Comments are temporarily disabled while I work on other things and slowly recharge my enthusiasm for blogging. In the meantime, why not read one of these?
In the past, I have vented at rather excessive length about how science blogs are fragmented and ephemeral. It often seems like the only time we write in parallel is when something happens that's so bad we all have to talk about it at once. And whatever we write scrolls off the screen in a day or two, if we're blogging frequently enough that any sizeable audience reads us (not so much my problem, really). Good explanations of introductory material — the stuff you need to know in order to understand other stuff — tend to get lost in the noise and are hard to retrieve and utilize later, when we need them. Structure on a scale larger than a few posts is hard to find.
So, having an opportunity to collaborate and make something which might last a little while was fun.
LaTeXnical services were provided by me. In years past, Reed Cartwright and Maria Brumm had done yeoperson's service in that regard, so several of the more frustrating aspects had already been solved. Still, I wouldn't be myself if I didn't take things too far, so this year, you're getting an index.
One of the biggest problems in teaching mathematics is making the connection between the math itself and the application of said math. To try and address this, (almost) every chapter begins with an introductory application for the technique to be studied, and ends with a more detailed study of how the math is used in solving an optical problem. I've tried to pick optical problems that don't typically appear in other optics textbooks, for instance: the Talbot effect, Zernike polynomials and aberrations, optical vortices, X-ray crystallography, computed tomography, and even optical cloaking! I've also taken the unusual step of including essay questions in the exercises: read a given scientific paper and answer questions about its relation to the given mathematical topic.
Though academic optics programs are becoming more common, I'm hoping the book will catch the attention of instructors teaching general math methods for physics courses.
Jeffrey Shallit calls our attention to the recent antics of Suzan Mazur, a journalist well-known among science bloggers for, well, getting everythingwrong. The best parts of any conspiracy theory are those which sound reasonable upon a first hearing, and Mazur is no exception. Among the bits not addressed by Shallit, this was my favourite:
Open-access scientific publishing, however, is proving useful to a degree in leveling the playing field so that independent scientists have a shot at being published and cited.
Eminently reasonable — if you don't know anything about journals, repositories or the entire modern publishing environment. Open Access is about lowering financial and legal barriers for readers, not reducing the standards or even necessarily changing the style of peer review. Yes, it's easier to get a note onto the arXiv than into the Physical Review, which is why there's so much fractured ceramic on the arXiv. It's still as hard as it ever was to get into a journal — and that's a good thing. In fact, Mazur's claim sounds more like the propaganda spread by Dr. Evil lookalikes that OA will undermine journals' quality control. Thanks for playing into the corporate hands of Big Publishing, tovarisch!
But independent scientists still face the problem of editors not having the cross-disciplinary knowledge necessary to properly assess unique papers, i.e., the biologists may not know enough physics, for example.
This is, indeed, a legitimate problem. However, it goes both ways: if editors can be overspecialized, then so too can authors. Sorry indeed is the spectacle of physicists who think they can write about biology without learning the subject first. Ironically, one of Mazur's persecuted scientist heroes is Vincent Fleury, who fits that description to a T[yrosine].
She claims "Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report colleagues attempted to silence them from publishing in their new book that Darwin's claim was wrong about natural selection." But somehow these attempts failed, since not only did Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini manage to publish their book, but they also got a long article in New Scientist about it.
All in all, evilutionary biologists make for lousy censors.
What was the nature of these "attempt[s] to silence them"? Mazur, the eminent journalist, doesn't tell us, but she does refer to "dark forces". (No, really!) For some amusement, read the comments in New Scientist on the article of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmirini. A rough estimate shows that about 90% of the comments are negative to their claims, pointing out that the article is misinformed and inaccurate.
And to further the theme of people continuing to do exactly what we expect them to, how about that New Scientist magazine? Ah, New Scientist. How do we love thee? Letuscounttheways . . . .
Little-known "fact": the reason physicists are trying to create a black hole at the LHC is because it's the only weapon powerful enough to defeat Cthulhu.
The Intertubes are filling up with arguments just not worth having. Sigh. You know what I need?
