Cocktail Party Physics

swf for godless heathen

Life is settling a bit, another book written, the next one in outline stages (Phillip, The Vegetarian Zombie...it's a children's book!), I love my job, my apartment, my pets (Ruby, the paranoid cat and her arch nemesis, Mona, the Wonderdog).  So I'm content, mostly. But I am missing something. Someone, actually. Seeing the lovely vid of the Skepchick wedding really hammered home that the hole in my life is lack of romance; a cute, smart guy to call "my boyfriend," someone to hold my hand at the tattoo parlor. 

So I'm doing the internet dating thing. I find it to be mostly hilarious, sometimes painful, and rarely fruitful. I'm careful to be honest with a full length recent pic, untouched by photoshop. The service I chose allows one to sort and be sorted by body type, race, age, gender, and location. Unfortunately, the service automatically adds one's astrological sign to individual profiles. Aside from that, I describe my firm skeptic beliefs, flaws, good qualities, and interests pretty concisely in my profile, figuring this is the best way for me to filter and be filtered. Hopefully that the net cast will help ensure that responses to my ad are men who are attracted to me physically and brainily (brainily? really?), and can tolerate the quirks I think could be a turnoff.

I find myself disturbed by the throngs of mooks who believe that ALLCAPS PROFILES ARE AWSOME AND BY THE WAY LOL IS ACCEPTABLE PUNCTUATION LOL that one can be accosted by on any dating site. They're annoying. They're dating site trolls who offer little to nil information in their profiles, that includes their email address because they're too cheap to pay for the actual service that allows one to privately email through their website. They contact me with reckless abandon. "YOUR HOT PLZ EMAIL ME."  This is par for the course. I just ignore it, though I really want to reply, "The thing is, I'm really quite smart, and the picture of you flexing your guns is pretty, but I'm seriously over it. Perhaps you should read more and work out less." This is guaranteed to encourage a response somewhere in between, "YR FAT!" or "YOUR A FAT BITCH LOL!" So, you know, it's better to just trash it.

Like most dating sites, one can also select from a dropdown list of religions (or choose atheist or agnostic) and political beliefs, but this actually tells me very little about the person. I think they should have a dropdown list of favorite superheroes, and I can then filter out all the Green Lantern/Aquaman fans. The choices are pretty much as follows:

Christian: Are you a capital "C" Christian, or a lower case "c" christian? A capital C can range from Fundie kooks who approach me in the Coffee Bean parking lot and ask me if I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior to the Catholic families in my neighborhood who walked the walk in the Love Thy Neighbor department, doubting anyone who claimed to know god's scorecard. A lower case "c" christian may visit church twice, once as a barely sentient being for their baptism, and again as a cadaver for their funeral. A lower case "c" might also say things like, "My mom told me were Lutherans, once, I think that means we can get divorced or something."

I can work with a lower case "c." Most of my friends are lower case c's, and I love them to bits. A capital C might leave me lingering as a vegetable on life support for years or trust our financial portfolio to a fellow C, and swear our retirement is in God's Hands. No Cs for me.

Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists don't proselytize, so the scale is trickier to navigate, because they seem less likely to bust out with the God Talk in a first email. So I'll stick with upper and lower cases in all religions to describe a general sense of the woo I find tolerant and tolerable. To me, a lower case is like love handles, a crooked front tooth, a Yankees Fan, or someone who snores when it gets too hot outside. It's in no way a deal-breaker, it's just a quirk.

Spiritual But Not Religious: This is super sketchy. Could be a Scientologist, an herbalist, and/or an exorcist. Could be someone who likes the idea of life after death, but doesn't subscribe to any major religion due to a fondness for bacon or masturbation (not at the same time...though, stranger fetishes exist).

Prefer Not to Say/Other: Really? Come out of the closet, atheists and agnostics. Show some of that backbone that has evolved over millions of years only to be wasted by someone who obviously would prefer to be spineless. SHOW YOURSELF. Or maybe you're a Moonie or Scientologist or something. In which case, come out of the closet and WARN A GIRL. You can't spring that shit on someone over tapas.

This category also includes people who believe in the healing power of crystals, and people who have a deep sense of wonder about the universe and describe it as spiritual without any woo intentions. I need more adjectives. Spiritual But Not Religious is a crappy descriptor.

I wish there was a skeptic site with a list of questions that would help filter out the woo people and keep the WOO HOO! people.

I figure you could front load a quiz, and anyone scoring 80% or lower would automatically be redirected to eHarmony. I have a list of questions I think would work well. I mean, it wouldn't necessarily filter out the Nice Guys, Rules Girls, or the general women-hating/men-hating assholes that can be found wandering the earth in a haze of stupid, (yes, even skeptics can be total jerks), but I think it would at least cast out most of the mooks, woo-believers, and hyper-religious nutballs. And that would be a great start! The pond would be smaller, but the quality of the catch would be vastly better, dontcha think?

I'd choose questions that pointed to basic logic, or that one could look up. It doesn't take a college diploma to be well-read, kind, intellectually curious, and bright. I'd rather date a mechanic who adores Vonnegut than a PhD who doesn't know that Han shot first. Of course, that's just me and my taste!

It'd go something like this, off the top of my head, in no particular order:

(1) What's the missing object that T-Rex is about to crush in this, the usual third panel of Dinosaur Comics?

a) T-Rex is about to crush a house!

b) T-Rex is about to crush the Empire State Building!

c) T-Rex is about to crush those annoying kids from Jurassic Park! That'll teach you to play with the flashlight!

d) YOUR FAT LOL!

