Science Writing

Recommended Science Books for Non-Scientists

drorzel — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 11:10:18 +0000

Recommended Science Books for Non-Scientists

Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.

This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...

I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so please, feel free to suggest books I should've included but didn't, either in comments there or comments here. If I get a lot of additional recommendations, I may compile them into another list, because, hey, easy blog post!

drorzel Mon, 04/06/2015 - 07:10

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Richard Fortey's books are great geological teachers - Trilobite, Earth, etc.

My favorite books by physicists are two timeless classics: Feynman's The character of physical law and Galilei's dialogues (both books). Of course it helps that I can read Galilei's elegant prose instead of a translation :).
As for mathematics, there's Singh's book on Fermat, a number of beautiful biographies (Zariski, Hilbert, Courant) and autobiographies (Halmos, André Weil). I hate with a passion Enszenberger's book because of its not-at-all-hidden misogyny; avoid it if it can land in the hands of a girl. For the readers who want to learn some mathematics, there's the incredibly beautiful Courant-Robbins, "What is Mathematics?" - it's dated of course, but it opens up worlds. I read it at 17 and it changed my life.
I know of a few really great books for children (say age 10) about female scientists (the Curies and Lise Meitner among them), but they haven't been translated into English.

I would have to include George Gamow's classic 'One, Two, Three...Infinity'. I read it in high school. It prompted a live-long interest in all things scientific (tho' I remain a dillettante).

I'm curious, what does it mean to say "he’s very much in the Whig history mode"? I only know the Whigs as an long-ago political party (both in the UK and USA), so what does the term "Whiggish" imply?

"Whig history" is a term for the presentation of history as a steady progression from the benighted past to the enlightened present. I don't actually know what the connection to the political party was, but this mode of history is very much out of fashion in professional scholarly circles.

Seconding Singh's Fermat book, twas quite good.

Anything by Mary Roach.

I second "One Two Three Infinity".

I do agree with having Feynman and Rhodes on Weinberg's list. I prefer "The Second Creation" for a viewpoint on what Weinberg and Salam did. ;-)

On your list, I definitely second the Brontosaurus book and Mr Tompkins.

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by
Jonathan Weine is a good story of evolution and the study of evolutionary topics in the Galapagos Islands a la Darwin. I would second Courant-Robbins, “What is Mathematics?” As with the original recommend-er I read it as a teenager and was thoroughly enchanted. The Rhodes book, off Weinberg's list, was terrific.

I'd like to share two books I have found

"Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World" by Dorrik Stow
where he explains the effect of plate tectonics on the evolution of ecosystems and species over the last 300 million years.

"If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and ..." by Stephen Webb
I like the entertaining way he discusses all the obstacles to life and space traveling.

Thank you for the list of books, I find it very helpful as I did not take science as a subject in school.

Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

drorzel — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 07:49:57 +0000

Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this:

Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF

— ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014

I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately, the story at that link is less awesome than awful. It goes on at some length about the astronomy, then dispenses with the physics in two short paragraphs of joking references to scare-quoted jargon from the AMO side. The end result is less a pointer to fascinating research than an instructive example of what not to do if you're hired to write copy about science outside your area.

The worst part of this is that now I have to take the time to do a better job of this. Which I can ill afford, but reading a description of the comb calibration process as "magical gizmo fun" leaves such a bad taste in my mouth than I can't let it go.

I dunno, at least this gives us a chance to do some physics. I mean, we hardly ever talk any more. I miss you, man... OK, that's a little weird. Anyway, let's get on with this.

Fine. All right, what's the issue here? Well, the astronomy part of that story is, from what I know, reasonably good. It's about the exoplanet-hunting group at Yale, led by Debra Fischer, and their search for ever more Earth-like planets. Their particualr technique is the redshift method, which looks at small changes in the wavelengths of light emitted by distant stars due to the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet on the star. This was the first method used to find extrasolar planets, and it's been used to locate and characterize dozens of planets.

So, when do they zap these planets with lasers? Well, since they're many light-years away, never. The lasers would be used only on Earth, at the telescopes being used to hunt for the planets in the first place.

See, the shift in the spectral lines is tiny, even for a big planet-- at a long-ago talk I saw about this ("long-ago" here meaning "1998"), they were talking about shifts of a quarter of a pixel on the CCD camera they were using to measure the spectrum. The sensitivity has gotten better, of course, but this is still a very demanding process. And what's more, it demands long-term stability if you want to see planets that are Earth-like in both mass and orbit-- you need to watch a star over a period of years, and know that any changes you see are due to its motion, and not drifts due to Earthbound effects.

Can't you just compare the lines from the star to the same element here on Earth? Yes and no. In principle, that's what they do, but there are a lot of complications. Among other things, the atoms emitting light in the stars are, well, in stars, which means they're in a very different environment than we can easily produce here on Earth. There are a lot of other effects that can shift the lines by a little bit, and you need to worry about that stuff.

There's also the fact that you want to know that your spectrometer is behaving nicely over the full range-- that it's not responding in a different way in different parts of the spectrum. So you need some kind of source with lines at lots of different wavelengths, as a check on that. This is traditionally done with lamps filled with a mix of gases-- thorium and argon is a common one.

And what's the problem? Well, there's a bit of black art to the making and maintaining of these-- the people who do it are amazingly good, but when you get to looking for the tiny shifts the exoplanet hunters want, and tracking them over several years, you worry that the calibration lamp will drift due to changes in the pressure, temperature, other gas leaking in, etc..

So, beaming a laser into the telescope works better? Because, like, you can watch the frequency be stable for years? Yes and no. Lasers can do better, not because you watch a single frequency for years, but because you can make a laser that produces a wide range of lines at frequencies you can measure absolutely.

Wait a minute. I thought lasers were a single color of light? Continuous lasers are pretty much monochromatic, it's true, but a pulsed laser is actually a collection of a large number of regularly spaced frequencies, and the shorter the pulse, the wider the range. It uses the same adding-lots-of-waves physics as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle video I did for TED-Ed.

But why are there lots of waves? Well, a laser works by sticking something that amplifies light between two mirrors facing each other. The light bounces back and forth, getting amplified a little bit on each pass, and some of the light leaks out on each bounce, because it's impossible to make a perfect mirror.

This leaking-out process is what produces the many different frequencies you get with a real laser. If your cavity is about half a meter long, the time to go from one mirror to the other and back will be around three nanoseconds, so every new light being produced at any given instant is being added to light that was created three nanoseconds earlier, and has been reflected. And also light from six nanoseconds earlier that's made two passes, and nine nanoseconds earlier, etc.

OK, but how does that create multiple frequencies? It doesn't create them, it filters out which frequency are allowed. If the frequency of the light pulse is just right, when new light waves and the reflected light waves come together, they interfere constructively-- the peaks from one align with the peaks from the other, and the two waves reinforce each other. If the frequency is a little bit off, though, the waves interfere destructively-- the peaks of one fill in the valleys of the other, and cancel out.

So, a laser only works at a single special frequency, like I said. No, a laser can only work at any of an infinite number of special frequencies, determined by the length of the cavity and the speed of light. These form a regularly-spaced "comb" (so called because the usual representation of the spectrum (like the figure above) is an array of spikes indicating high intensity at some frequencies and no light in between) of allowed laser modes (a very flexible jargon term that here just means "light of a particular frequency that will interfere constructively in a given laser cavity").

If you use the right amplifier material inside your laser, it will amplify many of these modes, producing light at a wide range of different frequencies. And when you add all those frequencies together, it produces a regular train of short pulses. The time between pulses is equal to the round-trip time for light in the cavity-- effectively, each pulse constructively interferes with the reflected light of previous pulses. This is called a "mode-locked" laser, because the rate at which the pulses occur and the spacing of the modes are both fixed by the length of the cavity.

The length of the pulses depends on the length and the properties of the amplifying medium. The wider the range of frequencies you amplify, the shorter the pulse, and vice versa. It turns out that if you make a laser whose pulses are only a femtosecond or so in length (that is, 0.000000000000001s), the range of frequencies spans the entire visible range of the spectrum. You can think of the pulse as the sum of millions of little lasers with slightly different frequencies that are all locked together.

Oh, and that's what you need for a spectroscopy calibration! Right. The cool thing about these comb sources is that you can lock their frequency in an absolute sense-- you compare one of the modes of the comb to the light absorbed or emitted by a particular atom, and adjust your cavity length as needed to keep that one mode at the same frequency as the atoms. This gives you a comb of frequencies whose frequencies are known as well as the frequency of your reference atoms; if you're really clever, you use something like an atomic clock as your reference and then you know the frequency of any given mode to ridiculous precision.

This is where you cite some old blog posts about clock stuff, right? Right. Such as this cool measurement of relativistic effects with a pair of aluminum ion clocks, or this demonstration of time transfer good to eighteen or nineteen decimal places.

They don't demand quite this level of precision for exoplanet-hunting, but even a less technically demanding comb system can give you a broad range of regularly spaced lines that can be tied to an atomic reference. This is exactly what you want to calibrate Doppler shift measurements over a wide range of frequencies. And the precision ultimately traces to the stability of atomic clocks, which are what we use to define time, and thus guaranteed to be stable unless the fine structure constant starts doing wacky things.

So, that's what they brushed off as "magical gizmo fun"? Not quite. The specific "magical gizmo" reference was to a second step of the process, that uses the same physics. You see, a mode-locked laser made at a reasonable size will produce too many modes for a typical telescope spectrometer to resolve cleanly, so they need to get rid of some of them. They do this by using a Fabry-Perot cavity, which is just a pair of mirrors facing each other with nothing in between them-- a laser minus the amplification medium.

The same bouncing-pulse physics applies to the empty cavity-- only very specific frequencies will interfere constructively, and make it through to the other side of the cavity. So they set up a Fabry-Perot that only transmits light at special frequencies spaced by, say, a hundred times the spacing between laser modes. This gets you every hundredth laser mode, which is a spacing that works better in astronomical instruments.

That's a gizmo, all right, but it doesn't sound all that magical. Or fun, for that matter. "Fun" is a matter of personal taste, but science is, after all, magic without lies. The word "magical" should never be used to gloss over actual science content. Not even ironically. That's what annoyed me enough about this story to write all this up.

