Vivat Libertas

I don't know where to begin with this, but I'll try: I am weirdly passionate about graphs. The idea that you can order numbers in space and time, and make them make lines and curves that tell you things, is simple - you're probably used to making graphs (and possibly heartily sick of them). It's so simple that I think we forget how powerful graphs are, that they take millions of experiences and put them in a form we can understand more intuitively. I'm going to put forward a proposal that will probably make most of you groan in frustration: graphs should inspire people. Okay, when I write it that way, that just sounds confusing. Inspirational quotes are one thing, but what the hell is an inspirational graph ?! I can't really answer my own question, unfortunately, except to say that an inspirational graph moves you on an emotional level. It reminds you of something beyond the graph, or makes you feel like you had an epiphany, or gives you some quiet satis...

Neoclassical economics is failing. I would go so far as to say that this is no longer controversial; its flaws have been known about for many decades now. Many, many fields have sprung from this failure - I would say that this is an extremely good thing. Some readers might wonder why I'm writing about economics at all. Importantly, I'm not an economist and have no formal training in the subject - I'm a vaguely interested party. I'm about as qualified as the pub bore (or most politicians) to tell you about the efficacy of various models; the difference is that I know I'm out of my depth. I am going to be discussing the perception of one particular field within economics, based on my experience with related fields. A more general concern is: why talk about the economy at all? Everyone talks about the economy. Everyone else is fed up of hearing about the economy, fed up of hearing about why the economy means that the rich have to get richer and the poor have to...

...Gravitational waves?! Yes, you read that right. The universe is alive - or should be - with the sound of gravitational waves. I'm very late to the party, but the LIGO Scientific Collaboration have released a video of the "chirp" black holes make as they spiral in towards each other and merge. A low rumbling quickens and quickens until it becomes a high whoop, the sound of two black holes crashing into each other (this crashing is technically known as a merger). For a brief moment the black holes are bright enough to outshine all the stars in the universe. It's a beautiful moment. It's beautiful to be living in an age where we can hear these things. It's beautiful to be able to detect these events within months of each other. The universe is alive with sound and light in ways we are privileged to see today.

I happen to think pop science gets a bad rap. It's regarded as dumbed-down science at best, or unreadable if not dumbed down (but seriously, how is Scientific American considered unreadably technical?). I can see how this bad reputation comes about; it's difficult to balance the deep technicality of science with the ability to entertain and inform a public largely unfamiliar with these technicalities. This isn't to say that the average person is stupid - in fact, patronising your audience makes for terrible science communication and angry reactions - but to say that science is heavily specialised. Writing about specialist concepts for a general audience is hard , and it takes time. So most of the people doing it aren't the people who have been working in these fields. In fact, they're unlikely to have any scientific training whatsoever. In an age where most people won't go a day without using some kind of scientific achievement, good popular science is more ...

Every time an article is posted about, say, the gender gap in certain sciences (physics and engineering are particularly bad offenders here), or the experience of LGBTQ+ scientists, the same kind of comment always comes up: why don't we just focus on the science? Why do we need to bring in politics or matters of identity? I think these kinds of comments are missing the point. Certain types of science, in particular more abstract or fundamental disciplines, don't care about the gender or race or sexual orientation of the scientist. The laws of physics are described by the same equations wherever you are on the planet, regardless of your identity. (More or less - the laws of physics as we've currently formulated them break down at edge cases, such as black holes, and it's not inconceivable that some alien civilisation might have formulated them in a completely different but hopefully mathematically equivalent way.) However, there is an argument to be made that a theor...

Our public discourse about science is terrible and awful. In general, it falls into these two highly exaggerated camps: Camp #1 : "Science is the only route to solving all of our problems and is going to show us enlightenment!" Camp #2 : "Science is rife with institutional bigotry! It is nothing more than a language white men use to make themselves seem smart and logical! Scientists don't understand the humanities and their thinking about oppressive structures!" Before launching into critiques of these camps and my own ideas about science, there are a couple of points I want to make: Regardless of how ethical science as a whole may be, it works (well, sort of works, maybe - I will get to this later). The reason we can disseminate and discuss ideas about how science is awesome or problematic is because we have electricity, semiconductor physics, the internet and a whole lot more, which is down to science rather than people commenting on science. Remember...

