Aliens, arsenic and alternative peer-review: Has science publishing become too conservative?

In 1959, physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi advanced a hypothesis about how we could detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The two suggested monitoring microwave signals from outer space at the frequency of 1420 MHz. This frequency is the frequency of neutral hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe and one which aliens would likely harness for communication. The paper marked the beginning of serious interest in searching for extraterrestrial life. A year later, Freeman Dyson followed up on this suggestion with an even more fanciful idea. He conjectured that a sufficiently advanced civilization might be able to actually disassemble a planet the size of Jupiter and use its parts to create a shell of material that would surround the parent planet’s solar system. This sphere would capture solar energy and allow civilizations to make the most efficient use of all such energy. The most telling signature of such an advanced habitat would be an intense infrared signal coming from the sphere. Thus Dyson recommended looking for infrared signals in addition to radio signals if we were to search for aliens. The sphere came to be known as a ‘Dyson sphere’ and became fodder for a generation of science fiction enthusiasts and Star Trek fans.

These two ideas and especially the second one sound outrageous and highly speculative to say the least. Can you guess where both were published? In the two most prestigious science journals in the world; the Morrison paper was published in Nature while Dyson published his report in Science. This was in 1960. I can say in a heartbeat that I don’t see similar ideas being published in these journals today, and this is a situation which we all should regret.

I bring up this issue because I think it indicates the significant changes in attitude about publishing novel scientific ideas that have occurred from 1960 to the present. In 1960 even serious journals like Nature and Science were open to publishing fanciful speculation, provided it was clearly enumerated. Now the demands for publishing have become more stringent, but also more narrowly defined. While this may have led to the publishing of more ‘concrete’ science, it has also dissuaded researchers from venturing out into novel territory. Most importantly, it has led the scientific community to put an unnecessarily high premium on ideas being right rather than interesting.

Science progresses not by being right or wrong but by being interesting. Most scientific ideas in their infancy are tentative, unsubstantiated and incomplete. Yet modern scientific publishing and peer review largely discourage the presentation of these ideas by insisting on convincing evidence that they are right. In most cases this emphasis on accuracy and complete validation is necessary to save science from itself; we have seen all too many cases of pseudoscience that looked superficially plausible but which turned out to be full of holes. Science usually plays it safe by insisting on unimpeachable evidence. But in my opinion this stringent self-correcting process has gone too far, and in our desire to err on the safer side we have erred on the extreme side. This is having a negative impact on what we can call creative science. The insistence on foolproof data and the public censure that researchers would face if they don’t provide it is deterring many scientists from publishing provocative results that are still in the early stages of gestation. Demands for conservative presentation are also accompanied by conservative peer review since reviewers fear backlash as much as authors. All this is unfortunate and is to the detriment of the very core of scientific progress, since it’s only when provocative ideas are published can other researchers validate, verify and refute them.

The furor about the recent paper on “arsenic-based” life brings these issues into sharp focus. Much of the hailstorm of criticism would have been avoided if the standards and formats of scientific publishing allowed the presentation of ideas that may not be fully substantiated but which are nonetheless interesting. By now we are all familiar with the torrent of criticism about the paper that has come from all quarters, from blog posts to opinions from well-known experts. What is clear is that the experiments done were shoddy and controls were lacking. But the criticism is detracting from the potential value of the paper. Irrespective of whether the claims of arsenic actually being incorporated in the bacterium’s replicative and metabolic machinery are true, the paper is undoubtedly interesting, if only as an example of a hitherto unknown novel extremophile. Yet it is in danger of simply being forgotten as one of the uglier episodes in the history of science publishing.

There is in fact a solution to this problem, one which I have been in favor of for a long time. What if there was a separate section specifically devoted to relatively far-fetched ideas and this paper had been published in that section? The paper would then likely have been taken much less seriously and its tenets would have been accepted simply as thought-provoking observations pointing to further experimentation rather than established facts. So here’s my suggestion; let the top scientific journals have a separate section entitled ‘Speculation’ (or perhaps ‘Imaginings’) which allows the presentation of ideas that are fanciful and speculative. The ideas proposed could range from purely theoretical constructs to the documentation and interpretation of unusual experimental observations. The only requirement is that they should be unorthodox and interesting, backed up by more or less known scientific principles, clearly defined and enumerated and contain testable hypotheses. Let there be a second type of peer-review process for these ideas, one which is as honest as the primary process but more forgiving of the lack of foolproof evidence.

The idea about Dyson spheres would fit in nicely in such a section. Another example that comes to my mind is an idea proposed by the biophysicist Luca Turin. Turin conjectured that we may smell molecules based not on their shape but on the vibrations of their bonds. The history of this idea is interesting since others had already proposed it earlier in respectable journals. Turin actually wrote it up and sent it to Nature. Nature deliberated for an entire year and rejected the paper. In this case Nature should at least be commended for taking so long and presumably giving careful consideration to the idea, but the point is that they wouldn’t have had a problem publishing it in a ‘Speculation’ section right away. Turin’s idea was interesting, novel, highly interdisciplinary, enumerated in great detail and backed up by well-known principles of chemistry and spectroscopy. It satisfied all the criteria of a novel scientific idea that may or may not be right. Turin finally published in a journal which only specialists read, thus precluding the concept from being appreciated by an interdisciplinary cross-section of scientists. There is now at least some evidence that his ideas may be right.

Interestingly, there is at least one entire journal devoted to the publication of interesting hypotheses. This is the journal ‘Medical Hypotheses’. Medical Hypotheses prominently lacks peer review (although they have instituted some peer review recently) and has occasionally come under fire for publishing highly questionable papers, such as those criticizing the link between HIV and AIDS. But it has also served as a playground for the interaction of many interesting ideas. The editorial board of Medical Hypotheses features highly respected scientists like the neurologist V S Ramachandran and the Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Arvid Carlsson. Ramachandran himself has iterated the need for such a journal. Science and Nature merely have to devote a small section in each issue to the kinds of ideas that are published in Medical Hypotheses, perhaps with a higher standard.

It’s worth reiterating Thomas Kuhn’s notions of paradigm shifts in science here. Scientific paradigms rarely change by playing it safe. Most scientific revolutions have been initiated by bold and heretical ideas from maverick individuals, whether it was Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, Einstein’s thoughts about the constancy of the speed of light, Wegener’s ideas about continental shift or Bohr’s construction of the quantum atom. Not a single one of these ideas was validated by foolproof evidence when it was proposed. Many of them sounded outright bizarre and counter-intuitive. But it was still paramount to bring these ideas to a greater audience. Only time would tell whether they were right or wrong, but they were undoubtedly supremely novel and interesting. And almost all of them were published by leading journals. It was the willingness to entertain interesting ideas that made possible the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century. It seems to be a strange historical anomaly to find journals much more prone to publishing speculative ideas a hundred years ago than today. Today we seem to worship the safety of truth at the expense of the uncertain but bold reaches of novelty.

Of course, the existence of a second-tier of publication and peer review would undoubtedly have to be carefully monitored. There is after all a thin line between reasonable speculation and pseudoscience. The reviewers in this tier would have to pay even more careful attention than they usually do to ensure that they are not pushing baseless fantasies. But as we have seen in the case of the vibrational theory of smell and the case of arsenic-loving bacteria, it’s not that hard to separate legitimate science with uncertain truth value from mere storytelling.