To be fair, it did take you about 1500 words to explain all this. You can hardly expect them to devote that much space to laser physics. No, but I don't think it's too much to expect some explanation, rather than just dumb jokes making fun of the jargon terms. Here's a quick attempt at something better, in approximately the same amount of space:

Fischer's group plans to calibrate their system using an optical frequency comb, a special laser that produces ultra-fast pulses of light only a few femtoseconds in duration, containing many different frequencies. The "modes" of this laser are evenly spaced across a wide range of frequencies in the red region of the visible spectrum where the EXPRES spectrometer operates. Setting the frequency of one of these modes to the natural absorption of a particular atomic transition fixes the frequency of all the modes of the laser.

The original laser actually provides too much of a good thing-- it has so many modes that they run together on the spectrometer. They fix this problem by using a Fabry-Perot etalon, a device consisting of a pair of mirrors facing each other. The light waves bouncing around between the mirrors interfere with each other, which filters out all but every Nth mode of the original laser, giving a comb with a wider spacing between modes. The end result is a regularly spaced set of lines across the XX nanometer range of interest, each line with stability comparable to an atomic clock. This is an ideal calibration source for the long-term measurements needed to pick out the tiny wobble of an Earth-like planet in an Earth-like orbit over many years of observations.

That's not perfect, I know, but it took me half an hour to write, and it's not insultingly dumb. With some revision (and some data to fill in the experimental parameters that the original article doesn't see fit to give us), it could be compact but also informative.

Yeah, I see what you mean. And keep in mind, I banged this out on the basis of background knowledge only, having no contact with the actual group doing the research. You would think that a writer with access to the research group in question-- and he definitely had that, because there are quotes from them earlier in the article-- would be able to do better. This ought to be better, and the fact that it isn't reflects very poorly on the writer, and on the Planetary Society for not demanding better.

I find this particularly annoying because it has this "all these big words! Optical physics is Hard!" vibe to it. It would be easy enough to do the same thing with the astronomy side, cracking wise about stellar classifications and the like, but they would never consider doing that, because that's their business. When it comes to physics, though, they have no qualms about dropping into Barbie mode, and I find that really annoying.

Well, I'm sorry you're annoyed, but it was nice talking physics again. Let's not wait so long next time, ok? I'll try, but I don't have as much control over my schedule as I would like. I sincerely hope, though, that our next conversation originates in something more positive than flippant and lazy science writing.

------

A couple of other links: I've been following this stuff since 2007, because I'm really old. I also wrote about frequency combs in the Laser Smackdown in 2010.

If you want more technical and historical detail, the 2005 Nobel went to Haensch and Hall and their Nobel lectures are free to read at those links.

drorzel Mon, 09/29/2014 - 03:49

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Very nice explanation of the use of frequency combs for exoplanet searches. I think the article you referenced was actually so bad that it didn't even convey, to an expert in the field, what they are doing. The Yale group is trying to do away the complexity of a frequency comb and simply use a stabilized Fabry-Perot and white light to generate the calibration lines. See their more detailed webpage -
http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/exoplanets/exoplanets-laser.h…
or a a paper on it -
http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0004

About lasers in general:
I didn't realize that a laser could put out multiple frequencies at once until you explained it, but it makes sense. Actually, the clearest explanation to me of what is coherent light is William Beaty's: not that it's "in phase", but that it's just "pointsource" light, *spatially* coherent:

http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html

The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta

drorzel — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 08:41:13 +0000

The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta

I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend.

As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there's only so far you can run with that conceit (says the guy who wrote not one but two pop-physics books about a talking dog...). It does a quick run through modern astronomy framed by the musings of an astronomer during an all-night observing session with a giant telescope (a "Big-Seer" in Upgoerese). This includes a bit of personal history:

She would never have thought to end up here.

She had not been one of those kids with a clear idea of what they are going to become. And to become a student-woman was not something she had dreamed of-- even less to become a student-woman who studies the All-There-Is.

Her family wanted for her a real job: a job everyone knew about.

A doctor-- that was a great job. She would have been good at that, they thought. Or one of those people who wear horse hair on their head and try to trip up other people for a living. They explain how things have really gone, say, if someone has killed another person, and have to make sure they are believed.

I excerpt this bit because it gets the basic idea across, and also shows the weakness of the form. Namely that if you don't already know a bit about what he's talking about, Upgoerization can render relatively simple ideas utterly baffling. I puzzled over that last paragraph for a disgracefully long time before I remembered the key fact: Trotta is British, or at least based in the UK. Which explains the relevance of horse hair.

And that's the problem I end up having with the whole Up Goer Five thing. It's sort of interesting as a technical exercise, in the same way that, say, a villanelle or a double dactyl is interesting. But beyond demonstrating the cleverness of the author, I'm not quite sure what the point is supposed to be. English offers a rich and amazing bounty of descriptive words with fine shades of meaning, and not making use of that seems kind of silly. The circumlocution required by the Upgoer form ends up obscuring as much as it reveals.

And that's pretty much the review of the book right there. Trotta does an impressive job of boiling astronomy down into Upgoerish, and it's fascinating (in a writerly sort of way) to see how he manages it. He also gets full credit for not "dumbing down" the discussion in anything but a linguistic sense-- the survey of astronomy presented here is compact but mostly complete, including mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and inflation, and a good discussion of how we know those things exist. It's not clear to me, though, that this book would convey all that much to people who didn't already know the basic outline of the subject.

Of course, the counter to that is that this might be an effective outreach to people who like language games and constrained verse forms. The whole Up Goer Five thing was vastly more popular than I would've expected, so clearly I don't have a great read on the appeal of this sort of thing. Maybe there are people who will pick this up to appreciate a virtuoso display of formally constrained writing (it's certainly that), and end up reading astronomy books containing a wider range of words to pick up some of the finer points.

So, anyway, I wish I had a stronger opinion to offer on this. It's an outstanding example of the form, and if you're more interested in that form than I am, I definitely recommend checking it out. Which I know is the worst kind of tepid "Sure to appeal to people who like this sort of thing" review, and will probably result in Basic never sending me another free review copy, but there's such a mismatch between this book and my tastes that it's hard to say anything more.

drorzel Mon, 09/22/2014 - 04:41

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Did somebody say villanelle?

Up Goer Five is very useful from a communicative English perspective: it shows that complex information can be communicated using very common, and very simple words.

For a Japanese student of English, brought up in the 'you must use perfect grammar and vocabulary' school of thought, this is a radical and liberating idea.

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, Day Two

drorzel — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 23:29:39 +0000

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, Day Two

The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.

So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the development of better sensors for drilling oil wells. The techniques needed to protect against inhomogeneities during information processing also help pick out small signals when doing NMR of rocks outside a potential oil well, to help determine the composition and porosity of the rock. It's a nice example of indirect benefits of basic research. He also talked about using nitrogen vacancies in diamond for magnetic sensing, another very promising application of quantum effects to problems that aren't the factoring of large numbers. Ray also brought items to pass around: a chip with some superconducting qubits on it, and a small piece of artificial diamond with NV centers. Those were a big hit.

In the afternoon, we got a tour of the quantum optics labs at KTH, from Mohamed Bourennane, who had the group do a Bell's Inequality test with down-converted photons. The lasers and detectors were all set up, but he had visitors change the detector settings to do the necessary measurements; the tour group I was part of got close to the maximum possible violation of the local hidden variable limit (2.7 out of 2.828...), so quantum worked really well for us.

The last session of the day was a fairly wide-ranging discussion of issues with communicating quantum mechanics to the general public, which mostly talked about whether people who wrte about quantum over-emphasize the weirder aspects. The problem, of course, is that weirdness sells, and it's hard to find the right balance between mentioning enough of the exotic aspects to draw people in without being gratuitously confusing. At one point, I felt compelled to channel Matt Leifer and speak up for the importance of thinking about quantum interpretations (on the grounds that particular views of what's "really" going on with the math can be helpful in suggesting particular lines of experiment that wouldn't seem productive to people favoring a different interpretation). So if reality felt a little wobbly yesterday afternoon, that's probably my fault...

We didn't come up with any foolproof solutions, alas, but it was a fun discussion. My talk is the middle of three today, so I'm likely to be a bit distracted for the morning session. Especially since I just thought of a joke I need to add to my slides...

drorzel Thu, 08/28/2014 - 19:29

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Has anyone thought of a doable experiment to test the many worlds intrepretation of quantum mechanics? I haven't heard of any.

I did criticize Sabine on the grounds that holding a workshop specifically designed to educate science writers on how to write about quantum theory, without actually inviting anyone who specifically works on understanding the weirder aspects of quantum theory that actually attract science writers and the public, seems a bit paradoxical to me. The response I got was that they couldn't cover everything, which I understand, but it seems like a strange inversion of priorities to me. It sounds like you could have used someone of this sort yesterday.

N.B. I was not haggling for an invitation for myself. I could not have travelled around this time anyway.

The Internet Exists Because of (Schrödinger's) Cats

drorzel — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 05:56:27 +0000

The Internet Exists Because of (Schrödinger's) Cats

I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-science writer.

The hook, as I mentioned on Twitter a little while back (early on a weekend morning, so nobody read it) is that you have Schrödinger's cat to thank for the computer you're reading this on. The core idea of the infamous cat paradox is that it's both alive and dead at the same time, existing in a mix of both right up until the box is opened. This isn't just a matter of it being in an unknown but definite state, either-- it's really in two states at once, and that seems weird and troubling.

However, while we can't see quantum effects with something as large as a cat, we can readily see them with electrons. If you do a double-slit experiment with electrons-- the results of which are on the screen behind me in the featured image above-- you see electrons detected at single points tracing out a pattern characteristic of wave behavior. One way to understand this is that the electron exists in a superposition of two states at one: the state of having gone through the left-hand slit, and the state of having gone through the right-hand slit. The interference pattern requires both of these, showing that the electron isn't just in a single unknown state, but a mix of both.

(Obligatory disclaimer here that I'm doing an injustice to a number of interpretations of quantum physics-- Bohmian models in particular-- that look at this a different way. I'm trying to get across a fairly mainstream version of the key ideas, though, and only have a few minutes to do it.)

This superposition business isn't restricted to slits, though-- it also works within and between atoms. If you bring two atoms close together, and look at the state of one of their electrons, you won't find it in a state that corresponds to being on Atom A or Atom B, but a state that looks like a superposition of both at the same time. The electron is shared between the two, existing in both states at the same time (technically, it's in one of two combinations: A + B or A - B, which have slightly different energies, but each give a 50/50 chance of finding the electron on either atom). This is what leads to chemical bonds within molecules (well, one way to understand it).