(2) Richard Dawkins is:

a) Wasn't he that guy on Family Feud who used to mack on the wives and daughters in every. freakin. episode and it was SO CREEPY?

b) An evolutionary biologist.

c) That guy in the wheelchair who talks like a robot.

d) I LIKE LONG WALKS ON THE BEACH (ed. note: dude lives in Death Valley) AND NO DRAMA LOL

(3) At a job interview, you are asked to take a Briggs-Myers test. Your response is...

a) I already know you're an ESTJ, OMG I HOPE MY BOSS ISN'T AN INFP!

b) Check the box on the unemployment form and go apply someplace else.

c) I LIKE A WOMAN WHO NOW HOW TO TREAT HER MAN

(4) OUCH! You have a killer headache. How will you treat it?

a) HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!

b) I dunno. Maybe I'm dehydrated. I'll have some water, maybe take an aspirin (ibuprofin, whatever), and take a nap if I can.

c) Mercury must be in retrograde, again.

d) Have pix, will send if i like u

(5) Girls can't do math.

a) True.

b) False

c) CAN WE MEET PLZ EMAIL I DON'T HAVE AN ACCOUNT ON THIS THING

(6) A straw man is:

a) The one who needed a brain in the Wizard of Oz

b) A logical fallacy in which one purposefully misrepresents his/her opponent's position

c) Not to brag, but I'm 8 inches. What's your name, gorgeous?

And so on, like that. What sort of questions do you think would best filter out the woo and the mooks? I'm sure there are female mooks, too, but I don't cross paths with them in dating-land, so I'm not exactly sure what sort of stupid shit they say that's comparable. Men? Any suggestions?

the electrons in your sunday paper aren't charged

Yep, you read it here first.  Electrons aren't charged.  At least, not according to this week's Parade magazine.  In an article by Stephen Fried, sandwiched in-between celebrity gossip and a article questioning whether schools should be able to tie down unruly students is the following quote:

"Since then, 12 major subatomic particles have been discovered: six uncharged particles called leptons and six charged particles called quarks. Physicists have also identified five particles that carry force, known as bosons. The evasive Higgs is the only boson that has never been observed."

I was clearly a little bleary eyed when my husband read that to me this morning.

"Wait - aren't electrons leptons?" I asked, trying to remember the wall chart I used to pass every morning on my way to my office.

"Last I checked", he said.

It is true that leptons don't have color charge,  but quarks (and gluons) do.  Color charge (which has nothing to do with color) is sort of analogous to electrical charge.  Electrical charge can take on two values (which we call positive and negative).  Color charge has three values (which got called red, blue and green).

Luckily, most of the public doesn't know that electrons are leptons and it's July.  Otherwise, physics teachers across the country would be faced Monday morning with angry students demanding to know when (and why) electrons were stripped of their charge. 

Oh, and just incidentally, the Higgs is the only boson in the Standard Model that hasn't been discovered.  Unless someone found the graviton and I just haven't heard about it yet.  Those four words make a difference.

OK, my intent here isn't to be snarky about the writer or the scientists who helped him with the article.  I bet that the article was a net positive for the scientific community because the people who read it got an idea of the magnitude of high-energy physics, what they're doing and why they're doing it.  (And I'll take on the assertion that high energy physics "helped make possible such technologies as the Internet, MRI machines, radiation treatments for cancer, and superconductors"  somewhere else.  I'll give them the Internet, but I'm yet to the convinced about the others.) 

The fact is, science is subtle and writing a two-page article that completely describes the search for the the origin of the universe is a near-to-impossible task.  But there are things we can do to try to make sure that the science is right.  Or at least, not wrong.  Jennifer's mediagenicity column has some general principles for helping the media get the science right. I've spent the last year working with various types of media and I've learned (mostly through mistakes) some helpful concrete hints.  With a little care, you can help ensure that electrons are never again deprived of their charge in print again.

1. Watch the notes the reporter is making if possible. They sometimes leave out phrases that they deem to be negligible, especially if you (like me) talk really fast. If you notice they omit something important, you can repeat the phrase and emphasize the part that was left out.  It helps to repeat yourself frequently.


2. Speak in short sentences. The more the reporter has to edit what you say, the higher the likelihood that your quote gets garbled. Scientists often speak in tangents, especially when you start to say something, realize that you need to explain a word in what you just said, start to explain the new word and... where was I going with that? If you give the reporter short sentences, you increase the likelihood of them being used. Especially in television.


3. Always ask the reporter for his or her email and give him or her your card with all your contact information including your cell phone number.  Reporters are usually on very tight schedules and they may have a question when you're not in your office.  Make sure the reporter knows that he or she is welcome to contact you about anything.


4. Send a follow up note.  Thank the reporter for interviewing you, but that's not the real reason you send a follow up.  You know what you said.  Say it again in writing.  Tell the reporter that you wanted to follow up because you know that sometimes you're not always as clear as you could be.  Print reporters especially often end up using what you sent rather than what they scribbled down because a) it's direct from you, so they're sure it's right and b) when you say something a second time, you're usually more succinct than when you said it the first time.


5. If you're doing television, ask if you can answer the question again.  Everything is digital, so it doesn't cost them anything more to tape you a second time.  Why? See #3 - the first time you get asked a question, you're talking and thinking at the same time.  I don't do both well at the same time.  The second time you say it, you've already done the thinking about the content, so  you can focus on how to say it more precisely and concisely.


6. Tell the reporter that need to make sure you aren't misquoted because (to a large part) scientists live on their reputations.  I find that people respond better to your telling them that you want to avoid having anything wrong rather than insisting that everything be right.  It's a subtle point: Yes, I realize that what you wrote is much shorter than what I said and that you're limited in space.  Unfortunately, it's also wrong.


7. This is the most important one for print. Offer to review the article before it goes to press.  If they don't want to let you do it, insist.  Make sure they know that you want to review it solely for scientific accuracy.  It's not that you don't trust them, but you know that they are trying to make something very complex accessible to a broad audience and you recognize that it's not always an easy thing to do.  If you are at an institution that has media people, you can get them to be the bad guy and insist on this.  If you're on your own, you just have to grit your teeth and do it.


