Hawking, Einstein, Africa

I understand the overall idea here and it is good, but on the other hand from a deeper epistemological issue is this not fostering Einstein-type physics...empirical evidence set aside? I think they mean merely a brilliant individual of the sciences.

Handwerksgelehrte

Theoretical physics...philosophy/sci-fi?

Time to re-evaluate physics

"Stephen Hawking in hunt for Africa's hidden talent"

by

Jonathan Leake

Science Editor

May 11th, 2008

Timesonline

Professor Stephen Hawking, who has devoted his career to finding the origins of the universe, is to begin a new search – for Africa’s answer to Einstein.

Despite suffering from motor neurone disease which has left him almost completely paralysed, Hawking, 66, has made the journey to South Africa to launch the project today.

Some of the world’s leading high-tech entrepreneurs and scientists have backed the £75m plan to create Africa’s first postgraduate centres for advanced maths and physics, after the British government declined to provide funding.

Hawking will be joined by eminent physicists and mathematicians including two Nobel laureates in physics, David Gross and George Smoot, and Michael Griffin, the head of Nasa. Naledi Pandor, South Africa's education minister, will also speak.

"The world of science needs Africa's brilliant talents and I look forward to meeting prospective young Einsteins from Africa," said Hawking.

Neil Turok, founder of the project and professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University, where he is a close colleague of Hawking, said the aim of the centres was to “unlock and nurture scientific talent” across Africa. "Apart from an African Einstein, we want to find the African Bill Gates and the Sergey Brins and Larry Pages of the future," said Turok, referring to the founders of Microsoft and Google.

The 15 new centres will be modelled on the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Aims) which was founded by Turok in Muizenberg, near Cape Town, four years ago. It has produced 160 graduates from 30 African countries, many of whom have gone on to take science doctorates. Another 53 will graduate shortly.

Among them is Buthaina Adam, whose mathematical skills shone out in Sudan's war-torn Darfur province where she grew up. With a physics degree from the University of Khartoum, she hoped to become a nuclear physicist, but shortage of money and opportunities left her career on hold until she was offered a place at Aims in 2006.

"Aims gave me a life, opened doors for me," said Adam, who hopes to return to Darfur and teach after completing a PhD.

Turok decided to push for 15 more Aims institutes after winning the £50,000 Technology, Entertainment and Design prize in America earlier this year. He donated the money to Aims.

He has since been offered support potentially worth tens of millions of pounds. Google, the Gates Foundation and Sun Microsystems are among those that have expressed interest.

Turok and Hawking hope that Aims’s students will help to overturn the negative stereotypes of Africa that were recently given expression by James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA.

Watson lost his job as director of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratories in America after suggesting that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans. A subsequent analysis of his own DNA showed that he had part-African ancestry.

"Watson's views were simply ridiculous," said Turok. "The quality of students we are seeing at Aims is extremely high. What they need is an opportunity to learn."

Hawking's keynote lecture this afternoon is expected to be the highpoint of the ceremonies in Cape Town. When he gave a talk at the Caltech campus in Pasadena in the United States, he was wheeled out of the auditorium to a standing ovation and took a victory lap in his wheel-chair while the crowd shouted: "We love you, Stephen."

Hawking is expected to repeat his call for a global effort to enable humanity to colonise space, starting with the moon and then Mars. Turok's hopes are more down to earth: he wants to persuade the British government to rethink its refusal to fund the Aims project.

"The Department for International Development spends £1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on aid to Africa every year but there is precious little to show for it. The people who will make Africa rich are the brightest people because they will generate wealth," Turok said.

Andrew Mitchell, shadow development secretary, was equally critical: "There is much more to Africa than poverty and starvation. This is an extremely important initiative and I’m going to see how the next Conservative government could support it."

The international development department said it preferred to focus on projects to fight poverty.

"SciFest Africa"

Innovative hands-on festival gets kids excited about science

by

Marc Zimmer

May 19, 2008

Chemical & Engineering News

Volume 86, Number 20

American Chemical Society

TAKE 40,000 STUDENTS, more than 500 scientific events, and a lot of energy; then mix them all up in a town of 125,000 inhabitants and you have an experience of a lifetime—SciFest Africa.