If you bring in more atoms, this process continues: three atoms, and each electron exists in one of three states that you can understand as a superposition of states associated with each of the atoms. Four, and the electrons are shared between all four. This goes all the way up to macroscopic numbers of electrons ("macroscopic" being a term of art in physics that means "more than you'd care to count"). If you look at a chunk of a solid, and think about one electron within that solid, the state of the electron is not a state bound to a particular atom, but an extended, smeared-out state within a band of same, shared between all of the atoms making up that material.

And this is the connection to technology. Those extended electron states, shared over all the atoms in a piece of material, determine the electrical properties of the material. And understanding how those states work allows us to control them, which in turn enables us to fabricate transistors by butting together bits of material with different properties in just the right way. And the ability to chain together huge numbers of transistors is what makes computers possible. Thus, the computer you're using to read this is a consequence of Schrödinger's cat: if electrons couldn't exist in multiple states at once, the modern semiconductor industry would be impossible.

------

So, that's my attempt at a new "hook" for talking about the quantum physics of superposition and cat states and the like. I can't be 100% sure I didn't subconsciously get this from somebody else, but as far as I know, I thought it up while walking the dog. I wanted something distinct from my prior discussion of it with Emmy:

and this is what I ended up with. Bringing in a bit of practical solid state physics was a bonus.

But as I hinted at the beginning, there's a good deal of dithering about this. For one thing, calling the extended states of electron band structure superposition states isn't quite right-- you can write those states as some complicated combination of more tightly-bound individual atomic states, but for most purposes, that's a lousy choice of a basis in which to express the state. The more typical way of looking at it treats those states as their own separate thing, and not a combination of localized atomic states.

On the other hand, though, while it's not an ideal choice for calculational purposes, you certainly could choose to describe electrons in a material in the basis of localized states. And I don't think it's wrong to do so, at least not at the lying-to-children level where this explanation is working.

There's also a more philosophical sort of argument in that what Schrödinger was worried about wasn't really superposition per se but the probabilistic nature of the theory and the fuzziness about what constitutes a measurement for purposes of the quantum-to-classical transition. That's why it's a cat in the story, because a cat is unquestionably classical in most respects, but there's no clear dividing line between microscopic systems that follow quantum rules and macroscopic ones that lok classical. And it's true, I don't really touch that, but then that's part of an ongoing argument that's really difficult to summarize. But I'm also not sure the subtleties matter, again at the current lying-to-children level.

And, you know, if you were to construct a power ranking of arrant nonsense written in pop-physics discussions of quantum mechanics, this would be really, really, really low on the list. At the same time, though, my training as a physicist and an academic makes me twitchy about these questions, even if the only people who will be bothered by them are other academic physicists. There's also a question of internal consistency, given that I have previously engaged in nit-picking over fine technical points of another pop-physics writer's discussions of weird quantum stuff.

So. Dither, dither, dither. In the end, I think I'll probably run with this, because my qualms about it aren't quite severe enough to force me to abandon it. But it has led to a lot of waffling, and now to a blog post with both a sketch of the argument and a description of the waffling, with a handy comment section in which people with really strong feelings about this argument can try to sway me into abandoning it...

drorzel Wed, 06/04/2014 - 01:56

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I'm not sure if this is related, but I'm hoping it is. During my intro E&M class, there was a subset of problems that always kind of bothered me. They were the, "If you put a point charge X meters away from a conducting sphere, what's the electric field strength inside the sphere?" and other related questions.

The answer always depended on the fact that electrons on the surface of the conducting sphere rearrange themselves into whatever pattern is required. This bothered me because it seemed as if either (a) the electrons were rearranging themselves instantaneously within a material, or (b) for the purposes of an intro E&M course, we were simply ignoring that motion because it wasn't to the final state.

If the electrons are rearranging themselves instantaneously, though, is that a consequence of the fact that, quantum mechanically speaking, they're smeared out across the whole conducting sphere and not really localized?

The electrons do not rearrange instantaneously. There will be some finite time that it takes for them to move, and physicists routinely ignore transition states like that to ponder the final state. Because the transitions are messy, and physicists don't like anything more complicated than what can be shown on a cocktail napkin. (I was a physics major in undergrad and taught HS physics for 20 years, so take this with a certain amount of tongue in cheek, please!) ;-)

This bothered me because it seemed as if either (a) the electrons were rearranging themselves instantaneously within a material, or (b) for the purposes of an intro E&M course, we were simply ignoring that motion because it wasn’t to the final state.

The rearrangement is not instantaneous, but the relevant timescale is short compared to the timescales of interest in a freshman E&M course. Since the electrons will have reached the final state, or at least be asymptotically approaching it, by the time you make the measurement in question with the equipment typically available in an undergraduate physics lab, we can neglect the transition state.

But in a scenario where we are rapidly switching between states, the transition does matter. You have to worry about the fact that your multi-GHz clock pulse is not a square wave, because even with a rise time of ~0.1 ns that is a substantial fraction of a clock cycle, whereas you didn't have to worry about it when clock speeds were 33 MHz. So if you are talking about that kind of application, then you do need to worry about the transition state. Thus you are more likely to encounter this discussion in an electrical engineering class than a physics class: it may be purely a physics matter, but it's mostly the EEs who need to worry about it.

The re-arrangement definitely isn't instantaneous, as that would violate relativity, but it's very fast-- nanosecond sorts of time scales. This is true even for microscopic systems-- there's a modification of the interatomic van der Waals force at long range that comes from the finite speed of light, which means that the electrons within an atom can't re-arrange themselves quickly enough to perfectly follow the fluctuating field from another nearby atom.

("This" in my comment #4 is referring to the re-arrangement requiring a finite time, not the nanosecond time scale. The time scales involved in the retardation shifts for things like van der Waals forces are much, much shorter.)

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification, folks.

Go ahead and run with it. You’re not lying i.e. trying to deceive them into believing something that is not true. Presentation should be tailored to the audience. You can talk about inter-fibrous friction fasteners and perhaps even start a debate over whether it is inter- or intra- or if fibrous is too limiting a factor, but if you’re talking to an audience of do-it-yourselfers just call it a nail and everything will be fine. As for inconsistency, you’ve been confronted with some new evidence. What does a scientist do when confronted with new evidence?

@1 and 7:

It is often the case that freshman physics problems are poorly posed. That problem statement is missing the phrase "and wait until they system is in static equilibrium". That context is often only found in a chapter title!

Replies @2 through 4 explain why that is a reasonable assumption for a good conductor under quasi-static conditions, but no assumption is needed for a well-posed (as opposed to an "open") question. And if you think for a bit about the difference between solving for static fields or working within a very restrictive class of time-varying problems and the messy world of antennas and the presence of other objects made of real conductors of varying quality. That nanosecond is short for many applications but long for a cell-phone signal!

What I'm Doing This August: Nordita Workshop for Science Writers

drorzel — Tue, 13 May 2014 06:29:30 +0000

What I'm Doing This August: Nordita Workshop for Science Writers

I've been setting up schedules with my summer research students lately, and the main constraint we're facing with that is that I'm going to spend most of August in Europe. Part of this is pure vacation-- Kate and I are going to the UK for a couple of weeks. Part of it is the World Science Fiction Convention in London, in the middle of that trip, where both Kate and I expect to be on programming (though there aren't any set items this far out). And the last bit has just been officially announced: I'm speaking at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers organized by Sabine Hossenfelder from Backreaction and George Musser. The description:

Quantum physics is a notoriously challenging subject even for the experts. The goal of this workshop is to give science writers the opportunity to take a step back and gain a broader perspective on this field. At the same time, we want to give researchers in the field the possibility to interact with science writers and share experiences about the pitfalls of science communication.

Some of the topics that will be covered at this workshop are: Quantum computing, quantum optics and novel tests of the foundations of quantum mechanics, topologial insulators, tests of emergent quantum mechanics, analog gravity, the gauge-gravity duality and its applications in condensed-matter physics, and searching for new physics in atomic, molecular and optical physics.

I'm extremely flattered to be included with folks like Ray Laflamme and Seth Lloyd, who have forgotten more about deep issues of quantum physics than I was ever able to explain to Emmy. I'm also looking forward to getting to visit an entirely new part of Europe.

The workshop is accepting applications through July 14, so if this sounds cool to you, fill out their application, and maybe I'll see you in Stockholm...

(This also means I'll be at loose ends in the UK for a couple of days, between Kate's heading home and my leaving for Stockholm, so if you're someone who books speakers, etc. in the London-ish area and would like a talk in late August, drop me a line.)

drorzel Tue, 05/13/2014 - 02:29

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Looking forward to seeing you - it's been a while!

I know people in the quantum groups at Imperial and UCL, so I'm forwarding this blog post to them in case they want to invite you for a talk.

Music Writing and Science Writing

drorzel — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 07:44:36 +0000

Music Writing and Science Writing

No, this isn't another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it's a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing.

On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider "old school" (the name of this blog was influenced by his Unqualified Offerings, though he's mostly stepped back from that) had a long series of tweets about pop-music writing, responding to some arguments that music criticism has degenerated and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim provides a link to some attempts to apply music theory to pop, and later to an entire blog full of that. I also threw him a link to this detailed analysis of a nuclear-powered earworm:

(That's from a music prof at Williams, and I found it via a link from one of the college's many social-media feeds.)

Jim's main argument, though, which apparently comes from a book I haven't read (I think it's this) is that a big part of the reason why music criticism doesn't do more with music theory is that music theory isn't especially well suited to dealing with rock/pop music. The tools of classical music analysis and criticism are built around a particular type of music, arising from the Western classical tradition, and don't work that well for rock and pop music that grew out of a very different musical tradition. As a result, as Jim puts it, the best you can hope for is "dancing about architecture"-- fumbling with an inadequate analytical toolkit to give impressionistic descriptions of what's really going on, or else falling back to talking about social and cultural issues that aren't all that closely connected to the content of the music.

It's an interesting argument, not just because I'm a fan of rock music and very much not a classical music fan, so it speaks right to my personal biases. (I'm currently obsessing on the new Hold Steady record, and really looking forward to seeing them play live on Friday). But I also wonder if there aren't some parallels to the eternal scientists vs. journalists thing.

That is, in the blogs linked above that do apply music-theory analysis to pop music, you can see them struggling with the familiar issue of communicating to people who don't share your technical vocabulary. You can see where it would be a lot easier for the writers to explain what's going on if they could use their normal jargon, but they have to define things as they go. In the first of Owen Pallett's Slate pieces there's even an element of the disparaging "You think you want jargon but really you don't" thing that happens when journalists deliberately write "bad" pieces in what's supposed to be the style of a scientist. (To his credit, the later ones get better.)

