Category: Science

“Science Is Weakest in the Lands of Islam”

HouseOfWisdomBK2012-09-01.jpg

Source of book image: http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327925578l/10379376.jpg

(p. 18) The upshot was, while the Greek works in particular were disappearing in Europe, they were being preserved in Arabic to be retranslated later into Latin for a rebirth of “lost” knowledge. This is one half of the point the author makes frequently in the text and, in boldface, as the book’s subtitle.

The other half is that contrary to some doubters, the Arab interest in learning extended well beyond translations: thinkers working alone or in observatories and houses of wisdom were conducting original research during “the world’s most impressive period of scholarship and learning since ancient Greece.” Accordingly, al-Khalili writes that ­al-Mamun stands as “the greatest patron of science in the cavalcade of Islamic rulers.”
Sometimes al-Khalili, like a lawyer who suspects a jury of unyielding skepticism, strains to give stature to the leading lights of Arabic science in the Middle Ages. But modern historians of science agree that more attention should be given to the Arab contribution to the preservation and expansion of knowledge at this critical period, and the author has done so in considerable detail and with rising passion.
But that was then, and al-Khalili is obligated to end on an inescapable but deflating note: science today is in a chronic state of neglect in the Arab world and the broader Islamic culture of more than one billion people. Al-Khalili spreads the blame widely, citing inadequate financing for research and education, sclerotic bureaucracies, religious conservatism, even an ingrained fear of science. The Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, perhaps the greatest Muslim scientist of the last century, won a Nobel Prize in 1979 and did what he could to promote a scientific renaissance among his people, without success. “Of all civilizations on this planet, science is weakest in the lands of Islam,” Salam said in despair. “The dangers of this weakness cannot be overemphasized since the honorable survival of a society depends directly on its science and technology in the condition of the present age.”
By recounting Arabic science’s luminous past, al-Khalili says, he hopes to instill a sense of pride that will “propel the importance of scientific enquiry back to where it belongs: at the very heart of what defines a civilized and enlightened society.”

For the full review, see:
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. “The Muslim Art of Science.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 22, 2011): 18.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 20, 2011.)

The full reference for the book under review, is:
al-Khalili, Jim. The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.

Models Often “Ignore the Messiness of Reality”

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Source of book image: http://www.namingandtreating.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SuperCooperators_small.png

(p. 18) Nowak is one of the most exciting modelers working in the field of mathematical biology today. But a model, of course, is only as good as its assumptions, and biology is much messier than physics or chemistry. Nowak tells a joke about a man who approaches a shepherd and asks, ”If I tell you how many sheep you have, can I have one?” The shepherd agrees and is astonished when the stranger answers, ”Eighty-three.” As he turns to leave, the shepherd retorts: ”If I guess your profession, can I have the animal back?” The stranger agrees. ”You must be a mathematical biologist.” How did he know? ”Because you picked up my dog.”

. . .
Near the end of the book, Nowak describes Gustav Mahler’s efforts, in his grandiloquent Third Symphony, to create an all-encompassing structure in which ”nature in its totality may ring and resound,” adding, ”In my own way, I would like to think I have helped to give nature her voice too.” But there remains a telling gap between the precision of the models and the generality of the advice Nowak offers for turning us all into supercooperators. We humans really are infinitely more complex than falling apples, metastasizing colons, even ant colonies. Idealized accounts of the world often need to ignore the messiness of reality. Mahler understood this. In 1896 he invited Bruno Walter to Lake Attersee to glimpse the score of the Third. As they walked beneath the mountains, Walter admonished Mahler to look at the vista, to which he replied, ”No use staring up there — I’ve already composed it all away into my symphony!”

For the full review, see:
OREN HARMAN. “A Little Help from Your Friends.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., April 10, 2011): 18.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 8, 2011, and has the title “How Evolution Explains Altruism.”)

The full reference for the book under review, is:
Nowak, Martin A., and Roger Highfield. Supercooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Where Credit Is Due

SchatzWaksmanStreptomycinLab2012-09-02.jpg “EVIDENCE; A lab notebook belonging to Albert Schatz, left, with his supervisor, Selman A. Waksman, and discovered at Rutgers helps puts to rest a 70-year argument over credit for the Nobel-winning discovery of streptomycin.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.