Once the ground rules are established and the initial obstacles are overcome, the second tier of peer review would have many advantages apart from encouraging the publication of speculation. It would also make reviewers more comfortable in recommending publication; since the ideas are speculative anyway, they would not insist on complete verification and would not fear backlash if the ideas they had reviewed turn out to be wrong. Journal editors would similarly find it easier to approve publication. And the scientific community at large perhaps would not be as critical as it has been in the case of the recent paper because it too would accept the proposed ideas not as declarations of truth but as tentative exploration. But the greatest beneficiaries of the improved system would undoubtedly be the publishing scientists. Their minds would be much freer to dream and they would fear much less retaliation from the community for daring to do this. Most importantly, unlike the recent case, they would not be under pressure to make statements whose implications exceed the objective factual implications of their claims, and they would be happy to just present the claims as interesting observations that point the way towards further experiments.

Science progresses by being the ultimate free-market of ideas; this has led to it being a highly social process where scientists build on each other’s work. But for this social process to work the ideas must be liberated from their initial nebulous beginnings. Ideas in the scientific marketplace come in different flavors, from boring and established to interesting and maverick. The current scientific publication and peer-review process imposes a straitjacket that ideas have to fit in in order to be ‘pre-selected’ for entry into this market. This keeps out some of the most interesting ideas and more importantly, dissuades thinkers from even pursuing them in the first place. The straitjacket does serve the valuable purpose of filtering flotsam but it is also filtering out too many other interesting things. Science is too haphazard and full of unexpected twists and turns to be entrusted to rigid rules of review and publication. We need to accept the liability of occasionally having a dubious idea published in order to keep open the possibility of also giving novel beginnings a public platform; the beauty of science is that the bonafide dubious ideas automatically get weeded out through scrutiny and so we should not have to worry about too many of them going on extended rampages. But the potentially good ideas can only be fleshed out by other scientists when they are allowed to be exposed to criticism, appreciation and ridicule. Even if the ideas themselves ultimately sink, they may serve as spores which lead to the germination of other ideas. And it is the germination of these other ideas that gets transformed into trees of scientific discovery.

We are all sheltered, invigorated and inspired by the branches of these trees. Let’s give them an opportunity to grow.

"The most ludicrous system ever devised"

That's Nobel laureate Harry Kroto on the peer-review system. Since he won his Nobel for fullerenes, Kroto has become a tireless promoter of science education and communication. This week's issue of Nature has a series of brief interviews with several Nobel laureates. One of the questions asked was about the peer-review system and whether it is an optimal one. Most laureates gave an analogy and paraphrased Churchill's quip about democracy: it’s a system full of flaws, yet better than the other alternatives. But Kroto went one step further:

Many people consider the peer-review system broken. Do you share their view, and do you have a solution?

The peer-review system is the most ludicrous system ever devised. It is useless and does not make sense in dealing with science funding when history abounds with a plethora of examples that indicate that the most important breakthroughs are impossible to foresee.

The science budget should be split into three (not necessarily equal) parts and downloaded to departments. The local institutions, and not government departments, should disburse funding as they are close to the coalface and can decide what needs support and what is in the long-term interest of the department. There should be no research proposals on which to waste time.

One part should go to young people chosen by their universities as the researchers on which their institution's future will depend — they have done the work, why waste time doing it again when people have no time and are too far away from the coalface and in general do not have the relevant expertise?

The second part should go to a group whose most recent report was excellent. This is the racehorse solution — if a scientist has just done some great work, let her or him run again.

Although I would have probably eschewed such strong words and do sympathize with the other laureates' perspective, my heart is with Sir Kroto. Revolutionary science has often been rejected by the peer-review system; it's worth noting that Enrico Fermi's paper on beta decay was rejected by Nature.

I myself have believed in having a separate section in leading science journals devoted to "improbable" science, speculative and brain-tickling ideas flung out for contemplation by the rest of the community. The section should make it clear that such ideas have not been validated, but then that's true of any scientific idea when it's being conceived. I seriously believe that such sections would provide a lot of food for thought for researchers who are willing to go out on a limb. Maybe the published, incomplete ideas will meet their own ideas to be synthesized into a more coherent whole.

Now of course that does not mean that any crackpot idea deserves to be published. There certainly needs to be a minimum standard for acceptance. For this there could be a second kind of peer-review, where reviewers are more forgiving and more creative in judging the merit of the proposed concept. These reviewers could judge the idea not on the basis of its validation but on the basis of its novelty, novelty that’s nonetheless grounded in sound basic principles of science (thus homeopathy would be instantly excluded). Such a two-tier system would then provide an opportunity for the publication of both “normal” science as well as potentially revolutionary science. An example that comes to my mind is Luca Turin’s novel idea about olfactory molecules being detected by vibration rather than shape. The idea certainly seemed grounded in basic physics and chemistry. Its publication would have pushed at least a couple of researchers to validate or disprove it. As it turns out it was rejected by a leading journal after a long wait.

As Freeman Dyson says, the most important scientists are often "rebels" who speak out against the conventional wisdom. Their far-fetched sounding pronouncements of today have often been transformed into the important discoveries of tomorrow. The least that science journals can do is to give their ideas a worldwide platform.

In praise of cheap science

The era of ‘big science’ in the United States began in the 1930s. Nobody exemplified this spirit more than Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley whose cyclotrons smashed subatomic particles together to reveal nature’s deepest secrets. Lawrence was one of the first true scientist-entrepreneurs. He paid his way through college selling all kinds of things as a door-to-door salesman. He brought the same persuasive power a decade later to sell his ideas about particle accelerators to wealthy businessmen and philanthropists. Sparks flying off his big machines, his ‘boys’ frantically running around to fix miscellaneous leaks and shorts, Lawrence would proudly display his Nobel Prize winning invention to millionaires as if it were his own child. The philanthropists’ funding paid off in at least one practical respect; it was Lawrence’s modified cyclotrons that produced the uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb.

After the war big science was propelled to even greater heights. With ever bigger particle accelerators needed to explore ever smaller particles, science became an expensive ‘hobby’. The decades through the 70s were dominated by high-energy physics that needed billion-dollar accelerators to verify its predictions. Fermilab, Brookhaven and of course, CERN, all became household names. Researchers competed for the golden apples that would sustain these behemoths. But one of the rather unfortunate fallouts of these developments was that good science started to be defined by the amount of money it needed. Gone were the days when a Davy or a Cavendish could make profound discoveries using tabletop apparatus. The era of molecular biology and the billion dollar Human Genome Project further cemented this faith in the fruits of expensive research.

We are now seeing the culmination of this era of big physics and biology. In recent years, university professors’ worth has exceedingly been measured by the amount of funding that they get. Science, long a relentless search to uncover the mysteries of life and the universe, has been transformed into a relentless search to find the perfect problem most likely to bag the biggest grant. Rather than focusing on the ideas themselves, the current system encourages researchers on proving their ‘worth’. The only true worth of a scientist is his quest and hunger for knowledge and his passion in transferring that knowledge to the next generation. All other metrics of worth are greatly exaggerated.

