Science

Science, Atheism and Gender

Science and atheism often go hand in hand. Many of the UK’s most famous atheists are also scientists, from Dawkins to Cox to Al Khalili. Unfortunately British atheism also shares some of the problems of British science and not least of these is gender representation. The blunt truth is that science and atheism are both dominated by men.

There was a mini-Twitter storm this week about an upcoming science event in London, “Consensus”, an event we’ve been helping to publicise and at which I’ll be volunteering. The event looks ridiculously cool with Richard Dawkins and Bill Bailey, among others, sharing a stage to talk about science- an inspired and original combination. Less original is the gender makeup of the panel- all 6 speakers are men. But where the organisers really messed up was in the FAQs for the event, in which they addressed the lack of women. Here’s a screenshot-

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To say the least, these comments aren’t helpful. It’s one thing to organise an event with only male speakers, which may not reflect a problem with the organisers so much as with science at large, but quite another to label those who simple raise the gender issue as “fanatical and misandristic” with “bigoted” opinions. Yes, this was meant to be comically over the top language, in keeping with the rest of the FAQ’s, but even going past the use of language the message remains “put up and shut up”. This is the absolute last thing we shoould say about gender imbalance.

The idea that there could be at least one woman speaker out of 6 isn’t absurd. There don’t seem to be data for the whole UK but at my own university, Imperial College London, around 20% of researchers are women. This makes the odds of, at random, picking a male speaker to be 0.8 which is pretty high. But the odds of picking 6 male speakers at random are 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.26; in other words we would expect only 26% of panels to be all male. All things being equal, we are quite justified in wondering why at least one woman isn’t on the panel. This is a institutional issue and not simply the fault of one event in London but for them to brush it aside as a non-issue of interest only to fanatics serves to excuse the status quo.

This is an issue that matters to the AHS, not least because we are currently organising our 2014 convention. After our initial invitations went out to potential speakers, all 6 who said they could come were men. We didn’t mean this to happen and like the organisers of Consensus we had also contacted women who just couldn’t make it. But we aren’t just leaving it. We put out a call on Twitter and Facebook for recommendations of women speakers and have been flooded with dozens of suggestions. This is no “positive discrimination”; these are women who are perfect for our convention but for various reasons don’t have the same profile as their male counterparts. Their invitations went out this week; incidentally on the same day that attention was drawn to Consensus’ FAQ’s.

Consensus have since removed this part of their FAQ’s, without offering an explanation. Both science and atheism are increasingly in the public eye and gaining ground. Atheists cannot criticise the Church of England for banning women bishops as long our own “bishops”, our most prominent leaders, are almost all men. A deliberate effort needs to be made by event organisers if we are to be serious about increasing representation within our movements. These events send a message about who we are. The AHS will play its part.

AHS member? I want to know your thoughts on this- please drop me an email on president(at)ahsstudents.org.uk

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Finding Beauty in Science: My Secular Pilgrimage

I am sat at a pew in Westminster Abbey, filled with a sense of awe and reverence. Unlike the elderly lady to my right, her hands clasped in silent petition, I am not here for prayer. I am, however, here on a pilgrimage of sorts in an attempt to understand the power and limits of science.

Five steps to my left and I will be stood over what remains of Charles Darwin. Four steps forward and I will come face to face with the death mask of Issac Newton. But it will take a keener eye to spot the object of my pilgrimage. Set neatly in the floor between Newton and Darwin is a small, unremarkable stone square about twice the size of my head. This is the nation’s memorial to the greatest British physicist since Newton and the man behind much of my final year of university physics; Paul A. M. Dirac. I have come to pay homage and end up spending a while just sat watching tourists pass the stone. Despite its simplicity this stone square is surely the most effective and beautiful memorial in the Abbey.

Kings, Queens and statesmen have relied on the skill of artists to convey, perhaps fabricate, a sense of their importance and success in life. Dirac’s memorial displays the power and beauty of his life’s work with just the 6 letters that form his most famous equation; the Dirac Equation. This is his own handiwork. To describe in so precise a form the motion and very existence of all fundamental particles of nature, the same stuff of which we are made, is an act of uncommon genius. For Dirac, however, it may also have been an uncommon act of sacrifice; the dedication of his life.