The 12th consecutive SciFest Africa, themed "See science through different eyes," was held April 16–22 in Grahamstown, South Africa, and drew students and presenters from all over the world. The goals of the festival are to get schoolchildren excited about science and to develop a culture of science in South Africa so that young students admire scientists in the same way that they admire professional soccer and rugby players.

This annual festival has more than twice as many attendees as an American Chemical Society national meeting, with most of the action occurring in a relatively small convention center. It is not a place for the fainthearted. I have never seen so many excited children all in the same place. The students, called "learners" in South Africa, breathlessly move between lectures and exhibits, deciding whether to attend a local drama company's quirky play about global warming and the effects it has on the polar ice caps or magician and physicist Bob Friedhoffer's informal lecture about the science behind magic.

SciFest was born in 1994, when Brian (Bug) Wilmot, a dragonfly specialist, attended the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Wilmot decided to create SciFest to bring science to young South African students. "Not that we call it science, we call it fun," Wilmot says with a smile. South Africa's festival has been so successful that other science festivals are being modeled after it, including Finland's SciFest Joensuu. One of the many fun and interactive exhibits at this year's SciFest was a virtual-reality tug-of-war in which students in South Africa competed with students in Joensuu.

The 569 events offered at the festival were arranged into a main program organized by SciFest and a fringe program planned and hosted by outside organizations. The main program consisted of 27 lectures (by 12 international and 15 South African scientists); 39 "talkshops," or lectures presented to small groups to allow discussion and debate; 326 interactive workshops; field trips; a laser show; science olympics with events such as bridge building, a balloon-powered rocket race, and trebuchet construction; a science quiz; paper-plane competitions; and 17 film screenings. Fringe contributors included Grahamstown-based Rhodes University, which gave the winner of the science quiz a one-year college scholarship; the University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town; and St. Andrews Preparatory School in Grahamstown.

Try to fit all that into your schedule and still find time to read a newspaper. The School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University published a low-budget, high-adrenaline daily tabloid, "SciCue," that was distributed to all attendees. Geared toward the older students, the paper reported on the previous day's SciFest activities. On the second day of the festival, for example, headlines included "A Primordial Alphabet Soup," "Sweet-Mouthed Romeos More Likely To Score," "Africa's Nice Rice Man," "Mystifying the Mind," "A Day in the Life of a Marine Biologist," and "Save Energy Now."

I went to SciFest to give a lecture about fluorescent proteins, mosquitoes with glowing gonads, and colorful brain tissue images called brainbows, but I was easily persuaded to also give a talkshop about ethical questions associated with genetic engineering.

THE FIRST ROW of my talkshop was already full when I arrived 20 minutes before I was due to start. The room filled up from the front to the back. I was in for a further surprise when I started chatting to my eager front-rowers; they were part of a group of eight students from the American School of Yaounde, in Cameroon, and had flown to South Africa just for SciFest. Cameroon has 200 different languages; the students all spoke at least one of the Cameroonian languages, as well as French and English. In the coming hours and days, I asked many students where they came from and was surprised to learn many school groups had traveled between five and 10 hours to be part of the SciFest experience.

The flagship events of SciFest are the lectures, for which the speakers are invited a full year before the festival. This year, the presenters included Sir David King, the U.K.'s chief scientific adviser and head of the U.K.'s Office of Science, and plant breeder Monty Jones, World Food Prize laureate in 2004 and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2007.

More than 400 people attended my lecture, and afterward I spent more than an hour answering questions from inquisitive students. The access students have to scientists, and their ability to ask questions of the scientists, is arguably the most important facet of SciFest.

"In many cases, you are the first real, live scientists the students have ever met," SciFest manager Margaret Wolff told me. "And flesh-and-blood scientists are so much more interesting than the kinds of crazy Einsteins you see on Cartoon Network."

SciFest's Frontiers of Science program gives lecturers a chance to discuss their research in more detail with local scientists at Rhodes University. I addressed their chemistry department, which is small—with just 10 full-time faculty members—but active. For example, chemistry professor Tebello Nyokong, the vice chairwoman of the SciFest national advisory committee, published 35 nanotechnology papers in 2007. The most famous paper to come from the Rhodes chemistry department was written in June 1939, by organic chemist and self-taught ichthyologist James L. B. Smith, who announced the discovery of the coelacanth, a fish previously thought to have been extinct for 65 million years.