It's definitely a tricky problem, and I think it's a contributor to the "degeneration" of music writing that people point to. You can't count on a typical pop-music fan to have any idea what a "tonic" refers to, or a "V chord" or any of the many other terms that show up in those pieces. I only have the very sketchiest idea of most of this stuff myself, as I never took music theory-- I played in the band all through high school, so I can basically recognize when a key change happens in a song that I'm listening to, but I couldn't begin to tell you from what to what. (On the one hand, I vaguely wish I knew more of the technical terminology here, but on the other, learning it would probably require an awful lot of listening to classical music, and I don't really care to do that...) So a classically educated music writer is in some ways in the same situation as a scientifically trained writer trying to communicate technical results without being able to use technical language

I also wonder, though, if there's a way to bring the analogy in the other direction; that is, a sense in which the oft-cited failure modes of science writing are partly due to applying technical and analytical tools to a subject they weren't really designed for. That is, it might be that in some ways writing about science is different than writing journalistically about other subjects, in the same way that writing about rock music is different than writing about Western classical music, and demands the creation of different tools.

Of course, I'm so fried right at the moment that I haven't really gotten any farther than that, and the next few days are going to be utterly brutal, so I'm not likely to produce any really deep and useful insights. But I didn't want to let this slip too far into the past, so I'll throw up this inconclusive post and see if it prompts anyone else to anything great.

drorzel Wed, 04/09/2014 - 03:44

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The tools of classical music analysis and criticism are built around a particular type of music, arising from the Western classical tradition, and don’t work that well for rock and pop music that grew out of a very different musical tradition.

Well yes, some of the tools don't carry over all that well. You rarely, if ever, encounter a twelve tone row or a cadenza in popular music. But many of the other tools have been around since Bach's time if not earlier, and they apply to any piece of music that uses the even-tempered tuning which has dominated Western music from Bach's time onward. A C major chord is a C major chord, no matter whether Bach or McCartney[1] wrote it. (Some 20th century concert hall pieces deviate from this scheme, and some hip-hop does as well, but most Western music, whether classical or popular, uses those same twelve notes or a subset thereof.) Twelve-bar blues, for instance, is defined by a certain chord progression.

It's true that your average popular music listener doesn't know musical theory, any more than he knows much about science. It's also true that people can enjoy popular music without knowing theory. But it's also possible to enjoy classical music without knowing theory. What theory does for some people is give them an additional level at which they can enjoy (or not) a given piece of music.

[1]McCartney didn't have any formal musical training before joining the Beatles, but he eventually did listen to some classical music--he got the idea for the piccolo trumpet part in "Penny Lane" from Handel's "Water Music". He also did make at least one attempt to write a classical piece, the Liverpool Oratorio.

I'd make three points:

- I feel like the better analogy is that trying to discuss classical sitar music of India with Western Music Theory is like trying to write about some of the latest biochemistry results as a physicist. There are several concepts (Gibbs free energy and rhythm), concepts that can be easily stretched, and those that require specialized knowledge in the appropriate subfield. Which isn't to say that the technical vocabulary isn't there, we're just less familiar with it.

- While Jim made a very interesting point about the limits of mechanical reproduction of music (with player pianos) I'd also argue that we were far more limited in how we could transmit musical information--now that we can accurately reproduce sound (we've made recordings) we've just hit a point where discussions about timbre are more relevant, since that's information that will be reproduced instead of being much more tied to a particular musical performance. As such, we're still in the process of codifying vocabulary to discuss some of these issues.

- I also wonder if part of this is not sociological. After all, the advice I've heard of good popular science writing, from Ouellette to Zimmer to Mlodinow, is that in order to really hook people into the science, you often need some element of human interest. There is, however, a strong countervailing feeling in science that "what we're building is agnostic to the scientist, it's absolute" to balance this. Pop music seems to be much more tied to the creator/primary performer, and perhaps lacks this as a balancing force.

Eric, the point I made in my Storify sequence, picking up from a book on prog titled Rocking the Classics, is that common-practice musical theory came poorly fitted to characterize the central features of rock-and-later popular music. Yes, chords still exist. Keys endure. Modes make a comeback. When I write songs I absolutely advert to commonly understood principles of harmonic analysis, for instance, and even before that, my ear is guided by the history.

But there's a compelling case - I'm not the only one who argues this - that what makes "rock" rock, the new thing about it, is that it privileges explorations of rhythm and especially timbre over explorations of harmony and melody. Vocal timbre and the vast sonic space open to the electric guitar, especially. And rhythm and especially timbre are aspects of music where common-practice theory, guided and limited by the Western notation system, has less or no vocabulary than it does for harmony and melody.

So when you write, "Twelve-bar blues, for instance, is defined by a certain chord progression." I read a dangerous oversimplification. 12-bar blues is partly specified by a certain (set of) chord progressions, yes. But it's also specified by a couple of different blues scales, none of which can be "spelled" according to common-practice dictate. (That is, using each letter from A-G exactly once over an octave.) And it's characterized by bent notes that hit pitches not precisely even on the blues scales. (e.g., if you bend the fifth note in a G-Major blues, you'll likely bottom out at a bitch below D-natural but above G-flat.) And it gains its power by the variation among clear tones, muffled tones, fuzz tones, etc. that have as much or more to do with timbre and attack than simple harmonic analysis can convey.

Perhaps someone could extend common-practice theory to include a well-specified vocabulary for discussing timbre. After all, Western theory has made great strides in finding ways to discuss polyrhythms. But I don't think anyone thinks common-practice theory has completed this work, or necessarily really begun it. Instead, there's a temptation to say, "Hm, 12-bar blues is a pretty simple progression of 3 chords that aren't quite diatonic to each other, so it's harmonically impoverished and devoid of interest, except when these jazz guys over here throw in a bunch of substitutions."

Is that clearer? It's just an elaboration of the argument in the Storify story, but maybe more useful.

Dammit, "below D-natural but above D-flat." Apologies for the typo.

*There are several COMMON concepts. (edit to above)

I also think Jim's comment about Drop-D tuning is going a bit too far--I'd think the scientific analogue would be someone going on about optical glass quality and the merits of sapphire vs silica in a piece on some new result on BECs--it's too technical, and of limited public importance. But that doesn't mean that discussions of more accessible things (like rhythm and harmony) are right out. It's possible to stick a bit of explanation of what's scientifically interesting about the Eagle Nebula along with just an eye-catching graphic.

I would note that I've heard exactly the sort of argument Jim mentions-- a long time ago now, I had an argument at lunch with a post-doc who was claiming that pop/rock music was inferior because it has less dynamic range than classical music. A full orchestra encompasses a much wider range of frequencies from high to low than you usually hear from pop music, which is generally restricted to what you can easily get out of a guitar. To him, that meant that rock music was inherently boring because of the reduced bandwidth, while to me, it seemed largely irrelevant-- while the range of chords occurring may be smaller, there's a rich variety of stuff going on that lets you distinguish between pop musicians, in the way that they play those chords. A fan of guitar-based pop will instantly be able to distinguish between, say, Richard Thompson and Eddie Van Halen (to take fairly extreme examples) not because one plays a different range of notes than the other, but in the way they play them, and subtle variations in how they process the music. Even people who write about this stuff for a living sometimes struggle to find a vocabulary to describe it, though.

a long time ago now, I had an argument at lunch with a post-doc who was claiming that pop/rock music was inferior because it has less dynamic range than classical music.

You and that postdoc may well have been talking past each other: in music "dynamic range" specifically means the contrast between the soft and loud parts. That's one of several ways to make a piece of music interesting, and the postdoc was correct that popular music, on average, makes less use of it than does classical music, mainly because it's easier to vary the force with which you are blowing air or pushing a string with a bow (as well as varying which and how many instruments are playing) than to adjust a volume knob while playing an instrument. But it's not the only way to make a piece of music more interesting. Rhythm, modulation, and timbre are also available. Jim is correct that rock music makes greater use of timbre than classical music does, but again, that's something that's easier for electric instruments (where there are knobs you can adjust) than for acoustic instruments (especially wind instruments--string players can pluck the strings or use the wood rather than the usual horsehair side of the bow); it's still there in classical music, where you might have violins playing a theme here and an oboe playing that same theme at other points. I may not be able to tell you on a blind listen whether Yo-Yo Ma or Mstislav Rostropovich is playing that cello part (though someone more knowledgable than I might), but I can tell you it's a cello and not a violin or trombone.

As for frequency ranges: They really aren't that different between a given pop music instrument and a given classical music instrument. The standard piano (used in both genres) can cover a bit over seven octaves. Depending how it's built, an electric guitar will typically be able to cover up to four octaves; the best wind instrument players might, depending on instrument, get about 3.5 octaves (some instruments less). If an orchestra has an advantage in frequency range, it's because you have a piccolo and a tuba available at the same time (as well as several instruments in between), but it's still about the same range, or less, as a piano. So in that sense, your postdoc friend was definitely wrong. Popular music may not always use as much of the range as a typical classical piece would, but it's there for songwriters who want to use it, and some do.

That misuse of "dynamic range" is my innovation; the conversation back in the day was about pitch, because it started from the observation that scanning through the radio dial in an unfamiliar station had made him realize that all pop songs fall in a narrow-ish range, while orchestral classical music covers a wider range. And I think that observation is true in a statistical sense, at least. That is, the average pop/rock tune falls in a band of pitches around the middle of the range of a guitar, with only occasional excursions outside that. I just don't think it's terribly meaningful.

Well, I count myself as the average music listener and I know a little bit about music theory, though I don't have the training the recognize the relevant pieces unless somebody tells me. I mean, I vaguely know what a D7 or a chord inversion is, but I need to see the chords written down to be able to tell what's going on. That having been said, this applies to classical music as well as to pop music, just that pop music tends to be dramatically simpler and makes up for this by building in other elements.

And since I'm typing anyway, I entirely fail to see the appeal of that song. And the video of that music prof is truly terrible.

Be that as it may, pop music is only partly about the music. It's to a large extent about the story that's being told, about the person, about the message. Take as an example this thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh4YLVNv0I8

Now remove the context and replace the lyrics with something irrelevant (you know, some boy meets girl whatever thing) and nobody would have listened to this.

Regarding the pitch range, it's one thing to write tunes for an orchestra with a professional choir and another thing to write a tune for some guy who can only hit three tones. Also, people like to sing along. You can shift a full octave, but if the vocal range of the tune is too large you have to skip in the middle which is awkward. Take Gotye's song "Somebody that I used to know". It has this awesome interlude with Kimbra, which is a full octave higher than the verses (guessing). I doubt that many people can sing the whole thing start to end.

