritating. Don't fall victim to a false sense of entitlement; buckle down and pay your dues. In the long run, you'll be glad you did. I firmly believe there is no such thing as demeaning work, or wasted effort, especially when it comes to writing, because everything eventually feeds into the creative machine -- even if you're writing seemingly mundane stuff. I've stumbled across some of my best ideas that way.

The good news is that there are an awful lot of publications out there that fall into the category of "science trade press," and they're usually looking for talented up-and-coming young writers with strong technical backgrounds. Check out opportunities with nonprofit organizations, research labs, or universities, all of whom publish magazines, newsletters, Web copy, even press releases, and are often in need of new writers. I've published two books (the second one's not quite out yet, but still...) and several articles in major magazines, but I do most of my work for nonprofits. I like them. They're chock-full of altruistic, intelligent people committed to communicating science at all levels of discourse. Not only are they a valuable resource, but I've formed a lot of good friendships through them.  Furthermore, nonprofits are stable and provide regular work. And they pay on time, which is critically important for a freelancer with a mortgage and a tubby little tabby cat with expensive tastes. Or you can make like Richard Krzemien and supplement your income with a bit of cartooning  (see below; for more cartoon survival tips, visit Krzemien's most excellent Website.)

My nonprofit clients also sometimes pay my expenses to attend scientific conferences. Admittedly, there's an impressive media machine in place for disseminating breaking research results to the science press, but there's no substitute for interacting with scientists firsthand when it comes to ferreting out possible stories. Rely 100% on things like press releases and EurekAlert, and you'll end up covering pretty much the same exact stories as everyone else. There's nothing inherently wrong with that -- those stories need to be covered! -- but the real thrill comes from stumbling across a killer story idea that for some reason, just hasn't caught the attention of your fellow science writers. (Trolling arXiv can also be useful, but I prefer direct interaction -- you get more of the story behind the science that way. And I love that sort of narrative.)

Once you get to the conference,  the question becomes, do you attend the prepackaged press conferences, or the technical sessions themselves? For me, this decision is easy: most of the technical papers are beyond my ken (sometimes they're above any scientist who doesn't specialize in that narrow field of research), so I welcome organized press conferences, although I do go to the occasional technical session. When I do, it helps that there's a pretty standard format for scientific presentations. I take notes on the introductory outline, jot down a few specifics from the body of the lecture, and then let my eyes glaze over in bewilderment until I hear those magical words, "In conclusion...." At which point I madly scribble notes again. I used to think I was the only one who did this, but turns out it's pretty much par for the course.

Assuming you have a strong science background, you'll probably want to attend actual sessions. But press conferences can be quite useful: they distill the most salient points of the research into a more immediately palatable concoction -- at least, that's the idea. Scientists are notoriously bad about bringing things down to a more general level. That's why scientists and science writers alike might find it helpful to peruse these two articles on FairerScience  (found via Element List) regarding journalists' advice to researchers who are trying to communicate their research: Keep It Simple and Interesting (KISI) and Keep It Careful and Intelligent (KICI). That's sound advice for everyone involved in the practice of communicating science.

Even if you're a whiz at note-taking, it's usually a good idea to schedule a one-on-one follow-up interview, just to ask a few more probing or clarifying questions about the research result du jour. And when you do...

Be in control of the interview. This is not to say you should be over-bearing, just know the information you're looking for, and direct the conversation accordingly. Ask broad, open-ended questions at first to set your subject at ease, then gradually work around to more focused queries. Many scientists aren't comfortable talking to the press, and this can draw out more reluctant sorts. The technique can sometimes backfire, though, such that you need to find a way to turn off the spigot of verbiage your open-ended question provoked. Personally, I like to let them talk, because you never know what sort of gems they'll utter when you least expect it. But time doesn't always permit, so don't be shy about jumping in with a firm redirect to steer the dialogue to where you need to go. 

Similarly, if you're writing about a topic that is controversial, you'll eventually need to ask some challenging questions. Don't do this at the beginning of the interview. Again, it's all about setting the subject at ease. He or she will be far more likely to answer your more challenging questions if you gradually broach the subject.

Don't be afraid to ask obvious questions, even if you feel a bit stupid about doing so. This is not an excuse for not doing your homework beforehand, mind you: by all means, acquaint yourself with the basic background of the topic you'll be covering, the subject's own contributions, etc., and make careful note of those things that aren't entirely clear. And be honest with yourself when assessing your level of comprehension; you might get the gist, but do you really understand it? Here's the acid test: if you can't explain it coherently to a non-scientist, you don't understand it deeply enough. It's far better to ask "Why is the sky blue?" than not to ask for fear of looking stupid, thereby not getting a critical answer. Here's a handy corollary:

Don't pretend to knowledge or expertise that you don't, in fact, possess. You might be able to pull this off with your family members over Christmas dinner, but trust me, anyone with a serious science degree is going to see right through your little act. And they're going to hold you accountable for your words -- and also for your poor punctuation and spelling. (A misplaced decimal point or minus sign can spell disaster for a science-themed article, after all.) Better to just not go there. Otherwise you might end up like Slate's Greg Easterbrook, ignorantly insisting that quarks don't have content and writing silly sentences like this: "String theory says that these seemingly amorphous infinitesimal aspects of matter are made from other dimensions, compressed to a smallness that strains imagination."

Easterbrook has been roundly ridiculed on numerous science blogs this past week. Normally I'd rally to the defense of a writerly comrade-in-arms, but I read the piece that caused the ruckus, and frankly, he deserved it. He should have asked the obvious questions, like, Whose genius idea was it to assign this guy the science beat at Slate? Sure, he has an instantly recognizable writer's "voice" -- something else you'll want to foster as you embark on your science writing career -- but there's a difference between lending structure and context to a piece via a "point of view," and skewing the facts of the research to fit your pet theory or personal hobby horse (in Easterbrook's case, Intelligent Design).

So, now you're entering the minefield of having to actually write the article. First and foremost...

Don't bury the lede. Okay, that's kind of a gimme, but you'd be surprised how often even experienced writers do this. Remember that you're telling a story. How you structure it depends on whether it's, say, a straight news story or a feature. For the former, the standard inverted pyramid format is recommended. So you want to open with the most salient points: what the result was, and why it is significant. Reveal other details bit by bit, in descending order of relevance, from there. BAM! Instant hard-hitting news story! (Oh, if only...)

I personally prefer writing more feature-ish type things which allow a bit more leeway and creativity with the lede (and also the writer's "voice"). That doesn't make it any easier to write. Sometimes it takes the first (or second, or third) draft just to figure out what that lede should be, so be patient if it doesn't come to you right away. The same advice applies if you're frustrated because the words just don't seem to be flowing out of you in perfectly parsed complete sentences to produce instant flawless prose. Remember, writing is hard -- yes, as hard as math or physics if you're going to do the thing right. My friend (and occasional guest blogger) Lee often laments: "Writing is easy. You just stare at the blank computer screen until drops of blood form on your forehead."