I have with me, to aid my pilgrimage, a copy of Dirac’s Lectures on Quantum Mechanics in which he lays out in just 87 pages the mathematical ideas that lead to his equation. The ordering and logic of Dirac’s prose is impressive and carefully chosen. If asked by a student to clarify a point during a lecture he would simply repeat what he had said, word for word, and continue with the lecture. As far as he was concerned, he had already expressed the idea as clearly as it could be stated.

He was just as inexpressive in his personal life, speaking only when necessary and answering with one word sentences. So private was he that many of his closest friends never knew what his middle initials – A. M. – stood for (it’s Adrien Maurice). In this sense Dirac embodied his own subject of physics with his life. Direct and to the point, never more than necessary.

Wandering further around the Abbey I find myself in Poets Corner, final resting place of Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and other greats, and can’t help but wonder who chose the better path in life. Certainly, there would be some buried in Poets Corner who would be quite hostile to the work of the scientists buried nearby.

The clock strikes four and the singers of the famous Westminster Boys Choir begin their daily service, their hymns reaching into every nook of the Abbey, exhorting listeners to direct their attention to heavenly matters. “There is no equation for the salvation of your soul,” they seem to say, although such arguments would hold little sway with Dirac, an ardent atheist and humanist.

The dead poets’ concern, however, would not be heaven but the heart; strangled, they might say, by the constraints of scientific rigour. This argument was most strongly made by William Wordsworth, himself memorialised in the Abbey;

Sweet is the lore which nature brings

Our meddling intellect

Mishaps the beauteous form of things

We murder to dissect

Part stanza, part slap, this is a direct attack on those who, like Dirac, dedicate their lives to science. When Dirac uses his equation to dissect the universe, does he also murder it? Is a life lived for science empty of beauty, of true meaning? Was Dirac’s?

The question cuts to the very heart of what has been troubling me since the end of my physics degree three weeks ago and what brings me here to the Abbey; was all this science worth it? Hidden to most visitors, this debate seems to wage in the Abbey itself. The Romantic poets vs the materialist scientists. Can they be reconciled?

Oscar Wilde, a much too outlandish poet to find himself in the sacred vaults of Westminster Abbey, famously declared, “all art is quite useless”. He argued that it was beautiful precisely because of this uselessness, because it was done for its own sake, not corrupted by practical concern. Perhaps the problem of science, and I know this sounds strange, is precisely the fact that it is quite useful. Often very useful. There was never a disease cured by a novel nor a planet probed by a poem but in being useful, science runs a risk that art does not; that it ceases to be for its own sake. This makes it better at attracting research grants but could explain something of why science is seen as an ultimately unfulfilling pursuit by many.

Can science be rescued? Is it possible to find the beauty of art within science? The Bristolian commemorated by that diamond stone and equation could have something to teach us. Although quite literal minded and blunt in his approach to life, Dirac’s idea of science was of science as an art, with mathematics his brush and his paint. He taught students always to pursue beauty in their work and would often reject proposed theories on the basis that they weren’t beautiful enough. His approach to physics was to play with abstract, pure mathematics and see if any physics popped up. His underlying belief, almost religious in its strength, was that the laws of nature should be beautiful and simple.

Dirac’s field, quantum mechanics, is notoriously complicated. Particles are also waves, electrons are said to be in more than one place at a time, even in more than one universe at a time. Obtaining useful results from this often requires crude approximations and simplifications. It seems that at its most fundamental, physics is at its most useless. This may be the spirit in which the heart of science can be rediscovered. Could science pursued for its own sake, the less useful the better, be not just a way to better equations but to rediscover a sense of beauty in the subject?

The choir has finished and I realise I’m at risk of staying for a church service. I perform one quick lap of the Abbey before heading out into the warm evening. I have no definite answers but I wouldn’t expect any certainties when trying to understand a quantum physicist like Dirac. Nevertheless, my secular pilgrimage has given me a glimpse of these Two Tribes in silent war. Could Dirac’s belief in the beauty of physics and science for its own sake provide a bridge between the two?

My head full of thoughts, I leave Westminster Abbey to its more traditional pilgrims.

