A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'

Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.

This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.

So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.

Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.

By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public  (scientifically published) Science .

They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.

Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality,  were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.

In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.

Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.

By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.

And more than a century later, still is.

In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .

Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.

Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.

 But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.

Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

The Who, What, Where, When of Climate Change I leave to others : I seek the "Why"

The Climate Wars are but the latest skirmish in an old, old war.

But with the stakes never higher, righteous anger fills both sides, each convinced that the other will lead their planet to rack and ruin.

I am Canadian, but I hate hockey and you will certainly see no climate hockey sticks here - nor any other peer-reviewed science either.


But I am passionately interested in the "Popular Science" of the Climate Change debate ----seeing it as the latest public expression of two wildly different and long-standing world-views/ philosophies/ ideologies/ theologies - call them what you will.

In my view, "all quarrels are about axioms and only about axioms", so I intend to peel back the hidden assumptions that fuel the animus ,found on both sides of the global warming debate.

There are hundreds of blog sites out there that are daily, nay hourly, actively reporting on the climate change front.

I don't share their collective passion for dissecting the details in scientific and quasi-scientific papers and reports, unfortunately.

But as a political science graduate and a long time politician, I feel much more comfortable putting this recent skirmish - maybe, at best, only ten years old - in its historical context.

For these clashing world-views are, at least in my view, as old as the human species itself.....

POPULAR SCIENCE has always included people talking to scientists as well as scientists talking to people ...

   HALIFAX - Professor Bernie Lightman, the editor of the prestigious history of science journal ISIS, told the 150th anniversary lecture celebration of the Nova Scotia Institute of Science (NSIS) at Kings College University on May 7th, that Victorian popularizers of Science encompassed far more types of individuals and organizations than the well known science practicioner-popularizers like Thomas Huxley that most histories of Victoria science popularization begin and conclude with.
  In speaking to the NSIS of non-scientists who dared speak in public about the sacred religion of Science (all bow), Lightman was in a very real sense, speaking to the converted.

   But Lightman's account of the extraordinarily wide variety of Victoria popularizers was a rebuke to popular science as it is regarded today, where most of those allowed to write about science are either prominent scientists or prominent science journalists.
   It is no game for amateurs both editors and readers seem to say.
   Perhaps in the area of popular science books, this is definitely true.
   But citizen amateurs are writing lots about science in blogs and being seriously read - to adapt an old joke about the Internet: 'on the Internet, no one knows you're a blog'.
   Meaning that visually, the blog of the top science journalist at the New York Times, of a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or from Josephine Blow from down the road , all tend to look alike.
   The blogging price of entry starts low and it starts free and neither Nobel Prize-winning academic footnoting nor mega media corporate money will enable any blog to separate themselves from their lessors.
   A future century's Dr Lightman will , beyond a doubt, be looking at blogs rather than lecture halls and Powerpoint magic lantern shows to locate the nexus of popular scientific debate in the 21st century....

WWII caused by Bad Faith Scientists preferring "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" to "TRUTH,TRUTH,TRUTH"

   After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was   perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.

   Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
   (Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
    It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
   There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
   Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
   It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
   They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well  respected for doing so.
   Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
  They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
  
 
  
  
  

Causes of WWII: what we learn at 15 we never forget, UNFORTUNATELY...

   WWII was run by the High School physics of 1895 , run by old Isaac Newton himself - his last hurrah.

  This is because WWII was, in particular, an old man's war - almost all the world leaders were in their sixties or even older  (hello Marshal Petain !)

   These old men had all been young once.

   And in many ways - many unfortunate ways - they still were.

   We learn best - and never forget - what we learn around age 15.

    So, half a century earlier, all the world's leaders, in every field of endeavor, had all been in high school learning the state of art of Science, as least as high school science teachers understood and taught it.

   In 1895, HS teachers understood and taught state of the art science just as the leaders of 1895 Science understood the state of the art as well.

   But this happy meeting of minds: from the world's top scientists to the dumbest of 15 year old (unwilling) HS physics student was about to end.

   From now on, after 1895, the world's top scientists would have to grapple with new, unexpectedly highly complex, verities to replace Newton's old HS-physics -simple verities.

   And if they found these new complicated verities unpalatable, imagine how much more so did the average HS science teacher find them to be.

   First to understand, even dimly ; difficult but possible.