Yeah:
(Reliving one's childhood can be a scary business. And on a related note: if my generation was raised by television, and everything on TV then is available on the Internet now, does that mean our memories are all uploaded and the Technological Singularity has already come and gone?)
He takes scientific discoveries made through hard work and sacrifice, strips them of all context and meaning until only jargon is left, and uses the fruits of his petty thievery to add spurious credibility to the mystical snake oil he peddles. Like certain others we could name, he has at best a third-hand knowledge of the science he pontificates upon, and when corrected on basic factual points, he doesn't flinch — because factual correctness isn't what his business is about.
His latest whine is typical of what passes for respectable commentary in less-than-critical quarters. Phil Plait aptly characterized it as "almost a bullet-pointed list of logical fallacies"; if you wanted examples to fill out your Baloney Detection Kit trading cards, Chopra would be a great place to start. Be the first on your block to collect the whole woo-ful set!
I was looking through my archive of old class notes for something or other (I started doing them all in LaTeX around my senior year, so I've lots of 'em stashed about various virtual corners), and I found a bit of advice from my third-semester quantum mechanics professor, regarding the term paper we had to write. As luck would have it, MIT OpenCourseWare has that document, too.
Here's a part worth dwelling upon:
In thinking about both style and structure, remember that you are writing a scientific paper and not a work of literature. The writing in great works of literature typically has multiple meanings, and can be understood in many ways, at different levels. It can be read differently by readers at different times or with different backgrounds. It often makes veiled allusions to other great literature. Over the years, great literature takes on meanings that go beyond those intended consciously by its author. In contrast, the central purpose of a scientific paper is the clear communication of your ideas to your readers, with no ambiguity, multiple meanings or veiled allusions. Your goal is to ensure that every one of your readers, who may indeed have varying backgrounds, understands your ideas in precisely the way that you intend.
The word "central" should not be overlooked: it can happen that a scientific paper does have "multiple meanings". If Alice writes an article and Bob comes along with a different background and a new perspective, a second "level" can emerge when Bob reads Alice's equations. (For example, take Alice = Dirac and Bob = Feynman, with the new meaning of the old story giving us the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics. Or, take Alice = Feynman and Bob = everybody who's read The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Someone who has studied the subject for several years appreciates those books in a different way than the larval-stage physicist reading them in high school.) But, while these new "levels" are nice bonuses, they definitely don't overrule the importance of clearly communicating the basic ideas.
The poet has to concern themselves with secondary and tertiary meanings, while the writing scientist can largely let them take care of themselves.
Veiled allusions belong more to literature than to science. A Pynchon or Nabokov novel can grow a hypertextual web in the back of the reader's mind, weaving tentative connections and plausible conjectures into a perfect paranoia — but in a physics paper, we like our allusions with explicit footnotes. Indeed, not having those explicit pointers back to the origins of ideas, and instead having to puzzle out veiled and sometimes unintentional allusions, can royally blow. One review article on a particular statistical-physics subject put it this way: "In subsequent times, a dozen authors must have enjoyed an identical epiphany when solving some particular model of a diffusion-limited reaction by an exotic field-theoretic method—ever a tour de force—ultimately to find that their methodology, and perhaps even their solution, had been previously discovered and published. Such are the rewards and penalties of working in a largely unreferenced field."
On more practical grounds:
Feel free to use whichever voice you are most comfortable with. "I will show," "we will show" or "it will be shown" are all fine. For unknown reasons, some students seem to think that personal pronouns are banned and the passive voice is required. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good scientific writing should be animated and compelling. Your paper should "tell a physics story". I find the overuse of the passive voice to be deadening. Don't be dull. Clarity and precision come first, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that this can only be accomplished via boring your reader to tears. Not true.
Try to lead your reader along, motivating their interest, building up the physics ground work you need them to understand, drawing them into the story you are telling, and working up to a compelling conclusion.
Incidentally, the term paper I wrote following these guidelines — and which I researched during the general haze of a spring break in Amsterdam, but let's not get into that today — eventually became this series of blag posts.
![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