You can shift a full octave, but if the vocal range of the tune is too large you have to skip in the middle which is awkward.

An example which almost all Americans would be familiar with: "The Star-Spangled Banner". The vocal part covers an octave plus a fifth, which is roughly the range of a decent (but not operatically trained) choir singer. Unlike most songs, this one is performed in different keys, according to the convenience of the performers: a marching band will usually play it in B flat, while an orchestra will usually play it in G. I can sing it without shifting octaves in the former key but not the latter: the low G is a little too low for my voice, but the high (for a tenor/baritone) F is no problem if I am in good health.

There are popular music singers with wider ranges. Peter Gabriel, at least at his 1980s peak, had a vocal range of at least three octaves and wasn't afraid to use it. And there are some popular songs I don't like because it is too clear the songwriter didn't respect the limitations of the singer (who may be the same person). I put most of Led Zeppelin's work in this category: Robert Plant has a good singing voice in its natural tenor range but an annoying falsetto (which most of Led Zeppelin's songs call for), and I have heard orchestral versions of that music that I liked better because they didn't feature Plant's falsetto. Beethoven made at least one similar mistake after going deaf: in the finale of the Ninth Symphony he asks the soprano soloist to sing a high B (almost two octaves above middle C) with a German Ü sound, which is almost impossible even for the best-trained soprano to pull off (this is not coincidentally in the most tedious section of that movement). Other songwriters are, shall we say, more aware of the limitations of their instrument.

Funny you mention Peter Gabriel. I'm a longtime fan - I picked up his second solo LP when it came out - and I just covered "Here Comes the Flood" at, basically, piano recital. (I'm a late bloomer...) And there was no way I was getting up to the high G# at the end of either the first or final chorus. Like most men who cover the song, I did the first chorus an octave lower, roughly, where even Gabriel does most of it these days. For the second time through, I decided to take the "It'll be those who gave their islands to survive" part up by...a third. And still didn't quite nail it in the throes of mid-performance jitters. :D

But! My lifelong fandom notwithstanding, for the top end of his range Gabriel relied on some fairly strained head tones and then falsetto. So I'm surprised to hear you compare him favorably with Plant on that score. To be sure, Gabriel's music has a much bigger place in my heart than Led Zeppelin music, but I'd have a hard time crediting that to Gabriel's superior pipes.

Besides, all us snobs know that McCartney basically anticipated Plant's entire bag of tricks in the Let It Be sessions. (Remember, those were in the can for considerable time before coming out, so don't go throwing the release timing of LZ I vs. Let It Be at me. ;) )

We're getting into matters of taste here, but of course each singer has his own pattern of overtones, which is how we can tell them apart. The overtones shift a bit depending on what part of the range a singer is using. I don't have a spectrum analyzer handy, so I can't quantify this, but I suspect that Plant's overtones shift more rapidly, and not in a good way, than Gabriel's when each goes into falsetto. And some people (I am certainly one) find some voices more annoying than others. It's the same reason most classical music aficionados prefer a Stradivarius to an ordinary violin: the overtones from a Stradivarius are particularly pleasing to most of the people who listen to classical music.

As an aside, one lesson my piano teacher bubbled with delight that, "I told my mom one of my students was learning a Peter Gabriel song and she got really excited."

The New SAT, Reading, Gaming, and Jargon

drorzel — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 08:20:46 +0000

The New SAT, Reading, Gaming, and Jargon

Given the academic circles I run in, it's not surprising that one of the most repeated stories crossing my social media feeds yesterday had to do with the changes to the SAT. Starting in 2015, the essay section will no longer be mandatory, and they're going to reconfigure the reading and math sections to emphasize different categories of questions.

My slightly cynical take on this is that changes seem to be driven more by marketing than education-- stories about this all mention that the changes make the new SAT more like the ACT, which has been gaining in popularity in recent years. Which cuts into the income of ETS, so they're re-arranging things to keep the cash flow coming. There's a lot of buzzwordplay about this-- "critical thinking" and so on-- but most of it sounds like the sort of stuff you come up with after the fact, to justify something you've already decided to do for more concrete reasons. But then, I might be a little biased, because the SAT's essay section was responsible for my first taste of Internet fame, back when Dave Munger and I did the Blogger SAT Challenge in 2006.

One interesting (to me, anyway, and it's my blog...) spin-off of this was a Twitter exchange with a former student, who tweeted "Memorizing big words is not a useful skill." I don't disagree with that, but it illustrates the big problem with the SAT's, and massive standardized tests in general. And also maybe a bit of a shift in the way we approach language.

What I mean by that is that I think the vocabulary section was never intended to be a memorization test, but a proxy test for wide reading. I say this mostly because while I did very well on the Verbal portion of the SAT back in the day (780, and this was in 1988 before they started "recentering" things), I never spent time memorizing anything in preparation for the test. I didn't really need to, because I spent a lot of time reading. A lot. Mostly genre fiction by that point, but really, just about anything with words in a row.

And the thing is, if you do that, you pick up a bunch of vocabulary more or less incidentally, and also the ability to figure out approximate meanings from context and other clues. Which is more or less what the SAT vocabulary section was testing-- "Here are some uncommon words, can you figure out what they mean?"

I think the original idea of the SAT vocabulary questions was to pick up those students who did a lot of reading, on the theory that doing a lot of reading (and thus acquiring a large vocabulary) was a good proxy for "scholastic aptitude." The problem, of course, is that this can be gamed. If you don't do a lot of reading, you can still do well on the test provided you're willing to devote a bunch of time to memorizing the definitions of obscure words. Which is dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the "right" way. Which makes it an attractive option for the indolent children of the idle rich, contributing to the birth of the modern test-prep industry.

So, to the extent that, over time, this has become more of a memorization test than a "reading widely" test, it's probably good to dump the vocabulary section. But the whole business remains in a sort of Red Queen race condition-- whatever they replace the vocabulary questions with will quickly be gamed in the same way that the vocabulary section was. There's just too much money around for it not to-- students will flounder with the new test for a year or two, but five years from now, high-schoolers will be doing something just as academically pointless as memorizing lists of big word, and ETS will start looking at new changes.

The fundamental problem, of course, is one of scale. The SAT is taken by millions of students at a time, and needs to be graded quickly and consistently. Which requires machine-gradable multiple-choice questions or the functional equivalent thereof-- even the essays get looked at for only a couple of minutes apiece, because that's the only way to power through that many tests.

This constraint opens the door for gaming the tests, and is probably part of why the scores are only weakly correlated with future college performance. Students can do very well on the SAT via a lot of strategies that exploit weaknesses introduced by the scale, but when they get to college and their work gets more individual scrutiny, the weaknesses hidden by the bubble-sheet tests get exposed.

So, what's the "shift in the way we approach language" bit? Another thing crossing my social media feeds was a post on Facebook from a scientist who had written an article that was (in the author's opinion) excessively edited, asking whether to argue over the changes. Responses were sort of split, with some people saying that it couldn't hurt, while others said it was futile. A few of the latter camp suggested that the editing was probably necessary to remove jargon terms.

One of the words cited as possible jargon was "herbivory," as in "behaving like a herbivore." Which made me sort of scratch my head, because that doesn't seem like an especially challenging word, particularly for an educated audience. And this was close on the heels of my "What Is Color?" post, which got a bunch of comments about my use of "disturbance" and "spectrometer." Which, again, I was a little surprised by-- "disturbance" doesn't seem like that hard a word (I wouldn't hesitate to use it with SteelyKid, and she's half the age of the target audience), and "spectrometer" is defined in the video.

And this seems like something where the expectations have changed a lot. In the process of researching the book-in-progress, I've read a lot of stuff about the history of science. Most of this is of recent vintage, but some of the stuff I read was basically popular science writing from the 1940's and 50's. And it's striking how much more the writers of that time expect from their audience, in an SAT vocabulary sort of sense-- they throw out moderately obscure words, and expect readers to roll with them. A lot of the stuff I was reading seemed like it would be flagged for excessive jargon by the folks who regularly opine on such things in the science-communication social media I follow.

There's a sense, of course, in which this is a good thing--the target audience these days is much broader and more diverse in a socioeconomic kind of sense. A lot of those authors also expect their readers to get allusions to Classical mythology, which probably wasn't elementary-school stuff in the 40's, either. I don't think it's a bad thing to move beyond aiming pop-science writing at folks who have already been to Oxford.

But at the same time, the collision of these two strands of my social-media universe makes me wonder if we haven't capitulated to the SAT-prep vision of the world. That is, we've internalized the idea that acquisition of vocabulary is something that happens through pointless memorization of lists of words, rather than as an organic part of the reading process. We seem to be much less accepting of writing that expects something of the reader, instead driving everything toward the Up Goer Five common denominator. And that, I think, is not a positive development, from either a science literacy or a college prep standpoint.

drorzel Thu, 03/06/2014 - 03:20

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An achievement test's goal is to exclude. A social activist's goal is to include. Given one million grams of diamond ore, one gram therein is product. How much exclusion is equitable?

End arithmetic; ask Siri. Do patois Siri done speaks?

Is herbivory really a standard word in that field? It seems too cute to my ears, I guess. Like describing something as "engineery" or "physicsy". I'm not really that knowledgeable of the field, though.

I've never really considered the idea of vocab as a proxy for being well-read, and the games played by ETS and the test prep folks. That's an interesting perspective. I remember the GRE more clearly than the SAT, and the thing that really bugged me on that was the disparity between the level of the math section and the level of the vocab. To get into engineering grad school, I have to demonstrate a mastery of algebra and geometry (stuff I learned in high school) and a mastery of vocabulary like mulct (and I still don't know what that means). I know there's a GRE subject test in math that goes deeper, but UF didn't require it and I didn't take it. (Not sure if it was even around in 2002, although I know the SAT subject tests were back in 1998.) It makes more sense from the perspective of being well read, and also being able to differentiate between the people at the end of the bell curve, but I still don't understand why the math test was so low level.

We capitulated to the "SAT-prep vision of the world" the very moment that it became expected of a student to spend time, effort and ... money, explicitly preparing to take the SAT in the first place. What you remark about your own experience, one which I relate to greatly, is that the bulk of your ability did not come from specific preparation, it came from your own intellectual pursuits. You might say it came naturally to you, even if there were specific activities which lent themselves to having prepared you to take the SAT throughout your entire youth.

Or, as the bulk of mankind refers to it, you were a smart kid.

