Giovanna Tinetti is an expert on detecting signs of life across interstellar space. She has worked at JPL, Caltech and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and has just won an Aurora Fellowship to pursue her research on biosignatures at University College, London. We caught up with her as she made an exploratory visit to the city that will be her home for the next three years.
From Mary, in response to my request for more information about the scientists who gave us the YORP effect:
"O'Keefe was my father. He was also responsible for discovering that the earth is (slightly) pear shaped, for which reason, we received many lugs of pears for Christmas for several years. He figured out how to map China when going from flat to round was unusual (during WWII) and he figured out that a satellite would help us to map the earth. He said tektites were from the Moon, and when nobody would listen, we put it on his funeral program so he'd have one more chance. He liked Wyeth and always talked about his appreciation of how light looks red when it comes through smoke or fog, but looks blue if it bounces off. I found his earliest comments about this in a letter to my mother before they married; he had read Goethe's Farbenlehre.
If Richard Dawkins had been smacked around the head with the double-slit experiment at an age when his skull was soft enough for him to feel the pain, he wouldn't be suffused with such luminous certainty about how the world works.
Evolution, the fundamental theory of biology, is tough for some folk to swallow. But that’s because a bunch of old bearded guys wrote something different a long time ago – and because the intuitions of an animal that lives for 70 years can’t handle what complex systems can get up to in 4.5 billion.
But unlike quantum theory, evolution has nothing mind-warpingly weird about it. So the nature of the real world seems obvious to an evolutionary biologist.
We physicists know from bitter experience that it isn’t obvious at all, and there are quite a few prominent physicists who believe in something beyond the material world. John Polkinghorne is an Anglican. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is a Quaker. Stanley Jaki is a Benedictine priest …
So when a young theoretical physicist starts claiming that something spiritual is “obviously nonsense”, as Bee has been doing over at Cosmic Variance, I start getting uncomfortable.
Referring to research done at the Maharishi University of Management, she says they give their theories an “appearance of similarity to established theories” by writing down “fancy Lagrangians”. Then she goes on: “Though to us this is obviously nonsense…”
And I start to wonder. Who is this “us"? And how obvious is it?
Nonsense it may be, but obvious nonsense is not the same thing as nonsense. Even in mathematics what is obvious is not always apparent – as the GH Hardy story demonstrates.
When it comes to the real world, a sure way to go broke is by betting on the truth of statements that seem obvious.
As Des Browne strides up to me and demands to know who I am, the answer momentarily escapes me. It is on the tip of my tongue and will come to me in a minute, I am sure. But whoever I am, I suddenly realise, this close to Britain's combative Minister of Defence is not where I would like to be.
The occasion is a debate about the morality of replacing Trident, organised by one of Browne’s constituents, Father Joe Boland of St Matthew’s, Kilmarnock.
In opening the debate the priest had done a fine job of demolishing the pro-nuclear arguments. “The government says we don’t know what the world will be like in 30 years’ time, so we need nuclear weapons to keep us secure. But if nuclear weapons equal security, then every country in the world should have them.
“If Iran cannot have nuclear weapons when faced with an immediate threat from nuclear powers, what right have we, based on some future threat? It is sheer hypocrisy.”
Deterrence is doomed to failure, he points out, because it must work without error until the end of time. “We have been incredibly lucky so far.”
When Browne stands up he looks edgy but determined. The politics are complex, he says, and the morality unclear. We must resist more countries getting nuclear weapons, while those that already possess them disarm gradually and multi-laterally.
I don’t normally write much about the social sciences, apart from education. But some of the research results in these sciences are strange and interesting, and it seems a shame to do nothing with them. So I’ve devised a little quiz. I’m going to leave it up here for a week, before posting the answers and where they come from.
I'll also offer a prize to one person who gets all twenty answers correct. This is a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2007, which has eight hundred pages of contacts and advice on getting started in newspapers, magazines, books, online and broadcast media.
It’s a good book. So good I bought it twice.
Right, here we go:
Snail-racing is an action-packed spectator sport compared to watching the drift of Earth’s continents, which usually move just a few centimetres a year – about as fast as fingernails grow. But occasionally events quicken dramatically, and become interesting enough for a "desk-bound geophysicist" like Dr Tim Wright to pack his bags and go camel-trekking across a desert.
The whole awe-inspiring edifice has got "caught up in its own mathematical beauty", according to a review of Lee Smolin’s new book in the latest issue of Physics World.
