Science After Sunclipse

In the appendix to a paper I am currently co-authoring, I recently wrote the following within a parenthetical excursus:

When talking of dynamical systems, our probability assignments really carry two time indices: one for the time our betting odds are chosen, and the other for the time the bet concerns.

A parenthesis in an appendix is already a pretty superfluous thing. Treating this as the jumping-off point for further discussion merits the degree of obscurity which only a lengthy post on a low-traffic blog can afford.

Continue reading ‘Of Two Time Indices’

Need to cite Twitter posts in your LaTeX documents? Of course you do! Want someone else to modify the utphys BibTeX style to add a “@TWEET” option so you don’t have to do it yourself? Of course you do!

Style file:

• utphystw.bst

Example document:

\documentclass[aps,amsmath,amssymb]{revtex4}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,hyperref}

\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{utphystw}

\title{Test}
\author{Blake C. Stacey}
\date{\today}

\begin{abstract}
Only a test!
\end{abstract}

\maketitle

As indicated, this is only
a test.\cite{stacey2011,sfi2011}

\bibliography{twtest.bib}

\end{document}

And the example bibliography file:

@TWEET{stacey2011,
       author={Blake Stacey},
       authorid={blakestacey},
       year={2011},
       month={July},
       day={25},
       tweetid={95521600597786624},
       tweetcontent={I find it hard to tell, in some
                     areas of science, whether I am
                     a radical or a curmudgeon.}}

@TWEET{sfi2011,
       author={anon},
       authorid={OverheardAtSFI},
       year={2011},
       month={June},
       day={23},
       tweetid={84018131441422336},
       tweetcontent={The brilliance of the word
                     ``Complexity'' is that it
                     means just about anything
                     to anybody.}}

PDF output:

• twtest.pdf

You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to have all the course materials necessary for a good, solid undergraduate physics degree available online, free to access and licensed in a way which permits reuse and remixing. I’d like it all in one place, curated, with paths through it mapped out to define a curriculum. When I say all the course materials, I mean that this webzone should have online textbooks; copies of, or at least pointers to, relevant primary literature; video lectures; simulation codes; sample datasets on which to practice analysis; homework and exam problems with worked-out solutions; interactive quizzes, so we can be trendy; and ways to order affordable experimental equipment where that is possible, e.g., yes on diffraction gratings, but probably no on radioactive sources. I’m talking about physics, because that’s what I nominally know about, but I’d like this to encompass the topics which I got sent to other departments to learn about, like the Mathematics Department’s courses in single- and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, group theory, etc.

One way to think about it is this: suppose you had to teach a physics class to first- or second-year undergraduates. Could you get all the textual materials you need from Open-Access sources on the Web? Would you know where to look?

What with Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare, review articles on the arXiv, science blogs, the Khaaaaaan! Academy and so forth, we probably already have a fair portion of this in various places. But the operative word there is various. I, at least, would like it gathered together so we can know what’s yet to be done. With a project like, say, Wikipedia, stuff gets filled in based on what people feel like writing about in their free time. So articles grow by the cumulative addition of small bits, and “boring” content — parts of the curriculum which need to be covered, but are seldom if ever “topical” — doesn’t get much attention.

I honestly don’t know how close we are to this ideal. And, I don’t know what would be the best infrastructure for bringing it about and maintaining it. Idle fantasies and pipe dreams!

I’d like to have this kind of resource, not just for the obvious practical reasons, but also because it would soothe my conscience. I’d like to be able to tell people, “Yes, physics and mathematics are difficult, technical subjects. The stuff we say often sounds like mystical arcana. But, if you want to know what we know, all we ask is time and thinking — we’ve removed every obstacle to your understanding which we possibly can.”

I don’t think this would really impact the physics cranks and crackpots that much, but that’s not the problem I’m aiming to (dreaming that we will) solve. Disdain for mathematics is one warning sign of a fractured ceramic, yes: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen websites claiming to debunk Einstein “using only high-school algebra!” We could make learning the mathematical meat of physics easier, but that won’t significantly affect the people whose crankishness is due to personality and temperament. Free calculus lessons, no matter how engaging, won’t help those who’ve dedicated themselves to fighting under the banner of Douche Physik.