8. Don't let one bad experience sour you on talking to the media.  Sure, you were quoted in a national newspaper as saying that neutrons have positive charge.  All your colleagues know that you know better.  The ones that say nasty things are just jealous that the reporter didn't want to talk to them.


9. (Added 7/29/09)  Brandon's rule: Unless you have evidence to the contrary, go into every interaction with the media assuming that you and they want the same thing:  an interesting and accurate story that get the reader excited about science.  There are always some bad apples, but the vast majority of science writers/reporters love science just as much as the scientists.


10. (Added 7/29/09)  Don't get upset with the writer until you know it was the writer's fault.  Scientists aren't used to editors actually editing.  My fights with Phys. Rev. are about commas and n-dashes.  Writers have editors who occasionally have to trim a few words to make something fit and the writer often isn't consulted on which words don't make the cut.  So don't be angry at the writer without due cause - he or she may be just as upset about the article as you are.

There's another benefit of being a physicist and not a journalist: Electrons can't sue for libel.

seeing the light

The rare breed of comic book lovers/physics nerds will no doubt roll their eyes at me for this, but yesterday I was thinking about Superman's X-ray vision (like you do...) and realized the whole thing was a sham. It is a fictional comic, you'll say, but I guess I did get my hopes up a bit because "X-ray vision" sounds like it took inspiration from real science, as much as a comic book glazed in delicious fictional syrup can. But it skips over one important detail: if Superman hoped to see anything with X-ray vision he'd have to EMIT X-rays as well as be able to see them. We cannot see things with our lowly human eyes unless they are illuminated by a source of visible light; most often the sun (or the glow of a computer screen if you're living in a writers cave like me). The sun does not emit X-rays, so superman would have to have another source. Underwear detector BUSTED.

 This goes for the 1950's X-ray Glasses as well. I know these were meant as some sort of party gag, but they equally dropped the physics ball. X-rays pass through clothing but they also pass right through flesh. Did men in the 50's find skeletal structures attractive? More importantly, who's idea was it to turn X-rays into a vehicle for SUPER CREEPINESS? These things turn a guy from clean cut to creeptacular faster than you can say "This packaging is really degrading to women."

It's true though, that the Superman pic above suggests superman DID, in fact, strike his subjects with self-generated X-rays. But I didn't automatically assume this because such vision would also leave behind a suspicious trail of tumors and hair loss. If superman were real. Which he's not. I do know this.

 When Superman debuted in 1938, the public was generally familiar with X-rays (discovered around 1875) and understood that these invisible beams could pass through materials that visible light could not. They have a high enough frequency that they interact with matter, and interact they do. X-rays are a form of ionizing radiation (thanks Lee for the recent post) and as they pass through your flesh they release electrons that careen through your body and damage cells. The X-rays are only stopped by the density of your bones. So I guess if I were searching for a fictional means of looking through walls, X-rays would be a good first pick. You couldn't use radiowaves, which are another form of light, because they are so large they don't really collide with the atoms in most materials, and instead pass right through them harmlessly. There's infrared light, but that frequency doesn't penetrate much more than visible light.

But that was in 1938. Since Superman's entrance into the world, we've really jumped ahead in our understanding and manipulation of light. And if Superman had been created sometime after the year 2000 I guarantee he would have teravision instead. What's teravision? I'm so glad you asked. Because I really do want to help Superman get a useful and scientifically accurate super power. I really do. So lets explore, shall we?

 Terahertz refers to light with frequencies lower than visible light (and much lower than X-rays) somewhere around the microwave range. It's a magical portion of the EM spectrum that when finely tuned can pass through clothing, cardboard, wood, plastic and ceramics, but not metal or skin. BUT HOW?!

Think, for a moment, about the sort of things that block visible light: clothing, skin, bricks. Now, consider things that do not: glass, water, air. Density has a lot to do with this fact. Even in the clearest water, you cannot see as far as you can through air because the water is ultimately denser. But the glass in greenhouses tinted glass (lets say green) absorbs all visible light except green light frequencies, which it reflects and sends back out (which is why we see it) pass through it like clear glass. So there's more at work than just density. The atomic structure of a material makes it possible to absorb some frequencies of light and not others. Terahertz radiation passes through clothing and not skin because this specific range of radiation is absorbed by water, which of course makes up a good portion of your body. How convenient. By finely tuning the frequency, scientists can even determine the water density of tissue.

Scientists have only figured out how to generate these very specific frequencies in the past decade, so they're only just now becoming available for a wide array of applications. And as you can see from the almost-not-safe-for-work-image below, it is already rolling into an airport near you.

Thanks to a mad rush of technology, terahertz radiation is now available in compact, wholesale scanners that have many potential applications like, for example, making sure folks getting on planes aren't hiding plastic guns in their pants. The scanners are so good that they reveal what those fictional x-ray specs always wanted to: the curves, crevices and potential weapons beneath your clothes. While a politically correct pat-down can take a precious five minutes, a terahertz scanner can swing over a randomly selected traveler in less than thirty seconds. And the TSA reports that many people prefer being looked at naked by a stranger than touched by one. Did I mention terahertz do all this without the health threats of X-rays? Seems almost too good to be true.

 It probably is. Last year the TSA decided to adopt the machines, (which have a variety of names: "Fully Body Scans" "Whole Body Imaging" or "submillimeter imaging") in a handful of airports. But of course they had to put in place regulations to make sure the images weren't abused. The people who look at the images are in another room far away from the passengers. They cannot bring any recording devices into the room, the computers cannot save, print or send data, and the person's face is blurred on the screen. But really, somewhere, something is going to slip. Patrick J Kiger just wrote an awesome post on this topic over at his "Is This A Good Idea?" blog at Discovery.

The agency is juggling the decision to place them in more airports or not, while Congressman Jason Chaffetz, representing the third district of Utah, introduced legislation to have them outlawed. In regard to this issue he has maybe my favorite quote of the year on his website:

"No body needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane." -Congressman Jason Chaffetz.