The accomplished chemist Alan Bard nails this problem in an editorial that castigates the current system for sacrificing the actual quality of research at the altar of the ability to bring in research funds. The editorial succinctly points out that in the race to secure these funds, scientists are often tempted to hype their research proposals so that the end product is more smoke and less fire. And of course, the biggest casualty is the education of further generations of scientists, those who are going to bring about the very technological and scientific advances that make our world tick. The result of all this? Young people are dissuaded from going into academic science; if their worth is going to be mainly judged in dollars (and that too only after they turn 40), they might as well work for the private sector.

Now of course nobody is arguing against scientists being able to file patents or apply for large grants. Money flowing in from these endpoints can sustain further research which today on the whole is more expensive. But as Bard’s article makes it clear, these activities are often becoming the primary and not the secondary focus of universities. That goes against the spirit of research and it undermines the very meaning of intellectual scholarship.

But most importantly, and Bard does not explicitly mention this, I think that the current environment makes it appear to young scientists just entering the game that they need to necessarily do expensive science in order to be successful. I think part of this belief does come from the era of big accelerator physics and high profile molecular biology. But this belief is flawed and it has been demolished by physicists themselves; this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to scientists who produced graphene by peeling off layers of it from graphite using good old scotch tape. How many millions of dollars did it take to do this experiment?

Sure, low hanging scientific fruits accessible through simple experiments have largely been picked, but such a perspective is also in the eye of the beholder. As the graphene scientists proved, there are still fledgling fields like materials science where simple and ingenious experiments can contribute to profound discoveries. Another field where such experiments can provide handsome dividends is the other fledgling field of neuroscience. Cheap research that provides important insights in this area is exemplified by the neurologist V S Ramachandran, who has performed the simplest and most ingenious experiments on patients using mirrors and other elementary equipment to unearth key insights into the functioning of the brain. These scientists have shown that if you find the right field, you can find the right simple experiment.

Ultimately, few can doubt that cheap experiments are also more elegant, and one derives much more satisfaction from simply mixing two chemicals together to generate complex self-assembled structures than using the latest accelerator to analyze gigabytes of computer data, although the latter may also lead to exciting discoveries. The beauty of science still lies in its simplicity.

But as Bard’s article suggests, are university administrations going to come around to this point of view? Are they going to recruit a young researcher describing an ingenious tabletop experiment worth five thousand dollars or are they going to go for one who is going to pitch for a hundred thousand dollars worth of fancy equipment? Sadly, the current answer seems to be that they would rather prefer the latter.

This has got to change, not only because simple experiments still hold the potential to provide unprecedented insights in the right fields, but also because the undue association of science with money misleads young researchers into thinking that more expensive is better. It threatens to undermine everything that science has stood for since The Enlightenment. The function of academic scientists is to do high-quality research and mentor the next generation of scientist-citizens. Raising money comes second. A scientist who spends most of his time securing funds is no different from a corporate lackey soliciting capital.

Science, which has nurtured and sustained our intellectual growth and contributed to our well-being for four hundred years, is like an eagle held aloft by the wind of creativity and skepticism. How can this magnificent bird soar if the wind fueling its flight and holding it high starts getting charged by the cubic centimeter?

The Velvet Undergrounds of science

Over at the physics blog "Uncertain Principles", Chad Orzel has a nice meme. He talks about the band called 'The Velvet Undergound' which itself was not very popular but which influenced many other bands. Orzel then asks which scientists were the Velvet Undergrounds of their respective disciplines. These would be individuals whose great achievements were not recognized during their lifetimes. He names Sadi Carnot.

I think there are two kinds of Velvet Undergrounds in science, ones whose achievements were not even recognized by their peers until after they died, and others whose achievements were recognized by their peers when they were alive but which did not make their names publicly known. Here's a few I thought of. Do you know more?

In the first category:

Josiah Willard Gibbs for thermodynamics: He published his founding contributions in an obscure Connecticut journal.

Gregor Mendel for genetics: His contribution was famously and independently uncovered only after 30 years.

Ludwig Boltzmann (partially) for physics: His belief in the existence of atoms was ruthlessly demolished by some including Ernst Mach.

George Price for evolutionary biology: His contributions to altruism were invaluable, but he astonishingly died as a penniless and homeless person on the streets of London

Henrietta Swan Leavitt for astronomy: Her groundbreaking and backbreaking work in exploring the Cepheid variables was pivotal to Edwin Hubble's foundational research on the expanding universe.

Hugh Everett for physics: His multiple universe theory is now increasingly embraced as a way to get around wavefunction collapse and problems with the Copenhagen Interpretation

In the second category:

Bruno Zimm and Jack Dunitz for crystallography: Zimm developed Zimm-Bragg diffraction theory. Dunitz inspired a generation of crystallographers (Dunitz is still alive actually)

Norman Heatley for penicillin: He was the brilliant technician behind the commercial production of the miracle drug

Stanislaw Ulam for math: He was the dominant contributor to Monte-Carlo methods

Arnold Sommerfeld for physics: He had a tremendous educational impact on most of the leading quantum physicists of the early twentieth century

Carl Woese for microbiology: He identified a whole new tree of life, the Archaea

Robert Wilson for physics: He designed particle accelerators the way Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings. A fine amateur architect himself, he was the driving force behind the aesthetically pleasing Fermilab

Stanley Miller: The father of modern origins-of-life research

S F Boys for chemistry: He invented the technique of using Gaussian orbitals to approximate Slater-type orbitals, a development that is at the root of all of ab initio quantum chemistry

Michael Dewar for chemistry: A brilliant man with a huge ego, he vastly influenced many branches of theoretical chemistry

Sidney Coleman for physics: He tremendously influenced a generation of theoretical physicists with his penetrating insight and criticism

Gilbert Newton Lewis for chemistry: The father of the shared-electron chemical bond

Frank Westheimer for chemistry: A founding father of bioorganic chemistry

Peter Mitchell: Mitchell won a Nobel Prize, but his extremely important contribution of chemiosmotic theory is virtually unknown to the public

The price of teaching

I have always been wary of evaluating faculty members based on the amount of money they bring in. One of the casualties of American academic science in the latter half of the twentieth century was that it commodified research, and money became a much bigger part of the equation. Research groups started to bear a striking resemblance to corporate outfits. Undoubtedly there were benefits to this practice since it brought in valuable funding, but it also tended to put a price on the generation of knowledge, which seems inherently wrong.

Now it seems that Texas A & M is thinking of turning this kind of valuation into official policy. As Chemical & Engineering News reports, TAMU is planning to rate its faculty based on their "net worth". This would be calculated based on the faculty member's salary, the funding that he or she can generate, and teaching (how on earth are they going to financially evaluate that?)

Sorry, but I think this is hogwash, and others seem to agree with me. The "worth" of faculty members goes way beyond the funding they can procure. There may be professors who bring in modest amounts of money but who inspire generations of students through their teaching, who significantly contribute to the public perception of science through science communication, and who generally contribute to the academic environment in a department simply through their passion and strong advocacy of science. Even from the point of view of research, there are faculty members who publish relatively less, do research on the cheap, and yet steer their respective fields in new directions simply by generating interesting ideas. Very few of these qualities lend themselves to spreadsheet analysis.

In fact, I will go a step further. If a faculty member does little more than inspire generations of students to pursue careers in science research, education and policy, there is no metric that can financially measure the worth of such contributions. Simply put, such contributions may well be priceless. That should easily satisfy Texas A & M's criteria for high-value "assets".