How To Think in Five Dimensions and Prove The Big Bang

This will likely be the geekiest thing I ever post but I don’t care. I’ve spent all of today on one particular problem on a General Relativity problem sheet and I have to talk about it.

The problem sheet’s challenge was to mess around with some geometry and see what comes out and lo and behold, the Big Bang came out. This is cool as hell. The process by which you can use nothing but a sheet of paper and a pen to unlock the secrets of the universe has always felt to me like a magic trick. Except of course it’s better than a magic trick. It’s better because it’s true.

There’s another way I think that theoretical physics might just be better than magic and it’s the reasoning behind this post. I’m betting that in revealing my secrets the trick won’t be spoilt but made all the better. I believe this because for me the beauty of physics isn’t simply in the end result but in the process. The twists and turns of both pen and logic are really what it’s all about. So here’s my attempt at getting across the magic trick, the secret to the physics performance. Here’s how to derive the Big Bang.

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I started this morning imagining a sheet of space-time. This means imagining something in four dimensions so the first thing I need to do is explain how to see that extra dimension. I promise it’s not as hard as you might think. When we talk about dimensions we normally mean space- up, down, left, right, forwards and backwards or x,y and z, mathematically speaking. But really, a dimension is just something you can measure. In the case of space you measure it with a ruler but speed can also be thought of as a dimension (and it is, in a thing in thermodynamics called phase space) and so can, say temperature. Imagine running your fingers over the surface of a metal ball with one end of the ball close to a heater. Your fingers will tell not just where each point is but how warm it is. As you run your hand over the ball’s surface your brain is interpreting information in not just the three dimensions of space but in a fourth dimension of temperature. So really, we use multiple dimensions everyday without realising. Imagine dripping multicoloured paint over the ball. Now between your eyes and hands you are taking in five dimensions worth of info, with each point on the ball having colour, temperature and position. If now move the ball closer to the fire so it starts to heat up then BAM we’ve introduced the dimension of time into things and now we can use the time to also describe each point on the sphere, e.g. (light blue, 50 degrees, 5 cm up, 4 cm right, 3 cm forwards, half past 6). Congratulations you can now think in multiple dimensions.

So back to that slice of spacetime. What does it look time? For the most part I just think of it like this-

Imagewhich is only 3D but if I really need to think of that 4th dimension I imagine it have varying colours on a rainbow scale from red to violet. What I’m really interested in is how curvy the slice is. I can talk about this using maths. Bigger numbers mean very curvy, the number 1 means not curvy at all. Now I’m ready to write an equation. I want to show you the equation because its very pretty but don’t worry if you can’t follow the maths too well, I’ll talk you through what everything means.

I’m going to use the letter g to represent curviness and add two little letters to the bottom to show what dimensions I’m talking about. T means time, i j and k mean the x, y and z axis (yes physicists could just say x, y and, but that would just be too sensible). So curviness is written as gij.

My ultimate goal in playing with this slice is to see if it stays still or if it stretches or squashes all by itself. The next step is to talk a walk on my slice and see what happens. I imagine my slice as a great big field with bumps and dips in it.

ImageLet’s run across that field. As you run uphill, especially if it’s steep, you’ll notice you start to lean forwards to keep your balance. The steeper it is, the more you need to lean. Running downhill you now need to lean back to stop yourself falling over. The amount you need to lean forwards or backwards, let’s call it the wobbliness of the terrain, depends on the curviness of your landscape. The wobbliness is an important part of your landscape too so let’s make that into an equation. The symbol for this is Greek. I can’t remember the name for it but it looks like a crane. This has three little letters on it which means it contains even more than our curviness, gij, which only had two. In fact, it contains a few g’s. Here’s what it looks like-

ImageSo now we know how to describe our space-time slice, which is great, but what about actual stuff? Planets and stars and beds and dogs- what about matter? Let’s drop a lump of matter into our space-time and see what happens. The lump will experience what in physics is called “stress”. This just means pushing and pulling due, for instance, to any pressure inside it and is affected by the density of the lump. We’re now going to allow for the possibility that the space bit of our space-time is expanding. We’re going to describe this expansion with the letter a with a=1 meaning we don’t have any expansion and the bigger a is, the faster we’re expanding. Remember, we aren’t assuming space is expanding, just allowing for the possibility. If our slice of space is expanding that means that everything in that slice will be stretched, so the stress on the lump of matter will increase. We denote stress with a T and it looks like this-

ImageThe capital P is pressure, the curly p is density and the u is speed, which depends on a, how quickly our space is expanding.