Choose analogy and metaphor over technical jargon whenever possible. Avoiding jargon is another "duh" suggestion (albeit easier said than done), but there's been some debate as to whether analogy and metaphor ultimately help or hurt the science communication cause. I stand emphatically behind the former. True, analogies and metaphors are, by definition, inexact, so there's some basis to the concerns regarding their use (or overuse) in popular science writing. For instance, some physicists don't like the standard balloon analogy for conveying the expansion of the universe, because it isn't precisely equivalent to what's actually happening in the cosmos. But I maintain that these are invaluable tools to helping nonscientists get their minds around a novel, abstract physics concept; fine-tuning that understanding comes later, once you've piqued their interest and sparked a desire to learn more. I won't belabor this point further, except to direct to you this excellent article by Siobhan Roberts in the Toronto Star on why scientists, as well as poets, find it useful to think metaphorically and employ analogies. Roald Hoffman also recently explored this issue for American Scientist. That reminds me:

Know your target audience. This is quite possibly the most difficult task of all. You might be surprised at how many scientists and science writers get the level of discourse wrong when attempting to write "popular science." Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe was an undeniably important book, and it started off quite promising, with one of the best explications of relativity my layperson's brain has yet encountered. But the minute he got into the specifics of string theory -- his area of expertise -- the level of discourse shot into the stratosphere. The prose became littered with jargon and densely packed technical details. Even highly science-literate general readers found the latter half of the book rough going.

My intent is not to unfairly single out Greene, whom I admire and consider an excellent communicator of science. I just think he wasn't quite sure about his target audience with that first book, and ended  up writing partly for the general public, and partly for his fellow physicists. No man can serve two (or more) masters. If you're going to write primarily for scientists, you will inevitably lose the general public's interest, and if you bring it down to a clear enough level to engage John Q. Public, your scientific readers will be bored out of their minds at having to slog through such obvious, elementary stuff. It's a noble endeavor to attempt to speak to all readers, but you can't be all things to all people. The knowledge gap between scientists and non-scientists has just become too damn wide, and until that changes, pick a target audience and tailor your writing accordingly.

And don't apologize for your decision. In a May 2005 review of Malcolm Gladwell''s Blink, Skeptic Magazine's Michael Shermer outlined three levels of science writing:

There are, roughly speaking, three levels of science writing in our culture: (1) technical (peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and university press books written by and for professional scientists); (2) popular professional (essays and articles in popular magazines and trade press books written by scientists for both scientists and moderately informed general readers — Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond come to mind); (3) popular general (essays, articles, and books by journalists and science writers for completely uninformed readers).

We live in the Age of Science, and all three levels are vital for the dispersal of scientific knowledge to an educated democracy. Sadly, too many professional scientists think level one is the only legitimate form of science writing, and that anything else is simply “dumbing down.”

Given the turgid prose stylings of most academic papers and monographs, I sincerely hope Shermer is mistaken about the last bit regarding legitimacy. But I suspect he isn't. Shermer goes on to discuss the fate of Carl Sagan, denied tenure by Harvard and admission to the National Academy of Sciences because he was so good at conveying science to the unwashed masses -- despite producing roughly an article per month in the peer-reviewed literature of his field. Peer pressure is a nasty thing.

Times have changed since Sagan first hit the scene, and an increasing number of scientists now understand that it's vital to communicate their research not just to their colleagues, but to everyone. (If nothing else, the tantalizing possibility of writing a bestselling popular science book might win them over.) But there's still a subtle, unspoken bias towards those scientists who choose to practice their gift of communicating to broader audiences. Perhaps that, too, will disappear over time. I hope so, because, as  Shermer observes in his Gladwell review, "[T]he craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science."

digitize me

A new physics-centric "carnival" called Philosophia Naturalis debuted yesterday over at Charles Daney's Science and Reason. We were going to submit something, we really were, having been included in the bulk email invitation sent out a few weeks ago announcing the impending carnival. Our excuse? (1) We're still fairly new to this whole blogging thing and we're still getting our head around the concept of carnivals. (2) Time got away from us because we were too busy taking the "Are You a Narcissist" quiz, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.  That's right, it's all about us.

More accurately, it's all about Jen-Luc Piquant. Her score almost maxed out the scale, which ranged from 0 to 40. The average American scores around 15.3; Jen-Luc scored a whopping 39. (She had a brief moment of uncharacteristic humility which destroyed her shot at a perfect 40.) Even celebrities -- which, a new study has found, tend to score slightly higher (17.84) than average -- aren't as narcissistic as my Faux-French avatar. I, on the other hand, scored a rather troubling 10 on the narcissism scale. I once joked to friends during a past blue period that my Indian Native American name would be Crippled by Self-Doubt. I was kidding. But apparently I barely have sufficient self-esteem to function in polite society. A certain degree of narcissism is healthy, after all; it's what gets us through the inevitable obstacles and disheartening stumbles in life.

I take comfort in the fact that (a) I kicked Jen-Luc's smug Gallic ass on the Buffy quotation quiz, and (b) researchers in this field draw a distinction between narcissism and egotism. Whereas egotists genuinely love themselves, narcissists "have low self-esteem and are compensating for it." So perhaps Jen-Luc is just much more insecure than the average avatar. Furthermore, the study might be a bit suspect in its methodology, considering it's the brainchild of Dr. Drew Pinsky, co-host of the popular call-in TV show, Loveline.

Admittedly, we're peeved at scoring so low and are therefore not being entirely fair. Pinsky is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California (USC), so he has some bona fide academic credentials, and the paper is slated for publication in the Journal of Research and Personality. The paper was co-authored by Pinsky's USC colleague, S. Mark Young, a professor of sports, entertainment, accounting, and communications (choose a field already!). And the quiz is actually the standard Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI) survey routinely used by clinical psychologists.

Here's a sampling of Pinsky's other findings: Women celebrities were slightly more narcissistic than their male counterparts. Musicians are the least narcissistic among celebrities. And out of all the celebrities Pinsky polled, it shouldn't surprise anyone that reality TV stars scored the highest, at 19.45, while female reality TV stars scored off the charts.

Pinsky's study drew positive commentary from University of Georgia psych professor W. Keith Campbell, who specializes in the study of narcissism, and even wrote a popular book on the subject: When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself. Campbell sees a disturbing trend among US college students, who he believes are becoming increasingly narcissistic. He attributes this in part to the surge in popularity of reality TV. This seems to contradict Pinsky's insistence that celebrities don't become narcissistic because of celebrity culture; rather, they seek out celebrity to compensate for their own psychic pain and emptiness. In fact, says Pinsky, "their greatest fear is losing their celebrity status."