You have a point, Chaffetz, but remember that just like every other safety precaution in the airport, there are some people who we may want to see naked...er...search in order to secure the plane for your wife and children. 

 

So while uses for security are probably the hottest issues being discussed right now, there are medical applications for terahertz technology as well. For example, because the light can pass through the top layer of your skin, doctors think they can use it to detect skin cancer, or even breast cancer. Apparently about 85% of cancers lie in the skin, but are too small to detect. So you know, Superman could help cure cancer and not cause it.

He would of course be on his own in figuring out how to generate and detect terahertz radiation using only his eyes. I don't think we're on the way to compact, glasses-sized devices of that kind. But you know, there's only so much I can do for the guy.

NEW VOICES: georgie boy

We continue to madly work on The Book, with a brief trip to Vegas last weekend for The Amaz!ing Meeting. To keep the cocktail party lively in our absence, Alex Morgan, budding science writer extraordinaire, is back with a fascinating historical account demonstrating the efficacy of case-based reasoning.

In 1877 in the well-to-do London suburb of St. John’s Wood, a sixteen-month-old infant is dying. Georgie has cried for weeks, but now he doesn’t have the energy to cry. Too feeble to sit up, he won’t move at all, if he can help it. He can’t bear for anyone to touch his legs, which are covered with bruise-like spots. His face is ash white. His gums are inflamed and spongy. His breath smells like a corpse.

The pediatrician, Dr. Sumner, has prescribed chlorate of potash and quinine bark – strong general-purpose medications – and later syrup of iodide of iron and cod-liver oil. For the inflamed gums, he orders alum and glycerin applied locally. But Georgie’s condition only worsens. The swelling of the gums grows still more extensive, until the whole of the mucous membrane of the upper and lower jaw seems to be involved, and the bleeding becomes more profuse. Georgie begins to have spasms in his throat that cut off his breathing.

Children die in Victorian England. In the upper-class areas of Liverpool, according to an 1899 report, 136 out of 1000 newborns die before they reach the age of one. Working class districts maintain a rate of 274 infant deaths per 1000, and 509 slum children die for every 1000 born, all within the first year after birth. A very sick child like Georgie, not responding to treatment, unable to eat, having difficulty breathing, is expected to die. But he gets a lucky break.

His pediatrician asks Dr. Walter Cheadle from London’s Hospital for Sick Children to consider the case. An unusually shy man, Dr. Cheadle avoids the clubs and dinner parties of his social class, but he is appreciated by his students and patients for his courtesy and concern. Large and strong as a stevedore, he stands taller than most of his peers at medical meetings. His friend and disciple, Dr. John Poynton, remarks that his enormous hands seem to “obliterate” the children who are his patients, but they respond to his kindness and aren’t afraid of him.

Famous in college for his athletic ability, he interrupts his medical-school studies in 1863 to join an expedition to chart a land route across Canada. In 1865, he co-publishes a popular book about his experiences, which includes his encounters with “scurvy, smallpox, starvation, massacres and hair-breadth adventures.” The picture below is from this book (Cheadle is the bearded man on the left).

Perhaps surprisingly, after returning from these adventures, he settles down, completes his medical studies and establishes a practice in London. Although he sees all sorts of patients, he becomes well known as an expert on children’s diseases. He is also an early champion of women in medicine. A note published at the time of his death hints that his professional reputation is damaged because he addresses the needs of children and the advancement of woman. This note refers to the “wrath and indignation” of some of his colleagues, because he lectures at the London School of Medicine for Women.

Imagine the scene as Dr. Cheadle first comes to examine Georgie: The enormous shy doctor in his Victorian black frockcoat asks the mother some preliminary questions then examines his desperately ill patient. He needs only a moment. He’s seen all this before: the child’s weakness, the still open fontanelle, the enlarged ends of the long bones, the bruised legs, the stinking breath, the inflamed gums. His report on the case notes “dark-red, soft, and gelatinous masses [protruding] from the mouth between the lips, and [giving] the child the appearance of being engaged in sucking pieces of raw flesh.” Dr. Cheadle asks what the boy has been eating. Georgie’s mother says he was weaned after six months. She’s been giving him oatmeal and rusks (toast). A little mutton broth. She can’t think of anything else. Georgie’s been living for eight months on oatmeal and toast, and occasionally broth.

Dr. Cheadle’s mind reviews his cases, thousands, indexed by the obscure associations of his experience: malnutrition and scurvy on the expedition to Canada; histories and symptoms of all the hospital’s sick children, treatments and cures, and failures; reports from polar expeditions, from the Franco Prussian War, from the American Civil War, many thousands of documents; and theories, about climate, about diet, about microorganisms, about lifestyle, conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with the evidence.

A colleague of Dr. Cheadle’s writes of him in the note mentioned above: “His [is] not that type of mind which [weighs] laboriously the pros and cons in the diagnosis of a case, but from his ample experience he almost intuitively [arrives] at the probable explanation of the illness." A hundred years in Dr. Cheadle’s future, the way a clinician uses cases to create diagnoses and treatments will be called “case-based reasoning,” and it will be offered as a variant of the scientific method. But here and now in Georgie’s nursery in a Victorian London suburb, case-based reasoning happens merely in Dr. Cheadle’s mind: He knows what he is dealing with and what to do.

His diagnosis for Georgie: rickets and scurvy. They are both vitamin deficiency diseases. Children who don’t get enough vitamin D develop rickets; the child’s body can’t absorb calcium properly and the bones are softened, often deformed. Vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy, a dissolving of the connective tissues, dreadfully mutilating and painful. Rickets is common in the children of Victorian England, but scurvy is unexpected. In Georgie’s case, it is at a particularly savage stage.