Now stress, like energy, is conserved. That means you can’t create or destroy it, i.e. the total amount of it can’t change. We can express the idea that the change in stress is zero like this-

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Adding in all of the letters we’ve already work out gives us

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where w is just a constant to do with the temperature of our matter. For cold matter, like the stuff around us, w is zero and we get

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where k is just some constant. For hot matter, like radiation, w is 1/3 and we get Image

Now let’s really look at what is going on in these equations. First of all that mysterious t0. It just represents some unknown time but what happens when t=t0? Well a=k(t0-t0)=0, in other words space has zero size. If a is zero then what about our density? We had

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so if a=0 and we’re dividing by a then we’re dividing by zero- which give us infinity. So there was some time in our space-time slice, t0, when our lump of matter was infinitely dense and concentrated in a tiny point of zero size before it started to expand. That, my friends, is the Big Bang.

Muse, Economics and Thermodynamics

There’s a song in Muse’s latest album that stands out in a big way. Not only is it their first song to feature dubstep, it incorporates an ambitious attempt at their own economic theory. You can listen to the song here but since the economics bit is so short, here it is in its poetic glory-

All natural and technological processes proceed in such a way that the availability of the remaining energy decreases. In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves an isolated system, the entropy of that system increases. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics will place fixed limits on technological innovation and human advancement. Energy continuously flows from being concentrated, to becoming dispersed, spread out, wasted and useless. New energy cannot be created and high-grade energy is being destroyed. An economy based on endless growth is unsustainable. *cue crazy dubstep*

 

Now I know it’s just a song so maybe it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it’s certainly an interesting idea- can we apply physics, particularly thermodynamics (the laws behind gases), to the economy?

The gut reaction would be no, of course not, the economy is based on inherently unpredictable human beings, how could this be governed by the laws behind gas expanding or ice melting? Human beings are not well-behaved atoms. But this is where thermodynamics is different to this atomist idea of science- thermodynamics accepts, embraces even, the idea that we can never really know what any one atom is up to. And yet it manages to produce extremely powerful laws that have been shown to be very accurate and are behind most of the inventions of the industrial revolution, such as the engine. So how do physicists get from calling atoms unpredictable to neat, predictive laws? Statistics, dear boy, statistics.

We may not know where an individual air molecule may be in 5 minutes time, but we can get an idea of the most probable places it will be. Scientists often call this the “random walk” model- if you flipped a coin to determine if you should step forwards or backwards, the chances are that after enough throws you’d get about as many heads as tails and end up somewhere close to where you started off. The modern equivalent of this is called the “Apple Maps walk”. Now imagine doing the random walk experiment with a thousand people, all starting quite near each other. Let’s go to the top of a tall building and look down on our coin-flippers after, say, a thousand tosses. What will we see? We should find that most people are pretty close to where they started off, even if only a few are exactly at that spot. We’ll also notice that there are people a bit further away but that there are fewer of them the further out we go in either direction. Then we might find one guy who made it all the way to the end of the street. He was the one guy who managed two hundred more heads than tails. Someone was bound to, after all.

The shape or formation of these random walkers is what mathematicians call a “normal distribution”. Now let’s throw in thousands more people and get them to spread out across a whole city, flipping coins as they go. From our aerial perch you might be struck by something- doesn’t this look an awful lot like a gas expanding in slow motion? It turns out that atoms can also be thought of as flipping coins and while some of them might end up in strange, unpredictable places, like the guy who threw a lot of heads, the overall formation is fairly predictable- a normal distribution, with things like pressure and temperature affecting probabilities.

And so with this model we manage to get the solid-as-a-rock- laws of thermodynamics, even if we can’t say much about what any particular molecule is up to. What the Muse song was suggesting is that we could apply this principle to the economy as well and with a bit of thermodynamics in our pocket, we can see why. Might humans also perform random walks with their economic decisions? There’s a chance some people will want to spend money on video games, others on holidays. Some people will want to be doctors, others teachers. We can’t predict what any individual will do but could we find an overall, reliable distribution that gave as a decent insight into the overall progress of the economy? Many physicists in recent decades have thought just that. Unfortunately for them and for the rest of us they were wrong. Massively wrong.