That might explain their willingness to take the NPI survey, which consists of 40 "forced choice" questions asking one to select one of two statements. For instance, "If I ruled the world it would be a better place" versus "The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me." (Guess which statement Jen-Luc chose?) The participating celebrities were all guests on Loveline during the past 20 months, who took time out from being interviewed to take the quiz -- much to the annoyance of Pinsky's brash, big-mouthed co-host, Adam Carolla, who admitted there were numerous backstage arguments about Pinsky "distracting" celebrity guests with his stupid scientific survey. Quoth Carolla: "Who cares? Is this ground-breaking, that celebrities are narcissistic? I mean, this is like you found out Liberace was gay."

One wonders how Carolla scored on the NPI, but he has a point. Regardless, clearly I need to work on being more self-centered. You'd think having a blog would boost my score by several points all on its own -- is there anything more self-indulgent? Not many science bloggers affect their own avatar, either. But judging from a recent crop of articles that has crossed my path over the past month, soon the average well-heeled American can have a tailor-made talking avatar not just on their computer, but in their home -- sort of a virtual all-in-one valet.

For instance, Themeaddicts, Inc. offers the Magic Message Mirror, which is far more than just another TV set disguised as a mirror. It's hooked up to an elaborate home security system. When a visitor arrives, he or she trips a sensor in the driveway, activating the mirror. A virtual character named Basil the Butler appears to announce the visitor's approach. It's the brainchild of Craig Barr, a wunderkind of Hollywood animatronics, whose creations have been featured in the blockbuster film, Jurassic Park (he built that astounding T-Rex), and at the King Kong attraction at Florida's Universal Studios. Basil doesn't just announce visitors; he can also let residents know when the Jacuzzi has reached the right temperature. (Anyone who can afford Barr's pricey Magic Mirror most certainly can afford a Jacuzzi.) Customers can even ask Barr to design custom animatronic and mirror characters.

So avatars are slated to be all the rage in cutting-edge electronic homes, such as the Cleopatra avatar that graces Brian Conte's home in Seattle. Conte is an unabashed tech-head, president of Fast Track, which sells "greeter" software for homes, so naturally, he incorporated the concept into his own not-so-humble abode. Whenever a family member comes home, Cleopatra greets them (by name! thanks to RFID tags on the family's respective key chains) via a 42-inch plasma screen by the front door, summarizing visitors, phone calls, voice mails, emails and any deliveries that have occurred in the occupant's absence, along with the weather forecast, stock market updates, and the national security level. But she can also roam throughout the house and appear on various screens, including wireless PC tablets, switching off lights, lowering shades, turning off the music, setting the nighttime security alarm, even waking up residents at requested times. Family members can interact with her directly in turn via built-in microphones in the ceilings.

It's not for everyone; there's an undeniable "Big Brother" aspect to the whole thing, and even Conte's wife, Patti, was a bit reluctant to let him install the system. Now she loves it, although there's still the occasional glitch in operations, and the voice recognition software for issuing commands needs some improvement. Patti also bemoans the fact that the Cleopatra avatar resembles Angelina Jolie, when she'd vastly prefer a more Brad Pitt-ish character. We think that's a reasonable request. Every Cleopatra should have her Antony.

Again, the technology is pricey, but "Brangelina" can certainly afford a "his and hers" system. However, Jolie might be a bit disappointed in her digital doppelganger, since the technology still can't quite create a "photorealistic human being." Most motion capture technology can't replicate the tremendous detail and idiosyncratic quirks of human expression. But Steve Perlman, a former Apple engineer, is in the final developmental stages of Contour, a new camera system that will make it possible to create realistic synthetic actors by capturing the intricacies of facial movement (not counting Keanu Reeves, whose features barely move at all).

Unlike prior systems, Contour offers significant increases in resolution: around 200,000 pixels, making the digital video images that result highly realistic. Eyebrows, mustaches and short beards can also be accurately conveyed. Perlman is still tweaking the technology, but director David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) plans to use Contour next year to film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Pitt will play a character who ages in reverse.

Hair is another problem area; even Contour has trouble with freely moving strands of hair. Another difficulty is the color. Real hair might have a sheen if it's dark, or glow if it's blond, the result of the scattering of incident light off individual strands. This effect is very difficult to reproduce digitally; just check out Jen-Luc's monochromatic tresses if you don't believe me. It requires complex calculations to keep track of all that hair-to-hair scattering, a laborious process known as path tracing. To save time, current methods use approximations, which work well for dark hair, and okay for brown hair, but just don't do justice to glowing blond tresses.

Why? Well, the problem is compounded because when light hits a mass of blond hair, it not only reflects off the surfaces of each strand, it also passes through the hairs (transmission) and emerges in diffused form, and then is reflected and transmitted yet again, and so forth. Two computer scientists at Cornell University have come to the rescue. Cornell professor Steve Marschner and his graduate student, Jonathan Moon, have developed a new algorithm that traces rays from the light source into the hair, using approximations of the scattering to produce a map of where photons of light are located throughout. The program then traces a ray from each pixel of the image to a point in the hair, using the map to determine how much light should be present in that spot. The result? Simulated blond hair in 2.5 hours that is as realistic as the far more laborious path tracing method, which required 60 hours of computation. Marschner is now extending his work to realistically simulate how hair moves. Animators everywhere, rejoice!

That's entertainment, but it's also cutting-edge science. After all, NASA maintains its own scientific visualization studio, whose employees are animators using the same software as Pixar Animation Studios to turn scientific data and concepts into visually compelling simulations. "Visualization is that  link between the flood of data coming down from space and the ability of the human mind to interpret it," NASA oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman recently told the Washington Post. Whether its compiling raw data from outer space, or producing Charlotte's Web, visualization technology is a critical component.

More importantly, all this cutting-edge technology is making it possible for everyone to indulge their inner narcissist by producing a digitized replica of themselves -- or their aesthetic ideal -- and an animatronic version is a natural extension of that. We just know P.Z. Myers is going to be all over Themeaddict's talking toucan and pirate skull.

the sky is falling

Be afraid! Be very afraid! Those evil particle physicists are at it again with their massive high-energy colliders, and if they're not closely monitored, their high-falutin' "experiments" might put an end to the universe as we know it. This could be doomsday, people, the ultimate Apocalypse! At least that's what an average citizen might think if they happened to stumble on this little item on Slashdot, which Jen-Luc Piquant found courtesy of the mystery blogger behind Angry Physics. It resurrects the rumor of universe-destroying mini-black holes that could be created once CERN's Large Hadron Collider goes online in -- is it 2008? I haven't been keeping up with the official start date.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the item appeared on the five-year anniversary of those infamous terrorist attacks on NYC and DC. Nonetheless, the smell of fear -- or at least of fear-mongering -- was still lingering in the air as various members of the Bush administration capped off a pre-election week of stumping across the nation, telling us why we should still be absolutely terrified of innocent-seeming items like bottled water and shampoo, which MIGHT EXPLODE ANY MINUTE. However, in fairness to the White House, concerns over continuing terrorist threats are much, much more valid than the worry that the LHC will end Life As We Know It On Earth -- almost infinitely so. Terrorist attacks have actually happened, and our country is still a major target of extremist groups, so a certain degree of caution should appropriately be exercised. (I still say the whole liquids and gels ban on flights is ludicrous, however.)