Although scurvy has been known for centuries as a disease of sailors, soldiers, explorers, and others adults cut off from fresh food supplies, Dr. Cheadle is among the first to document it in children. He encounters two other cases like Georgie’s a few months later and writes a paper about them that appears in The Lancet in 1878 (“Three Cases of Scurvy Supervening on Rickets in Young Children,” available online from Science Direct for a fee. "Georgie" is called "G.S." in this paper.). He describes the three cases in detail, distinguishing the symptoms of rickets and scurvy, noting their separate implications and treatments, coining the phrase “infantile scurvy” to further make his point that this isn’t simply a more severe form of rickets but two diseases at once. 

Dr. Cheadle has never heard of vitamins. Their discovery is decades in the future. But he understands that diet is the issue here, although many colleagues disagree. Dr. Cheadle argues in his 1878 paper against the various other theories about scurvy, including that it is caused by humid and/or cold climates, excess salt in the diet, lack of exercise, and ptomaine poisoning. “There is, however, an invariable factor, without the presence of which all other casual and irregular factors are powerless to set up the disease. This essential factor, it has been proved over and over again, is the absence of certain elements in food. If the body is deprived of these elements, [scurvy] is produced. What these elements are has not yet been absolutely settled with scientific precision, but we know positively that they exist in fresh vegetables, in lime-juice, in milk, and in less considerable degree, perhaps, in some other fresh animal foods.”

Dr. Cheadle prescribes fresh food and fresh air for Georgie. Using only his “case knowledge” and without any theory to back him up, Dr. Cheadle’s recommendations are remarkably on target. He allows the cod liver oil to continue, since fish oil is known to help cure rickets, but he stops the drugs. He orders raw (unpasteurized) milk along with a tablespoon a day of minced raw meat sweetened with sugar, foods which contain some vitamin C and vitamin D. Pasteurizing kills the bacteria in milk but also destroys vitamin C. Dr. Cheadle seems to understand that being outside will also help the child recover. Humans generate their own vitamin D in response to sunlight. In the other cases discussed in his 1878 paper, he adds potatoes and fresh orange or lemon juice to his dietary recommendations, all foods rich in vitamin C.

Georgie gets better. Less than two months after Dr. Cheadle provides his diagnosis and his recommendations, the pediatrician writes him the good news: “The child is decidedly improving. Sponginess of the gums has completely disappeared, and he can sit up now without any inconvenience.” And in a follow-up letter, "Since you saw him the child has greatly improved. The fontanelle is all but closed; the swelling &c. of the gums have entirely disappeared … The spine is straighter and firmer, and he can sit upright, and even move about the floor, though not as yet able to stand. … He has more or less continued the diet you recommended, and I have now allowed his parents to take him to Margate to try the effect of salt-water bathing." Dr. Cheadle’s final comments on the case are: “I have since learnt that the child is running about thoroughly strong and well.”

According to a 2004 article in the Journal of Nutrition Science, “[t]he first scientific approach to [rickets] was made by McCollum and his co-workers [in 1914].” This article describes the discovery of the biochemistry of vitamin D, a story climaxing in the awarding of the Nobel prize in 1928. (Nobels were awarded in 1937 for work on vitamin C.)  Thus, Dr. Cheadle’s use of “case-based reasoning” to cure patients is not “scientific” by the criteria of this article.

Case-based reasoning (CBR) was formulated in the 1980’s as a way to teach computers “learning by experience.” The key insight was that most human problem solvers do not use rules or theories to guide their thinking but rather decide what to do based on their past experiences. CBR’s approach to problem solving is to develop a database of cases as an ongoing community resource that can be organized and understood like a person’s experiential memory.

In a medical CBR system, clinicians search the archive for past cases to help solve a current case, then enter the newly solved case to enrich the archive. CBR searches by “similarity” rather than “exact matching,” in analogy with the qualitative way that humans associate one thing with another. A contribution of CBR to cognitive science is in formulating ways to capture this subtle human skill in computer algorithms. While scientists might be inspired to develop theories from a carefully maintained archive of cases, the cases need not be reduced to theory to make the knowledge they contain useful. The goals of “ treating patients” and “understanding disease” are not identical.  

Dr. Cheadle cured Georgie without having a twentieth-century understanding of vitamins. Georgie would have been 52 in 1928 and 61 in 1937, when the significance of vitamins D and C were being  Nobel-y acknowledged, respectively, but it was thanks to Dr. Cheadle’s case-based clinical knowledge that Georgie lived to be 2 in 1878.

zapping the new age

I really could have used co-blogger Allyson's advice about skeptic etiquette earlier this year. At a recent party, a bunch of my non-science-geek friends and I got to moaning about all the time we spend in front of our computers. I've always thought one of the ironies of my life was that when I was growing up, my parents yelled at me to not sit so close to the TV and I now earn my living . . . sitting too close to what is, essentially, a TV. Lots of us older folks have eye fatigue from it, especially from the old CRT screens that really were pretty much the same as a TV. But one of my fellow partiers loudly declaimed that we were all being irradiated by our computers too, and that she'd bought this special amulet to turn back those rays and all the other irradiation modern life subjects us to and "other negative energies." The best part was that the woman she bought the amulet from is able to recharge it remotely and is always adding new protections to it. Best money she'd ever spent, she said.

 Moments like this just make my brain hurt.

We'd already had the LHC-black hole discussion in which I'd successfully quashed that panic, but my bullshit meter was almost off the dial with this. I had to really bite my tongue not to say something scathingly sarcastic to someone I didn't know, and it was all I could do not to roll my eyes like a Kewpie doll. It was odd (and kind of heartening) how the room went really silent though. And then I was chagrined to realize I didn't really have enough hard data at my fingertips to rebut everything she said, and that was embarrassing. I know about the scientific studies refuting the dangers of overhead high voltage wires, but I only have a vague grasp of how CRTs and LCDs work. So I thought I'd use my ignorance (shameful, I know) to offer up a quick lesson in how to refute this particular species of New Age Quack, diplomacy not included. (Check with Allyson about that.)