So neither would it be a surprise that your kids should also be smart, whether by nature or nurture. Accordingly also not a surprise that your kids will know the meaning of "disturbance", "spectrometer", become fluent in the metric system and adapt more readily to the notion that light at a wavelength of 540nm is green.

What also does not surprise me, is that considering all of this, you appear to be out of touch with what level an (average / normal / random) 11 year old would be able to communicate at. The reason I am not surprised is not anything relating to your strengths, which are what keep me reading your blog religiously, but rather that this is just exemplar of the raison d'etre of the Alan Alda Communication Center in the first place.

Science does a generally poor job of communicating science to non-science people. That said, while I believe this to be true, it is also true that the other end of this un-bridged gap does not reach as far across as we would like - and this is precisely how I feel it all relates to the notion of changing SAT format.

But as far as that is concerned, what does it matter anyway? We only relate these scores to other students, and even then in the overall context of other information like grades, extra-curricular activities, etc. I suppose my point is that the real flaw here has nothing to do with the test and everything to do with some combination of our K -12 education system and our cultural values.

Test prep becomes nothing but a veil between the "smart kids" and the kids with the resources and motivation to prepare them as meticulously as possible. I took the SATs a year before you did. I did well, though not as well as you. My best friend at the time was coached and tutored and otherwise prodded by his well-to-do parents, and still did worse on his 4th attempt than I did on my only, un-prepared attempt. That he is now an MD-PhD, and I am only now finishing a B.S. should say all there really is to know about the worth of any standardized testing at that age.

This whole business of SAT etc. seems to miss the whole point of identifying if a potential student has remembered (or perhaps knows) the background information needed to continue on to college/university. I never had to take this, (I graduated from high school in 1947, went to local city and State colleges, paid my own way, gt a few scholarships, and still got my degrees and a good professional job) and the whole idea that people are making money out of figuring out how to ace these tests rather appalls me, among other things. Just for fun, I took an SAT-type test in the 80's, and found the math part really hard (I received only about 550 for a total score - embarrassing), and don't even remember any of the `lit' parts, that seem to disturb people these days. This trend of SAT etc. as a guide to a student's ability is basically pointless and demeaning to teachers, and just seems like another money-making scheme. Knowledge as a commodity? .

Great point.

The thing I loved about the original Up-Goer Five comic was how it seems superficially simple but really expects a lot of background knowledge. If you don't know what oxygen is, you probably also don't know that air has "parts" or that it becomes "wet" and takes up less space when you get it cold enough.

Tom@2 - That's because "engineering" and "physics" are already nouns. You don't need to create “engineery” or “physicsy” to get a noun referring to an entire field of things. In contrast, what single word would you use to refer to the entire set of things which are herbivorous? ("Herbivorousness" would be the property, not the set of things with that property.)

I'm guessing your impressions of cuteness are based on the predilection of baby talk to add -y to the end of words, e.g. "are you comfy-womfy in your jammy-wammies?", and the (related?) use of -y to make imprecise adjectives (sugary, splintery, fuzzy, etc.) That's distinct from the precedented usage of ending class words with -ry, though: Archery, forestry, chemistry, carpentry, gadgetry, pottery, etc.

rehana@5 - True. "In defense of jargon" arguments typically make rather similar points. Jargon is often impenetrably dense to people not in the know, but rather precise to those who are. You can try to replace it with "simpler" language, but you either end up with something that is vague and confusing, or something that's accurate but so long and tortuous that even experts get lost halfway through. If you're going to discuss something like oxygen in any depth, there's no substitute for having prior experience with the topic enough to know what all is implied when one says "oxygen".

Thanks to Obi-One in Star Wars, I suspect all 10 year olds already know disturbance (in the force).

...while I did very well on the Verbal portion of the SAT back in the day (780, and this was in 1988 before they started “recentering” things), I never spent time memorizing anything in preparation for the test.

Neither did I (and I scored in the low to mid 700s, a few years earlier than you), but there were companies offering SAT prep services in my day (at least in well-off suburban areas like where I lived during my high school years), and I remember at least one of the mailed ads claiming substantial score improvements attached to names of students I recognized as being in the class a year ahead of me.

I agree with William @3: once it became clear that, ETS propaganda notwithstanding, a student could improve his SAT score by using these test prep services, that became the preferred route for any student in a family with the resources to pay for it. IIRC ETS was claiming that the best preparation method for the verbal SATs was the method you and I used: read extensively, so that you would learn to decipher unfamiliar words in context. An ability to recognize Latin and Greek roots was also helpful, so they recommended taking a foreign language (preferably Latin, but Spanish or French would do--I took Spanish, which also had obvious practical value where I was living). But once it became clear that rote memorization of words produced the same effect with (for most students) less effort, it was game over.

As for SteelyKid, I also agree with William that her situation is not typical. She is at least average, and probably well above average, in intelligence, and she lives with two parents who have high expectations for her ability to learn words like "disturbance". Lots of kids live with parents who don't have such expectations.

For the record, from other context, I suspect "herbivory" was not an adjective, but a reference to the action of herbivorous behavior. Not "My cat eats grass, so she's kind of herbivore-y" but "Ed Begley Jr. is well known for his herbivory." That kind of thing.

I'm also not attempting to contest the claims that I used words that would be unfamiliar (though I'm inclined toward the "disturbance in the Force" position of Omega Centauri advocates); the oldest kid I have regular experience of is five-and-a-half, and she's pretty awesome (though not an off-the-charts above-grade-level reader, based on the report card that came home yesterday). I was genuinely surprised by those comments, though, for the reasons stated.

I also have no problem with the claim that test-prep courses and the like are engines of inequality. For that reason alone, it's good to shake up the test format every now and then, just to give smart kids with fewer resources a fighting chance. But short of doing an individual in-depth assessment of each kid as an individual, there's not a whole lot that can be done to prevent wealthy families from using the resources they have available to give their kids every possible advantage. I think we can and should do more to provide better resources to a wider range of families, though, and I should've commended the small steps ETS is taking in that direction, also announced yesterday.

I thought about the Star Wars reference before I commented about "disturbance". I had even seen it by that age. With that said, I still think that many might not fully grok the meaning of the word. I realize you could often figure it out from context, but if you're trying to explain a new concept I'd warn against it--they'll have less context for the word and they may need to break to think about the meaning of the word, which could cause them to lose focus from the actual lesson at hand.

They'd definitely have zero context for nanometer, though.

I read a lot with kids, mostly elementary and preschool level, and never have I had a problem with words being too hard. Often I've had problems with the simple text making the book boring.

This is both for books I'm reading aloud/share-reading with the kid, and for books the kids read independently and then talk about later. So I always recommend using the word that fits, even if it is a "big" or "hard" word, and trusting the readers to figure it out. Nothing gets my hackles up more than a review that warns that the text might be too advanced for kids because of a few unusual words, because it completely goes against my experience. But I don't know any actual data about this.

The kids I know range from smart (in the schools Gifted program) to learning-disabled (in the school's resource program). The oldest is now 15, so my experience goes back about 13 years. I still hang out with KG age kids too.

But short of doing an individual in-depth assessment of each kid as an individual, there’s not a whole lot that can be done to prevent wealthy families from using the resources they have available to give their kids every possible advantage.

If tomorrow we replaced the college admissions process with a detailed background investigation, during which time a kid's portfolio of work was analyzed, the academic resources that they had access to over their lifetime was inspected in order to calibrate for advantage or disadvantage, and extensive interviews were conducted to gauge intellectual curiosity, and the whole thing was done at no expense to the student, the rich would still win. They'd hire coaches to help the kid prepare for the interview, and also to ensure that their school essays and projects did not just get them an A but also demonstrated originality on whatever rubric the college interviewers will use.

Inequality can be addressed on the margins, but in the end it is a timeless fact of human experience. I say that not as an apologist, but rather as an skeptic. So much of what is ostensibly done for the purpose of combating inequality in education is really done to make the upper-middle class feel that at least they tried. I know that my own work with disadvantaged students is not a systemic fix and thus is really of the "at least I tried nature." But at least I do know it, so I don't fool myself. And by just doing what I can instead of making a show of trying to revamp society, I probably waste less money in the process.

Mencken had it right:

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-broke-underesti…

How well the S.A.T. correlates with future academic performance is only important when it's the only criterion for making that prediction. Which, obviously, it isn't, ever. Rather, its value has historically come from how much it improves prediction of academic success when added to an existing evaluation process.

College admissions already consider a student's demonstrated academic achievement. If the SAT is made to correlate better with future academic success by making it correlate better with past academic success, its value will not have been improved. From the College Board's press release touting how the changes better align with what students have been taught, this seems to be exactly what is happening.

I don't disagree with this, but I think there are things you can do to minimize the effects of coaching or other purchased aid. Oral exams are an effective assessment tool for a reason, after all-- when you can see how somebody approaches a new problem in real time, that gives you a lot more information, and it's much harder to fake it-- not impossible, but much harder, so that it would be harder to get by just on prep classes. The problem is, they're also really resource-intensive, and the gain in fairness might not be worth the cost.

If the SAT is made to correlate better with future academic success by making it correlate better with past academic success, its value will not have been improved. From the College Board’s press release touting how the changes better align with what students have been taught, this seems to be exactly what is happening.

I think the main value of the tests even now is not so much the scores themselves, but as a consistency check on high-school grades. That is, if somebody has all A's on their school work, but an 820 on the SAT, that tells you that either something is fishy about those grades, or the school is just really terrible. Likewise, a student who runs a C average but has 1400 SAT's is either the beneficiary of some amazing test-prep classes, or at a truly amazing school. In either of those cases, you know you need to look a little more closely at that student when making an admissions decision.

There's also a sense in which it can help students from districts with fewer resources. If a student from a poor rural area where they can't afford tons of AP classes and test-prep programs gets a really high SAT in addition to running an A average, that tells you that they're really very good. Provided, of course, that the distortion from test-prep gaming of the test is not too great. Which is why (as someone who came from a rural district in which I was the only student in two of the three AP courses I took) I think it's worthwhile to shake up the tests now and again to stay ahead of the test prep industry to the greatest degree possible.

I think the main value of the tests even now is not so much the scores themselves, but as a consistency check on high-school grades. That is, if somebody has all A’s on their school work, but an 820 on the SAT, that tells you that either something is fishy about those grades, or the school is just really terrible. Likewise, a student who runs a C average but has 1400 SAT’s is either the beneficiary of some amazing test-prep classes, or at a truly amazing school.

In each case there's a third possibility that will inevitably be pointed out with great enthusiasm, since this is the internet.

