Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Fukushima Revisited – Science for The People

sftp-fullsize-redbgIn the most recent episode of Science for The People*, host Rachelle Saunders discusses the Fukushima nuclear accident with nuclear energy expert Charles Ferguson and Rob Tarzwell, a medical doctor with focuses on nuclear medicine and psychiatry. The interview provides a nuanced view of the disaster – helping the rest of us to understand what happened, why it happened, and how things stand for the future.

The guest discuss the idea that we do not really know what constitutes a “safe” level of radiation exposure and how what impacts our decisions – mass evacuations around Fukushima may have killed more people than exposure would have. They also talk about what this disaster will mean for nuclear power use and how that will impact efforts to increase use of clean energy sources.

If you want a clear understanding of the events at Fukushima and their ongoing context, make some time to listen to Rachelle Saunders, Charles Ferguson, and Rob Tarzwell on Science for the People (Episode #236).

*Disclosure: I provide research assistance to Science for The People. So, while my opinion is inarguably correct, it is biased.

Sunday Science Poem: The Irreversibility of Time

Czesław Miłosz’s “This World” (1994)

Telomere_capsIt’s a question you’ve certainly heard before – the laws of physics work just fine when you run time backwards, so why, in the real world, does time only go forwards?

Run a movie backwards, and what you see could never happen in real life: a diver never leaps feet first out of the pool onto the board, while drops of water fling themselves back in. But, as Richard Feynman explained, at the level of atoms and molecules, there is no reason why running the film backward should be absurd – our laws of physics say time is reversible at the microscopic level. Feynman argued that time’s forward motion was a macroscopic phenomenon, rooted in the universe’s relentless increase in entropy. Physicist Lee Smolin has pursued a similar (but in many ways a radically different) idea – the forward flow of time is a consequence of a network of relationships in the universe. He may be right, but for the time being, why time is not reversible is still a deep mystery.

Physics isn’t the only place where reversibility appears to be a mystery. Why isn’t life reversible? Aging and death seem inevitable for us individually, but with each birth, the clock is reset. Biological time is reversed. How is that possible?

We don’t really know. Before your children are born you age twenty, thirty, or forty years. Your DNA has been copied and recopied, accumulating damage, telomeres have shortened, and your cells are on the way towards senescence, and yet each newborn gets a fresh start. Amazingly, each successive generation of children is not born ever more prematurely aged. If the clock can be reset for our germ cells, why can’t we reverse biological time in the rest of our cells? Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: The Irreversibility of Time”

Your Cheating Data

What makes scientists cheat? It’s cheating week over at Pacific Standard, and in my contribution, I talk about why scientists cheat.

I come up with three reasons:

1) It’s easy. So much of science is built on trust; generally, nobody comes into your lab and checks your notebook, equipment, computer code, or raw data. This is true of PIs as well – they trust that their grad students and postdocs are not faking their data.

2) There are (some short-term) incentives to cheat in science. In today’s hypercompetitive scientific community, there can be great pressure to cheat when you think your future in science is threatened. However, I think the long term incentives don’t favor cheating. Most serious cheaters seem to be caught quickly, the risks are huge, and the benefits of cheating scientists are more ephemeral than the benefits of many other types of fraud – scientists aren’t stashing laundered money away in offshore bank accounts.

3) When the data doesn’t go your way, it can be hard to accept that your idea is wrong. So much of science, especially experimental science, is a matter of judgment – what anomalous data is significant, and what data is simply a screw-up. Scientific publications by necessity are a selection of the work done by the authors, not a report of everything they tried. There are moments in every scientists career when some idea you knew just had to be true turns out to be wrong. Some cheaters are scientists who can’t deal with being wrong.

Political Polarization

Elkanah Tisdale, 1812 (Public Domain)

The current levels of political polarization and partisanship, which we are keenly aware of in the wake of the US Federal Government shutdown, get blamed on many factors, especially the bogeyman of new technology, the internet and social media.

Political critic Dan Carlin makes the point in his most recent Common Sense podcast (“The Shutdown Sideshow” at about 8:30) that increased political polarization should be an expected consequence of increased gerrymandering. In gerrymandered voting districts engineered to effectively guarantee the victory of a particular party, the winner of the election is primarily determined by the party primary elections. The winner of the party primaries is determined by each party’s “base” voters.

The inevitable result of such a system is the election of progressively more extreme politicians selected by gerrymandered districts, which effectively cut the majority of moderate voters out of the process. Responses to the activity of these politicians would then drive polarization among voters.

Is Dan Carlin right on this one? I cannot say for certain, but after five minutes of thought, it seems like increased political polarization is the expected consequence of an increasingly gerrymandered system, with or without modern communication technology. The burden of proof, therefore, falls more heavily on those arguing that it is the result of some other factor (eg, internet) or that political polarization has not increased.

$cientists on Money

Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist, has collected a variety of banknotes from around the world that feature scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. in the notes artwork. For me, it underscores the diverse locations that take pride in these individuals that have contributed so much to scientific progress (and their diverse backgrounds). It is also amusing to have such individuals on denominations that are best expressed in scientific notation (eg, Tesla on a 1010 Yugoslavian Dinar note, pictured).

In another way, the notes highlight the lack of diversity in our society’s perception of who great scientists are. While there are five notes honoring scientific concepts or technological feats, there are only three non-European scientists featured, and only one woman (Marie Curie).

I do not blame Jacob Bourjaily for the imbalance. First, it is unreasonable to expect the collection to be exhaustive or to not focus on the cultures most proximate to one’s own. Second, scientific research has been structured (ie, women forced to work for free without their own labs or titles) so that the credit for the work of clever women has invariable been handed to men. Remember when they did not really want to give Marie Curie the Nobel prize because of lady-bits?

Putting a more diverse representation of scientists on the money seems like a great way to promote science education, as well as present role models. I’ve got Andrew Jackson on a $20 in my wallet. I think we can safely say that no one with any sense wants any of our kids to grow up to be like genocidal Old Hickory. With that in mind, who would you like to see on our cash?

*Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.