Alchemists work for the people. —Edward Elric

I’ve received several invitations to be listed in a “Who’s Who”, over the years. As far as academic spam goes, it’s been slightly more common than the invitations to attend fraudulent conferences or to publish in fee-gouging, unrefereed vanity journals. (Memo to academic vanity publishers: I know LaTeX. I’ve wrangled two volumes of conference proceedings into shape. I’ve done six books through three different print-on-demand services. I handled the production editing and the typesetting for two editions of The Open Laboratory. I can do your job myself, and I can do it better than you.) I’ve gotten several e-mails with basically identically repeated verbiage in recent weeks. Take a look:
Continue reading ‘Academic Spam’

Now and then, one hears physicist stories of uncertain origin. Take the case of Niels Bohr and his horseshoe. A short version goes like the following:

It is a bit like the story of Niels Bohr’s horseshoe. Upon seeing it hanging over a doorway someone said, “But Niels, I thought you
didn’t believe horseshoes could bring good luck.” Bohr replied, “They say it works even if you don’t believe.” [source]

I find it interesting that nobody seems to know where this story comes from. The place where I first read it was a jokebook: Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (1971), which happens to be three years older than the earliest appearance Wikiquote knows about. In this book, Isaac Asimov tells a lot of jokes and offers advice on how to deliver them. The Bohr horseshoe, told at slightly greater length, is joke #80. Asimov’s commentary points out a difficulty with telling it:

To a general audience, even one that is highly educated in the humanities, Bohr must be defined — and yet he was one of the greatest physicists of all time and died no longer ago than 1962. But defining Bohr isn’t that easy; if it isn’t done carefully, it will sound condescending, and even the suspicion of condescension will cool the laugh drastically.

Note the light dusting of C. P. Snow. Asimov proposes the following solution.

If you despair of getting the joke across by using Bohr, use Einstein. Everyone has heard of Einstein and anything can be attributed to him. Nevertheless, if you think you can get away with using Bohr, then by all means do so, for all things being equal, the joke will then sound more literate and more authentic. Unlike Einstein, Bohr hasn’t been overused.

I find this, except for the last sentence, strangely appropriate in the context of quantum-foundations arguments.

The question came up while discussing the grand canonical ensemble the other day of just where the word fugacity came from. Having a couple people in the room who received the “benefits of a classical education” (Gruber 1988), we guessed that the root was the Latin fugere, “to flee” — the same verb which appears in the saying tempus fugit. Turns out, the Oxford English Dictionary sides with us, stating that fugacity was formed from fugacious plus the common +ty suffix, and that fugacious (meaning “apt to flee away”) goes back to the Latin root we’d guessed.

Gilbert N. Lewis appears to have introduced the word in “The Law of Physico-Chemical Change”, which appeared in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 37 (received 6 April 1901).
Continue reading ‘Fugacity’

REVIEW: Gregory J. Gbur (2011), Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering. Cambridge University Press. [Post also available in PDF.]

By golly, I wish I’d had this book as an undergrad.

As it was, I had to wait until this past January, at the ScienceOnline 2011 conference. These annual meetings in Durham, North Carolina feature scientists, journalists, teachers and students, all blurring the lines between one specialization and another, trying to figure out how the Internet can help us do and talk science. Lots of the attendees had books recently published or soon forthcoming, and the organizers arranged a drawing. We could each pick a book from the table, with all the books anonymized in brown paper wrapping. Greg “Dr. Skyskull” Gbur had brought fresh review copies of his textbook. Talking it over, we realized that if somebody who wasn’t a physics person got a mathematical methods textbook, they’d probably be sad. So, we went to the table and hefted the offerings until we found one which weighed enough to be full of equations, and everyone walked away happy.

MMfOPE is, as the kids say, exactly what it says on the tin. It begins with vector calculus and concludes with asymptotic analysis, passing through matrices, infinite series, complex analysis, Fourierology and ordinary and partial differential equations along the way. Each subject is treated in a way which physicists will appreciate: mathematical rigour mortis is not stressed, but when more careful or Philadelphia-lawyerly treatments are possible, they are indicated, and the ways in which their subtleties can become relevant are pointed out. In addition, issues like the running time and convergence of numerical algorithms are, where appropriate, addressed.
Continue reading ‘Gbur’s Mathematical Methods‘

On occasion, somebody voices the idea that in year [tex]N[/tex], physicists thought they had everything basically figured out, and that all they had to do was compute more decimal digits. I won’t pretend to know whether this is actually true for any values of [tex]N[/tex] — when did one old man’s grumpiness become the definitive statement about a scientific age? — but it’s interesting that not every physicist with an interest in history has supported the claim.