For the anomalously low score, the person might be going through a truly awful personal crisis that made it impossible for them to concentrate on the day of the test, or have some sort of severe test anxiety. Of course, the solution is to look more closely at the application, but justice demands that we point this out.

For the anomalously high score, the person could be in the "smart but lazy" category. Usually they say something like "I'm just too creative for this system, man. I don't do assignments, you know, in the conventional way." I say that if they don't do academic work in the, you know, conventional way, man, then they should not do the conventional upper-middle class thing and be admitted to college. They should go out and do something, like, unconventional, man. This will make them happier and also make some college professors happier.

Memory is hugely important for intelligence. Obscure words are just a vehicle and diligence is also being tested.

The problem is, [oral exams are] also really resource-intensive, and the gain in fairness might not be worth the cost.

It's not just the resource cost, either. Expect your legal department to have kittens if you seriously advance an oral exam requirement, especially if your school isn't already doing field interviews (and even if they are, it's a much higher demand on your field interviewers). They'll probably insist on background checks for everybody doing the oral exams. At least, this is what I have heard, unofficially, from the office that runs my undergraduate alma mater's applicant interview program.

Nor will it stop the super-rich from trying to game the oral exams the way they already try to game interviews (you had a rant on that subject a few years back). The "educational consultants" would have to work a bit harder for their paycheck, but they could give their clients practice drills, so that they'll be less susceptible to panicking in the actual oral exam. And unlike under the current system, they actually would be offering a tangible service.

Alex - Smart kids who are lazy in high school, where they are highly regimented and/or bullied and are expected to do what seems like arbitrary makework, may blossom in higher education when they are in the classroom voluntarily and are, to a much greater extent, choosing what they wish to study.

I'm horrified to hear that an editor of - presumably - a biology paper thought "herbivory" was too big a word for his audience. Good grief. But there is a horrific trend of trying to avoid having students encounter any new vocabulary. I have a friend in a humanities field who helped to edit a textbook in the late 1990s. The publisher asked that they remove the term "foil" - in the dramatic or literature sense, of A serving as a "foil for" B, because they thought *college* students would not be familiar with it. Well, now's their chance to learn it, right? Nope. And what we will wind up with is Newspeak. You can't think thoughts for which you haven't been allowed to learn the vocabulary.

And, for all the biases of standardized tests, the biases of face-to-face interactions can be just as bad. One person's "Energetic and dynamic" is another person's "Pushy and demanding", often depending on gender and race.

I don't want multiple-choice tests to be the be-all and end-all, and I'm fine with periodically mixing it up to keep the gamers on their toes, but I'm not sure we should completely do away with them either, for certain purposes.

Well, one thing that is different from before is the importance these tests are- or at least portrayed- for those taking it. Basically all tests can be gamed as long as they have a pool of questions and it is worth doing so. It is unlikely that something like this will escape being gamed.
My suspect feeling of why the Writing section was removed is due rather to the increased load of essay readers who previously only had to deal with PSAT and SATII.

Aside- I feel that one way to emphasis context clues and reduce memorization is to flat out invent words. (ex: for herbivory, rather than like a herbivore- have the meaning be for those that do not pursue a goal (prey) and are fine taking what's available on the "ground" for them- which is kind of how it is used in Japanese slang).
However, that might possible cause trouble given people's dislike of abstraction and those who don't understand and use the fake words seriously.

Also, there's a paradox of sorts in this where:
A) If they make the test more correlated with future performance, it will be more valued as a criteria.
B) If it is more valued as a criteria, the higher incentive it is for people to game (or outright cheat) the test making it less correlated.

Often a metric's good until it is tied to a quota.

"Starting in 2015, the essay section will no longer be mandatory, ..."

No wonder! Essays are still not susceptible to a computer' program's machine-reading and interpretation and grading. Maybe when Johnny's computer can read and grade essays, they'll return to the test material.

Oh, well, that's progress in the fool's paradise that is the technopoly.

"the vocabulary section was never intended to be a memorization test, but a proxy test for wide reading. I say this mostly because while I did very well on the Verbal portion of the SAT back in the day (780, and this was in 1988 before they started “recentering” things), I never spent time memorizing anything in preparation for the test. I didn’t really need to, because I spent a lot of time reading. A lot."

Fortunately, kids still read a lot. Many have read every single book in the Harry Potter series---and so did a lot of young adults without kids, by the way.

The essay question wasn't added to the SAT until long after I took it (yah, I'm old) and I always wondered how they could possibly claim to objectively put a numerical score on so many essays - especially if it's not just "A" vs. "B" etc. but a score with two significant figures.

Back when we did the Blogger SAT Challenge, Dave found some volunteers who did actual SAT essay grading. I don't recall the exact details, but I believe each essay got read by two human graders, each of whom gave it a score on a scale from 0 to 6. The scores got added together for the final grade.

The time they spend reading each is pretty short-- less than 10 minutes per. One of those old links might have more detail, but I couldn't find it quickly.

"For the anomalously low score, the person might be going through a truly awful personal crisis that made it impossible for them to concentrate..."

The solution to some brief temporary crisis is to reschedule or retake the test, which I believe is already allowed. I remember that I had the option of taking the SAT again a few weeks later.

For a really big crisis... well any such circumstance which would make it impossible to do well on a test during a several month window will very likely also make it wise to simply delay school because the ongoing crisis would disrupt that as well. There is some flexibility on the course of higher education.

I was one of those 'very good test scores, B+ grades'kids in high school.. and really the same in college. So I guess it was predictive. My 'test prep' was to buy a little booklet with a couple sample tests and take them timed to get used to the format.

It's not hard to game grades and extracurricular activities either. There were some rather dim bulbs with great GPA's at my highschool. Hard workers taking easy classes. I expect they did the same in college.

I'm rather dubious that we can sort kids intellectual prospects better than +/-20 percentiles with any cheap procedure, so outcomes become very arbitrary if rating differences smaller than that have strong effects on opportunities, which I think they do.

Science Journalism vs. Sports Journalism

drorzel — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 08:52:04 +0000

Science Journalism vs. Sports Journalism

Over at Backreaction, Bee takes up the eternal question of scientists vs. journalists in exactly the manner you would expect from a physicist: she makes a graph. Several of them, in fact.

It's generally a good analysis of the situation, namely that scientists and journalists disagree about how to maximize information transfer within the constraints of readership. That's a very real problem, and one I struggle with in writing the blog and books, as well. Lots of people will read content-free piffle, but if the goal is to convey good, solid science to as many people as possible, well, that's a tricky optimization problem. It's damnably difficult to determine exactly what level will work best, too-- conventional wisdom is that equations are death, but then, The Theoretical Minimum hit the New York Times bestseller list.

I wanted to pick up on something of a side issue, though, which is a comment Bee made about the contrast between science journalism and sports journalism:

One big assumption is that most readers have very little knowledge about the topic, which is why the readership curve peaks towards the low accuracy end. This is not the case for other topics. Think for example of the sports section. It usually just assumes that the readers know the basic rules and moves of the games and journalists do not hesitate to comment extensively on these moves. For somebody like me, whose complete knowledge about basketball is that a ball has to go into a basket, the sports pages aren't only uninteresting but impenetrable vocabulary. However, most people seem to bring more knowledge than that and thus the journalists don't hesitate assuming it.

Tom at Swans on Tea comments on this as well, and the book-in-progress uses a quote from Carl Sagan about baseball box scores to open a chapter about sports statistics. So this is another real and regularly noted problem.

I think the difference here is mostly one of frequency, though. That is, as I wrote a few years ago, the comparison between sports journalism and science journalism only looks bad when you think about common sports. If you look at more obscure sports, that are only regionally popular, the coverage for hard-core fans is just as inscrutable as anything scientists write. And if you find coverage of those sports in media outside their normal ranges, what you get looks a lot like science journalism-- lots of definitions of unfamiliar terms, repeating of basic information, etc.

And I think that's the key difference. If you don't know anything about sports, watching ESPN is bizarre and incomprehensible at first. But if you stick with it, and watch for a while, you can get up to speed pretty quickly, because there's so much of it. There are events in the major sports basically every day, and it doesn't take long to start to recognize patterns, and pick up the jargon from context.

Science journalism doesn't get that same advantage. Outside of special-interest magazines, the only place you can count on finding science stories on a regular basis is the Tuesday New York Times. And because that's a single once-a-week section, they can't do every science every week. It might be a month between stories about physics, and multiple months between stories about a particular subfield.

Which puts science more in the position of Olympic sports than basketball or football (whichever sport you want that term to refer to). If you watched coverage of curling in 2010 and again this year, odds are you got to see a basic "Here's how this weird sport works" promo at least once each year. And other than some upgrade in CGI technology, the 2014 explainer was probably virtually identical to the 2010 explainer, just like two particle physics stories from the same years. You can't assume familiarity with the terminology, because people don't have regular enough exposure to either curling or particle physics to get familiar with it.

So, the ultimate solution to the problem is just more coverage, more frequently. But then you run into the problem of trying to pay for the whole thing again...

Another possible solution, as Bee notes, is to do a multi-level explainer-- a really basic version of the story for people with no background knowledge, then a couple of more technical write-ups for people who know a bit more, and for near-experts. Tom is rightly skeptical that anything like this would be done by a current publication.

But there is a sense in which this is already being done, in that we have both general-interest media outlets (the Times, etc.) and specialist science publications at a variety of levels. For example, you would expect a story about a new physics result in Discover to be very general, with little assumed background, while something in Scientific American will be a little more advanced. Physics World will be still more detailed, while Physics Today will really only make sense to people who are physicists (though maybe not in the same subfield as the initial result). The hierarchy of stories exists already, and doesn't need additional expense to create it.

(There is also a parallel situation in sports-- that is, if you're reading the sports page of a daily newspaper, you'll find they assume a bit less background than ESPN, which assumes much less than a specialized publication about a specific sport. Hard-core football or basketball sites are about as readable to the casual fan as Physics Today is to the average Science Times reader.)

The problem is how to direct people to it. That is, how do you move a reader from the Science Times to Scientific American to Physics World? The Internet would seem to offer the ability to do this via links, but most media organizations regard links to other publications as slightly less desirable than painful and disfiguring disease. Any reader leaving the site is seen as lost forever, so they make it as difficult as possible to get anywhere else. Most of them won't even link to the source papers and/or press releases, which is maddening.

There ought to be an opening here for a sort of meta-journalism site, something that would aggregate and sort stories by their level of background, and present those links. But again, money is an issue-- how do you get readers to start seeking out that kind of service, in large enough numbers to fund the work of sorting and linking?

drorzel Mon, 02/24/2014 - 03:52

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One note that I couldn't fit into this in a graceful way: I do think there's been some change over time. Modern science journalism is fairly comfortable with the idea of a Bohr-type atom, for example, and doesn't go into great detail about that.

