Every month, I get physics books from all over the place. I only get an opportunity to review a fraction of these books, though I feel bad about each one that I have to pass up. Plus, it's kind of hard to remember which books came out in a given year when I'm working on my "Best of the year" posts in December.
To help streamline things, I will now offer a monthly post that lists the upcoming physics books I feel are the most relevant to readers of this blog. I've posted my first one, collecting a list of the major physics books for January 2012. Don't worry, reviews will still come ... but this post will include books that I know won't get a full review but are still worth getting out there.
Leave a comment if you know of any upcoming books that I've missed!
I've been thinking a lot about scientific values lately, since watching a talk by neurologist Sam Harris, where he is speaking on whether science can say anything about morality. I won't speak to his larger point (other than to direct readers to his book The Moral Landscape), but I will pull this one quote out of his statements (starting around the 19:30 minute mark on the video):
... science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak about facts without embracing certain values. It's not that you can't get an "ought" from an "is," you simply can't get an "is" without embracing certain "oughts." Consider the simplest statement of scientific fact. Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This seems to be as value-free an utterance as human beings ever make. What do we do if someone doubts the truth of this proposition? What if someone comes forward and says, "I'm sorry, but that's not how I choose to think about water"?...
What do we do with that person? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. If a person doesn't share those values the conversation is over. We must appeal to the value of understanding the world. The value of evidence - in this case some hundreds of years of evidence in chemistry. The value of logical consistency? Much of what we believe about the world is predicated on the validity of our beliefs about the structure of water. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves someone should value it. If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you invoke to show that they should value logic?
Now, Harris is using these points as part of his overall discussion of morality ... but I want to go another direction with his invocation of the "values" of science. My undergraduate degree includes a minor in philosophy, so in addition to my work in science, I also have familiarity with the philosophy of science. This notion that scientific investigation requires inherent value judgments resonates with that part of my education.
Really, these "values" all represent something which I gather together under the general umbrella of "scientific reasoning" in my article on skills needed to study physics. At the time, however, I didn't make the connection between scientific reasoning and any sort of value system, but the connection is certainly there. As Harris points out, scientific reasoning is at its heart a decision about what sort of things we value.
In other words, as I'll argue, the primary goal of science instruction - especially in the early years - is (or at least should be) to instill these intellectual values into students.
Political Correctness and Scientific Values
Immediately, I can sense some readers balking at the idea that a science teacher should be involved in the teaching of any sort of values, but I say that these values are so crucial to the scientific enterprise, and making students into rationale thinking adults, that they can't be overlooked. The problem with science education is that it's stepped away from teaching scientific thinking (including scientific reasoning and scientific values) in favor of a spattering of facts and procedures.
Part of this reason has been the politically correct need to give all opinions equal weight, even those which are dangerous to scientific teaching.
A few years back I wrote the article "Why Study Physics?" which puts forth my basic argument for why scientific literacy is so important to our society and culture. That article includes the following quote by Richard Feynman, describing what science is:
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely) , how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments are made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and show.
I then suffered from some bizarre bout of political correctness and said: "The question then becomes (assuming you agree with the merits of the above way of thinking) how this form of scientific thinking can be imparted upon the population."
Looking back on it, though, whether or not anyone "agrees" with the merits of scientific thinking (as described by Feynman) is irrelevant.
First of all, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone would stand up to oppose any of the above thought processes. Even the most anti-scientific person is hardly likely to take to the floor of Congress (where many of these anti-science people seem to gather) and say, "I don't believe that knowing how to handle doubt and uncertainty has any merit." While the anti-science crowd often make their livings from people's inability to distinguish truth from fraud, I'd say that they still see the merit in it, at least in their own lives.
Second, even those who oppose such thinking (probably on a subconscious level) don't have the right to prevent it from being imparted upon the population. If their way of thinking would result in people being unable to distinguish truth from fraud and show, or to be unable to think about things so judgments can be made, then their thought system is just plain inadequate to the task of dealing with the world.
Why Creation Science is Dangerous
At the beginning of 2012, Indiana's State Senate (my home state) introduced Senate Bill 89, which consists of this text:
"the governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation."
I felt strongly enough about this to contact my state senator. (New Hampshire has a more complex bill, which I'm sure I'll get to in another post.) Once I laid out my bona fides - my science, education, and writing background - I got to the meat of my protest:
Science must address the evidence, and by its very nature saying that a natural phenomenon can only be explained by reference to a non-natural phenomenon is anti-scientific. Allowing public schools to teach "creation science" as part of an established science curriculum puts us in danger of having students ill prepared to understand how science really works. The Creation/Evolution debate may be worthy of discussion in a social studies or religion class, perhaps as some sort of elective, but there is nothing scientific about "creation science," and it has regularly been shot down as an attempt to inject religion into science curricula. The current wording seems to allow it to be taught on equal footing with evolution, which would be doing a disservice to the students, parents, and taxpayers in our state, who expect that science classes will actually inform students about science, rather than be used to indoctrinate non-scientific thinking.
To my way of thinking, the invocation of God is not the biggest problem with "creation science." God could exist, after all, despite the general lack of evidence. The problem with it is that running up against a natural mystery and invoking an un-natural explanation is not scientific and has no place in a science classroom.
Teaching this as a valid scientific methodology is equivalent to teaching randomly picking numbers as a valid addition process in math class!
Scientific Values
In other words, creation science fails to mesh with the basic values at the heart of the scientific enterprise.
Especially since becoming a parent, I have firmly come to believe that the task of teaching science is really the task of instilling scientific values, and the earlier the better. Children are inherent question machines, and the way we respond to these questions will teach them how to answer questions throughout the rest of their lives. Responding to questions with honesty and an open sense of inquiry, to see if they can figure out a way to find the answer on their own, either through investigation, experimentation, or research, is probably the best thing you can do for instilling scientific values.