One classic illustration of how the old guys with the beards knew their understanding of physics was incomplete involves the specific heats of gases. How much does a gas warm up when a given amount of energy is poured into it? The physics of the 1890s was unable to resolve this problem. The solution, achieved in the next century, required quantum mechanics, but the problem was far from unknown in the years before 1900. Quoting Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics (1964), volume 1, chapter 40, with hyperlinks added by me:
Continue reading ‘“More Decimal Digits”’

…to the most thoroughly awesome movie ever.

I’m seriously proud of this one:

The Merry May Incident.

(Filed under EXT. CITY – NIGHT.)

The Faculty of 1000 recently announced a competition for the best made-up drug name, and my contribution is one of the three finalists. The winner will be chosen through the supremely scientific methodology of the Interweb Poll. I encourage the Gentle Reader to visit, chuckle and vote your conscience.

UPDATE (5 August): Hey, I won! Thanks everybody! Now the swag is mine, all mine, moo hoo ha ha, etc.

Why? Solidarity.

In network science, one can study the dynamics of a network — nodes being added or removed, edges being rewired — or the dynamics on the network — spins flipping from up to down in an Ising model, traffic flow along subway routes, an infection spreading through a susceptible population, etc. These have often been studied separately, on the rationale that they occur at different timescales. For example, the traffic load on the different lines of the Boston subway network changes on an hourly basis, but the plans to extend the Green Line into Medford have been deliberated since World War II.

In the past few years, increasing attention has been focused on adaptive networks, in which the dynamics of and the dynamics on can occur at comparable timescales and feed back on one another. Useful references:
Continue reading ‘Adaptive Networks’

I appear to be live-tweeting the International Conference on Complex Systems, using the hashtag #iccs11.

A few complaints about the place of computers in physics classrooms.

Every once in a while, I see an enthusiastic discussion somewhere on the Intertubes about bringing new technological toys into physics classrooms. Instead of having one professor lecture at a room of unengaged, unresponsive bodies, why not put tools into the students’ hands and create a new environment full of interactivity and feedback? Put generically like that, it does sound intriguing, and new digital toys are always shiny, aren’t they?

Prototypical among these schemes is MIT’s “Technology Enabled Active Learning” (traditionally and henceforth TEAL), which, again, you’d think I’d love for the whole alma mater patriotism thing. (“Bright college days, O carefree days that fly…”) I went through introductory physics at MIT a few years too early to get the TEAL deal (I didn’t have Walter Lewin as a professor, either, as it happens). For myself, I couldn’t see the point of buying all those computers and then using them in ways which did not reflect the ways working physicists actually use computers. Watching animations? Answering multiple-choice questions? Where was the model-building, the hypothesis-testing through numerical investigation? In 1963, Feynman was able to explain to Caltech undergraduates how one used a numerical simulation to get predictions out of a hypothesis when one didn’t know the advanced mathematics necessary to do so by hand, or if nobody had yet developed the mathematics in question. Surely, forty years and umpteen revolutions in computer technology later, we wouldn’t be moving backward, would we?

Everything I heard about TEAL from the students younger than I — every statement without exception, mind — was that it was a dreadful experience, technological glitz with no substance. Now, I’ll freely admit there was probably a heckuva sampling bias involved here: the people I had a chance to speak with about TEAL were, by and large, other physics majors. That is, they were the ones who survived the first-year classes and dove on in to the rest of the programme. So, (a) one would expect they had a more solid grasp of the essential concepts covered in the first year, all else being equal, and (b) they may have had more prior interest and experience with physics than students who declared other majors. But, if the students who liked physics the most and were the best at it couldn’t find a single good thing to say about TEAL, then TEAL needed work.

If your wonderful new education scheme makes things somewhat better for an “average” student but also makes them significantly worse for a sizeable fraction of students, you’re doing something wrong. The map is not the territory, and the average is not the population.

It’s easy to dismiss such complaints. Here, let me give you a running start: “Those kids are just too accustomed to lectures. They find lecture classes fun, so fun they’re fooled into thinking they’re learning.” (We knew dull lecturers when we had them.) “Look at the improvement in attendance rates!” (Not the most controlled of experiments. At a university where everyone has far too many demands made of their time and absolutely no one can fit everything they ought to do into a day, you learn to slack where you can. If attendance is mandated in one spot, it’ll suffer elsewhere.)

Or, perhaps, one could take the fact that physics majors at MIT loathed the entire TEAL experience as a sign that what TEAL did was not the best for every student involved. If interactivity within the classroom is such a wonderful thing, then is it so hard to wonder if interactivity at a larger scale, at the curricular level, might be advisable, too?

It’s not just a matter of doing one thing for the serious physics enthusiasts and another for the non-majors (to use a scandalously pejorative term).

What I had expected the Technological Enabling of Active Learning to look like is actually more like another project from MIT, StarLogo. Unfortunately, the efforts to build science curricula with StarLogo have been going on mostly at the middle- and high-school level. Their accomplishments and philosophy have not been applied to filling the gaps or shoring up the weak spots in MIT’s own curricula. For example, statistical techniques for data analysis aren’t taught to physics majors until junior year, and then they’re stuffed into Junior Lab, one of the most demanding courses offered at the Institute. To recycle part of an earlier rant:

Now, there’s a great deal to be said for stress-testing your students (putting them through Degree Absolute, as it were). The real problem was that it was hard for all the wrong reasons. Not only were the experiments tricky and the concepts on which they were based abstruse, but also we students had to pick up a variety of skills we’d never needed before, none of them connected to any particular experiment but all of them necessary to get the overall job done. What’s more, all these skills required becoming competent and comfortable with one or more technological tools, mostly of the software persuasion. For example: we had to pick up statistical data analysis, curve fitting and all that pretty much by osmosis: “Here’s a MATLAB script, kids — have at it!” This is the sort of poor training which leads to sinful behaviour on log-log plots in later life. Likewise, we’d never had to write up an experiment in formal journal style, or give a technical presentation. (The few experiences with laboratory work provided in freshman and sophomore years were, to put it simply, a joke.) All this on top of the scientific theory and experimental methods we were ostensibly learning!

Sure, it’s great to throw the kids in the pool to force them to swim, but the water is deep enough already! To my way of thinking, it would make more sense to offload those accessory skills like data description, simulation-building, technical writing and oral presentation to an earlier class, where the scientific content being presented is easier. Own up to the fact that you’re the most intimidating major at an elite technical university: make the sophomore-year classes a little tougher, and junior year can remain just as rough, but be so in a more useful way. We might as well go insane and start hallucinating for the right reason.

Better yet, we might end up teaching these skills to a larger fraction of the students who need them. Why should education from which all scientists could benefit be the exclusive province of experimental physicists? I haven’t the foggiest idea. We have all these topics which ought to go into first- or second-year classes — everyone needs them, they don’t require advanced knowledge in physics itself — but the ways we’ve chosen to rework those introductory classes aren’t helping.

To put it another way: if you’re taking “freshman physics for non-majors,” which will you use more often in life: Lenz’s Law or the concept of an error bar?

Am I the only nerd out there who doesn’t really give a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys for logic puzzles? The blue-eyed islanders always tell the truth, except on Thursdays after teatime, when they put on the mauve hats and can only smoke Parliaments if the fox and the cabbage are left on the island simultaneously . . . If I wanted to fret about the behaviour of agents whose actions and character are unlike actual humans in every way, I’d be an economist.

(Also, I never made it further into Tolkien than The Hobbit, and my closest approach to superhero comics has been Sandman. Everything I know of RPGs I learned because I had a flatmate once who spent her evenings whacking things with a Keyblade. For a costweeting physicist, I have a surprising level of indifference to vast stretches of “geek canon” — as the Internets seem to define it. Maybe the notion of “canon” doesn’t mesh so well with the idea of a personality geared to intense interest in particular, more-or-less circumscribed subjects?)

If your logic puzzle ties into some larger body of mathematics, then I might be able to summon up interest in it, but in my experience, they’re seldom presented that way. When a puzzle has no connection to the larger weave of knowledge, to an actual -ology either pure or applied, I move on to ones which do.

We are currently in the midst of updating the too-long-unupdated software which underlies Science After Sunclipse. This process has largely gone without incident, though some mathematical formulæ are failing to display properly. Until we get everything sorted, just imagine an early-1990s “This Website Under Construction” icon next to anything which doesn’t look right.