Am I a dog? Vote Now

When I wasn’t trying to solve the fiendishly difficult Easter Clue Hunt my kids set for us, I spent a pleasant hour or two re-discovering the original wiki, started by Ward Cunningham in 1995. It still feels fun and anarchic and useful. Another day I will start a rant on what is and isn’t a wiki .. but meanwhile … one thing that struck me is that the community policy is Real Names Please. This seems to run counter to standard Internet sociology. What many people love about the Internet is that nobody knows you are a dog. On the other hand, maybe hiding behind anonymity is what leads to the nastier sides of the internet, like trolling. I note that I just made a couple of wikipedia links there. Now the folks that edit wikipedia are by and large a sane and well behaved community, but most usernames have almost no information, or little that tells you whether to trust this particular editor. I can see that one wants to avoid things getting personal, but its far too easy to make sock-puppets.

My instinct is that openness and transparency is good. I always sign my referees reports. (So if you just got a mean one that you suspect is me, it isn’t!!) On the other hand, from various experiences of friends and colleagues, I am well aware that sometimes you need privacy. And of course we need the possibility to blow that whistle without the secret police knocking on the door etc. But how common is all that? Enough. Lets do a poll thingy. Which of these is closest to your opinion?

 

The Truth is Out There … isn’t it?

Its disconcerting reading/watching the news from Ukraine. Not just because of the fear of decades of war to come, but the temptation to slide into relativism. Statements and stories from various quarters vary from the vaguely inconsistent to the baldly contradictory. Its tempting to think “well, they are all lying”, or “hmm.. it all depends on your point of view”. You slide down that slope and pretty soon there is no truth. We can’t let that happen. The truth is out there somewhere. Its just hard to extract from the filtered messages. As scientists, our philosophical stance is that we must be personally sceptical; you should not trust authority blindly. That’s all very well but I ain’t going to Kharkiv to make my own observations. I have to trust somebody don’t I? But who? In descending order of reliability, I guess its (1) The Guardian and the BBC (2) Our own governments (3) The Ukrainian government (4) The Russian government (5) My mate Kevin who is usually down the Dog and Ferret on a Friday, and (6) The Daily Mail.

Mind you, some days science is just as hard. I mean research, the process of uncovering new truths. The truth is out there, but its hard work to find. There are no tablets of stone. You’ve been working on something for months, but every so often you wake up in a sweat thinking oh crap it could all be wrong. Suppose X is going on instead of Y? (Radio loops versus inflationary polarisation anyone?) The philosophy of science doesn’t help. Most scientists claim to be Popperians. You can never prove, you can only falsify. All models are provisional. But its such a small step from there to “all truth is provisional”. Somehow we have to cling on to the belief that there IS a definite truth; its just that we can never have it.

A further problem is the same one we get in trying to understand Ukraine: the human filter. We can’t make all our own measurements. We have to read other people’s papers, go to conferences, and so forth. But we are all human; chasing our careers; making our pitch; following fashions; squabbling with rivals. This doesn’t mean we are not sceptical and rational; we are. But the messages are filtered through biology.

Our biology filtering a truth that is out there is essentially the message of much of Eastern mysticism and Buddhism. I have long been fascinated by where mysticism chimes with science, and where it jars. Definitely some of each. I am sitting through a MOOC on Buddhism and Modern Psychology which is quite fun. (Partly of course in mentally preparing myself for my upcoming AstroTech MOOC. Scarily soon. Gulp.) Anyway…  Zen holds that at least in principle once the biases and illusions have been stripped, you can actually personally and directly perceive the truth. Satori. Unexcelled Complete Awakening.

Boy. I’d just love a kind of mini-Satori on the structure of quasars.

Concrete Science Epiphanies

The title is a kinda cultural reference to Musique Concrete, don’t you know. Maybe should be read in French.  Sea-onss kon-krett. Pretentious, Moi?

Anyhoo. I have always loved that moment when Jane Public looks through a real telescope and sees the rings of Saturn. Suddenly its real. Not on TV. Seen with her own eyes. There is a physical context. She had to walk up some stairs to the roof, queue up, bend at an awkward angle, and squint. Mental processing is good, but physicality is also good. It helps the scientific understanding, and it has a separate cultural impact which has its own importance. Its a kind of epiphany, an awakening.