The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a vicious legal battle between Dr. Waksman and his graduate student Albert Schatz over who deserved credit.
Dr. Waksman died in 1973; after Dr. Schatz’s death in 2005, the papers were much in demand by researchers trying to piece together what really happened between the professor and his student. But nobody looked in the small cardboard box.
. . .
Thomas J. Frusciano, the head archivist of the Alexander Library special collections, recalled that the Waksman papers had been acquired in 1983, 10 years after the professor’s death, and had even included a vial of streptomycin. He asked a member of his team, Erika Gorder, to search the stacks.
She remembered seeing the small box next to Dr. Waksman’s papers. “I must have passed by it a million times,” she said, “but I always thought it must contain miscellaneous material from the Waksman papers when they were cataloged.”
When she pulled down the box and carefully opened it, however, there, loosely piled inside, were five clothbound notebooks — just like Dr. Waksman’s, but marked “Albert Schatz.”
In the notebook for 1943, on Page 32, Dr. Schatz had started Experiment 11. In meticulous cursive, he had written the date, Aug. 23, and the title, “Exp. 11 Antagonistic Actinomycetes,” a reference to the strange threadlike microbes found in the soil that produce antibiotics. Underneath the title he recorded where he had found the microbes in “leaf compost, straw compost and stable manure” on the Rutgers College farm, outside his laboratory.
The following pages detailed his experiments and his discovery of two strains of a gray-green actinomycete named Streptomyces griseus, Latin for gray. Each strain produced an antibiotic that destroyed germs of E. coli in a petri dish — and, he was to find out later, also destroyed the TB germ. The notebook shows that the moment of discovery belongs to Dr. Schatz.
One of the pages in Experiment 11 had indeed been cut out, but the page was toward the end of the experiment, after Dr. Schatz had made his discovery. There was no evidence of a break in the experiment to suggest that Dr. Schatz might have removed the page to conceal something he didn’t want the rest of the world to know.
And in Dr. Waksman’s own papers — in the 60 boxes — there was confirmation that the professor knew the missing page was not a real issue. His legal advisers had told him bluntly that it was a distraction. As one lawyer wrote, the missing page was “insignificant.”
As for the professor’s story that Dr. Schatz’s uncle had carried off the key 1943 notebook, Dr. Waksman’s own documents make clear it could not have been true. At the time the key notebook was not at Rutgers; it was with university-appointed agents who were preparing the streptomycin patent application. Here, indeed, was evidence that Dr. Waksman had deliberately spread doubt and confusion about Dr. Schatz’s Experiment 11 in a campaign to belittle the work of his student.

For the full story, see:
PETER PRINGLE. “Notebooks Shed Light on an Antibiotic’s Contested Discovery.” The New York Times (Tues., June 12, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 11, 2012.)

The issues treated above are discussed in more detail in Pringle’s book:
Pringle, Peter. Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug. New York: Walker & Company, 2012.

Global Warming Heretic Svensmark May Be the Next Shechtman

(p. C) The list of scientific heretics who were persecuted for their radical ideas but eventually proved right keeps getting longer. Last month, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, having spent much of his career being told he was wrong.
“I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying,” he recalled, adding that the doyen of chemistry, the late Linus Pauling, had denounced the theory with the words: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
The Australian medical scientist Barry Marshall, who hypothesized that a bacterial infection causes stomach ulcers, received similar treatment and was taken seriously only when he deliberately infected himself, then cured himself with antibiotics in 1984. Eventually, he too won the Nobel Prize.
. . .
Perhaps it’s at least worth guessing which of today’s heretics will eventually win a Nobel Prize. How about the Dane Henrik Svensmark? In 1997, he suggested that the sun’s magnetic field affects the earth’s climate–by shielding the atmosphere against cosmic rays, which would otherwise create or thicken clouds and thereby cool the surface. So, he reasoned, a large part of the natural fluctuations in the climate over recent millennia might reflect variation in solar activity.
Dr. Svensmark is treated as a heretic mainly because his theory is thought to hinder the effort to convince people that recent climatic variation is largely manmade, not natural, so there is a bias toward resisting his idea. That does not make it right, but some promising recent experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) raise the probability that Dr. Svensmark might yet prove to be a Shechtman.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Is That Scientific Heretic a Genius–or a Loon?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., November 12, 2011): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Take U.S.D.A. and C.D.C. Advice with a Grain of Salt

(p. 8) When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
. . .
When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”
. . .
(p. 9) A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.
. . .
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
. . .
Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

For the full commentary, see:
GARY TAUBES. “OPINION; Salt, We Misjudged You.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., June 3, 2012): 8-9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2012.)

Neglecting Valid Stereotypes Has Costs

(p. 169) The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Coal Mines Help Paleontologists Learn about Environmental Change

DiMicheleWilliamSpringfieldCoal2012-06-12.jpg “SUBTERRANEAN; William A. DiMichele in the Springfield Coal. The dark mass is a coal seam; the lighter shale above is interrupted by a fossil tree stump.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender.
. . .
“Effectively you’ve got a lost world,” said Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has explored the site. “It’s the closest thing you’ll find to time travel,” he added.
. . .
The reach of the Springfield forest should allow scientists to undertake ecosystem-wide analyses in a way never before possible in landscapes so ancient, and such studies may help them predict the effects of global warming today.
“With our own CO2 rises and changes in climate,” said Scott D. Elrick, a team member from the Illinois State Geological Survey, “we can look at the past here and say, ‘It’s happened before.’ ”
Today, we burn the scale trees of the Carboniferous by the billions: they have all turned to coal. Newly discovered, the Springfield forest is already crumbling to bits, as coal-mine ceilings quickly do after exposure. But with continued mining, more ceilings are being revealed every day.
“You have to dig to find fossils, going inside the anatomy of the planet,” Dr. Johnson said. “Bill DiMichele realizes he has an entire industry digging for him, creating a tunnel into an ancient world.”