Some string scientists have even begun to justify their evidence-free efforts, writes Michael Riordan, by offering a new philosophy of science "in which hypotheses no longer require observable evidence in order to be accepted as valid theories."
To a hardened experimentalist like himself, he says, "this is blasphemy".
It’s an unfortunate choice of word, since it seems to concede the relativist position that science is no better than any other story we tell ourselves, or read in ancient texts, while trying to make exactly the opposite point - that unlike other belief-systems science is firmly based on solid evidence.
What's more, it is not only experimentalists who would reject this new philosophy of science: You’d have a hard job finding anyone active in science who would agree with it – or disagree with Riordan’s telling comparison with another piece of non-science:
"If we accept string theory as valid while it evades observational tests, how can we legitimately rebut arguments about the ‘intelligent design’ of the universe? The honest answer is that we cannot. For these arguments too are not falsifiable; they do not allow testing by measurements."
And yet and yet… What is and isn’t science is not always clear-cut. The scientific method police can get a little too keen.
Scientists from Texas A&M and UC at Berkeley have just set up a "high-tech sentinel" in the Arkansas bayou, to hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker. The bird was believed to be extinct, but recent sightings suggest reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.
But the evidence is inconclusive. So the scientists have designed an intelligent video camera and image filtering system, which they are prepared to leave searching the woods for the elusive woodpecker for years and years and years.
Is that science?
Well patient search by people who call themselves scientists is a common activity, whether the objects sought are woodpeckers, gravitational waves, Higgs bosons or the Loch Ness Monster. But it’s not an activity that fits easily into the scientific method slot.
The scientific method was best described by Richard Feynman in a 1960s lecture to a classful of awestruck students: "In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this law we’ve guessed is right, that this would imply.
"Then we compare the computation results to nature ... compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
"It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong."
What the woodpecker watchers are doing bears little resemblance to that model. Their hypothesis that the ivory-billed woodpecker survives somewhere in the bayou is not falsifiable. No real-world test could prove it wrong. So are their efforts not science?
It is not an accusation that has been made, as far as I know, against the woodpecker scientists. But it was levelled rather strongly against SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, whose scientists have been conducting an almost identical activity for decades. (Except of course that they’re not looking for radio signals from distant woodpeckers.)
"I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses," says Michael Crichton. "The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion."
But SETI pioneer Frank Drake is equally robust: "There is no way by our search that we can prove there are not intelligent creatures in space. Even if we made the most extensive possible radio search and found nothing, perhaps there are civilisations out there which don’t transmit radio.
"So we cannot prove the negative. And some people say that means SETI is not science. Well, I think that’s just playing games with words."
I agree with Drake*. And not just because Crichton is better at science fiction than fact - being the best-selling author of Jurassic Park and a prominent climate-change denier.
But it does leave you wondering exactly what is science and what isn’t. And who decides.
If we insist on the scientific method, that consigns intelligent design and string theory to the fairy-stories file, but it also takes out SETI and the woodpecker watchers, among a host of other honest endeavours.
If we relax the criterion too much, we open the door to the cargo cults, a supernatural designer with a strange fondness for hairless monkeys, and far more parallel universes than there are particles in the one we are just beginning to know.
Going back to my previous post, it's easy to figure out what art is. Art is what artists do and call - or sometimes don't call - art.
So is science whatever scientists do and call science?
Quick quiz. Which are science?
a) Ivory-billed woodpecker watch
b) Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)
c) Hunt for the Loch Ness Monster
d) Human-induced climate change
e) String theory
f) Intelligent design
(I go with yes, yes, yes, yes, maybe and no.)
* I’d like to share a few more words from Frank Drake, not because they shed light on what is science and what isn't - but just because they’re great words:
"I often think, as we’re observing and these little blips appear on the screen, that we are very much like people in the forest somewhere, with the wind blowing and the leaves rustling. Perhaps we hear in the distance human shouting, for a brief moment. But we can’t be sure.
"It could well be that that’s exactly what’s happening in our galaxy."
- Oooh, your IQ is 145? I like 'em beautiful and dumb!
- By looking at you I can tell you're 36-25-36 which, by the way, are all perfect squares.
- According to the second law of thermodynamics, you're supposed to share your hotness with me.
- I wish I was your differential, because then I'd be touching all your curves.
- But enough about me, let's talk about mu.
- What say we skip this nerd-fest and hit an all-night symposium on Euclidean Geometry?
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