Despite the best efforts of science communicators everywhere, quantum woo is still prevalent, mostly peddled by annoying snake oil sellers and very much even on the fringes of pseudoscience. In that regard it's less harmful than, say, anti-vaccination propaganda or GMO scaremongering - which both have a far bigger platform. Unfortunately, its supporters are no less rabid. To them, quantum mechanics is a mystical tool which can allow you to do anything, and if you don't believe them, you're a fed. Yes, every practising physicist is now a fed. I was quite surprised by this as well. Quantum mechanics is actually fairly old and has its roots in the 19th century. Even what we think of as modern quantum mechanics was actually born in the 1920s and is at this point nearly a century old. Still, classical electromagnetism, which is about 150 years old, doesn't really have any accompanying woo (even if electricity and magnetism can be conceptually very difficult until you...

5 words a girl* never wants to hear: "My Matlab install's not working." *for girl, read lazy physics trash So I up and googled things and stumbled upon SciLab, which is good because it took like 10 minutes to install and looks a lot like Matlab on the surface. The documentation is plentiful (and man, I have never been more glad I can read French because about half the help documentation is French). This is good because I haven't done any serious data analysis since last June. Yes, it's been eight months since I've analysed lab data using a computer program. There are downsides to missing a semester of lab after all. I feel like such a noob! (on the plus, setting up scilab to take my data is about 1000 times easier now that I know how to program...but I now need to learn to get it to spit out nice graphs) Yay! By mucking around with style = a negative number I got it to plot points. But datafit is an actual function and I have to write actual code. ...

One of the reasons I really, really like doing physics is because it gives you an amazing bullshit filter, if you let it. All of a sudden the world becomes clear and sharp and deep, described by the beautiful and powerful language that is mathematics. Hopefully you learn the tools to tell the plausible from the just plain nonsense and try to base things on evidence. Because physics is shiny and wonderful and leaves people speechless, the awe of physics is popular and widely publicised. By and large, this is a good thing; I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to learn not just for utility but for pleasure, and to learn whatever the hell they please. Unfortunately, because most people are averse to maths (this is an utter travesty; numbers aren't scary), most popular science books gloss over or ignore the mathematical foundation of physics, giving people misconceptions. Now add that to the wave of stupid people promoting things like quantum woo and what do you get? A bun...

There is magic in this world. We call it electricity. OK, before everyone yells at me, I don't actually  believe that electricity is magical. I do, however, believe that it's not exactly easy to get to grips with how it works, especially when you get to things like flux and Gauss's law and the idea of shielding conductors. This is based on my personal experience and the fact that out of 300 people in my year, a good proportion of us are having trouble with our electricity and magnetism course. My year isn't stupid; in fact, we're probably the brightest cohort in a while according to the metrics my university uses. I go to the university where they invented graphene and where Rutherford overturned the "plum pudding" model of the atom in his famous experiment. Not too shabby. It's not like we're a degree mill. Anyway, the point is that even very intelligent people get confused by electricity and magnetism. In my opinion, this is because the c...

As pseudoscientific woomongers will never cease to remind you, waves are everywhere. For once, they're right. Fundamentally, a wave can be defined as a disturbance that travels at some velocity v. These can be travelling waves (which are self-explanatory because, you know, they propagate from one place to another), standing waves (the usual example is a plucked guitar string - the string is fixed at 2 points and so the wave produced ends up interfering with itself), transverse waves (the wave oscillates perpendicular to the axis of propagation, as in a light wave), longitudinal waves (the wave oscillates along the axis of propagation, as in a sound wave), mechanical waves (the wave travels through a medium, as in ripples on a pond) and nonmechanical waves (for example, light again - it doesn't need a medium to travel through). In other words, waves are all around us, from light to sound to pressure waves to ripples on a pond. I might sound like a five-year-old at th...