For the full story, see:
W. BARKSDALE MAYNARD. “An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change.” The New York Times (Tues., May 1, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 30, 2012.)

AncientRiverbedMap2012-06-12.jpgSource of map graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Observed Climate “Not in Good Agreement with Model Predictions”

The author of the following commentary is a Princeton physics professor:

(p. A13) What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.
The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned.
. . .
Frustrated by the lack of computer-predicted warming over the past decade, some IPCC supporters have been claiming that “extreme weather” has become more common because of more CO2. But there is no hard evidence this is true.
. . .
Large fluctuations from warm to cold winters have been the rule for the U.S., as one can see from records kept by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. For example, the winters of 1932 and 1934 were as warm as or warmer than the 2011-2012 one and the winter of 1936 was much colder.
. . .
It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or are already happening as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But these ominous predictions are based on computer models. It is important to distinguish between what the climate is actually doing and what computer models predict. The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with model predictions.
. . .
. . . we should . . . remember the description of how science works by the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman:
“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

For the full commentary, see:
WILLIAM HAPPER. “Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again; The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with predictions.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 27, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Asteroid-Mining Start-Up Hopes to Launch First Spacecraft within Two Years

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“A computer image shows a rendering of a spacecraft preparing to capture a water-rich, near-Earth asteroid.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) SEATTLE–A start-up with high-profile backers on Tuesday unveiled its plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids, a highly ambitious effort aimed at opening up a new frontier in space exploration.

At an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight, a group that included former National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials unveiled Planetary Resources Inc. and said it is developing a “low-cost” series of spacecraft to prospect and mine “near-Earth” asteroids for water and metals, and thus bring “the natural resources of space within humanity’s economic sphere of influence.”
The solar system is “full of resources, and we can bring that back to humanity,” said Planetary Resources co-founder Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight.
The company said it expects to launch its first spacecraft to low-Earth orbit–between 100 and 1,000 miles above the Earth’s surface–within two years, in what would be a prelude to sending spacecraft to prospect and mine asteroids.
The company, which was founded three years ago but remained secret until last week, said it could take a decade to finish prospecting, or identifying the best candidates for mining.

For the full story, see:
AMIR EFRATI. “Asteroid-Mining Strategy Is Outlined by a Start-Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 25, 2012): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 24, 2012, and has the title “Start-Up Outlines Asteroid-Mining Strategy.”)

Warming Planet May Cause Fewer High Clouds in Tropics, Allowing Heat to Escape into Space

CloudWeatherBalloon2012-05-03.jpg “A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the leading proponent of the view that clouds will save the day. His stature in the field — he has been making seminal contributions to climate science since the 1960s — has amplified his influence.

Dr. Lindzen says the earth is not especially sensitive to greenhouse gases because clouds will react to counter them, and he believes he has identified a specific mechanism. On a warming planet, he says, less coverage by high clouds in the tropics will allow more heat to escape to space, (p. A14) countering the temperature increase.
. . .
Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point “nutty.” He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate.
But for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases.
Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
. . .
“If I’m right, we’ll have saved money” by avoiding measures to limit emissions, Dr. Lindzen said in the interview. “If I’m wrong, we’ll know it in 50 years and can do something.”
. . .
“You have politicians who are being told if they question this, they are anti-science,” Dr. Lindzen said. “We are trying to tell them, no, questioning is never anti-science.”

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN GILLIS. “TEMPERATURE RISING; Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters.” The New York Times (Tues., May 1, 2012): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated April 30, 2012.)

Physicist Says “Financial Models Are Only Mediocre Metaphors”

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Trained as a physicist, Emanuel Derman once served as the head of quantitative analysis at Goldman Sachs and is currently a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. With “Models Behaving Badly” he offers a readable, even eloquent combination of personal history, philosophical musing and honest confession concerning the dangers of relying on numerical models not only on Wall Street but also in life.

Mr. Derman’s particular thesis can be stated simply: Although financial models employ the mathematics and style of physics, they are fundamentally different from the models that science produces. Physical models can provide an accurate description of reality. Financial models, despite their mathematical sophistication, can at best provide a vast oversimplification of reality. In the universe of finance, the behavior of individuals determines value–and, as he says, “people change their minds.”
In short, beware of physics envy. When we make models involving human beings, Mr. Derman notes, “we are trying to force the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper. It doesn’t fit without cutting off some of the essential parts.” As the collapse of the subprime collateralized debt market in 2008 made clear, it is a terrible mistake to put too much faith in models purporting to value financial instruments. “In crises,” Mr. Derman writes, “the behavior of people changes and normal models fail. While quantum electrodynamics is a genuine theory of all reality, financial models are only mediocre metaphors for a part of it.”

For the full review, see:
BURTON G. MALKIEL. “BOOKSHELF; Physics Envy; Creating financial models involving human behavior is like forcing ‘the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper.'” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., December 14, 2011): A19.

The book under review is:
Derman, Emanuel. Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life. New York: Free Press, 2011.