Even in physics, one shouldn't dismiss a potential risk outright, particularly since the LHC will achieve unprecedented energies that will hopefully lead to exciting new physics. "New physics" implies that scientists could find something surprising, or revolutionary, which could in turn be potentially dangerous. After all, Wilhelm Roentgen never dreamed in 1898 that his newly discovered x-rays could be fatal in large doses -- the proverbial double-edged sword. But in case people have forgotten, this isn't the first time we've heard about mini-black holes being produced in colliders. Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generated all kinds of world-ending rumors when it fired up in 1999, prompting the Sunday Times of London to print an hysterical article with the headline, "Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth!" Congress called for special hearings, and legend has it that one reporter called Brookhaven to ask whether RHIC had already created a black hole that swallowed the plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. as it flew past Long Island. (I would like to think this story is apocryphal, but alas, it probably isn't.)

Most of the RHIC hysteria centered not on mini-black holes, but on strangelets: an object formed should strange quarks stick around long enough after a high-energy collision to combine with up and down quarks. If a resulting strangelet had a negative charge -- an even more unlikely prospect than a strangelet forming in the first place -- it would gobble up all normal matter it encountered, until the entire universe was converted into strangelets. Aiee! Fortunately, the probability of this happening is, at best, on a par with winning the lottery not just once, but more than 10 times in a row. And that's an optimistic estimate. My favorite quote at the time was by MIT physicist Robert Jaffe, who told New York Newsday that, with regard to the formation of strangelets, it was more likely that "a spaceship is going to land in the middle of Texas, and that aliens are going to come out and tell us that the New York Yankees are all aliens."

My point is that both of these prospects have been carefully studied, in depth, by a panel of top-notch experts in the field, a mere 7 years ago, and found to be, well, fairly preposterous. Mini black holes might be a wee bit more likely than the formation of strangelets, but even if they are produced, they wouldn't pose a threat. Why is that? You might well ask. Two words: Hawking radiation. Back in the 1990s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can emit tiny particles of radiation, which cause them to lose mass over time, gradually winking out of existence. It's the result of virtual particle pairs popping out of the quantum vacuum near a black hole. Normally they would collide and annihilate into energy, but sometimes one of the pair gets sucked into the black hole, resulting in an apparent violation of energy conservation. The mass of the black hole must decrease slightly as a result to counter this effect and ensure that energy is still conserved. How fast it evaporates depends on the black hole's size: the smaller it is, the faster it evaporates. Ergo, even in the event the LHC produced mini black holes, they would be roughly the size of an electron, and would evaporate in mere fractions of a second.

Ultimately, the best argument against the latest "mini black holes" doomsday scenario is the same as for RHIC and its hypothetical strangelets: it hasn't happened yet in the earth's atmosphere, which is routinely bombarded by cosmic rays, and has been for billions of years, yet no evidence for strangelets or mini-black holes has been detected. Ditto for the high-energy collisions at RHIC, which has been operating for several years now. Okay, that last bit is not quite accurate: there's some debate among particle theorists about whether RHIC has produced a fireball with properties strikingly similar to a black hole. But as predicted theoretically, whatever it was proved too short-lived to pose a catastrophic risk; it wasn't even around long enough to collect much data beyond the mess of squiggly lines pictured at right.

Neither the RHIC nor the LHC doomsday scenarios are unique in modern physics history. During the years of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, there were concerns that a nuclear explosion would set the Earth's atmosphere. (Gratuitous Morpheus quote from The Matrix: "It was we who scorched the sky.") SLAC's B factory caused ripples of doomsday concerns when it came online, and there were fears in the 1990s that Fermilab's Tevatron might create a supernova instead of (or in addition to) discovering the top quark. All proved to be unfounded.

So why does this kind of irrational panic keep happening every time a major physics experiment is slated to begin? For starters, human fear isn't logical, and we're living in an age of unprecedented scientific progress, in which the public is both fascinated by, and fearful of, what science has wrought, and what it might produce in the future. It's also an era where the knowledge gap between scientists and the average person on the street could more appropriately be termed a yawning chasm. The panic stems from ignorance of the actual physics at work. Normally this would be our cue to decry, once again, the sad state of scientific literacy (or lack thereof) in this country. And we are, indeed, still concerned about this. But in fairness to the public, sometimes physicists forget what it was like not to have a PhD in the field. Consider all the science stuff people need to know just to make sense of it all.

Thanks to popular authors like Hawking and the seeping of the notion into popular culture (Futurama played with black hole physics in one memorable episode), the average citizen probably has a rudimentary grasp of black holes and the effects of extreme gravity. But they don't necessarily know about Hawking radiation, which requires a solid grasp of concepts like matter and antimatter, virtual particles, energy conservation, and energy/mass conversions, just for starters. And they don't have a good grasp of relative size scales, so a "mini black hole" might call to mind something the size of a donut, rather than a teensy subatomic particle. Nor will they appreciate the associated physical differences related to size -- like the strength of the object's gravitational pull, for instance, or the amount of energy required to produce a top quark. (The energy to make a top quark is impressive when expressed in GeVs, but extrapolate that to the macroscale, and it amounts to roughly the energy required for an adult male to perform a single pushup.)

Matters aren't much better when it comes to the inner workings of the actual facilities. The public knows (at least one hopes they do) that physicists are smashing atoms inside giant colliders, but they don't understand that producing a mini black hole -- or a top quark, Higgs boson, or hypothetical graviton, for that matter -- requires concentrating sufficient mass into very tiny spaces to reach the literally astronomical high energies needed to recreate early cosmic conditions in the lab. And even then, it would probably require that string theory be correct in its assumption that gravity isn't as weak as it seems to be, because it can seep into extra dimensions -- meaning it would be much stronger at the Planck scales at which such dimensions might exist. So now we're asking them to be conversant in basic string theory and extra-dimensional concepts as well, not to mention the notion of a Planck scale. Given the fact that there are members of the public with active brain cells who can't even remember that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa, and it seems a lot to ask of the average nonscientist, especially if they're distracted by the season premiere of Grey's Anatomy.

