Another howler from Science Magazine

In my last post, I scolded the editor-in-chief of Science, Holden Thorp, for an op-ed, though I largely agreed with his conclusion.  It didn't take long for him to provoke the DTLR hornet's nest again, and this time I can't say I agree with him.  The April 11 issue features another op-ed by him, titled "Teach Philosophy of Science".  He points out the risk of the erosion of public trust in science, pointing specifically to survey results indicating that 92% of Americans "felt it important that scientists show they are 'open to changing their minds based on new evidence,' which is of course what they must do," Thorp writes.  He claims that the "history of science is a powerful narrative of this culture of self-correction" and laments that "Resetting the public's understanding of how science works will be a big job."  His proposed solution is to teach philosophy of science to undergraduate science majors!

I regard that proposed solution as a non-sequitur.  Using Thorp's own argument, I say it is the history, not the philosophy of science that should be taught.  To be honest though, when I was a young student, I was interested in history, but not the history of science.  I was busy learning the science itself.  I am much more receptive to history of science now, for the reasons Thorp suggests.  I have not found philosophy of science to be insightful or to help me think about doing science.  Earlier this year I finished reading A Philospher Looks at Science, by Nancy Cartwright.  While I admire her support for the views of Kay and King's Radical Uncertainty, her book hardly made a dent on my way of thinking about science, and how to do science, whereas Kay and King helped me substantially clarify my thinking on probability models applied to the real world.

Returning to Thorp, the bigger problem in his argument is that somehow the public will trust science more if only they understood better how scientists change their views and "self-correct".  Unfortunately the history of science has plenty of examples of abject failures as well as successes.  Consider the wholly unnecesssary resistance to such figures as Ignaz Semmelweiss (who contributed to the germ theory of disease), Dan Shechtman (discoverer of quasicrystals), and Katalin Kariko (mRNA pioneer).  Consider also the crisis of non-reproducible research that I mentioned in my last post.  Science won't self-correct if no one bothers doing the self-correcting.  There are no financial or professional incentives either to reproduce others' work, nor to do one's own work with sufficient care and sound methodology to ensure it will withstand the test of time.

At its most cynical, science is merely a self-propagating exercise in securing endless piles of grant money for "research" of limited value and interest, as noted in this recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder, who points out that it is public tax money that fuels the seemingly joyless cycle of beg, spend, and publish.  If the public saw science this way, rather than in the romanticized way Thorp imagines, would they really trust scientists enough to allow their taxes to be spent as such?  Personally I would not, and I am a scientist!

I assert that the number one thing scientists can do to increase public trust in science is to reform their own house.  Only then will they deserve public support and trust.

Digression.  I last wrote about Sabine Hossenfelder nine years ago this month.  Although in that post I largely disagreed with her on one particular topic, I've since come to admire her devastingly blunt contrarian views on physics research.  For some time, I was also a financial supporter of hers on Patreon, though I am not longer financially able to support any of the deserving people I admire on Patreon.

Science Magazine colossal hypocrisy

I could not believe my eyes when I opened the Feb. 2 issue of Science to the editorial page.  The featured op-ed, as frequently is the case, is by the current editor-in-chief, Holden Thorp, and is entitled "Earning Respect and Trust".  He discussed the Science family of journals' editorial staffs, and the lack of respect they sometimes encounter by authors of submitted manuscripts.  He rightfully defends these staffers, and insists that they be respected by lab scientists.  I wholly agree with these sentiments.  It is his method of argument that I strongly reject.

Let's look, for example, at a few sentences in the third paragraph, line by line.  First,

If anything, the challenges that science is experiencing now are not due to a lack of success in the laboratory.

That is manifestly false.  The crisis of non-reproducible research, documented for nearly 20 years now, with almost no widespread progress on reform, has been a frequent topic of discussion on DTLR, and even in the news section of Science itself.  Two of the cornerstone enablers of this crisis have been poor methodology, both in the lab and in the data analysis.  I have specifically called out previous AAAS CEO Rush Holt's similar denials that it is exactly the core activity of scientific research that is rotten; for example:  here, here, here, and here.  I won't rehash those arguments.  Holt's retirement from AAAS, the year after my posts, was greatly welcomed.  However. Holden Thorp has now revived what I will call the Holt Myth.

Next,

The notion that lab work is the only purposeful endeavor in science is obtuse and is an example of precisely what leads to the view that scientists are intellectual elites who do not value the contributions or abilities of anyone except themselves and the small group they deign to recognize as their peers.  Every time this academic hauteur is revealed to the public, confidence is lost for a simple reason--scientists like these are not inspiring the people's trust.