I certainly realize how hard it is (Kids ask so many questions!), but the good thing is that this process tends to be a lot of fun for everyone involved.
What values are necessary for the scientist (or at least the good scientist)? Some are proposed by Harris, and I've added a couple more that I've thought up:
- Understanding the World/Universe is a Worthy Endeavor
- Respect for Evidence
- Principles of Logical Consistency
- Learn from Others
- Communicate Results to Others
How's this list look? Can you be a good scientist without any of these? Should some be rephrased? Do you have any suggestions for scientific values that I've missed?
I'll be exploring these values in more details in the coming weeks, and I look forward to advice on how to help flesh out the list and make it useful to teachers of science.
Two physics stories in 2012 easily eclipsed all the others, making headlines all over the place. Here are the two stories that caused the entire physics world to sit up and take notice:
1. Faster Than Light Neutrinos
Easily the most significant of these stories, if it pans out, would be the discovery of neutrinos that move faster than the speed of light. If further evidence suggests that this is happening, then 2011 will become a defining, benchmark year for physics.
Physicists have a tendency to define physics into three basic epochs:
- Pre-Newtonian physics (which really isn't considered physics)
- Classical (Newtonian) physics
- Modern physics
The modern physics era is usually defined as beginning in 1905, when Einstein published the papers that basically formed the origin of both relativity and quantum physics.
If neutrinos are moving faster than the speed of light, then 2011 will be yet another dividing line, because physicists will have to completely revise what they've believed they understand about the universe, possibly adopting some form of variable speed of light cosmology, which has until now been just a fringe, abstract hypothetical conjecture.
However, don't throw out your old physics textbooks just yet! Physicists are still extremely skeptical about these neutrino results, and rightly so. The whole situation is caused by results out of only the OPERA experiment at CERN and, though follow-up research has supported the original findings, there's still very little overall evidence for such a bold claim. In addition to more work at OPERA, scientists at other facilities are hoping to test the findings to get confirming evidence. It'll really be in 2012 that these results will stand or fall ... but then it took over a decade from 1905 for Einstein's papers to bear fruit, as well!
2. The Higgs Boson
One of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider has been to search for the elusive Higgs boson, the particle which rounds out the Standard Model of particle physics by giving the other particles their mass. See, the problem with the Standard Model is that it's too perfect. The symmetries involved match up in such a way that, if it described the universe, there would be no mass of any kind.
Enter the Higgs boson. This particle is a crucial component of the Higgs mechanism, which throws the symmetries involved off just enough to allow for the observed masses to manifest in our universe. In other words, it's the particle that makes "stuff" out of energy.
For a few weeks in November and December, it was sounding like CERN scientists were going to announce that they'd discovered the Higgs boson, but these rumors appeared to be overblown. Instead, they offered only "a hint of a detection." Normally, this annual report of findings doesn't come out until the new year, but CERN decided to release them before the holiday season this year.
These results, which come from the ATLAS and CMS projects, both show some data bumps which scientists think may correspond with regions where the Higgs boson would reside. Right now, the scientists involved are saying there's about a 50% chance that the results are the Higgs. Next year, the research will ramp up in these areas and we'll have better confirmation (or refutation) of the results.
The ATLAS results indicate a mass of 126 GeV while the CMS results give 124 GeV. (GeV = gigaelectron-volts, which is an energy measurement corresponding to mass. A hydrogen atom is about 1 GeV. These results would give the Higgs boson about the same mass as a cesium atom.) It looks like the results do narrow the range of the Higgs boson's energy level to somewhere between 115 GeV and 130 GeV, giving the CERN scientists a range to explore in the future, even if they don't find further evidence right at the 124-126 range.
If these are the right energies for the Higgs, then the current version of the theory will need to be modified to account for it. There's a possibility that something like supersymmetry (or something new) would need included to make the theoretical Higgs boson match up with the one we ultimately observe.
3. Everything Else
This isn't to say that other physics stories haven't proven interesting as well. For example, an internet video demonstrating quantum levitation went viral this year, ending up ultimately on The Today Show. Ultimately it caught my attention by sparking a fun segment on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report.
Possibly one of the biggest stories in 2011 hasn't been strongly tied to science, but rather to economics. The economy is still tottering along, trying to right itself, and science research budgets have been slashed along with everything else. Easily the most iconic aspect of humanity's space program, the costly space shuttle was retired in 2011, calling into question man's future in space. Though this means little for science itself (which can easily be carried out with unmanned missions), there's certainly something emotional that gets lost in removing direct human experience from the equation.
But science isn't safe from these cuts either. For much of the year, it looked likely that Congress was going to cut funding to the James Webb Space Telescope, the currently-being-built successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Without it, we'll be very hard pressed to observe the universe in greater detail, which is needed to gain a better understanding of the role played by both dark matter and dark energy in the formation and development of the cosmos. (In 2012, there may also be more Earth-based experiments that shed light on these.)
In November, however, some budget-wrangling saved the James Webb Space Telescope, though it did put a cap on how overbudget the project is allowed to go.
With an election year ramping up, this certainly isn't the last we'll hear of funding cuts to science research projects. As with the stories above, it looks like 2012 will help decide how this one comes out.
First, I have posted an article about the most recent season 5 episode, "The Speckerman Recurrence," which features Sheldon watching the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics awards streaming live online. This episode, therefore, took place on December 10, 2011.
Also, I've posted three more "classics" from season one into our episode archives:
It's definitely fun to catch up on some of these earlier episodes. While the dynamic has certainly changed over the years, specifically with the integration of Amy & Bernadette as regular female characters, the show's done a very good job of maintaining itself. Here's hoping that there are many more seasons of science-filled mirth in store for us!