I move in circles where people don't really like science; they're constantly complaining about corporate science whores covering up the truth, working for Big Pharma, trying to sell us dopey pills and being slaves to the military. The irony of some of them doing this on their computers and smartphones over the internet while drinking pasteurised milk is not lost on me. (Incidentally, some of those who call themselves liberal or leftist have also succeeded in giving liberalism and leftism a bit of an anti-science reputation in some quarters, thus driving some popular science publications even more rightwards than they already were thanks to being propped up at least in part by industry money. Nice job breaking it, guys!) Anyway, now that I've finished insulting the people I was supposed to be trying to win over (nice job breaking it, Osnat! Next time, shut your big mouth and remember that no matter how juicy that snark is, it's not worth permanently offending the peopl...

So this March 3rd I was reading an excellent blog post about the hard and soft sciences (linked) and, well...it made me think, which is always good. In particular it made me think about what hard and soft science mean to me. I think I wrote a little before on the sciences and humanities and on linking things , so I'm not particularly averse to the soft sciences. I don't think they're evil, and I think they're important. (I do confess to preferring hard sciences, though, because they deal with data that is more easily quantified.) Actually, I'm pretty sure anyone who participates in the endless "my chosen discipline is better than yours" debate is wrong. Yes, even if they're a physicist. That blog definitely gave me pause for thought: I think often a lot of us in the hard sciences think our disciplines are better because we can use more quantifiable data (before anyone starts crying about the tyranny of numbers here, the problem with quantif...

Popular perception The public perception of the sciences and the humanities is that they're separated by some endless gulf. The scientists work nine to five jobs, and often longer, researching cures for cancer and string theory and all sorts of boffin-y stuff, while the philosophers and classicists either really think and feel , unlike those cold scientists, or they piss around pretending to look clever, depending on your viewpoint. Scientists do things boringly; philosophers and classicists have deeper insight. And of course, scientists think the humanities are too soft, while professors of the humanities think the sciences are soulless. Frankly, I think anyone who thinks that has a brain full of bullshit and, if they're a scientist or working in the humanities, pretty piss-poor at their job. It doesn't look like it, but both rely on the same skills of linking things together while also being able to analyse things deeply. It also doesn't look like they can help ...

I really hate it when TV presenters are the face of science programmes. You might be wondering why I actually care enough to make an entire blog post about that. Firstly, I should probably put things into perspective and combat the ills of society, and secondly, I should probably get a life. That said, this post (hopefully) develops into something vaguely important. The thing is, as a general rule TV presenters know nothing, or very little, about science. A programme may try to remedy this by interviewing actual scientists working in the field, but it still seems to come off as some Z-list media personality talking to the token egghead that they have to put in because it's about science and they have to make sure that it's factually correct, if grossly oversimplified. This does really not help public understanding of science - which is already sorely lacking. It's absolutely infuriating: people who know nothing about science get to show off some "gee whiz!" ...

Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am  going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it...

I don't really talk about this much. I probably should do, since it's quite interesting. I came across this tweet from Alom Shaha , talking about how having female role models doesn't make a difference to girls' appreciation of physics. Now, this is a massive problem - the ratio of men to women in physics is still quite skewed, but I'm getting off topic. He asked for thoughts, and since I have a big mouth and fairly good typing skills here's what I came up with . It sparked off a little bit of commenting, particularly when I mentioned the role of the media in telling girls to "shut up & look nice" . Two women, @RedRubia and @Queen_Claire , told me that nobody had ever told them they couldn't do maths and that they were very proud of being presentable lady geeks who had never thought that they should shut up, in which case, more power to them. @Original_Cindy  then claimed I was wrong (but hasn't actually put any evidence forth for th...

Let's get a couple of things straight. I'm a godless egalitarian liberal who distrusts big corporations and has a virulent hatred of Rupert Murdoch. So far, so good, right? I fit in quite well amongst the crunchy-granola ranks of fashionable liberals - perhaps, with my political compass score, I stand out from them a little: In short, I'm a die-hard left-libertarian. But now things get a little more problematic. You see, apart from being a perpetual doubter , I also like science very, very much - to the point where I'd like to be a physicist when I'm older. This already annoys some feminists - thankfully very few of them - who think that some of the most basic principles of science, such as scientific objectivity, are geared towards men. They're pretty much the reason why I self-identify as an egalitarian rather than a feminist. It also seems to annoy members of the wider liberal community, who think that the scientific method and academia are the stomping-gr...