Now, I completely agree with this criticism!  However, he uses the term "top journal" earlier in the paragraph, not quite saying, but seemingly implying, that his journal is among the top ones.  In many fields Science certainly is considered among the top journals (e.g., see here), and he is part of the very elite he seems to be complaining about.  Authors who aim to publish in such elite journals, where novelty is prized over reproducibility, are incentivized to be sloppy and fast, rather than careful and slow.  The motto of DTLR is "Garbage In, Gospel Out":  Thorp's journal could be exhibit A of this phenomenon.  Perhaps Science and its editors should themselves take a humility pill before lecturing the rest of us on the harms of elitism.

 

 

Aerodynamic lift

It is natural to expect anyone who claims to be a physicist to be able to give a simple, intuitive explanation of aerodynamic lift, using basic principles of classical mechanics.  Unfortunately, most of the time a physicist's such explanation is misleading, over-simplified, or just plain wrong.  One of the most important reasons for this is that there is no such simple, intuitive explanation.  I recently stumbled upon a reference to this excellent 2020 Scientific American article by Ed Regis, that outlines the two main competing explanations (Bernoulli's theorem vs. Newton's third law).  However, others such as the Coanda effect, have been proposed, and are not mentioned in the article.  Nonetheless Regis' article resonated with me because he seems to give a balanced discussion while debunking some of the clearly incorrect variants of these arguments.  He also spoke with two people whose insights I regard as essential, namely, John D. Anderson and Doug McLean.  Anderson is the author of a number of widely used textbooks on relevant topics, such as Introduction to Flight, Fundamentals of Aerodynamics, Modern Compressible Flow, Computational Fluid Dynamics: The Basics with Applications, and A History of Aerodynamics.  (I own three of these books.)  McLean is a retired Boeing engineer, and author of Understanding Aerodynamics, which I recently acquired.

I became interested in the competing intuitive explanations for aerodynamic lift during my time in graduate school, in the late 1990s.  At the time I was involved in atmospheric science research.  One of the professors I worked with informed the members of his lab that Prof. Anderson had been invited to visit our university; and moreover (knowing of my interest in this topic) my professor had invited Anderson to visit our lab for a discussion on it.  It was certainly an honor, and I and at least one other student in the group asked Prof. Anderson to sign our textbooks during his visit.  At the time, I was very partial to the Newton's third law version of the explanation (and still am, though I recognize it as woefully incomplete).  Anderson struck a more neutral tone, stating that both the Bernoulli principle and Newton's second law were at work in lifting an airfoil.  Neither of them was "wrong" per se.  That discussion over 20 years ago seems compatible with the views he gives in Regis' piece.

I won't discuss the officially accepted explanations, formulated in the early 20th century, given by Kutta and Zhukovsky, for 2-dimensional flow, and by Prandtl, Lanchester, and Prandtl's students (notably Blasius) for 3-dimensional flow, here.  However I note that Falkovich (Fluid Mechanics, 2/e, Cambridge University Press, 2018) points to the importance of viscosity in these formulations.  A purely inviscid flow "produces no lift" (p. 56).  He continues, "Without friction-caused separation [of the boundary layer], birds and planes would not be able to fly."  Neither the Bernoulli principle (which is strictly only true for inviscid flows) nor the Newton's third law explanation makes any reference to boundary layer separation and nonzero circulation around the airfoil.  As Anderson says in the Regis article, there just isn't a "one-liner" explanation of aerodynamic lift.

Galileo's Assayer and Torricelli's barometer

A couple months ago, Science magazine had a retrospective by Alex Gomez-Marin on Galileo's The Assayer, which was published 400 years ago this year.  Part of a series of scientific disputes regarding the nature of comets, this particular piece lays out Galileo's methodological perspective on how science should be done.  I've only read selected excerpts in translation, but I do know that others (e.g., Flemish contemporary Simon Stevin) held similar views.

Meanwhile the December issue of Physics Today features a Backscatter item on Torricelli's barometer, by Karina Cooper.  Torricelli was Galileo's last "student", and his work with the barometer was an important step in the understanding of hydrostatic pressure.  Together with Torricelli's efflux law, this achievement ranks him as a major founder of 17th century fluid mechanics, along with Stevin and Galileo's older student, Benedetto Castelli.

My interest in these matters, and the history of classical physics more generaly, has grown noticeably in the last year or so, particularly in the arena of fluid mechanics, which is an interdisciplinary field involving physics, mathematics, and engineering.  Seeing these items in Science and Physics Today is a great way to wind down the year of 2023.  

 As a bonus I praise Physics Today for featuring a cover story in November on research in contemporary fluid mechanics, namely the piece by Detlef Lohse and Olga Shishkina on "Ultimate turbulent thermal convection".  However, the authors' insistence on the relevance of the reported work for real world situations, such as atmospheric and photospheric convection, seems to me insincere when they focus on results for "classical regime" aspect ratios between 0.5 and 1.0.  The atmospheric and photospheric examples involve large aspect ratios.