   Then to demonstrate them physically : virtually impossible, even with the best most expensive university equipment.

   Above all to set as exam questions for 15 year old minds, to render forth, inside of two hours, as correctly completed equations.

    Simply not possible : the only correct answer any student /teacher/Nobel prize winner can say - thanks to post-1895 Science - is that "the photon is both a wave and a particle and as to where it is and was it it is, at any moment of time,  is as good your guess ,teacher, as it is mine."

   Not the sort of answers that parents and employers want to hear, nor the sort of answer that science teachers want to produce, if they expect to paid well and much respected.

   So,it was not just the old men who ran WWII, but all the young men and women running the actual scientific side of the war, who continued to be taught in, and at least half believe, the old Newtonian verities.

  Still are taught them, in fact !

  This more than 100 years after they began to be seen, at best, as merely an approximately correct version of a sub section of real physics (IE relativity and quantum physics).

  Published Science - in GCR's definition of that term - IE published in peer-reviewed ,credible, journals in basic science, changed greatly, after 1895 ,without really impacting the world at all  ---- in the physical sense.

  Even its intellectual impact was muted until the 1980s - if even then.

  Popular Science ran WWII - which is to say Science as understood by the general population - including Prime Ministers, Presidents and dictators.

   And that Popular Science still saw humanity's ability to mold and re-shape Nature and Reality in such exalted, unrealistic, fashion that it led the leaders of the world 1939-1945 into History's most horrific war, simply by extrapolating what they had been taught 50 years earlier in science classes.

   To make these distant events seem more pertinent to today (and tomorrow) : the old men running the world today also last learned what little science they know 50 years ago - back before the rise of the environmental science for example.

   Inside their perpetually-15-year-old-minds, the remnants of  optimistic 1950s-era science still can't understand what this fuss about Climate Change is all about......

   

SPOIL your child and raise a DENIER

Michael Marshall

DENIERS are not 'Anti-Science'.

Tens of thousands of my friends in the world of POPULAR SCIENCE all think so, all say so.

Over and over.

But they are all wrong.

Deniers love science - their kinda science.

It is just yours and my kind of science they loathe.

The kind of Science that says to them: "NO", "YOU CAN'T" .

"PLEASE EAT YOUR PEAS", "PLEASE TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE", "PLEASE BE NICE TO YOUR GRANDMOTHER" .

The kind of science they like is not "CAN'T" science , but "CAN" science.

"OH, DARLING YOU DON'T HAVE TO EAT YOUR PEAS, IF THEY UPSET YOU SO MUCH - WE WILL MAKE YOU SOMETHING YOU LIKE".

 "JUST RUN ALONG WITH YOUR FRIENDS, DEAR, I WILL TIDY YOUR ROOM INSTEAD."

Spoil your child, dote on your child, folks, and I will guarantee that
you will raise yourself a DENIER, someone who thinks the whole world-  Hell, the whole Universe - is theirs on a platter.

Woe to any bunch of jumped-up scientists who dares deny these spoiled adults their right to despoil the Earth and then move onto new planets and asteroids to clearcut and stripmine.

These tantrum-trained mental two years olds are merely denying your right to deny them their rights to do what ever they want, when ever they want, where ever they want....

My job isn't "inside the BELTWAY" ...

Michael Marshall

My job, as I see it , isn't "inside the BELTWAY" of peer-reviewed science.

Whenever I do peer inside that Beltway (ie when reading the articles in our leading science journals) I see little to complain about.

And I am a great one for complaining.

Instead I see provisional results, I see uncertainty, doubts, probabilities, possibilities, unknowns.

I see, in other words, scientists admitting that there are limits and restraints on what we can know and what we can do vis a vis the physical world.

(I am not naive and I know that these admissions are themselves frequently only provisional, necessitated by the need to be accepted into peer-reviewed journals.)

No, my concern is the science of our day-to-day world (POPULAR rather than PUBLIC science in my definition of those terms) and here I see big, literally "Life-Threatening", problems.

Most of us pick up what little notions of science's potential and methods we retain, from textbook teaching in high school or from a few undergraduate intro courses.

We supplement this with the occasional news item  and magazine article, perhaps even with that best-seller book from that famous scientist we've seen on the telly.