Part of the problem is that people get freaked out by the idea of radiation in general, not realizing there are many types of it and that we are, indeed, being irradiated all the time, not just by our electronics. That darn visible light bombards us all the time! The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is huge and only the higher end, beyond the visible spectrum, is strong enough to be truly dangerous. The harmfulness of radiation depends on its energy, whether it's powerful enough to knock electrons off an atom's orbital shell, turning it into an ion: ionizing radiation.

For example, the wavelength in sunlight that tans you or, in excess, gives you skin cancer is not the visible spectrum or we'd all have fried eyeballs (which is what happens when you look directly at the sun because the light is concentrated through the lens of your eye onto a small spot on your retina, like a bug under a magnifying glass). It's UV or ultraviolet radiation, just next door to the violet end of the visible spectrum (hence the ultra prefix) that makes you sizzle. And that's the least of its effects. Over the long term, UV light can cause cellular and molecular changes that result in cataracts, permanent changes to skin and fibrous tissues, and skin cancer. Because it causes chemical changes in the body, the effects can be exacerbated by "birth control pills, tetracycline, sulphathizole, cyclamates, antidepressants, coal tar distillates found in anti-dandruff shampoos, lime oil, and some cosmetics."

The most common sources for ionizing radiation are nuclear reactions natural and man-made (fusion and fission) and natural radioisotopes. Don't know an isotope from an antelope? An isotope is a version of an element that has a different than usual number of neutrons (a different mass number) but the same chemical properties. A radioisotope emits enough EM energy to strip away the normally tightly bound electrons from an atom, making it a charged particle, like x-rays. Only the shortwave end of the EM spectrum has enough energy to do this—not the electrons coming out of your CRT TV.

While it's true that every appliance in your house that uses an electric current is surrounded by an extremely low frequency (EMF) electrical field, that radiation is of the non-ionizing sort, even the microwave. The health hazards of this type of radiation are probably negligible in the low concentrations we're exposed to.There are some exceptions, of course. Stick your head in the microwave and you'll cook yourself, but that's because microwaves excite the water molecules until they give off heat. You won't be radioactive afterwards, just cooked. Likewise infrared radiation, which  makes some beautiful photographs!). IR filters allow viewers to see differences in ambient temperature, which is why they're used in night scopes, but the radiation itself is not up to much more in everyday concentrations than heating you up a little.

Much like the radiation that's coming off your computer and TV screens. CRTs are not so popular now that flatscreens have gotten cheaper, but the initials stand for Cathode Ray Tube, which is the source of the "ray" part that seems to freak people out. That ray is a stream of electrons produced by the heated cathode filament and steered by electromagnetic coils. Those electrons pass through a fine-mesh mask and strike a screen coated with phosphors, temporarily goosing them into a more excited state, making them glow. So that electron energy beam is mostly absorbed by the phosphors on the screen. Some of it does escape, but it's mostly hanging around the glass screen making it staticky and attracting dust motes. Because the first thing a free electron (not to be confused with a free radical) wants to do is bind to something. It's lonesome, just a little negatively charged particle looking for its love match in the orbital shell of some other atom. If there are enough atoms with odd-numbered electrons around (like copper's 29), they pass the electrons around like a swingers party and you get a current. That's the crackle you hear when the screen turns off, and why you sometimes get zapped when you touch a CRT display. The free electrons find you more attractive than the glass.

So, those pesky free electrons—how harmful are they? Um, depends on the source energy (see comments below). There is a type of radiation that involves free electrons (beta decay), but these are high-energy ionizing particles that come out of of the nuclei of radioactive materials like plutonium, not out of hot filaments in a cathode ray tube (which is essentially like a lightbulb). The truth is, you're exposed to more radiation risk in a routine x-ray or in the radon-choked basement of your house than from a cathode ray tube. That's because not all radiation is alike.

Because radiation exists as both particles and waves, its potential for damage depends on how much energy it has. The higher the frequency, the more energy it has and the more potential for damage. That's because some radiation—radio waves, for instance—either passes harmlessly through you or is reflected off your skin, like some wavelengths of light; they're low energy, long wavelength. High levels of exposure to even low-frequency/low energy waves can have an effect on biological systems, but the that seems mostly negligible at everyday exposure levels. Some EM radiation, like x-rays, pass through the softer tissues of your muscles and organs but are stopped by the denser bones, leaving those blank, unexposed spaces you see on x-ray film that show your skeleton. When x-rays strike the atoms in your tissue, including those in your DNA molecules, they have enough energy to knock the electrons off, creating charged ions that alter the usual chemical reactions in your body, or even break the DNA up. The cells die or work in weird ways. If this happens in enough cells, mutations or other reactions that we read as radiation sickness or cancer can occur. In small doses though, the body is self-correcting enough to heal whatever damage is done in the name of seeing that fracture in your tibia or the denser mass of cancer tumors.

LCDs are an entirely different fish in some ways, but operate similarly. These displays are built in kind of a sandwich style with the liquid crystals in the middle between layers of glass, filters and electrodes that supply the current. The material that gives LCDs their acronym are crystals that have lost some of their positional rigidity. Nematic liquid crystal molecules, which are usually rod-shaped, are still more organized than isotropic crystals, but both are semi-liquid. Application of a current causes them to realign or "untwist" themselves into various configurations that block or reveal the light which also passes through vertically and horizontally aligned polarizing filters. The pixels in this case are a substrate of indium-tin oxide. If you've got a liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor, you may have noticed that it attracts significantly less dust to its display surface than your old CRT. This tells you that there are fewer free electrons floating around looking for other atoms to bind to (or that your house is a lot cleaner than mine is). That's because instead of spraying electrons gatling-gun style, in LCDs the current is channeled in a grid to different parts of the screen in a closed circuit.