Nonetheless, the cover is worth reproducing here.  We don't get to see fluid mechanics featured on the front cover of Physics Today all that often!

If I don't write again this year, may you all have a wonderful holiday season and a blessed new year.  See you in 2024!

Scientist Biography Series, some notes

Almost two years ago, I had a post on some scientist biography series published by various university presses.  I'd like to provide a few miscellaneous notes on that post.  

First, the Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Science Biographies, was originally published by Blackwell and called the Blackwell Science Biographies.  I recently acquired used copies of the volumes on Galileo and Newton, two of the three in the series devoted to physicists (I am missing the volume for Ampere).  My copy of the Galileo volume (by the late Father Michael Sharratt) is from the Blackwell era, while my copy of the Newton volume (by the late A. Rupert Hall) is from the Cambridge era.

Turning to their rival, Oxford University Press, I discovered a more general biography series of theirs called Lives and Legacies.  I see that there are ten volumes in the series, only two of which are dedicated to scientists.  One is Isaac Newton, and the other is Ben Franklin.  To the extent that Franklin was a scientist, he was a physicist, so it is notable that the only 2 scientists in the series are physicists.

The 2023 Nobel Prizes

Following the announcements of the Nobel Prizes this past week has been quite thrilling.  While I won't comment on the literature and economics prizes, one surprise (to me) is that this year's Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned, was a physics major in college, and onetime professional engineer.  She has previously been awarded the Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society.  Physics World notes that she is the third physicist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Andrei Sakharov himself, and Joseph Rotblat.

The physiology or medicine prize to K. Kariko and D. Weissman for "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19" was particularly delightful.  Reading of Kariko's professional struggles and marginalization, while managing to raise an Olympic Gold-Medalist daughter, provides yet another critique of conventional academic culture, groupthink, and incentive structures.  Both laureates labeled in the scientific wilderness for many, many years, before seeing one fruition of their work take on global significance, arguably changing the course of history.

The prize for physics to P. Agostini, F. Krausz, and A. L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" is for an accomplishment less familiar to me, and learning of its details has been very instructive.  As I started reading about this work, I immediately thought of 1999 Chemistry laureate Ahmed Zewail, who I found is indeed mentioned in the scientific information packet released by the Nobel Foundation.  It was interesting to see AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) physics honored again after the 2018 prize; indeed both the 2018 and 2023 prizes have done much to address the historical imbalance against female laureates.  There are now three living female Nobel laureates in physics at the same time, something unprecedented.  (And if you include this year's Peace laureate, there are four living women physicist Nobel laureates!)

Finally I am always pleased when a chemistry prize is awarded (as in Zewail's case) for a physics-related achievement - in this year's case, quantum dots.  Like many, I'd heard of quantum dots without knowing the names of the scientists who pioneered them, including those honored this year:  M. G. Bawendi, L. E. Brus, and A. I. Ekimov.

This has been a good batch of laureates to honor industrial scientists, as Katalin Kariko was, for some time, primarily employed by BioNTech, while Alexei Ekimov was still affiliated with a company called Nanocrystals Technology, Inc., at the time of receiving the award. 

The Nobel Prizes are justly criticized in many quarters, and should not be the only mark of high prestige that scientists and the general public focus on.  Having said that, the Nobel Committee did a fine job with this year's selections, doing much to maintain credibility for their efforts.

Some good stuff in Quanta magazine

I'd like to highlight a couple of excellent physics articles that appeared in Quanta magazine last month.

First, Thomas Lewton profiles Jonathan Oppenheim's work on hybrid classical-quantum theories of quantum gravity.  The idea seems to be that instead of attempting to quantize the gravitational field, let it remain classical.  To reconcile quantum uncertainty with a classical spacetime, gravity must be stochastic; it must be noisy.  

Second, Katie McCormick discusses a topological insulator analogy that has been used to explain atmospheric motions such as Kelvin waves in the Earth's atmosphere.  Taruh Matsuno's successful prediction of equatorial Kelvin waves in the 1960s was, evidently, one of the only times theoretical work in geophysical fluid dynamics was predictive of phenomena later discovered in nature.  The article focuses on Brad Marston and collaborators' theoretical and observational work demonstrating that Matsuno's waves can be understood using a topological insulator analogy (think quantum Hall effect).  Once again, a theoretical prediction (Poincare gravity waves in the stratosphere) was subsequently confirmed observationally.  Finally the article discusses David Tong's quantum field theoretical framing of coastal Kelvin waves.

I had attended a talk by Marston at the APS March Meeting earlier this year (see my earlier post), but did not quite follow it.  I am grateful to Quanta magazine for distilling the story into a form that can be consumed by a wider public (including me).