Out here in the real world, the science we get is still mostly Whiggish Science, Newtonian Science , a science that sunnily dismisses any possibility of limits to Man's knowledge of reality (given enough time and money thrown at the scientists' labs).

(Let me give you a mild example, from an article I recently read with admiration, until this short passage jarred me into alarm ; it's
from STEVEN WEINBERG, Nobel prize winner and a key architect of The Standard Model of physics:

"...I think that we'll get to the point where there are no puzzles of this sort. And that will be quite a remarkable turning point in the intellectual history of the human race."

To his credit, Dr Weinberg didn't quite say the physicists' equivalent of the medical doctors' "we can close the book on infectious disease", but in his quiet, cautious way, he came damn close.)

Most other examples are far more blatant.

And I see all this hot air hubris as what is driving our world to meet its Climate-Changed-Doom.

Not so oddly enough (given my previously stated lack of naivety) most of this Blue Sky Science wind is generated by the same chappies as what wrote those carefully constipated peer-reviewed articles: Drs Hyde & Jeckel, PhD,FRS .

My job then is to expose split-personality scientists and ask the real one to stand up: either stand up and admit they really see no limits to what Man can do or stand up and reaffirm that Reality will always be a bit of a mirage forever slightly beyond our grasp.

That is, I only want our scientists to be consistent: to say outside the Beltway of peer-reviewed journals what they say inside it.

Is that too much to ask ?

And once our Stevensonian pair have made their admissions , we will then be better forearmed as how to trust their handling of the Climate Change brief....

PROVIDENTIAL science versus PROVISIONAL science

Michael Marshall

Traditionally the popular face of science has always been badly out of sync with the public face of science.

Surprisingly, popular science (science talk for non-scientists or  junior-level scientists) does not primarily come from quickie 800 word news columns from the conventional media's science popularizers.

Instead that science talk originates from the big fat hardcover books ,written by many of science's most respected practitioners.

Unfortunately, in the past, the accurate science in these books -- usually written by major prize-winners well into their dotage --- always tends to be mixed with a great deal of overly-optimistic blue sky imaginings.

Most of the book could never get accepted as articles by any peer-reviewed journal --- but other scientists have generally been reluctant to say as much --- because these are the past or current heroes of their own profession.

Most of these other scientists realize these books are simply crass tools to 'sell science' to a skeptical taxpayer and to tired businessman.

It is Whig Science - triumph piled on top of triumph, ever upward and onward- 'people, can't you just smell the sizzle from them there steaks??'

As all scientists benefit if the general public continues to regard science as well worth the money we spend on it, scientists generally bury their scruples and keep their doubts to themselves.

As a result , the con continues.

And very effectively too, because we readers are disabused from holding doubts about the optimistically windy parts, by the honored name on the cover ---- and by the silence from other scientists.

In turn, those books are read -- and absorbed into their efforts --  by science journalists and the editors of undergraduate textbooks, and by high school science teachers.

Thus it is the only science that most of us non-scientists ever learn.

As such, this science is resolutely old-school 19th century newtonian in tenor, and is portrayed as the one human activity we could rely upon to give reliable, exact answers.

Its Laws of Nature are conveyed as if  Providential and carved as a concise formula onto tablets of stone for all eternity, by whatever or whoever is the atheist equivalent of the Jehovah of Moses.

That was then, this is now.

Thankfully ,the popular face of the newer science is increasingly being cast in the style of the public face of both the old and the science.

 Science, in its public face, (scientists talking to other scientists on their same peer-level) has always been cautious and tentative.

Which is a 'Good-Thing', because that is the reality of reality and so should be the reality of science.

This cautious style can be seen in the style of any article found in science's peer-reviewed  journals.

Here the Laws of Nature are more properly represented as Provisional as yesterday's promises from a politician.

Newer science practitioners are much more willing to reveal the uncertain and tentative public face of science in the popular works they write for the general public and this can only be a good thing.

However there is hundreds of years of the old-school Blue Sky popular science still out there to fight against and this is what leading, more than anything else, to today's 'war between the sciences'.

Many of us can't get our heads around the blunt - but finally honest - messages we are getting from today's working scientist , because we have grown up with 70 or more years of windy optimism from POP Science.

That's where the DENIERS are coming from: they have been lied to for so many decades by science that they can't tell now when it is finally telling the truth.....