Middle Ages March

As far as possible I try to avoid writing about the teaching of evolution and opposition to climate change in this country because of their overly politicized nature, but this piece in the NYT is one that no one can wisely ignore. It details a growing movement to conflate rejection of evolution with rejection of climate change that many people, and sadly especially conservatives, are spearheading. States are trying to introduce bills encouraging the teaching of “all sides” of scientific issues. Conservative politicians are advocating for students to know “all the facts”. But nobody is fooled by these thinly veiled promotions of ignorance...


...Read the rest of this post on the Desipundit blog

An alternative BBC list for the "educated" mind

So there's this little blurb going around on Facebook in which the BBC has listed 100 books written over the last 200 years or so and asked people how many they and their friends have read. The books are diverse and include everything from Jane Austen to J D Salinger to Harry Potter.

Obviously the BBC thinks this list is important in some way or that people who have read some of these books are educated or well-informed. There is a note informing us that most people would have read only 6 out of those 100 books. Perhaps this is startling.

But what is startling by orders of magnitude is that this list of 100 books does not include a single scientific work. Now of course people would not be expected to have read The Principia. But what about Darwin's "The Origin of Species"? Or, looking at something more modern and still pivotal, Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"? These volumes are comparable to many of the books listed by the BBC, certainly in terms of comprehension, and also almost certainly in terms of importance.

Most prominently, what about C P Snow's "The Two Cultures" which lamented the rift between science and the humanities? You want to see a classic example of this rift? WItness the BBC list! Snow would have nodded his head vigorously, especially and most ironically because the exclusion of his own volume from the list makes his point resoundingly clear.

So, dear BBC, if I were to draw up my own short and admittedly limited list of scientific works that surely deserve as much of a place in the "educated" man's mind as the august books you present, I would cite the following. I haven't read all of these works; but with all I have a passing familiarity and some I have read more seriously. Let's even forget Newton's "Principia" for now and focus on the last 200 years as the BBC mostly has, and even just on the 20th century. Of course some of the following are more important than others; some are popular treatments while others are defining and fundamental volumes for their respective fields. But one can still come up with a highly readable list, which in my opinion would enrich the mind of any human being.

1. The Origin of Species- Charles Darwin

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions- Thomas Kuhn

3. The Logic of Scientific Discovery- Karl Popper

4. Silent Spring- Rachel Carson

5. Science and the Common Understanding- J. Robert Oppenheimer

6. Principia Mathematica- Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead

7. Physics and Philosophy- Werner Heisenberg

8. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions- Edwin Abbott

9. On Growth and Form- D'Arcy Thompson

10. What is Life?- Erwin Schrodinger

11. Men of Mathematics- E T Bell

12. Microbe Hunters- Paul De Kruif

13. The Mismeasure of Man- Stephen Jay Gould

14. The Selfish Gene- Richard Dawkins

15. Sociobiology- E O Wilson

16. Mr. Tompkins- George Gamow

17. The Double Helix- James Watson

18. The Nature of the Chemical Bond- Linus Pauling

19. Chaos- James Gleick

20. Advice to a Young Scientist- Peter Medawar

and finally

21. The Two Cultures- C P Snow

Consider the diverse and varying importance of these works. Kuhn and Popper are defining volumes in the philosophy of science. Darwin needs no explanation. Schrodinger inspired a generation of physicists like Francis Crick to change fields and initiate a revolution in biology. E O Wilson's book started a fierce chapter in the "nature vs nurture" debate whose ramifications can still be felt. In one fell swoop Gould demolished the foundations of scientific racism and eugenics. Pauling's book is one of the most important scientific works of all time and redefined chemistry. D'Arcy Thompson's beautiful volume established the mathematical foundations of developmental biology. Bell and De Kruif both inspired dozens of famous scientists like Andrew Weil and John Nash who went on to do groundbreaking work and win Fields and Nobel medals. Russell's book was a landmark event designed to provide a foundation for all of mathematics. Watson's book is considered the archetype of how real science is done, warts and all. Carson became the godmother of the modern environmental movement. On a more limited but important level, Gleick, Gamow and Dawkins made chaos theory, quantum physics and selfish genes comprehensible to the layman. And Medawar, Oppenheimer and Snow wrote deeply thoughtful volumes on the relationship between science, society and culture.

Now I suppose it would not be too presumptuous to ask the question; how many of these have the BBC list-makers read?

Can a religious person head the National Institutes of Health?

Francis Collins is an unusual scientist. A physical chemist and doctor who rose to prominence as the leader of the Human Genome Project, he has recently been appointed by President Barack Obama as head of the NIH, the largest biomedical funding and research organization in the country. Collins is unusual because along with this undoubtedly distinguished scientific credentials he brings another kind of background to the job; that of a pious, church-going Christian. A few years ago Collins published a book that argued for a scientific basis for belief in God, and not just a theological one. Needless to say, his views have caused concern among a number of atheist scientists and secular scientists in general...

...more on Desipundit

DEAR NEW YORK TIMES

You disappoint me

Dear Sir,
I was rather shocked to notice that in your "Notable Deaths of 2008" slide show that included 44 famous people from the arts, medicine, literature, television, politics, cinema, music and journalism, the name of the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler was missing. Dr. Wheeler who worked on the Manhattan Project died on April 13, 2008 and was one of the century's greatest scientists and a national treasure. During his long and remarkably productive life in which he worked with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, Dr. Wheeler played a key role in shaping American science, education and government policy. While it was heartening to see an obituary of him in the New York Times, I was quite disconcerted to see no mention of him in the Notable Deaths of 2008 Multimedia slide show list. While I understand that such an enumeration cannot be all-inclusive, Dr. Wheeler's stature as an American scientific icon should ensure the inclusion of his name in any short list of famous American people who died in 2008. I sincerely and strongly hope that this omission would be corrected.
Thank You
A fan of John Wheeler

Wheeler worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs, served as an advisor to high-profile Presidential scientific committees, mentored brilliant scientists and leaders like Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne, resurrected and pioneered rather neglected relativity research in the 60s, coined the word "black hole", rendered invaluable teaching service at Princeton and Austin and propelled American physics into the first rank. If a list of notable American deaths of 2008 does not include his name, I don't know whose name it should.

When it comes to public exposition of achievement, it seems that popular media sources always give science short shrift in preference to other areas like art and cinema. The rift between the two cultures keeps growing. Science was undoubtedly one of the core foundations of The American Twentieth Century. Now it threatens to slip away from beneath the twenty-first. The country neglects it to its own perilous detriment. John Wheeler would have been unhappy.

SAVE SCIENCE ON TUESDAY

It was Richard Nixon who got rid of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee during his tenure, which has not been resurrected since. In the 80s, Ronald Reagan embraced the idealistic vision of Star Wars, a pipe dream that did not have a valid scientific basis. In the 90s, Congress got rid of the Office of Technology Assessment which is supposed to provide the country's political leaders with bipartisan scientific advice. Science on the whole in the last twenty five years has been on a downhill path as far as respect for it in political circles has been concerned.