The logic of thermoeconomics (yes I made that up) seems pretty sensible but unlike thermodynamics, it simply doesn’t face up to the evidence. Thermoeconomics does actually provide a reasonable way to model the everyday fluctuations in the stock exchange but where it fails is exactly where it is needed most- it is helpless in the face of extreme events. Thinking back to thermodynamics, it is pretty clear that when released from an aerosol, the particles of a deodorant will spread out fairly evenly across the room. What we would never expect to happen would be for all particles to very abruptly gather in the corner of the room. That just doesn’t happen. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in a stock market crash- people stop behaving randomly and start moving in herds. Where selling once balanced out buying, suddenly everyone wants to sell. Where lending balanced out need for capital, suddenly everyone’s too scared to lend.

Part of this is psychological. Fear can prevent people from making what might normally be seen as a rational decision. Lack of information can make people risk adverse. But more than this is a fundamental problem with the thermoeconomic model. Thermoeconomics assumes that all economic “particles” are independent of each other but in our economy people and institutions can get much more interconnected than was previously thought. Banks were way more exposed to the housing market than anyone had realized, for example, and as one bank faced failure, the complex web of banks lending to banks lending to banks left the whole system in danger. The aerosol gas was retreating to the corner of the room while neatly spelling out “SHIT”.

So where does this leave our philosophizing rock stars? The thermoeconomics they preached may be no good for accurate day-to-day prediction, but could it be applied to make comments about the economic system in general? My instinct is no, it can’t. Not only is thermodynamics a rubbish way to model human interactions, we are not an isolated system. The earth emits thermal radiation out into space in a more disordered form than it came from the sun, increasing the entropy (disorder) of the universe but not necessarily of the Earth. The only bit of their argument that really makes sense is that we should be cautious about using limited resources. But that much is pretty obvious, a posh way of saying that resources won’t last forever. We just need to use more renewable resources to avoid running out of fossil fuels, that’s all. There’s certainly no reason to believe thermodynamics put a limit on human progress.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken the song too seriously, but it’s been a fun ride. The next time you hear a rock star make some claim about the application of physics to economics, you’ll be well armed. Muse should stick to their music.

What’s Science For?

What exactly is science for and what can it really tell us? Answers to this get thrown about the place all the time. No sensible person could deny that science is the only way to tackle questions like “How did the earth come to be?” and “What is the shape of the universe?” but what’s more up for debate is whether science can answer the “why” questions. Why are we here? Why is this right? Why did he have to die?

It was an article in the latest issue of New Humanist that got me thinking about this. The article, by a physicist, argued that physics can answer the “why” questions- specifically the question of “why are we here?” The author, Michael Brooks, explains, “We can’t delve straight into the question of why we are here, of course; we have to split it into bite sized parts” It’s here that I feel he, and others like him, miss the point. Breaking the thing up into empirical questions destroys the point of the question to begin with.

So am I committing scientific heresy? Well, maybe. But I don’t think science has ever really been intended to answer this kind of question. When we ask “why are we here?” we don’t want to know by what mechanism we came into existence, we want to know what our purpose is, or if we can even have such a thing. This is a question we can’t just break down into chunks; we have to swallow it whole. Science may provide an answer but it will be an answer to a question that no one really asked in the first place. To steal from Wordsworth- we murder to dissect. Maybe this is why the answers tend to be so big, and so varied, because we just have to make some all encompassing statement (like “God did it”) or stay quiet.

I choose to stay quiet.

If grand statements of faith just don’t feel right and statements of empirical fact just dodge the question, it’s perfectly reasonably to say we don’t have a clue why we’re here, or even if the question itself makes much sense. There’s nothing unscientific about that, it’s just reasonable.

So why do we do science? Well firstly, many important questions are empirical, even if The Big One isn’t. But I don’t think there’s any harm in stating that, you know, it’s just awesome. In my General Relativity lectures today we started warping spacetimes. Warping spacetimes. With just pen and paper. That’s cool as hell- as far as I concerned, that’s more than enough reason for science.