I wish I had a solution to the problem, other than to echo everyone else in calling for a redoubling of our education and outreach efforts. But sometimes it seems to be a losing battle, doesn't it? Granted, it's discouraging at times, but I still say it's a war worth waging. Otherwise, think of what a less-than-scientifically-literate layperson might make of last month's breaking news about graphene: "Black Hole in a Pencil," the Science magazine headline read.

Pencils? Black holes? What could possibly be the connection? That headline gave me pause, and I'm reasonably scientifically literate. I even know a little bit about graphene, thanks to my regular attendance at certain physics conferences. (I'm hoping to write a more extensive post on the subject at some point, but I'm still muddling through the technical details.) In essence, graphene is the two-dimensional version of graphite, the stuff of pencil lead. There was some doubt as to whether this was even possible -- for it to be truly 2D it would have to be a mere atom thick, making it also highly unstable -- but Andre Geim and cohorts at the University of Manchester in the UK succeeded in creating sheets of graphene in 2004, and have been investigating this new substance further ever since.

It's pretty exciting stuff. Much has been made of the material's potential for creating ultrafast molecular-scale transistors, especially the fact that the electrons in graphene zip along at the speed of light, as if they had no mass -- contrary to special relativity, which says no object with even the tiniest bit of mass can ever exactly reach the speed of light. Geim's latest results suggest that graphene can also shoot electrons through other materials as if they were invisible, making it possible to test the so-called Klein paradox in a tabletop experiment. (You can see nifty movies of the effect here.) It's related to quantum tunneling, in which electrons can tunnel through supposedly insurmountable energy barriers. The likelihood for tunneling decreases the higher or thicker the energy barriers that are raised, and infinitely high walls should reduce those chances to zero. Oskar Klein, however, said that if particles were moving fast enough (i.e., at the speed of light), they could pass through even infinitely high barriers. It's the kind of bizarre behavior that would normally require superheavy atoms or -- ta-da! -- black holes.

Um... That's it? That's the "connection" between pencils and black holes? I understand if you feel a bit cheated, since the connection seems pretty tenuous at best. Sure, Science was attempting to find a creative, fun little angle to liven up a potentially dry topic, but in this case, it's highly misleading. They let their own cleverness impede effective communication of the essential concepts. I guarantee the average non-scientist reader would just hear "black hole" and "pencil," and react accordingly. (On the upside Jen-Luc points out that hardly anyone outside the scientific community is likely to read Science.) Blame the editors if one day, in the near future, some poor kid taking the SATs starts worrying that his Number 2 pencil could make like a black hole  at any moment, and quite possibly destroy the universe.

all the world's a stage

Jen-Luc Piquant is going through another irritating diva phase following her Cyber-debut last night in an avant-garde performance art tribute to Dylan Stiles, the young Stanford chemist who performed an NMR analysis of his own ear wax. Unlike Dylan's original post, which is fast becoming legendary in the science blogosphere, hardly anyone saw Jen-Luc's performance. She only had a bit part, playing one small sliver of the resulting spectral analysis. (Meaty roles for avatars are a bit hard to come by, and the director didn't think she had enough "star quality" to pull off the leading role of the ear wax.) But her head is nonetheless spinning with an inflated sense of her own budding celebrity.

Jen-Luc was inspired to trod the virtual boards in the first place upon hearing that physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, made his operatic debut on August 25 in the Austrian mountain village of Alpach while attending a technology conference there. The "opera" in question was called Atom and Eve. It first debuted in 2003 during the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University -- the libretto was written by none other than Marc Abraham, Ig Nobel organizer and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research -- and it tells the touching tale of a star-crossed romance between a humble little oxygen atom and a beautiful female chemist who notices him one day in her microscope. In his characteristically witty press release for this event, Abraham opined that it is quite a propos for Wilczek (pictured below) to sing the lead role, since his Nobel-Prize-winning work on subatomic particles showed that "distance makes the quarks grow fonder (or at least increases their attraction)."

Wilczek might be a bit of an anomaly in terms of scientists taking to the stage, but science itself has historically inspired its share of timeless drama (and probably melodrama) in the theater, most notably dating back to 17th century England and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Among modern offerings, David Auburn's Proof, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia all deal with scientific themes, and all debuted to critical acclaim. There is now a film version of Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, so the trend is filtering into Hollywood. Alan Alda memorably recreated physicist Richard Feynman onstage in the play QED. And last year the San Francisco Opera debuted a newly commissioned opera called Doctor Atomic, about the events leading up to the first atomic bomb.

Those are just the major league players. There's also a host of up-and-coming playwrights with a passion for creatively weaving scientific concepts and themes into their work -- playwrights like Charlotte Jones (Humble Boy), Jacqueline Reingold (String Fever), and Lauren Gunderson, who has just published her first collection of plays, Deepen the Mystery: Science and the South Onstage. Chaos theory and fractals, quantum mechanics, chemistry, biology, and string theory have all enjoyed a moment in the footlights, often accompanied by ruminations on their ethical or social implications. And that's not counting more frivolous fare like Abraham's Atom and Eve.

So this is undeniably a cultural trend, one that is analyzed quite extensively in a fascinating new book, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen, by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, a senior lecturer in drama and theater arts at the University of Birmingham in England. Shepherd-Barr draws on extensive interviews with both playwrights and directors to examine a broad range of contemporary plays that merge drama with scientific content, organized according to scientific themes. The result is a crisp, intelligent, and eminently readable treatise that offers some intriguing insights into this "not-so-newfound chemistry between science and theater," as the book's press release phrased it. There's even a comprehensive (and annotated!) list of science plays over the last 400 years at the back of the book. That alone makes it an invaluable resource for fans of science and theater, like me.

She begins by establishing a working definition for what actually constitutes a "science play," a necessary exercise given the astonishing variety in the range of styles and structures adopted by playwrights dealing with scientific themes. According to Shepherd-Barr, science plays "share certain critical features: a casting of the scientist as a hero or villain (or sometimes both); a direct engagement with 'real' scientific ideas; a complex ethical discussion; and an interdependence of form and content that often relies on performance to convey the science."

That seems clear enough. But then what makes any given science play successful, not just at the box office, but as theatrical art? It's related to that interdependence of form and content mentioned above. Specifically, those science plays that are deemed to be most successful artistically are the ones that thoroughly integrate "real" science, "successfully harnessing a theatrical language to a scientific one." It's worth quoting Shepherd-Barr more extensively here:

"Plays like Copenhagen succeed in part because they avoid the pitfall of sloppily appropriating precise scientific concepts for vague, general purposes. They do not tempt audiences to a reductive and vague application of the uncertainty principle or of chaos theory to life in general, which is just the kind of over-simplification C.P. Snow warns against in The Two Cultures."