One of the many paper review copies I've received and not read is a collection of a hundred-odd years of science writing from the New York Times. It might be interesting to go through the physics stories in that, and look to see if there's a clear progression in the background knowledge they assume over the years. In my copious free time...

There wouldn't be any money producing a collection of science writings from the NYTimes. And two such places already exist regarding your metafilter: Reddit and Slashdot.org.

Is the change over time simply a result of science changing over time? I mean, 100 years ago a journalist would have to have a deep explanation of the Bohr-type atom simply because the model had just been invented. Today you don't need it because everyone has been taught it in grade school.

Conversely, 100 years ago (or so) journalists probably didn't need to go into great detail about the luminiferous aether theory - any reasonably well educated person would have been aware of it. Today, though, to discuss it in anything other than an aside you'd have to give a backgrounder on it, simply because it's no longer taught.

I think that's the key: you can't really expect the general public to have any more scientific knowledge than what they learned in elementary and high school. As science progresses, you change the curricula, but the people who've already graduated don't get the benefit. Science journalism lags as it has to deal with people whose last formal science instruction was 40 years ago, and anything that's been developed since is new and controversial to them.

Is the change over time simply a result of science changing over time?

That is certainly a factor. Twenty years ago, if I were describing how the aurora works to a layman, I would make an analogy to their TV screen, which in those days used cathode ray tubes. (Which is why TV sets in those days had depths comparable to the dimensions of the screen, so a 27" screen was considered huge.) That analogy wouldn't work today, because the younger members of my potential audience (who are spending way too much time on my lawn, natch) would have no idea what a CRT screen is.

But other changes also come into play. A hundred years ago, if your audience consisted of educated people, you could assume that they had some knowledge of Latin, so you wouldn't have to explain every Latin-derived word that came up in your story, and you could assume they knew how to form the appropriate plural. Today, few people learn Latin[1], and modern Latin-derived languages don't form plurals the way Latin did (Italian comes closest, but few Americans learn that language). So if recognizing a Latin plural form is important to understanding the story, you have to point it out.

[1]Or Greek, for that matter. Language evolution is at work here: people used to know that, e.g., "phenomena" was the plural of "phenomenon", but as much as using "phenomena" as a singular noun drives me nuts, I realize I'm fighting a losing battle.

Couldn't finish reading that piece. Whether it concerns sports or science, the number one rule is: write in an interesting way, so your readers don't give up after two paragraphs. Great job!

When I think about how, as an avid sports fan, I've been able to make the progression from Sports Illustrated to ESPN to Football Outsiders, it's in part because writers from Football Outsiders have been able to make inroads into the the more mainstream sites, and that's made me aware that the more advanced and obscure sites exist. So ESPN runs articles from this site called Football Outsiders. Or the bio of a writer mentions that he used to be at Baseball Prospectus, and I check that out. (And yes, both of those sites are going to be mostly inscrutable to the casual fan.)

You know, some sports journalism on the blog level tries to do rigorous statistical analysis. Poo-poo it at your own peril.

I'm not trying to run down sports journalism-- far from it. I actually have a chapter in the book-in-progress about the use of statistics in sports, and how if you understand what's going on with those, you're in a decent position to understand scientific statistics.

Sports punditry, now...

Clarification appreciated!

Here's something I wrote a few years ago, a different take on the comparison of sports journalism and science journalism:

http://cardiobrief.org/2009/10/07/october-thought-experiment-suppose-th…

Work. Finish. Publish.

drorzel — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 09:21:01 +0000

Work. Finish. Publish.

A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that's about it). I'm sure there's a lot of non-fiction writing advice that would seem similarly interesting-but-useless to the fiction crowd.

What's striking, though, is the universality of one particular line of advice, which shows up in lots of pithy forms through that thread. I'm going to repurpose a great quote from Michael Faraday, though, who was once asked what the secret to success as a scientist was, and replied:

"The secret is comprised in three words— Work, Finish, Publish."

The "work" in Faraday's quote is something distinct from the writing that goes into the "publish" part, but you can move the whole thing into the writing portion, sort of like one of those recursive-acronym jokes ("What does the 'B' in 'Benoit B. Mandlebrot' stand for?"). The issues are basically the same whether you're talking about research-leading-to-writing, or just writing.

Work. This is the absolute most essential thing. Whether you're discovering fundamental principles of magnetism or writing a book where you explain science to a talking dog, you need to do the work. Not talk about doing the work, not fiddle with calendar apps and word-processing programs-- do the work. If you're doing science, get into the lab and do some science; if you're writing, park your butt in front of your favorite writing implement, and write.

It's not just that you can't make significant discoveries or produce great books without work, it's also that if you don't work at it, you will never get better. That's true of science, where time in the lab helps you hone new skills and develop expertise that will be useful later, and it's true of writing, where you get better with practice. Even if your early work is crap, you won't be able to produce great work later unless you work.

This is the part of the process where most people fall down. And even people who are successful go through periods where they fail at this step-- God knows, I've had plenty of stretches where I spend more time clicking aimlessly through blogs or playing stupid mobile-phone games than I do working on research or writing. Stuff only really gets done when I consciously decide to do the work.

In a weird way, SteelyKid and The Pip have actually been helpful with this-- the productive activity event horizon they've introduced to Chateau Steelypips has forced me to be a lot more disciplined about my time-- I block out an hour or so every morning after dropping The Pip off at day care when I go to Starbucks and do work on my projects, with no class prep or chair crap allowed, and that has, surprisingly, turned into a really productive block of time for me. I don't recommend having kids just for this purpose-- though there are lots of other good reasons-- but by whatever means, you need to lock up some time as Work time, if you're ever going to get anything done.

Finish. One of the great things about science is that it's never really over. There are still people noodling around with scientific issues that were known in Faraday's time, finding new wrinkles in old problems, and I think that's really inspiring.

It's also a bit of a trap, through, in that there will always be some new thing you can futz around with, and some tiny lingering question you could investigate more. Once you start poking at something in science, there are an endless series of rabbit holes to fall down, all filled with wonderful stuff to explore.

Given that, how can "Finish" be sensible advice? Because there's a point where you have to just declare that you're done. You're never going to wrap everything up completely, and some loose threads will always have to be left dangling for the next person to pick up. Or to form the start of your next project. At some point, though, you have to be finished, or you'll never get anything done.

This is a hard problem, one I've struggled with from both sides. As a post-doc, I was the guy saying "Look, we are finished with this. I'm not re-doing the analysis from scratch with a new paradigm. We can do that for the next paper." As a junior faculty member, I caught myself doing the opposite, saying "I just need to sort out this one more thing..." about a project that was perfectly well publishable as it was at that moment. Recognizing the point when you're Finished is a tricky thing, but essential to success.

The same is true of writing-- there are always a couple of typos, or phrases that are a tiny bit awkward and could be re-written one more time. And there are places you could add asides, or objections that you haven't fully anticipated, or branches of the story you could go off and explore, and a hundred other ways to avoid Finishing. And at some point, you need to Just. Stop. You can never chase down every little lead, fix every little problem. At some point, you're Finished, and need to move on to the next thing.

This is another tricky point to identify. We had a running joke at NIST that the paper-writing process was only over when the latest round of changes was just reversing edits made in the previous round, and that's one indicator. Another good one is when you find yourself saying "Oh, God, I can't stand reading this crap one more time..." At that point, declare it Finished, and move on.

Publish. This is, obviously, critical to academic success, in that you need to have publications if you want to get credit for discovering stuff, and get a job. And it carries over to writing as well-- you're not a success until stuff you wrote appears. In either case, you're never going to be a success that unless you send it off to somebody to publish.

And, as with the Work step, the act of sending it off to others can be essential whether or not it leads to immediate success. Getting editorial feedback is necessary to improve in both science and writing, because that's the only way to find out how your work appears outside of your own head. Just sending an article off to a publication might not bring immediate success, but it will get you feedback that will help you be successful down the road.

This is one of those areas where I've been phenomenally lucky-- as I said over the weekend, I feel a little guilty when reading a lot of writing advice, because I've never needed to hustle the way a lot of folks have. I have a great day job that pays the bills, and the opportunities I've had to publish have mostly come to me, through an utterly bizarre lightning-in-a-bottle process.

But still, this is important advice to heed: your results don't mean anything unless you publish them. And this is another place where people fall down-- they have something all done, but fear either rejection or just hassle, and so good scientific results sit in a (metaphorical) drawer somewhere. There's really no excuse for that in the age of blogs and the arxiv, though-- even if you can't face the slings and arrows of Reviewer 2, you can throw up a blog post or an arxiv preprint with minimal difficulty. And the same sort of thing is true of writing-- if you don't want to deal with pitching stuff to editors (and have some sort of way to keep food on the table without doing that), put it on a blog, or self-publish. It doesn't take much effort, and can sometimes let you do an end run around the hassle-filled parts of publishing (as my publishing career and to some extent Scalzi's can testify...).

I've seen lots of people fail on each of Faraday's steps. I know people who don't have Ph.D.'s because they could never bring themselves to buckle down and do the work, or declare an end to their research and write stuff up. I know people who have been "writing" books for years without ever putting fingers to keyboard, and others who have endlessly expanding manuscripts that they just can't seem to stop noodling around with. And I know people who have done the work, and declared it Finished, but can't be bothered to send it off and deal with referee reports, so good work languishes unread.

So, whether you're a scientist or a writer, Faraday had the core of it: Work. Finish. Publish. They're not always sufficient for great success, but they are unquestionably necessary. Fail to do any of them, and you have no chance of succeeding.

Of course, even better than Faraday's advice might be this comment from Theyis, late in Scalzi's thread:

My advice: Don’t read a column like this just before you write. You will focus more on all the advice than on the writing.

Which is another way of saying "Get back to work." And once you're finished, publish it.

(It's also worth a callback to Harry Connolly's advice that I was talking about back on the weekend, specifically the point where he says "Nothing bad happens if you give up." If you really, truly, can't bring yourself to do one of these steps, that doesn't mean you're a Bad Person, it just means you would rather be doing something else. If you're too busy blogging to finish your thesis research, you probably ought to get out of research and become a writer. If you like the idea of being a writer, but never manage to put fingers to keyboard, you're probably not going to be a writer, and should focus on your day job.)

drorzel Thu, 02/06/2014 - 04:21

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