Science, philosophy, cosmology

Cosmology is the attempt to understand in scientific terms the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. This ambition has been with us since the ancient Greeks, even if the developments in modern cosmology have provided a picture of the universe dramatically different from that of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. The cosmological thinking of these figures, e.g. the belief in uniform circular motion of the heavens, was closely related to their philosophical ideas, and it shaped the field of cosmology at least up to the times of Copernicus and Kepler.

Nowadays it is not uncommon among scientists to question the relevance of philosophy for their field. This may be part of a simplified view according to which science is mostly about finding the best match between theories and empirical data. However, even on such a view one can identify interesting philosophical issues, like underdetermination of theories and theory ladenness of data. Moreover, apart from matching theory and data, science is often concerned with what the studied theories implies for our deeper understanding of the world. This involves the philosophical activity of interpreting the theories in question, and philosophy thus continues to be an integral part of scientific, including cosmological, thought. One may argue that cosmology is even more philosophical than most other sciences, in that it more explicitly deals with the limits or horizons of scientific knowledge. In particular, as cosmology involves the age-old questions of the possible temporal and spatial limits of the universe, it is naturally associated with irresistible speculations of what may cause or lie beyond those limits.

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"Philosophical aspects of modern cosmology" by Henrik Zinkernagel

Science, religion, aliens...new book review

"Science, religion and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence"

by

David Wilkinson

February 6th, 2014

Chemistry World

Imagine we woke up tomorrow to news that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. What would be the implications? And just how likely is it that such life might exist outside of our Earth? As I read this brilliant book, which presents the arguments for and against very readably, I found myself oscillating between believing that humans are unique in the universe and feeling that there must be many other planets containing intelligent life.

On the one hand, there is Enrico Fermi’s paradox: at lunch one day in 1950, the famous physicist asked aloud, ‘Where is everybody?’, referring to alien visitors. Fermi argued that if the Earth is not special in having intelligent life, then civilisations should already have evolved many times in our galaxy, since there are billions of stars older than the Sun. If any one of these civilisations had wanted to colonise the galaxy, they could have done so by now. Since there is no compelling evidence that any aliens have visited the Earth, we must conclude that we are alone.

On the other hand, one of the pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Frank Drake, estimated that there were probably between 1000 and 100 million advanced civilisations in our galaxy. But the problem with such estimates is that one is multiplying the very large number of planets in our galaxy with the very small probability of the conditions on a particular planet being ‘just right’ for intelligent life to emerge. 

The author of this excellent book has PhDs in both astrophysics and systematic theology and he provides a detailed discussion of the issues involved: physical, biological and theological. As Arnold Wolfendale, a previous Astronomer Royal, says in the book’s foreword: ‘For atheists and believers alike, there is much food for thought.’ This book would be ideal for anyone interested in the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere else in the universe. I will be buying it for someone myself.

Science, Religion and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

ISBN-10: 0199680205
ISBN-13: 978-0199680207

Deceased--Ian Barbour

Ian Barbour

October 5th, 1923 to December 24th, 2013

"Ian Barbour dies at 90; academic who bridged science-religion divide"

Barbour sparked debates on issues such as the origins of the universe and the ethical implications of technology. He won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

by

Elaine Woo

January 1st, 2014

Los Angeles Times

For Ian Barbour, the deadly possibilities of the Atomic Age raised questions that science couldn't answer — a perplexing situation for a young physicist after World War II.

He responded to the challenge in an unusual way: After completing his doctorate in physics he enrolled in divinity school and forged a career devoted to bridging the chasm between science and religion.

Barbour, whose work opened a new academic field and brought him the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion died at a hospital in Minneapolis on Christmas Eve, five days after a stroke, said his son, John Barbour. He was 90.

A professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., for more than three decades, Barbour wrote 16 books, including "Issues in Science and Religion," a 1966 volume that helped spark the ongoing debate between scientists and theologians on issues such as the origins of the universe, evolution and the ethical implications of technology.

He "gave birth almost single-handedly to the contemporary dialogue between science and religion," said Robert John Russell, the founder-director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, a nonprofit teaching and research institute affiliated with UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. "He made a convincing and lasting case that science and religion are more alike and analogous than unlike and conflictive."

In the 1950s, when Barbour began to promote discourse between the two fields, scientists had little tolerance for religion, and theologians had little interest in science. His was a lonely voice for rapprochement.

"I always felt we needed to move beyond the hostility," Barbour told The Times in 1999. "Scientists say they believe in evolution, not God. Religious scholars say they believe in God, but not evolution. Well, I say we don't have to choose a side. We can meet somewhere in the middle."
He received the Templeton Prize in 1999 for a lifetime of work that judges said helped expand the field of theology. He gave most of the $1.24-million award to the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

His views about the commonalities between religion and science were criticized by such prominent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould. But Barbour's advocacy made inroads at such leading organizations as the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, which in the mid-1990s launched a program to improve communication between religious and scientific communities on matters such as environmental stewardship and life beyond Earth.

"Scientists particularly have appreciated the humble and insightful ways he has considered how we imagine and model the unknowns in each realm," said Jennifer Wiseman, director of the association's Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.

Born in Beijing on Oct. 5, 1923, Ian Graeme Barbour was one of three sons of his American Episcopalian mother and his Scottish Presbyterian father, both of whom taught at Yenching University. (His father, George, was a distinguished geologist involved with the group that discovered the early human remains known as Peking Man.) The family left China in 1931 and spent a few years in England before settling in the United States.