SciFest Africa's permanent staff of five people is responsible for finding presenters for more than 500 events and for putting together the complex weeklong program. They supervise 150 interns and volunteers who supplement the staff during the festival. The staff members also find sponsorship for the festival, which allows for an entrance fee of only about $1.00. Besides the obvious challenges of feeding and housing the festival's 45,000 attendees, SciFest's organizers have a uniquely African challenge: South Africa has grown so rapidly that its electricity use has outstripped its electricity production. As a consequence, festival organizers had to work around scheduled 2.5-hour power outages every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning. My hosts in the chemistry department at Rhodes, for example, secured a generator so that they would not have to power down their nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers during the outages.

FOR THE FIRST 11 years, support for the festival was provided by Sasol, a South African chemical company. This year, Sasol was joined by an insurance company, Old Mutual. The British Council, the Finnish and French Embassies, and the U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored speakers from their home countries. To ensure that students from even the poorest schools could attend the festival, the South African Department of Education funded transportation and admission for two teachers and 30 students from the most disadvantaged schools in each of 35 school districts surrounding Grahamstown.

Recognizing that the hustle and bustle in the conference center must be overwhelming to many of their rural visitors, Scifest organizers employed local university students to act as SciGuides. These guides welcome incoming school groups and give them short introductory tours before letting them run free in what is well-fertilized ground for nuturing future scientists.

Americans can learn a lot from the success of SciFest Africa. We need to do more to change the public's awareness of science and chemistry, and an event like SciFest might help attract more students to the sciences, especially those from underrepresented groups. Wouldn't it be great if we could have an annual ACS ChemFest associated with one of the two national ACS meetings? Imagine busing students from local, economically disadvantaged schools to an ACS ChemFest, where our dynamic faculty, industrial chemists, and students could show off their favorite demonstrations and excite students with cutting-edge chemistry.

Science in Africa

History/philosophy of science...I think so!

This is a huge problem today...so few scientists have a history of their profession. Robert Thornton who had recently received his Ph.D. and was preparing his teaching material at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez in 1944 wrote Einstein a letter. Thornton's question was simple and relevant: Is it worthy to introduce as much history of science and philosophy of science as possible into the realm of modern physics.

Einstein's answer [December 1944]:

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today -- and even professional scientists -- seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is -- in my opinion -- the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

Nothing new from Einstein for in 1916, Einstein wrote a memorial note for Ernst Mach:

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this.

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as "necessities of thought," "a priori givens," etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.

Physics [and indeed all sciences] can be misguided and troubled with problems without a clear perspective of history and philosophy of science.

Single events/scientific epistemology

The following is an excerpted and edited conversation from a physics chat room [October 6th, 2003]. The discussion was initiated by member "X" and essentially asked if a event occurring once can be admitted to the realm of scientific epistemology? Thus, the discussion.

X--Ok, a serious topic. Do events which can happen only one single time belong to the realm of science/physics--justify answer.

Y--Neither X. Religion--falls in category of miracles.

Z--If an experiment is valid, it can be repeated.

Y--I just cannot imagine a single event--one would never empirically prove it.

X--So physics/science is limited to phenomena which are repeatable?

Y--I agree with Z.

Z--X, I think if the event just occurs once, it would be as if a physics law were created only during that event and later destroyed.

Y--Theories are connected to repeatable events by definition.

X--Well anyway I thought a miracle was an event that takes place without respecting the laws of physics etc.

Y--Yes.

Y--But X....

Y--Part of a definition of a theory is that it is repeatable.

X--Is the miracle concept dependent on the state of our knowledge then?

Y--Its part of scientific method--multiple experiments.

Z--Like I had said.... if an experiment cannot be repeated it is as if the laws of physics existed only for the moment that the experiment occurred.

Y--Current knowledge, yes.

Y--Yes Z.

Z--Not all the laws.. .the ones that permitted that experiment to occur.

Y--Yes.

X--OK Y, if science can only handle repeatable events, then we are doomed to never "KNOW" anything about unique events.

Y--Perhaps.

Y--How important are unique events in epistemology?

Y--Any significance?