Plasma displays have a similar structure to LCDs, but the medium that's excited by the current is, obviously, plasma: charged gas confined in "cells" sandwiched between several layers of glass and other materials. Since plasma displays ultimately use UV radiation to excite their pixel phosphors, they contain a protective layer of magnesium oxide (the same compound found in both Milk of Magnesia—as magnesium hydroxide—and some electrical cables. Versatile stuff!) that blocks the ionizing UV radiation) but is transparent to the visible spectrum. So you're still probably getting zapped less by your plasma TV than by an old CRT, though the CRT "leakage" is the standard by which safe radiation is measured for electronics.

The upshot is that none of the radiation emanating from your appliances is the kind emitted by nuclear materials, so you're not going to get cancer or radiation sickness from it. None of it is of sufficient energy to fry so much as a mosquito, let alone cook your brain. In fact, one thing most people overlook is that we are ourselves walking electrical fields. Our brains are electrochemical dynamos, zipping signals along our synapses millions of times a second, the proverbial telephone switchboard. Our own electrical field created by the movement of current between cells is slight, but the fields inside our cells are as powerful as lightning bolts. One day, we may actually become our own local area network. That little shock of electricity between people that we talk about is not only a metaphor.

Okay, now that you know you're not being bathed in deadly ionizing radiation or high levels of non-ionizing radiation from your computer or TV or microwave, what about that "charging remotely" thing? How's that work? Wifi? Radio waves? Light? Microwaves? Hey, maybe that's frying our brains! Slap a radiation hazard sign on all those psychics' doors! But thanks to Allyson, at least you can be polite about it.

i think it's time

I should let you all know that I am - gasp! - double blogging this. Not as gross as double dipping; maybe a little more like re-gifting, but only because the original gift was so good I couldn't keep it for myself. Anyway, there's a slightly different post on this topic over on symmetrybreaking as well.

 "Time, I think, is a little bit like love. It's accessible to all of us; it is intuitively experienced by all of us in the same way; yet it retains its mystery at whatever level you weigh in on it. It is a mysterious force that we all can experience and share." That's how journalist and session moderator John Hockenberry opened "Time Since Einstein," at the World Science Festival in New York a few weeks back.I love this thought. And maybe for a handful of physicists and philosophers, time is also what we love.

Let me quickly note that the World Science Festival was awesome. If you are in New York next year I highly recommend it. I will try to post some more about it later, and Lee has also posted in reference to some of the forty sessions they held all over Manhattan. I'm sorry I couldn't go to more, but while it's not often that such a great event falls in my lap, it's even less often that it coincides with my sister visiting. Whad'ya gonna do?

Hockenberry welcomed to the stage a panel to make any physics junkie drool. It consisted of physicists George Ellis (who co-wrote a book with Stephen Hawking called The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime), Sean Carroll (prominent cosmologist, a fantastic speaker and writer over at Cosmic Variance), Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara (another great speaker and theoretical physicist investigating a number of fascinating subjects about the nature of our universe) and Roger Penrose (I won't even attempt to tell you everything this man has done for physics, mathematics and cosmology in his lifetime).

(Ellis, Carroll, Markopoulou-Kalamara, Penrose)

 

(Albert, Heller)

 Add to that physics-philosophers David Albert and Michael Heller, and you've got a panel that, honestly, was too big to fit into an hour and half session on such a broad topic. I could easily have listened to each of these people talk alone for an hour and a half. But what a fantastic brew of people to answer whatever questions you might have about time. Or twist every notion you have about time and leave you completely befuddled and doubting your own reality. Either way.

So first thing's first: what was time before Einstein? It was the stage on which everything else took place. It was an absolute and unchanging part of our surroundings. Even space was more flexible than time. We could go backwards and forwards in space; we were learning to control motion through air and water and on land. But it was not within our abilities to change time in the same way; not even to speed it up or slow it down.

That was then. After Einstein, time changed. With relativity time became a player on the stage instead of the stage itself; a player that could be influenced and warped by the other players. Jennifer discusses relativity in one of her posts, so I'll be brief. Einstein's theory of relativity established that no frame of reference is absolute or superior, and that from different reference frames space and time can appear different. While you may think your minutes are ticking by the same as they always have, someone passing you at the speed of light might see your clock hands spinning frantically, the hours and minutes whipping by. All the while, that quickly moving observer would feel no change in her own time. And this isn't just an illusion. Neither reference frame keeps the "right" time because there is no right time. Just relative time. Which brings up the big 'ol question: What is time?

According to relativity, it's a dimension in space-time, but there seems to be more to that question pawing at my brain. The panel of physicists tried to help me out and at least gave me hope that they're looking into it.

If Einstein's theory of relativity had been the end of the story, our investigation into time might have been simpler. But right after Einstein realized time was relative, another group of physicists were realizing that a lot of other things we thought were definite were also not so much. Quantum mechanics crashed the party at about the same time and declared that not only is matter quantized into particles (which cannot be reduced to anything smaller), but the behavior of these particles is not based on cause and effect, but probability, like the roll of a die. Electrons orbiting an atom aren't in any one place; they exist in a cloud of possibilities,until we pin them down and make them chose one. Both theories are revolutionary. Both are correct. Neither quite agrees with the other. 

Markopoulou-Kalamara is trying to figure out how quantum mechanics and relativity can both be right, yet both so different. She's really like a physics ambassador: trying to unite two sides of a conflict, each of which has a pretty strong case. How do we unite them into one peaceful union? One theory, that  Markopoulou-Kalamara helped develop, is called loop quantum gravity and is an alternative to string theory. LQG doesn't include the higher dimensions of string theory, but postulates that space-time is a fabric weaved out of quantized loops, or excited gravitational fields. Sooooo....real complicated.