It's tough to argue with that sentiment, although I might point out that Shepherd-Barr concerns herself with the cream of the theatrical crop in her book (and rightly so). For every play like Copenhagen, which seamlessly weaves accurate science into its dramatic/thematic web, there are a dozen others that flirt with science, appropriating ideas and metaphors in ways many scientists find objectionable. Does that make them bad theater? Not necessarily. They might not meet Shepherd-Barr's stringent criteria for a successful "science play," but they could still resonate emotionally with an audience and have a powerful artistic impact, even if the science isn't quite up to snuff. That's something many scientists have a difficult time grasping.

Case in point: in January, the physicist Marvin Cohen wrote an interesting article for APS News detailing his experiences during the final developmental stages of Doctor Atomic. Specifically, he was invited to attend a workshop in San Francisco to hear an excerpt of the opera performed. Cohen became, well, a little obsessed with a scientific inaccuracy in the opening lines:

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only altered in form

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only altered in form.

The lines aren't so much wrong, as incomplete. Albert Einstein's famous equation (oh, come on, you know the one!) showed that matter can be changed into energy, which is the underlying physics behind the atomic bomb: "You destroy a little bit of matter and turn it into a huge amount of energy," per Cohen. Indeed, the opera's opening lines are taken from a 1945 report that says just that, but for artistic reasons, the composer (John Adams) and librettist (Peter Sellars) opted to simplify things a little. Cohen pointed out the discrepancy, and admits that he "naively assumed [they] would change the offending lines. It's one of the characteristics of being a professor: you assume people are listening to you, and that they will react appropriately when corrected."

I guess it depends on how one defines an "appropriate" reaction. Needless to say, the line wasn't changed, although Cohen lobbied valiantly on behalf of scientific accuracy, even going so far as to suggest an added line that would make the opening "acceptable."  The producers would have been forgiven for taking umbrage at Cohen's chutzpah, and telling him to take a hike. Instead, they were good sports about it, graciously inserting a note into the opera's program acknowledging the "problem." In turn, Cohen was refreshingly frank in acknowledging the uncomfortable position in which he found himself, drawing a parallel between his experience and a famous anecdote immortalized onscreen in the film Amadeus. The Austrian emperor tells Mozart that his new opera has "too many notes." Mozart responds that it had just the right number of notes, and when the emperor blithely suggests the composer merely cut out a few notes here and there to make the opera perfect, Mozart tartly inquires, "Which specific notes did your majesty have in mind?" Cohen confessed, "I never thought I'd be on the other side. I always identified with Mozart."

Kudos to Cohen not just for his willingness to involve himself in an artistic project, but also for his good humor when colliding head on with the age-old clash between C.P. Snow's "two cultures." Art trumps science when it comes to theater. It's as simple as that. Yet I'd venture to say that deep down, while they appreciate the fruits of artistic pursuits, most scientists adhere to the sanctity of cold, hard fact, and are a bit uncomfortable when scientific fact is appropriated for artistic purposes.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Science on Stage is that Shepherd-Barr tackles the innate scientific bias against fiction, and the associated tendency to be overly didactic, head-on, and she doesn't pull any punches while doing so. "Scant attention has been given to the fact that these are first and foremost plays," she writes, also criticizing the fact that critics and scholars alike have focused too much on accompanying social and ethical questions.  She explores this issue in-depth in Chapter 8, which proved (for me) to be the most thought-provoking and illuminating discussion in the book. Science plays are "first and foremost... viable dramas, scripts for performance, literature for the stage -- not merely vehicles for the teaching of science." Specifically, she draws

"... a clear distinction between those science plays whose main purpose is didactic -- to educate people about the particular concept or field being dramatized -- and those that stage science in an aesthetically integrated way. There are many science plays whose scientific content is unassailable but whose theatricality is weak. They may teach science, but they do not make superb or even satisfying drama."

It's not just scientists; historians can be equally intransigent when it comes to a work of art taking liberties with established facts. To illustrate her points about what can happen when the fictional world of the theater comes up against the "real" world of scientific and historical fact, Shepherd-Barr uses Copenhagen, which proved to be particularly controversial because it dealt with recent history -- and a controversial history at that. "Many historians and scientists... [feel] that theatricality detracts from or compromises objective truth and historical fact. The very notion of fiction that theater naturally implies seems problematic for some," she writes. There is a very  understandable concern that audiences -- who tend to get far too much of their knowledge of both current and historical events from entertainment rather than academic source materials -- could be misled into "learning" something that is, if not outright false, not quite right either.

For Shepherd-Barr, this question is largely moot, again because theatrical works like Copenhagen were not created with didactic intent. She is an unabashed Frayn fan, a champion of the artistic merits of Copenhagen, which she clearly deems the reigning gold standard among the present crop of science plays. And I agree with her contention that the above criticism is negated because Frayn's intent was never to "educate" his audience about science. Or history. He set out to create a work of art. Frayn isn't using theater in the service of art, but rather, he "uses the history of science as a vehicle of the theater."

Science plays can still be a terrific teaching tool, regardless of the playwright's intent, even if the science isn't entirely accurate. Those very inaccuracies can provide an opening to discuss the underlying science in more detail, and an audience might be more likely to pay attention and retain the new knowledge if imparted in a theatrical context. Shepherd-Barr suggests that the educational aspect might be best addressed through the organization of performance-linked scientific symposia on the topics explored in specific plays, as was done in NYC (and elsewhere) for the Broadway premiere of Copenhagen. (Similarly, the San Francisco Exploratorium organized a special exhibit to mark the debut of Doctor Atomic.)

I had the privilege of attending the 2000 Copenhagen symposium in NYC, which featured several excellent lectures by both scientists and historians on the underlying physics and history that inspired Frayn's play. The undisputed highlight was an evening discussion with Frayn and Broadway director Michael Blakemore about the process of creating the theater piece. Frayn was particularly eloquent in describing how, while reading Heisenberg's original 1927 paper on uncertainty, he was struck by the notion of quantum fuzziness -- that one cannot simultaneously know both a particle's position and momentum -- and chose to extrapolate the metaphorical implications of that concept to form the thematic underpinning of Copenhagen. "Human intentions have their own irreducible fuzziness," he said. He envisioned the actors as busy subatomic particles circling around the nucleus during rehearsals until it is time to be "seen." The audience, in turn, reminded him of photons, "shining the light of their attention onto the actors." One of the exciting things about live theater is its immediacy, and the fact that the same exact performance is never given twice, no matter how rehearsed it might be. In Frayn's words, "The energy an audience brings to [the performance], the energy of their laughter, and rapt attention, changes what is there." Observation impacts "reality."