Y--Other than saying that our current knowledge may be incomplete.

Y--There is room for uniqueness.

Y--An indication of an incorrect and incomplete body of knowledge.

X--Or, is the issue really a matter of human interpretation in that we only accept that which we understand /a la caveman having a wind god because he couldn't understand air.

Y--In a way yes.

Y--Knowledge is always unfolding and will accept the unique.

X--No brain--no epistemology ???

Y--Right.

Y--Maybe X....

Y--There may be in the future room for miracles.

Y--Like a burning bush that Moses experienced.

X--Then maybe physics is a dead end in our trying to answer fundamental questions since "brains" are just parts of some kind of bio mechanisms.

Y--Not really X.

Y--Physics--a body of knowledge--will always be unfolding.

Z--If our brain were different.... would physics be different?

X--As I was saying, even with a unique event there is hope since we still can talk about probabilities and information content etc.

Y--Miracles may be a part of a body of knowledge in the future.

Y--Everyone will have a Moses burning bush.

X--The miracle concept is independent of any religious connotation / just depends on our state of scientific knowledge right ?

Y--No.

X--How so?

Y--Religions use a unique event to bolster their faith.

Y--Not really scientific for them.

X--Their faith or their faithful?

Y--If anything else, it is a slam by religions against science.

Y--Burning bushes, parting a large sea, water into wine, and so on.

X--Can we agree that science is just ordered/classified knowledge plus methodologies to obtain new knowledge ?

Y--In the future--yes, begging the question Z--these events may be part of a new body of knowledge.

Y--Yes X.

X--So, to know what science is, we must know what knowledge is.

X--And we are back to the premise that all "human" knowledge is based on actual physical observations.

Y--Uh--not entirely.

Y--There may well be metaphysical.

X--So, if we physically observe a unique event, it is part of our body of knowledge.

Y--Perhaps.

Y--Maybe an undiscovered explanation.

Y--Consider the following....

Y--Ancient mans’ very first observation of Halley’s comet.

X--Seemed unique to ancient man.

Y--He may have considered it a miracle or unique event based on current knowledge--then guess what--76 years later it appeared again--now the current single event knowledge of the event was understood and became a part of a new body of knowledge.

Y--So the same maybe with a burning bush.

X--So we open the door for "religious miracles" to someday be part of our knowledge base. I cannot accept that on the simple basis that many such "religious miracles" were made up in the minds of people and never were observed.

Y--We don't know that for sure X.

Y--The events could have happened.

Z--And what about the virgin Mary visions? They occurred many times... is that an unique event?

Y--But I do agree that they have more mythical/religious meaning than an actual physical event.

Y--No.

Y--Repetition does not yield uniqueness.

Y--That is part of an hypothesis of an event.

Y--Quantifiable repetition.

X--There is quite a difference also in an event which reoccurs on its own and an event that we can make reoccur, say in a laboratory.

Y--Yes--but to add bona fide events to a body of knowledge does require lab testing.

Y--The lab can be the universe--not a building downtown.

X--I think it is an unanswerable question as to whether or not there are miracles.

Y--For the time being yes.

X--For example, if a miracle is more than just not yet discovered science.

Z--An example just occurred to me... the cases of "miracles" in medicine.. a terminal person is about to die and suddenly survives... the doctors cant say what happened and made this person continue alive... is it undiscovered science?

X-- Also we have to look at the possibility that all events are unique! After all each is characterized by a time parameter etc., etc., etc.

Y--I think so Z.

Y--Recovery from a disease can be a mystery.

Z--But while they don't discover, they say "it was a miracle".

X--Z, I would say unknown science since we do not yet know all there is to know about physiology etc. And we may never "discover" what kept the person alive.

X--We are all just skirting the deity issue.

Y--My point exactly.

Y--Ultimate knowledge of everything may never be know.

Y--There must be some mystery.

X--Z, Also remember the survival due to a medical miracle may in principle be like knowing that the probability of one single number in the unit interval being chosen is zero yet individual numbers are chosen i.e., happen.

Y--Perhaps man is incapable of knowing all.

[The names were changed to protect the innocent.]

Any thoughts about single, non-repeatable events and scientific knowledge? Should miracles be left to matters of faith? They certainly don't fit within the criteria of scientific epistemology.