Markopoulou-Kalamara's work constantly brushes her up against questions about the nature of time. Time is just one issue that general relativity and quantum mechanics can't quite come together on. When physicists realized that matter is divided up into particles and light into photons, the question arose of whether or not time was also quantized. Seconds and minutes mean no more to nature than inches and feet; they are human constructs. Could nature have a quanta of time? According to Markopoulou-Kalamara, yes, if you take the relativistic view and think of time as a dimension of space-time. But if you take a more quantum view and think of time as change, then maybe not. And change is how she prefers to define time.

If time is not quantized, then can we ever really define the past, present and future? Does our notion of this moment, of "now" really mean anything? One audience member asked if we could actually freeze this moment, take a picture of it, and look back and acknowledge that this moment did exist. The problem with this, from the quantum perspective, is that taking a picture of something like an electron causes it to go from a fuzzy cloud of probability, to just one state. You pin down the electron in one place. You open the box and find the cat either alive or dead. But if you didn't take a picture, the box would remain closed. "Now" would consist of an electron cloud instead of those definite states. By trying to define "now" you just might change it and chose one of many possible "nows." But if we could define a quanta of time, we might have a way to single out the moment we live in, compared to the ones we remember and those that have yet to happen.

 Panelist Roger Ellis believes there must be a quanta of time. The problem of dividing up time might be related to the problem of dividing up space, as put forth by Zeno's paradox: if you were traveling from point A to point B, you'd have to pass the half-way point between A and B. But if you divided half the distance between A to B in half, and cut that in half, and that in half...you'd find that you could continue dividing the distance between A and B into infinite halves and thus you would cross infinity with each step. How can one ever cover an infinite distance? It suggests that motion should be impossible, but it's clearly not, so we have a paradox. So Ellis relates:

"If you look between my fingers, the question is how many points are between there. And in some views of physics there's not just an infinite number of points, there's an uncountable infinity of points between. I don't believe it. I believe there's got to be a discrete number of points. The same thing happens if I were to say one...two. How many points were between there and there? Was there an uncountable infinity of points? I don't think so. I think there was a discrete number of time events between that point and that point."

The discreteness of time, the difference between then, now and still-to-come, is intrinsic to our human experience. Maybe it will be a notion we'll have to let go of one day.

If time is change, can it really move forward? Could things return to the way they were and essentially take us back in time? Does time move forward at all, or is that just an illusion paired with our human experience? Ellis has this to say:

"There are many theoretical physicists who think the flow of time is an illusion, and I think that's a great mistake...according to quantum physics you don't know the outcome of events until they happen. We know what happened in the past, there's a time called the present when things are happening, and there's a time in the future which is not yet determined. That's my view on it, which is not a very widely supported view."

The Arrow of Time - the idea that there is a difference, intrinsic to nature, between flowing forward in time rather than backward - is a sticky subject. In our macroscopic world, if you took a movie of your life and ran it backwards, it wouldn't look realistic. And upon further investigation, you'd find that running the world backwards would violate some laws of physics. But on the microscopic scale, running the film in reverse doesn't normally violate the laws of physics. Nature doesn't seem to have a preference for the direction of time, at least for the most part. In the late 1990's scientists finally observed some time asymmetric particle processes. These are extremely rare, but they do exist.

 But there is one big hitter in nature which supports the arrow of time, and that's the second law of thermodaynamics. Imagine running a video of your life backwards as you made an omelet. It's very easy to take a whole egg and scramble it, but would be incredibly difficult to unscramble it. A whole egg is less chaotic than a scrambled egg, and a better word for chaos is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy will only increase or remain constant, and never decrease, in a closed system. (Most examples of increased entropy such as a broken window, can be fixed because they exist in open systems. The entire universe, however, is closed.) This has profound implications on the life of the universe. It means things are getting more chaotic and cannot return to a more organized state. Eggs are getting scrambled but not unscrambled. Nature does care about the direction of time. I once again point you to a previous post of Jennifer's (she's on the ball). 

But there's so much more to be said. The second law tells us that there is, indeed, a preferred direction of time, but it doesn't tell us why. Will a unified theory of quantum gravity solve the problem? What happens when the entropy in the universe reaches a maximum? Does the arrow of time have a length? A beginning? An end?

Besides writing for Cosmic Variance, cosmologist Sean Carroll is also a soon to be author of a book on the arrow of time, titled From Eternity to Here: A Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time . I'll pass the buck to him (see the list of related blog posts) and other sources to talk more about the arrow of time.

Here's what Carroll had to say about the notion of a beginning of time:

"Scientists have gotten used to the idea that when people ask us 'What happened before the big bang?' we give St. Augusta's answer: we say there was no such thing as before the big bang. But in very recent times, beyond Einstein, we're realizing that we have absolutely no justification for saying that that's true. We have to move beyond Einstein to understand what happened at the big bang. And the answer might be that the universe came into existence at the big bang: there's nothing before. Or it might not. There could be something before the big bang...cosmologists, people who are working on quantum gravity, are very interested in what we've learned since Einstein to answer these questions and go back and answer St. Augusta's question."

Einstein apparently hated the idea of the "beginning" of time. It does seem rather odd to have a very distinct beginning on one end, and infinity on the other. But Einstein also hated the idea of a probabilistic universe, even after spending years contributing to quantum mechanics. He summed it up in the quote that He (referring to God) "does not throw dice." It's amazing that his ideas were in front of his own human willingness to accept them. 

As the audience tried to wrap their head around all this, Hockenberry tried to wrap things up by asking "What is time?"

"Change," said Markopoulou-Kalamara.

"I'd have to prepare a two semester course," said Heller.

But Ellis Penrose closed it out: "It's what clocks measure."

I know I've probably left you with more questions than answers, but that's exactly how I felt walking out of the session. My friend and I wondered if someone completely unacquainted with physics would think these people knew an incredible amount about time, or nothing at all. And really, both are true. For as much as we've learned since Einstein, we've only found an exponential number of new questions to ask. Hockenberry closed the session with this:

"The Coming of Wisdom with Time," by W.B. Yeats:

Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth.