Tag Archives: science

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Agnotology: The science of ignorance

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luckyMany of my fellow citizens believe that the Apollo program was faked, evolution is a lie, global warming is a sinister plot by Al Gore to take away their Hummers, and President Obama is some kind of Nazi foreigner whose healthcare plan will lead to mass euthanasia. Disinformation seems to be a winning tactic.

So, yes, Discover Magazine’s interview with Robert Proctor, Stanford science historian and co-editor of Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance, had some resonance with me.

Snips:

Just what is agnotology?
It’s the study of the politics of ignorance. I’m looking at how ignorance is actively created through things like military secrecy in science or through deliberate policies like the tobacco industry’s effort to manufacture doubt through their “doubt is our product” strategy [spelled out in a 1969 tobacco company memo [pdf]]. So it’s not that science inherently always grows. It can actually be destroyed in certain ways, or ignorance can actually be created.

Have you continued your focus on tobacco?
I recently collaborated on an exhibit of the most outrageous tobacco ads called “Not a Cough in a Carload.” It’s centered on medical-themed tobacco ads: that tobacco’s good for your T-zone, that it calms your nerves. Scientific tests prove that brand A is better than B, or, you know, 20,000 physicians recommend Camels, and so forth. The use of athletes and models, and the artwork is just beautiful.

How do you maintain the perspective essential to your kind of research?… [I]t’s important to see the past the way the people saw it. So I’ve written two books on Nazi medicine, and the goal there was not just to condemn them, but to see how in the world they came up with those ideas and those movements and how they justified them to themselves. So we see them as full humans and not just scarecrows, so we can actually understand the depth of the depravity or whatever. But at least we see it honestly, and that’s a traditional historical virtue.

[Image: leifpeng]

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Light in a bottle

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microresonatorScientists have developed a technique for confining light within a bottle:

Similar to the motion of a charged particle stored in a magnetic bottle, i.e., a particular spatially varying magnetic field, the light oscillates back and forth along the fiber between two turning points. For this reason, this novel type of microresonator realized by the physicists in Mainz is referred to as a bottle resonator. Tuning the bottle resonator to a specific optical frequency can be accomplished by simply pulling both ends of the supporting glass fiber. The resulting mechanical tension changes the refractive index of the glass, so that depending on the tension, the round-trip of the light is lengthened or shortened.

This could lead to the creation of a glass fibre quantum interface between light and matter, which in turn is an important component of hypothetical quantum computers and quantum communication systems.

[from Physorg][image from Physorg]

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Science and drugs and rock’n’roll: can we make science cool?

Much like science fiction, science isn’t considered to be cool (unless you’re a geek like us, of course). So what can be done about science’s image problem?

Over here in the UK, a chap called Richard Bowdler is trying to open the eyes of ordinary people to the cooler sides of science by doing a form of outreach. His Guerrilla Science organisation sets up tents at music festivals and hosts talks, lectures and participatory hijinks, with the aim of pressing people’s sensawunda buttons and banishing the notion of science as dull stuff for people with slide rules and labcoats.

Often the host asks how many of those present hail from a science background – and always, only few put their hands up. So does Bowdler hold with the widely held view that the British public are not interested in science?

“I don’t subscribe to that view, but I would say that science is seen in a very uncool light, which I personally believe to be a rather immature standpoint.”

Speaking on the evolution of music, science writer Zoe Cormier is at pains to press this point home. Explaining the reasons for setting up the project she says: “We’re here to show you science is NOT boring.” She could well be preaching to the choir. After every talk there are dozens of inquisitive minds throwing forth questions.

And as one speaker told me, these aren’t the same as the questions discussed in science labs. Instead, the audience tends to see the big picture, and often the scope of their enquiries takes the scientists by surprise. When there’s no more time for questions, small crowds descend upon the speaker as the Q&A continues by the candy-pink stretch limousine outside. All of those presenting their research are flattered by the interest, often returning to lectures on similar areas of research the next day to form impromptu roundtable sessions with the audience. There’s no end to people’s appetite for science here.

How much of that openness to new ideas is due to the, er, explorative frame of mind that prevails at music festivals is open to debate. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that science, when properly framed, can fascinate everyone – think of the popularity of Carl Sagan, for instance, or the inimitable lecture style of the late Richard Feynman.

But is there perhaps a risk of cheapening science by trying to make it more rock’n’roll? After all, for every exciting moment in the lab, there’s plenty of dull number-crunching and repetitive procedures to go through; hell, my first year of university eroded my interest in electronics almost completely. Should science be left to those most suited to it by temperament?

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Femtotech: the next big small thing

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Still battering on about nanotech? Man, you’re soooo noughties, get with the program. The new small-scale frontier is femtotech – we’re talking customised atomic nuclei strings here. Says Professor Alexander Bolonkin:

The form of matter containing and subsuming all the atom’s particles [from nucleons (neutrons, protons), electrons and other nuclear particles] into the nucleus is named degenerate matter. Degenerate matter found in white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. Conventionally this matter in such large astronomical objects has a high temperature (as independent particles!) and a high gravity adding a forcing, confining pressure in a very massive celestial objects. In nature, degenerate matter exists stably (as a big lump) to our knowledge only in large astronomical masses (include their surface where gravitation pressure is zero) and into big nuclei of conventional matter. Our purpose is to design artificial small masses of synthetic degenerate matter in form of an extremely thin strong thread (fiber, filament, string), round bar (rod), tube, net (dense or non dense weave and mesh size) which can exist at Earth-normal temperatures and pressures. Note that such stabilized degenerate matter in small amounts does not exist in Nature as far as we know.

All strictly theoretical at the moment, it seems. But hey – if you were worried that putting nanotech into a science fiction story sounds a bit passée nowadays, at least now you can make the jump to the next level without worrying that you’re just making it up out of whole cloth.

Beyond Molecular Nanotechnology is Femtotech : Proposal for Synthesizing Degenerate Matter

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Predicting future technologies with Eric Drexler

chipEric Drexler describes how you can apply scientific methods to assess the lower bounds of the capabilities of future technologies:

A subset of the potential capabilities of future levels of technology can be understood by means of a design process that can be described as exploratory engineering. This process resembles the first phase of standard design engineering (termed conceptual engineering, or conceptual design), but it serves a different purpose
…
In the early 20th century, a missing fabrication technology was the combination of engineering expertise and metalworking techniques (among others) that were required to build large aerospace vehicles. The physics of rocket propulsion, however, were well understood, and the strength and weight of large, well-made aluminum structures could be estimated with reasonable accuracy.

On the basis of exploratory engineering applied to this kind of knowledge, engineers who studied the matter were confident that orbital flight could be achieved by means of multistage chemically fueled rockets.

This was an element of Drexler’s Engines of Creation I found especially compelling: that we should base our ideas of future technologies not on what we already have, but what lies within the bounds of what is possible by physical laws as we understand them.

[image from quapan on flickr]