Although George Bush's administration has been the single-largest malefactor of science and all it stands for and in general although Republicans have done more damage to science, all administrations since the 1970s have overall been lax and negligent in supporting science and its essential spirit. As I have written before, the issue goes far beyond the important one of providing funding for basic scientific research. It has to do with trusting unbiased advice that tries to give you a picture of the world as it is, and not how you would like to see it. It has to do with promoting and respecting open-mindedness and true bipartisan debate. Thus science has always stood opposite dogma, a fact that is usually hard to swallow for most politicians who would want to color the world with their own ideological brush. This is a wholly fatalistic attitude because a disrespect for science means an abandonment of informed decision making, eventually a sure path for a country's spiral into regress.

Barack Obama is not good for science because he is a liberal Democrat. He is good for science because he largely stands for all that science traditionally has; open minds, patient and careful thought, forthcomingness and respect in listening to dissenting opinions, a mistrust of blind reliance on authority and a willingness to listen to all sides of the debate before taking an informed decision. Obama also knows he is not perfect and embodies another key aspect of science; the ability to understand one's deficiencies and limitations and seek the best possible advice to overcome them. There is scarce doubt that he will bring knowledgeable science advisors into the White House and that he will take seriously the advice of people with whom he may not agree. At the same time he will weigh all the options and sides and try to take as unbiased a decision as he can. In an age of climate change, evolution, food crises, energy crises, drug resistance and nuclear terrorism, science is going to become an increasingly key and vocal part of the national debate and the future of this country. Obama understands this. Maybe that's why, a few days ago, 76 Nobel Prize winners represented by the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann wrote an open letter to the American people and endorsed Obama as most prudent for science in this country.



The American people need to reclaim their lost preeminence in science and technology and their respect for learning and rationality. They need to reaffirm their place in the world as the land where open minds meet unlimited resources and intellectual capital. The time has come when this land needs to save science from itself. With this in view, anyone who deeply cares about science, reason and objective thought should vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday.

PLEASE, DON'T STAND IN THE WAY OF THIS MAN

This is as sensible and assertive a statement about evolution that we can expect from a Presidential candidate

Do you believe that evolution by means of natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the variety and complexity of life on Earth? Should intelligent design, or some derivative thereof, be taught in science class in public schools?

Obama: I believe in evolution, and I support the strong consensus of the scientific community that evolution is scientifically validated. I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny.

This is from the latest issue of Nature whose cover story is about the candidates' views on scientific issues, views that are going to be of paramount importance to the future well-being of this country. Nature asked the candidates 18 questions about science and technology, including questions about increasing funding for basic research, speeding up the track to permanent residency for talented foreign students, and pumping more funds into biomedical innovations.

Not suprisingly, McCain's camp declined to answer with specifics and Nature dug up relevant statements from his old speeches that mainly included boilerplate sound-bytes. Obama's camp on the other hand provided rather eloquent and clear answers that actually talk about facts. It's pretty amazing to hear answers that actually are filled with details about science. McCain's cast of "science" advisors looks like a Gilligan's Island outfit and includes HP chief Carly Fiorina (who thinks Sarah Palin is quite competent to be President), James Woolsey, a former CIA director and Meg Whitman, former CEO of EBay. This group seems as miscast for science as Sarah Palin is miscast for being Vice President. Obama's advisors on the other hand include some real scientists, including Dan Kammen from Berkeley and Harold Varmus from Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Obama would speed up the residency process for foreign students, minimize barriers between private and public R & D (this is going to be very important). And Obama is as clear about nuclear energy as anything else

What role does nuclear power have in your vision for the US energy supply, and how would you address the problem of nuclear waste?

Obama: Nuclear power represents an important part of our current energy mix. Nuclear also represents 70% of our non-carbon generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option. However, before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, key issues must be addressed, including security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage and proliferation. The nuclear waste disposal efforts at Yucca Mountain [in Nevada] have been an expensive failure and should be abandoned. I will work with the industry and governors to develop a way to store nuclear waste safely while we pursue long-term solutions.

Most importantly, Obama promises to reform the political environment for scientific opinion; this would include appointing a Chief Technology Officer for the government and strengthening the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, a key source of scientific advice for the President that was abolished by the odious Richard Nixon

Many scientists are bitter about what they see as years of political interference in scientific decisions at federal agencies. What would you do to help restore impartial scientific advice in government?

Obama: Scientific and technological information is of growing importance to a range of issues. I believe such information must
be expert and uncoloured by ideology. I will restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees. More broadly, I am committed to creating a transparent and connected democracy, using cutting edge technologies to provide a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens. Policies must be determined using a process that builds on the long tradition of open debate that has characterized progress in science, including review by individuals who might bring new information or contrasting views. I have already established an impressive team of science advisers, including several Nobel laureates, who are helping me to shape a robust science agenda for my
administration.

This point is the most encouraging policy vision, after a 8 year tradition of bullying, manipulating, cherry picking, ignoring and roughing up science and objective facts. The cost of scientific ignorance will be progress in all its forms.

Reading this is like being immersed inside a gutter for all your life and suddenly coming up for fresh air in the bright sunlight with a gasp. This man deserves to lead this country. This country deserves to be led by this man.

THERE GOES ANOTHER TEMPLETONIAN

Richard Dawkins has quipped that the Templeton Prize- a stupendously expensive honor tagged at 1.6 million$, more than the Nobel Prize- is given to someone "who is prepared to say something nice about religion". The Prize, whose motive I have never understood, is awarded each year to people who "have made progress in science and religion". Apart from satisfying the personal whims and perspectives of its wealthy patron, I am not sure why a prize should automatically be awarded to someone who is willing to praise religion.

But even that kind of opinion would not do harm, because after all it would be an opinion. Stranger is the viewpoint of those who try to reconcile science and religion in weird ways, and their words can even be damaging because of their misleading meaning. Michael Heller, who is both a priest and cosmologist, unfortunately seems to come from such a breed. The Polish Catholic priest who has been awarded the prize this year says some strange things, not quite unprecedented in our times, but causing more trouble than good in my opinion:

"In an interview with Ecumenical News International the day before the 12 March announcement, Heller reiterated his belief that the oft-described "two worlds" of religion and science are not at odds, saying that without the meaning afforded by religion, "science would be meaningless"...

I certainly don't think science is meaningless or even lame without religion, at least the kind of religion that is practiced by followers of organized religions. What does the "meaning afforded by religion" even objectively mean? There may be some perceived connection between some of the more abstract notions espoused in the Eastern religions, but again, it is dangerously easy to see connections between science and spirituality where none could exist- Fritjof Capra has done this, and Deepak Chopra has taken it to pathological levels.

Now I am no "fundamentalist atheist". I do take objection to some of the more one-sided sounding views on religion held by Dawkins and others. But that's ok. Rational thinkers usually don't agree completely with each other and that's how progress is collectively made possible. In any case, I do agree with the gist of what the "new" atheists say. My problem is not so much with whether it is "right" or "wrong" but with whether it will work. Whether we like it or not, we will need the help of both moderate atheists and religious moderates to get a handle on religious fundamentalism. No matter how right atheists are, it is quite likely that it would be religious moderates who would be able to more or at least as much effectively fight fundamentalists on their own ground. Religious beliefs or the lack thereof are just like other strongly-held opinions. To change them, one needs to adapt to the need and situation, and different approaches are needed with different kinds of people. Some people needed to be scolded, some need to be cajoled. No matter how bang-on-target atheists' arguments are, aggressive attitudes simply don't work with everyone, it's just human nature.