I encountered two more such epiphanies yesterday. Here in Edinbrr its Science Festival time. (In Edinburgh, if you miss a Festival, don’t worry. There will be another one along in a minute.)  During the day I donned my STFC tee-shirt and helped out at the STFC roadshow, Seeing The Universe In All Its Light. This has all sorts of groovy things, but the bit I loved best is dead simple. We had a bunch of TV remote controls and pointed them at people’s camera phones. You can see the IR beam, which you can’t see with your naked eye. People almost gasp. There are invisible things in the Universe, but they are really there. You don’t need a million pound device. I can see it with with my own phone.

Wind forward to the evening, where I was part of the SCART Connection, a strange event that presented the results of pairing up scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy with artists from the Edinburgh College of Art to see what they would come up with. This involved microscopic pictures of sludge crystals, sculptures of Ice-2,  Fibonacci spirals, a social soundscape project, and yours truly pontificating about cosmic violence to the accompaniment of electronic music by a local composer.  All very weird and wonderful. One thing that struck me was people’s reactions to a movie of those tiny sludge crystals. You could see them jiggling – Brownian motion in action. When told that this was caused by buffeting by atoms, their eyes bulged. Atoms? I can see them in a movie made by a guy from the Art College? Wooaahh.

Impact!!!

I thought maybe a Bruce Willis style title was needed. Well, if I’d written “A report on an RCUK workshop I attended concerning possible adjustments to the Pathways to Impact process” its just possible there might not have been so many click-throughs. So. Anyhoo. Some things surprised me and some didn’t…

(1) Pretty much everybody (including me) agreed that the Impact thing is in general a Good Thing, but only if it avoids degenerating into a box ticking mechanical exercise. Unfortunately this is a Big If, as we all know.

(2) Also everybody seemed to agree it should work by carrot and not by stick, and that while it should generally be important to the community as a whole, it doesn’t have to apply equally to every single separate individual. Many but maybe not all of us agreed that this sort of thing works best if pursued by talented individuals who are actually keen on it, and helped by departmentally based tech-transfer specialists.

(3) There were many other detailed concerns and confusions, but I am happy to report that I am left with the impression that STFC is actually doing this much more sanely than the rest.  Our community’s impact statements are generally of a high standard. They are scored by specialists in the office, not by academic referees. They are averaged over groups, and averaged over time. They are graded and known to count in getting your research funding, but only along with many other known criteria. On the other hand, there are  distinct pots of competitive money for impact activity, which provides the carrot. All this is, I think, well understood by our community.

By contrast, I heard from other councils/scientists that impact statements are pass/fail, and are often sent back to be re-done; that people find it hard and unrealistic because each separate project needs its own impact plan; but on on the other hand it was unclear whether it actually made any difference, that people didn’t know the rules, and it wasn’t clear where in the “research cycle” it made sense to plan impact. Nearly all these problems evaporate in the context of the consolidated grant system (likewise the old rolling grant system), and dedicated commercialisation and public engagement schemes. Suddenly I understood why the pages of THES were full of people whingeing about Impact, and why this is never astronomers or particle physicists.

Of course, the scary thing is that BIS/RCUK being the way it is, there is a distinct danger that STFC will be forced into line to be more like everybody else. Gird your loins. You don’t want this.

(4) Maybe the least surprising thing… the air was thick with gobbledegook. I hate to be tribal but … glancing round the room I could tell who had a physical sciences background by the grimaces whenever anybody said we had to “interrogate the challenges” or “discuss the issue around X”, or when it was claimed that the issue was that  “we were seeing a conceptual problem with linearity” and so on.  If you swallow your annoyance and let these kind of phrases swim round your head for a bit, you can usually see what people are getting at. Usually.

(5) Andy Parker, currently Head of the Cavendish, grabbed an opportunity to make a nice wee speechette. Impact is fine – it has to be good gently encouraging scientists to be relevant. But the real problem with UK PLC is that Big Finance does not invest in technology. The City only thinks about money in abstract. I guess UK industry is a bit unadventurous too, but the real problem is the Absence of Angels.