Among the most telling points Shepherd-Barr raises is the fact that the controversy over Copenhagen has largely raged among scholars, critics and certain scientists or science historians."'Regular' audience members seem to have had no trouble separating fact from fiction and keeping Frayn's stage world distinct in their minds from the world of real events and people," she writes.

It's probably true that scientists tend to underestimate the general public on such matters. It's an understandable reaction, given some of the more grievous instances we've all encountered of the public's ignorance of -- and often hostility towards -- science. But there is also a public fascination with the human side of science, and its implications for society. Shepherd-Barr comments on the fact that plays like Copenhagen, despite being dialogue-intensive and demanding close attention from the audience, have nonetheless proved to be extremely popular with non-scientific audiences, asking, "What, in turn, does this tell us about our expectations of the audience; have we underestimated what they can and will see?" In a word, absolutely. Perhaps we likewise underestimate what audience members will take away as "true" from a theatrical production. Perhaps not. There is a great deal of hand-wringing among educators over the disturbing lack of critical thinking in our society. I share those concerns. But how can we foster critical thought if we won't let people make up their own minds, even if it means they might misunderstand -- or worse, reject -- the "truth"?

This issue seems especially pressing in light of the debate currently raging over the factual inaccuracies and historical distortions featured in the made-for-TV movie, The Path to 9/11. ABC and Disney have sought to defend their controversial film by essentially claiming "artistic license": they have never claimed, they say, to have created a factual documentary, but a creative work of fiction. This strikes me -- and many others -- as disingenuos at best, and there is strong circumstantial evidence (via overseas trailers and unedited versions released in, for example, New Zealand) that this assertion is outright dishonest. It also illustrates an important point: when discussing how science and history are creatively adapted to the arts, we must also make a critical distintion between an actual work of art and blatant propaganda.

It's pretty clear to any thinking human being that The Path to 9/11 is, at best, thinly veiled propaganda, and ABC/Disney's attempt to pass it off as anything else is shameful in the extreme. They should be publicly exposed and called to task for their transgression. Frankly, however, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the calls for censorship and boycotts on the part of the left-wing blogosphere -- a misgiving that, alas, finds me on common ground with none other than Senator Bill Frist (and I can't tell you how much that horrifies me). But whereas Frist is waving the free speech flag for overtly political purposes, I'm more concerned with protecting future programming from falling victim to a right-wing counter-attack, for specious political reasons.

We're approaching a critical election, and I understand that feelings are running high. By all means, let's expose the film's distortions (some might call them "lies"), but banning it altogether does a disservice to all of us. We're dealing with recent history, with tragic, world-changing events that happened a mere five years ago, so things are fresh in the public's collective mind. There is also a plethora of publicly (and easily) available documentation regarding the established facts of that terrible day, which makes it easier to poke holes in the film's more outrageous depictions.

It's ironic, and more than a little counter-intuitive, but I would argue that the wisest course of action is also the most difficult: trusting the TV audience to be able to tell the difference between the  fantasy scenarios depicted in The Path to 9/11, and the historical facts on record. The risk is that our trust will be misplaced -- and for some people, that inevitably will be the case. Nonetheless, the audience deserves the chance to make its own call (which includes the option, in my case, of choosing not to watch such dreck at all). The freedom to choose what we believe is part of what makes this country great. I think preserving that freedom is worth the risk.

guest blogger: embracing change

BREAKING NEWS: Your usual blogger is taking a one-day sabbatical to bring you a thought-provoking rumination on global warming and climate change by Lee Kottner, Jen-Luc Piquant's personal stylist, who also ably filled in for me in July during my all-too-brief vacation. Lee's rumination is particularly timely in light of a new article in SEED covering many of the issues she raises, written by Sci-Blogger James Hrynyshyn. (Dude, buy a vowel for that last name already! In fact, take some of mine!) It's a complicated, multi-faceted topic, one that I rarely cover in depth, and I'm hoping her post generates some useful comments, particularly regarding Lee's questions on the mathematical models used to measure climate change. So without further ado, I give you Lee:

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First, thanks to Jen, as always, for hosting my ruminations. Don't blame her for the content. If you're going to heap scorn and derision, do it over here. Next, a disclaimer: I'm not a Republican (or a Democrat), nor a Luddite, nor a science-illiterate. And that's as defensive as I'm going to be.

Now I'm going to talk about climate change and why the data do not entirely convince me—and what the current conclusions reveal about how we view the world and our place in it. This post will probably bring heaps of scorn from anybody who's seen "An Inconvenient Truth" (which I haven't), but I'm actually writing this in the spirit of inquiry. I've discussed global warming with several people who ought to know (mostly air quality scientists) and they've never offered me a sufficient explanation beyond "that's what the models show." My problem is that I wonder if the models are running with sufficient data to extrapolate from.

I've got a fairly complicated view of global warming, which seems wiser than not (or delusional), considering how complicated the topic is. Climate science is a complex and fairly young science, as sciences go. Although the disciplines used to study climate (physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology) have well-established principles and methodologies long used to investigate other problems, modern climatology as a discipline is not much more than a century old. By contrast, the study of physics, chemistry, and biology date back thousands of years, and as modern disciplines were practiced with some degree of reliability since the Age of Reason. (Yeah, it's scary that rational science based on the ordered accumulation of facts is actually only a few hundred years old.) Compared to, say, physics, climatology still has that new car smell. This matters only because the younger a discipline is, the less research has been done and the more conflicting ideas about theory there are. It's not a bad thing, but it's not what non-scientists, especially policy makers, want to hear. They want absolutes and incontrovertible facts.

One of the factors that most hampers scientists in studying long-term climate changes is precisely this newness of the study as a scientific discipline. Science depends on reliable, cumulative data and before we started keeping track of precipitation, severe weather patterns, average temperatures, etc. in a systematic, quantitative manner around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the written data is pretty spotty and, far enough back, virtually nonexistent. Calibrated thermometers, for instance, weren't even invented until the 16th century. And it's hard to have a sense of a global climate when you haven't even figured out how many continents there are, or quite how large the earth is, or what the ratio of land to water is, or what the chemical elements are. From paleographic evidence, we have some idea about other drastic changes in climate, in the earth's magnetic field, of the arrival and departure of ice ages, and of the rise and fall of oceans. Written historical records, as far back as they go, have recorded smaller blips in the pattern of climate: the Little Ice Age in Europe and the corresponding warm period, long stretches of drought, volcanic eruption-driven "volcanic winters." But any absolute accuracy in the data only reaches back into the 19th century—just slightly more than 200 years of data in a system that's been running for billions of years through innumerable and unknown geological changes. Even scientists at NOAA acknowledge that "[t]here are not enough records available to reconstruct global or even hemispheric mean temperature prior to about 600 years ago with a high degree of confidence." [emphasis added] And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just significantly downgraded their worst-case scenario from models run five years ago, because of new and improved data.

So here's my question (and it's definitely not rhetorical. I really do want an answer): If we only have about 600 years worth of data on mean temperature for a planet whose rocks are roughly 4.54 billion years old (though its life-supporting climate is billions of years younger) how reliable is that? 600 out of say, even 4 billion is a pretty insignificant fraction. Somebody do the math for me; I suck at it. The point I'm making is that, even if in the last 200 years the climate has changed appreciably (and I'll give you that it has), how do we know the earth hasn't gone through similar periods at other undocumented times in its history? Could the answer actually be that we don't? And if we don't, what does that mean?

Cause and effect in studies of complex systems like climate and ecology is not always a clear-cut thing: Do X and Y happens, unless P interferes or M isn't present. For one thing, living systems are often complex beyond our expectations if not our imagination, and are always surprising us in some way. It's hard to model a system that you're still discovering new facts about. For instance, how much influence does the Amazon really have on carbon dioxide re-uptake (subscription required)? And the phytoplankton we thought were doing that job too aren't doing it as well as we once thought.

Do I believe global warming is a fact? Yeah, no problems there. Do I believe it's entirely caused by human factors. Um, maybe. Do I think there're some alarmist claims on the environmentalist side? Yeah, I do. Do I think the Republicans are stupid for ignoring them? Why, yes, I do, if only because none of their suggestions—decreasing our dependency on oil; finding clean, renewable alternative energy forms, cutting pollution and in general living more lightly on the earth—are in the least harmful to anyone but oil company CEOs and stockholders, who already have more money than God. Oil is a lousy source of energy and there are much cleaner ones that would not even require major infrastructure changes to implement. As far as I can see we already have the technology to maintain the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed with energy and manufacturing and transportation that's at least, at a guess, 25% cleaner than at present, and the only thing that's stopping us is greed.

So I have no objections to the Kyoto Protocols; I think the US needs to get on board that wagon. They're one of the reasons I don't own an air conditioner or a car. I have no doubt that the climate change forecast by most of the accepted models, if unchecked, is going to bring catastrophic changes to Life As We Know It.

And there's the rub.

Over the last few hundred years of human population explosion, we've done some pretty stupid things. We regularly build on vulnerable coastlines. We've dammed and diverted rivers, ruined watersheds, farmed land never meant to be farmed and created huge dust bowls, depleted resources at a fantastic rate, and basically crapped in our own nest. We have, in short, expected the earth's climate and ecology to bend to our desires, instead of trying to figure out how to best work within the system. This is an old argument, trotted out on a regular basis by the early radical ecology movement (c.f. Jackson Browne's anti-nuke anthem "Before the Deluge") and not unheard of now. But let's face it: human beings are control freaks and we don't, as a species, like change. This is one of the reasons global warming and its consequences terrify those of us who take it seriously.

Our complex climate is doing things we haven't been either smart or numerous enough to take note of previously except in an anecdotal way and we feel put upon. The ocean is going to come in and wash away our sandcastles and it pisses us off and frightens us. And it frightens us with good reason. Human beings not only don't like change, we don't deal well with it. Changes in the coastline will affect national boundaries and the amount of land available for the people living within those boundaries. Whenever changes of this sort happen, it makes people nervous enough to think of annexing their neighbors' land, or going in search of more. In earlier centuries, climate change may have sent the Vikings on their raids or been a factor in the French Revolution. If the availability of fresh water is already becoming an international issue, just think what the shrinkage of arable land will do.

New Orleans is a drastic example of what global warming might bring us (and what might happen to Battery Park City here in New York). Or such is the received wisdom. The fact is that New Orleans was built largely below sea level with poorly constructed and maintained levees and it was only a matter of time before a category 5 hurricane came roaring in from the Gulf of Mexico and inundated a city that was built where none should have been. Don't get me wrong: Katrina was a tragedy, but it was a statistical tragedy of tempting fate in the same way Venice and the lowlands of Holland are. Build below sea level or on marshy ground, and you'd better be prepared to get wet. And this is precisely the kind of change we're not prepared for.

We have a long history of this kind of risk blindness. People regularly build on the slopes of active volcanoes, on shifting barrier islands, on landfill, on fault lines, in the regular paths of typhoons and hurricanes. Instead of developing settlements in safer places, we attempt to develop ways to protect ourselves from natural disasters. Often we wait until they happen to even recognize the problem, let alone find a solution, which is basically what we're now doing with global warming. The trouble is that global warming doesn't only affect us, but the entire ecosystem we inhabit. The consequences might be not just the obliteration or inundation of our own structures, but the extinction of species.

As a rule, we think of extinction as a man-made problem, and yet there have been extinctions throughout history that had nothing to do with us. At least five times during the earth's history, 30-95% of its species have been wiped out, making way for the ecosystem we see around us now. Because it's familiar to us and because it seems to have been around "forever" in our foreshortened view of history, this is the ecosystem we think is "right" and that it should be preserved at all costs. But if global warming is not necessarily a man-made phenomenon, but a phase of a cycle that's been going on for millions of years, we may be witnessing nothing more than a natural change. Even if we've contributed to it, somehow sped it up, this is nothing that hasn't happened before.

And without change there is only stagnation and ultimately the death of the system. Humans often forget (if we only recently began to understand) that we're one very disruptive part of a much larger system. We're not, however, necessarily the most important part. No, really, it's not all about us, though we like to think so, in our solipsistic way. I suspect this is because our lifespans are so short, and history is so long. Strangely enough, humans also like to think that we're powerful enough to be the sole cause of all the world's ills, as well as of its marvels. There's as much hubris in that attitude as there is in the idea that we have the power and knowledge to "fix" something as complex as climate.

The point here is that we're looking at patterns in the history of an extremely long period of time, from a very narrow point of view which assumes that much of what happens is either due to our actions or controllable by us or is, at least, going to affect us the most. But the earth has been going through climatic and geophysical upheavals for billions of years without human intervention, and I suspect that it will continue to do so. Just because there are enough of us around to make note of it, and our civilization is advanced enough to begin to understand what is happening, doesn't mean that what's going on is unnatural—just that the changes we see happening are going to affect us as they never have before.

Change of some kind in our biosphere is inevitable and the flora and fauna we live with seem to be far more flexible in their ability to adjust to those changes than humans are. They adjust sometimes by becoming something other than what they were, in a process we call evolution. The question is not what we'll do about the change in climate, but how will we adapt to the changes already occurring. Should we stop trying to fix global warming? Absolutely not. Truthfully, though, I'm more concerned about the social consequences of global warming than I am about global warming itself. We need to remember that change is inevitable and not necessarily the thing to panic over that we frequently think it is. Sometimes change is just . . . different.

Adapt or die.