C N R RAO, IT AND THE WANING OF YOUNG INTELLECT

Prof. C N R Rao, the doyen of Indian science, seems to have ruffled a few feathers over at The Acorn with his labeling of IT workers in an Outlook piece as ones who are akin to "coolies who are working for wages and not producing great intellectual material". Rao's thrust was at what he sees as a worsening intellectual milieu in Bangalore because of this drain of bright minds towards "lesser" tasks. Naturally people are galled at his unkind words and wonder what he wants to say.

I think there are several points that need to be addressed in his piece. Some of his points seem justified to me, others are not. In general, it seems like he starts off on the right foot and ends up on the wrong one. The right one pertains to lamenting the siphoning off of young, bright people to the IT sector, possibly at a loss to pure scientific research. There is more than a modicum of truth in this fact. In the 1960s, when private engineering and management colleges were very few, bright students chose to study science if only because there were few other options. If you were lucky, you would get admitted into COEP in Pune or VJIT in Bombay, but what other options were there for an aspiring engineer? Many of these aspiring engineers then chose to study science and get into industry or academia. This led to a constant supply of bright, intellectual minds in universities and colleges as well as a constant turnover of talented professionals in R & D and teaching, and I can empathize if someone misses this atmosphere and its benefits. I myself would have loved to have some of my friends who studied engineering study the sciences with me. I would have greatly benefited from their intellectual abilities, and ultimately the whole field would have done so. I am sure the intellectual atmosphere in colleges and universities in the 60s was much more vibrant especially in the sciences than it is now. These days, many students who study science only want to do it as a doorstep degree to get into other fields like management. Naturally their heart is not in the discipline unlike that of many of those in the 60s or 70s.

The result of this is that there is a steadily weakening trickle of highly intelligent and intellectual people who are studying science and the humanities. IT workers are many, gifted young scientists are few in our country. Many of those who would have studied science 25 years ago have been "lost" to IT, there's no doubt about this fact in my mind. And in saying that Rao is absolutely right.

Rao is also not the first or only scientist who laments this decline of young people in basic R & D. Many senior scientists say the same thing, that there were many more talented people in the sciences before than there seem to be now. They bemoan the fact that the generation of Vikram Sarabhai, C. R. Rao, Jayant Narlikar, M S Swaminathan and and in fact C N R Rao himself might have been permanently lost to history. P. Balaram, the present director of IISc. and also one among these stalwarts, also mused over similar matters in many of his fine editorials for the magazine Current Science. The reasons for this decline are also acknowledged and manyfold. The simple financial criterion that attracts people towards fields like IT is a true fact. Add to that declining government salaries, nepotism in science, reservations and the problems therein and a lack of scientific temper among young people and their parents, and it is not surprising that there are few students opting to study the sciences or humanities.

Perhaps most importantly, Rao and others are also right in saying that this negligence of basic scientific research will have serious consequences that may not be visible now. All the applied technology that we take for granted currently, including the foundation of IT, has had its origins in basic scientific research. The development of quantum theory for example was key to the development of electronics. In the past, many private companies like Bell Labs and IBM have been pioneers in this kind of research. But whether funded by private or public funds, the point is that it's only basic research that can sustain technological productivity in the long term. While IT generates jobs, ideas, connectivity and economic benefits, it cannot directly bring about the kind of research that led to the invention of the transistor, the integrated chip, superconductors and Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) which won a Nobel Prize this year. All these inventions were made possible by basic science. All of them constitute the backbone of the information age. Without such basic scientific research, we are steadily going to lose the raw material of ideas that lead to future technological advances.

To be fair, this problem does not exist only in India. Scientists and policy makers in the US have also lamented for a while now the decline in basic research in private corporations like IBM which in the 80s was a focal point of such research and a nurturing home for Nobel Prize winners. However, it should also be understood that with the growing focus on product development and pleasing investors, companies are going to be increasingly hard-pressed to come up with research pipelines that have a low risk to returns ratio. Basic research by definition does not fit into this category; it is highly risky, promises no immediate returns, and can go on for protracted periods of time before any breakthrough is possible. And yet history has shown that it is the only way to generate ideas and intellectual capital for long-term, path-breaking technological development. For this reason too, it is only the government that will have to increasingly fund such research, even though private corporations will continue to play an occasional pivotal role.

But back to Prof. Rao. Until now, he has gotten it right. A lack of attention to basic research and to scientists who do it will have serious repercussions. It is true that many promising students are pursuing IT, students whose intellectual skills could be valuable in basic R & D. But when Rao blames the IT sector for this, there are some problems with his argument. Some of them have been noted at The Acorn. Clearly, blaming the IT sector is like cursing the darkness. It is better to light a candle. In this case, the only way would be to revamp the scientific curriculum, ramp up salaries and financial incentives for aspiring scientists, improve the teaching of science in school including better communication of popular science, make science attractive for young people by removing prejudices, regionalism and mediocrity in it and in general improve the image of science as an attractive career option. The private sector can also significantly contribute to this awareness with their increasing focus on some university-like research. Pharmaceutical companies for example can fund basic biomedical research in universities. I was disappointed that while Rao criticises the IT sector, he says nothing about how to galvanize his own sector. I share his disappointment with the decline in the intellectual milieu of research and science, but lamenting the virtues of this milieu says nothing about how to reform it.

But one of Prof. Rao's statement which I think galled many was his perceived denouncing of IT workers as everyday Joes who don't do anything creative. Let us put this in perspective. His statements made it sound like he was somehow judging routine work to be inferior compared to intellectual work. First of all, criticising IT work as being routine is not necessarily an insult. Many IT workers I know have acknowledged that much of their work is routine. There is much virtue in doing an honest job, no matter how routine it is, if you do it well. In addition, even routine jobs can benefit from flashes of creativity. We have to realise that human growth and national development needs every kind of individual input; from the matchmaker's to the poet's. In my opinion, one needs a critical mass of every kind of worker to sustain a healthy economy, vibrant intellectual culture and prosperous technological growth. Clearly we need more clerks than poets, we need more gardeners than fiction writers, and so we also need more IT workers than pure scientists. There is nothing wrong with that. What I would agree with Prof. Rao about is that we have more than the critical mass of IT workers in India right now, while the mass of scientists is dwindling. Whether the current scientific mass is critical or not I cannot say; I often get the feeling it is not. But what I think is certain is that compared to the mass of IT workers, the mass of new scientific talents is not increasing. If this mass becomes less than a certain value, we will face serious long-term effects which won't be ameliorated fast. And it is in recognising this fact that I fully share Prof. Rao's concern. We definitely need more young scientists. While historically the IT sector may have siphoned them off from science, it leads to nothing of value to curse the IT sector to justify the problems in pure science. However, while IT workers are not obliged to fund basic science, there is no doubt that scientific development will get a great boost if they do. So many such cases abound in universities in the US, where wealthy entrepreneurs including IT entrepreneurs have funded highly successful institutes, departments and centers of basic research. These centers have been very productive and contributed immensely in some cases to the science and technology of this country. Clearly it is not too much to ask like Prof. Rao does that such wealthy entrepreneurs in our country too fund some of our science.

But finally, I need to say a word about Prof. Rao's article. Amidst the reaction to his criticism flows the painful nostalgia he feels for his beloved Bangalore. As someone who has been born and been there all his life, we should empathize with the change he disappointedly documents. I can imagine that any senior distinguished citizen of that beautiful city would have felt this change and felt saddened. To blame this change on IT is too narrow-minded a view. But the fact that this change includes some bad aspects inherent in it cannot be doubted. We need more intellectuals and more scientists irrespective of IT or anything else. We need more poetry and music. Anything that treads on these deeply ingrained and important human values needs to be examined. We should not look for a way that would stifle it. But we do have to find a way around it.

THE PRICE OF SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE WILL BE LIBERTY ITSELF

The Bush administration has reached new highs in suppressing sound science and manipulating scientific evidence about key national issues to suit its whims and to divert funding towards politically expedient projects. But even more disturbing is the lack of scientific thought and skepticism and complicity of a public which cannot evaluate the actions of the administration for itself and which lets the government spend its tax dollars wherever it wants to. Important issues will never get funded if the public is not well-informed. If this trend continues, the price the country may pay for scientific ignorance would not just be a poor standard of living and retarded technological growth, but liberty and freedom themselves...

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THE AGE OF UNPOPULAR AND SOFT SCIENCE

When I was in college, there was a cohort among us science-minded folks who looked down upon popular science that was then being popularised by scientists like Jayant Narlikar. With more than a hint of egotism, they used to shun "scipop" as they called it as being the bastard son of "real" science. I always used to disagree with these friends of mine, perhaps because I myself was interested in popular science since the beginning. But somewhere I used to find myself wanting to agree with their contention that what we were supposed to do was real science, macho science, and that we should not pay attention to this dumbed down version of science, wimpy science.

Also when I was in college, the real academic stars among students were those who excelled in mathematics and physics. Chemistry was somewhere in between. Those who studied biology were seen to lack the intellectual zing and brilliance that these other mathematically oriented folks had. The mathies; they were the ones considered the brainy child geniuses. Maths and physics, these were the "hard" sciences. Biology was a "soft" science. And we needn't have even gotten started on the social sciences like psychology.

What's common between these two above attitudes? They are both lopsided and in the end, just wrong.

Now Michael Shermer, a favourite author of mine and editor of Skeptic Magazine has written an excellent piece in Scientific American that demolishes both these myths; that popular science is somehow less respectable than technical science and that biology and the social sciences are "soft". I agree with him and have some thoughts of my own.

First of all, while it is true that doing creative research in mathematics or physics is quite hard, at least the variables that define a system are constrained by the researcher. One can have very fixed assumptions and axioms. In biology or psychology on the other hand, it is often difficult to even define the variables, let alone constrain them. In fact it is usually impossible to constrain them in the real world. Physics, for all its usefulness, many times involves multiple assumptions about "ideal systems" that need to be radically modfied when approaching real-world problems. It is of course very important to have results from these ideal systems, but the point is that applying them to a real life system is if anything as hard as the conception of the approach. And it gets harder as you move from cells to bodies to human societies. So the epithet of "hard sciences" for more mathematically based sciences is really a misnomer. This notably is not taking away anything from these sciences as being the foundations of most scientific research, but it's just an acknowledgement that their application to "higher" levels requires non-reductionist and novel techniques that are as hard as their own.

As an aside, this should also demolish any thoughts people might have about the reasons for there being more women in the biological sciences. Clearly, any attempts to correlate this fact with their intelligence is nonsense. If anything, women might be more successful in the biological sciences because they are better at having an overall view of things.

And so it is also for popular science. While there is a lot of mediocre or average popular science out there, its is very difficult to write an impeccable popular science book; one in which the science is simplified but not oversimplified, crystal clear but not naively presented, catchy but not too informal or flippant, rigorous yet accessible. There are very few examples of such writing. I would suggest almost anything written by Richard Dawkins, Philip Ball, Brian Greene, Stephen Jay Gould and my favourite popular science book of all time, John Casti's Paradigms Lost. Writing supremely readable popular science is as difficult, if in a different way, as doing challenging research.

But there is a quite different and extremely important reason why popular science should be hailed right now. The dark forces of ignorance, religion-inspired politics and general intolerance are making science even more confusing and inaccessible to an already scientifically-challenged public. It is the utmost need of the day for more science writers to come forward and write enlightening and eloquent science. For this reason, popular science now has become as important in my opinion as the best of scientific research. Without conveying science well, it will languish even more in the shadows, and we would be deprived of the one thread of rationality which can save us.

AS BAD AS IT GETS: A DEBATE WITH TWO SURPRISINGLY CREATIONIST GENTLEMEN

How a debate with two friends about creationism turned into a defense of science itself...

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THE CULT OF SCIENCE

For many people of faith, science seems like just another reality generating enterprise, and scientists as just another community of people with their own core set of beliefs. However, this belief, just like religious beliefs, is illusory. It neglects the fact that science is actually anything that constrains us to trust something on the basis of evidence, something that we conform to in our daily lives, and a scientist is anyone who does this. In this regard, many people in the world who don't have a scientific degree are nonetheless scientists.

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THE MYSTICAL SIR ISAAC

One of the favourite tactics of religious people who want to use science as firepower for their arguments, is to proclaim that both Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were religious. They think that marshalling the tacit support of two dead scientists who are among the greatest in history would help them fight for their cause.

However, there are a number of points that help to refute such disingenuous arguments. In the first place, such an argument is an appeal to authority, which by itself does not provide any 'proof' whatsoever for its justification. Now, as far as Einstein is concerned, it's quite clear that he used 'God' as a metaphor for the ultimate mysteries of the universe, for those awe-inspiring truths in the cosmos which we can't yet comprehend. Uses of the word God or something similar galore in Einstein's famous and oft-quoted phrases and writings, yet to my knowledge, there is not an iota of evidence that he believed in the personal deity which most people associate with the word 'God'. In his later years, Einstein was a strong supporter of Zionism and the creation of Israel, yet, it's clear that even these concerns of his were more humanitarian than religious, and did not attest to any deep deistic Jewish faith inside himself. So, for religious people to claim Einstein as their own is dishonest, and shows a simple ignorance of historical facts. At most, Einstein can be called a spiritual philosopher, but not a religious person by the common definition of the term.

But among all the scientists in history, the genius who appears the most mystical to future generations is Newton. This is partly because of the sheer and astonishing breadth of his imagination, which still defies comprehension. He single-handedly laid the foundations for all future physical science, and also invented the mathematical tools necessary to describe nature. Inspite of the two great achievements of twentieth century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, we still live in largely a Newtonian world. Purely as a scientist, Newton's abilities do appear mystical and almost magical to all of us. This image of Newton is cemented by the way he lived his life, as a solitary and obsessed man who toiled for months in his laboratory and rooms without once appearing in front of the outside world, as a recluse who was so paranoid about his creations- pinnacles of human thought- that he sought to keep them secret for years, deciding to publish them years later in a burst of revelation. As Alexander Pope said, 'God said, let Newton be, and all was light'.
Religious people's fascination for Newton and their tendency to claim him as their own cannot be entirely disparaged, however. Newton in fact saw himself less as a scientist whose job was to document facts about nature and weave them into elegant theories, and more as a solver of puzzles, puzzles whose clues were laid by God for man to unravel. He saw God as the ultimate riddler, and man as the being whose duty was to lay bare His conundrums. He was a Unitarian, who believed in the oneness of divine existence. All these beliefs of Newton explains his later intense forays into theology and alchemy.

Yet, Newton's life cannot belie the facts. The first fact is, the laws of nature which Newton discovered don't need a divine explanation to justify their elegance, power, and use. The world is governed by the laws that he discovered, and it makes as much sense to ask for the 'laws behind the laws' as it does to ask what was before time happened. Even if we do discover some ultimate laws behind these laws, there is no reason to suppose that those laws would not be mathematical.

The second fact may be harder to digest, but it is also true. Newton's later obsession about alchemy and theology was largely crackpot and nonsense. His reams of writings on religion and theology seem more like figments of a magic kingdom constructed by the mind of a deluded person, although just like in the writings of a deluded person, there are some interesting conlusions that he draws. It is difficult to imagine what made Newton give up his spectacular study of natural law, and start searching for cryptic clues in the Bible. But one thing is for sure, whatever the driving force, it is the products of his scientific studies that have survived the test of time, and guide the behaviour of science in the modern world. Just because Newton was a great scientist does not automatically give him authority over deciphering ancient texts, as some religious people would have themselves believe. One can be exalted in one field, totally misguided in the other, and history has many examples which demonstrate this. Newton the natural philosopher was invaluable to mankind, but Newton the alchemist and theologian was at worst a deluded mortal, and at best an amusement of interest to historians, not to mention psychologists.

The third and most important fact that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about Newton, is to accurately guage the times in which he lived. This is perhaps the greatest fallacy which religious people commit, that of analyzing Newton outside the context of his times. We cannot forget that this was the seventeenth century. It was a time when religion did provide the best 'explanation' of many perplexities in the world. Apart from astronomy and mathematics, no other science was well-developed, and both astronomy and mathematics needed the spark of differential and integral calculus that Newton breathed into them to come to life. Newton may have been an extraordinary thinker, but he was probably awed as much as anyone else by the astonishing diversity and workings of life. Biology was not even a formal science then, and absolutely nothing was known about cells and organelles, although Newton's contemporary Robert Hooke would soon coin the term 'cell'. We knew nothing about microbes and their role in disease, about genes, about the transmission of hereditary characteristics. Most importantly, the world had no inkling of the great revolution that would lead us to redefine our origins and existence- the theory of evolution by natural selection, another gigantic intellectual revolution fomented by Newton's fellow Englishman two hundred years later. It is easy, even today, to look at life around us and think that a supernatural being created it. In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was as ignorant and smitten by all these mysteries as anyone else, and it was much easier for him and everyone else to believe in a divine provenance for all things in the world.

This was also a time when the grip of religion was very strong, and one also needed courage to make contrary views known. In fact, Newton's views on the oneness of God would have been heretical if he had made them public. The liberal King Charles II made a special concession and allowed Newton to become a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in spite of these views. Newton kept his side of the bargain and never published his religious views. That of course did not stop him from poring over ancient texts in private. He believed that theology, alchemy, and the laws of physics, all were manifestations of the divine power of God. But because he said so, that doesn't make them so. Within the context of his times and his genius, one can be sympathetic towards Newton's beliefs, but that says nothing about the facts, which prove that the laws of physics do not need to be combined with theological views in order to attain consistency.

Lastly, the most important and simplest truth about both Newton and Einstein cannot be forgotten; they might have even had beliefs akin to religious ones, but they chose to marshall their intellect and energies to unraveling the mysteries of the universe through science and not religion. Newton may have turned to religion in his later life, but as noted above, for him, his religious excursions were a natural extension of his scientific excursions. As for Einstein, he never gave up his scientific pursuits, although God continued to be a common metaphor in his writings.

Einstein and Newton; the stature of both these men was such and their creations were so lofty, that one cannot help apply religious or spiritual connotations to them. But it should never be forgotten that they looked towards science, not religion, as a means to understand the universe and our place in it.

As for being in awe of the universe, the one fact that the atoms that you and I are made up of were manufactured billions of years ago in furnaces in the innards of blazing and dying stars is much more profound and spiritual for me than contemplating a deity whose existence is questionable by any standards.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH MICHAEL CRICHTON?

What's wrong with Michael Crichton? At one point of time, he was a great and visionary writer, writing crisp fiction with engaging if somewhat dubious scientific fill-ins. The point however was that you never got the feeling that the science was absurd, because it seamlessly blended together with his fiction. Because the fiction was great, you could easily bypass the science and be satisfied. More importantly, you knew that the science was absurd, and Crichton did not make any attempt to justify it in the light of known, sane science. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park potentially came from technologies that did exist then, but Crichton did not make it try to sound as if such dinosaurs were just around the corner. And he did not cite articles from Nature or Science to prove such a point.

Alas. In the last few years, I don't know what Crichton is trying to do, but he seems to have taken up some self-declared responsibility to try to create public awareness through his works. Before, his science was just fantastic with no pretense to getting grounded in reality. But now, his science with its professed link to 'real' science, has quickly become dubious. The epitome of this is there for everyone to see; State of Fear, which climate experts and laymen alike have roundly criticised as being grossly misleading. In cherry-picking scientific facts and statements from journal articles, and by trying to sound scholarly by citing them in footnotes, Crichton has been inevitably compared to the Bush administration, taking a biased tack on science. These days, whenever naysayers of climate change are being criticised, it is sadly not uncommon to find Michael Crichton's name among them.

Not only climate change, but now genes, patenting, and genetic engineering have become the target of his latest book, Next. I haven't read the book, but I don't feel encouraged to do it based on reviews, although it does sound less inflammatory than State of Fear. Recently, Crichton also came under fire by experts for writing an article about gene patenting in the New York Times. Not only was he criticised for misrepresenting the real situation, but also for not even understanding the complexities for biotechnological patenting in the first place.

However, the real grudge I have against Crichton is that, in his efforts to include dubious science masquerading as serious science in his writings, he has compromised on his real strength; his supreme ability to write fiction. As I said before, you could easily bypass the science in Jurassic Park or The Andromeda Strain, because the fiction itself was so riveting. In fact, the fiction was so engaging, that it made the science sound real. However, for example in State of Fear, the fiction is so insipid and scripted, that it doubly reinforces the feeling of both poor fiction as well as poor science in the reader's mind.

I hope that Crichton recovers from the illusions which he is trying to perpetuate. There are many other ways in which he can do public service if he wants to. Compromising on his ability to deliver solid fiction, combined with misrepresenting science, is the worst way to do it.

TURNING THE TIDE

Drew Faust just became the first president of Harvard in the 371 years old history of its hallowed corridors. Ironic, and surely gratifying to many, after the last president put a permanent blemish on his tenure by making comments that were widely interpreted as sexist. He said infamously that "innate differences between the sexes" might be responsible for women being underrepresented in academics.

Ah, the old nature versus nurture debate...you show them what you can do, Dr. Faust.

I have a different question though; tomorrow, what if science actually proves that yes, innate and irrevocable differences between men and women are responsible for women being relatively weak at academic careers? What, then? If that happens, then at least science should also simultaneously and objectively "prove that men are jerks". Call it even then? Personally, I don't believe for a moment that science could ever provide a definitive answer to any such complex issues. But the question strikes at the heart of the conflict between science, and public and social policy.

The conflict was probably on Jim "Honest" Watson's mind, when he apparently contended that thin women are unhappy.

Hat tip: Chembark