Barbour earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College in 1943. Exposed to Quaker thought during college, he became a conscientious objector who spent World War II fighting forest fires in Oregon and working with mental patients in North Carolina.

After obtaining a master's degree in physics from Duke University in 1946, he went for his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he was a teaching assistant for Enrico Fermi, the Manhattan Project scientist responsible for the world's first atomic chain reaction.

He earned his doctorate in 1949 and joined the physics faculty at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he found himself increasingly drawn to the ethical and theological implications of scientific discoveries. With a Ford Foundation fellowship, he studied theology, ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School and earned a divinity degree in 1956.

Before completing his divinity studies, he accepted an offer from Carleton College to teach physics and religion. In 1960 he founded its religion department and began to write about issues of concern to both scientists and religious thinkers.

"What had started as an attempt to fit together two halves of my own life had become a wider intellectual inquiry in which I found that many other people were interested," he wrote in an autobiographical essay.

In 1989 and 1990 he gave Scotland's prestigious Gifford Lectures, an annual series of talks on natural theology whose presenters have included Albert Schweitzer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Barbour's lectures were turned into two books, "Religion in an Age of Science" (1990) and "Ethics in an Age of Technology" (1993).

In his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize, Barbour spoke of the urgent need to break down barriers, offering cloning as an example of the ability of science to tell society what is possible and of religion to reflect on what is desirable.

He also challenged people to reconsider the biblical view of death as a punishment for human sin.

"Now we know that death was present long before human beings were around, and that it was a necessary feature of an evolutionary process in which new forms of life could appear," he said. "We can take the Bible seriously without taking it literally."
Barbour's wife of 64 years, Deane Kern, died in 2011. He is survived by four children, a brother, three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
 

Ian Barbour [Wikipedia]

 

Religion and Science

by

Ian G. Barbour

ISBN-10: 0060609389
ISBN-13: 978-0060609382

Related interest...

Einstein: Spiritual and the scientific

Theodocy and cold science

Deceased--William Hamilton

Deceased--Gabriel Vahanian

Shift in value definitions--F. Nietzsche

“God remains dead. And we have killed him.”...things change

Richard Dawkins dialogs with Eryn Brown of the Los Angeles Times

"Q&A: Richard Dawkins discusses evolution, religion and his fans"

British author and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins talks about evolution, religion and his 'appetite for wonder.'

by

Eryn Brown

November 30, 2013

Los Angeles Times

Richard Dawkins was enjoying a coffee at the Mondrian Hotel when a star-struck waiter interrupted him to thank him for his work. It was the kind of thing that happens a lot at the swanky West Hollywood hot spot — but usually to showbiz celebrities, not biologists.

Dawkins is used to the adulation. The British intellectual has become a celebrity thanks to his books on evolution — including "The Selfish Gene," written in 1976 — and his vocal atheism, expressed in works like "The God Delusion," published in 2006. His latest offering is the first volume of his new autobiography, "An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist," which describes his childhood in colonial Africa and his early scientific work.

Dawkins talked with The Times about his writing, his fans and what people do and don't understand about evolution.

You have a lot of readers who are not scientists.

Yes. I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts. Science has a timeless quality to it.

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful, or art being useful.

People do talk about music being useful, as a tool for training the brain.

They do, that's true. If you're really struggling to find something to say, that's what you'd come up with. It's not quite as bad as saying it's useful because it's good exercise for the violinist's right arm.

But music is beautiful, music is inspiring. And so is science. I'm of the Carl Sagan school of science writing — it should be beautiful and inspiring and enthralling and thrilling. Because reality is all those things.

We are privileged to be in reality. We get here by a process which happens to be my subject — evolution, Darwinian evolution — and the fact that we understand how we got here is itself wonderful.

Do you think people understand evolution?

Jacques Monod, the great molecular biologist, said that the trouble with natural selection is that everyone thinks he understands it.

It's a simple idea. And yet, simple as it is, nobody thought of it until the 19th century, which is remarkable when you think of what clever things had already been thought of in mathematics and physics. On the face of it, it would seem to need less cleverness to think of natural selection than to think of Newton's Laws, the mathematics of Archimedes or Pythagoras, or the astronomy of Galileo or Kepler.

How do you define natural selection?

That the bodies that survive are the ones that are good at surviving, and they pass on the genes that made them good at surviving.

Some living things stay planted in the ground, like trees. Some fly, some hop, some run, some dig, some climb, some eat animals, some eat plants. All are doing the same thing fundamentally, which is preserving and propagating the genes that made them do it and allowed them to survive.

It's why animals and plants look so beautifully designed — although with flaws and shortcomings, which are themselves revealing. They are flaws and shortcomings which no "intelligent designer" would ever have built in.

What do people misunderstand about natural selection?

In many cases they think that living, surviving animals turn into other surviving animals, as in: "I've never seen a dog turn into a cat," or "I've never seen a monkey turn into a man."

Another common misunderstanding: They also fail to realize that evolution is terribly slow. People want to see it happening before their eyes.

One of the difficult things to get across to people is how immensely long it takes. That may be why it took so long for Darwin to arrive on the scene. People are not used to things grinding out over such a long period of time.

Has scientists' understanding of evolution improved since Darwin?

It has definitely improved. I suppose the biggest change was the importing of Mendelian genetics into evolution. People realized that Darwinian natural selection had to be interpreted as changes in frequencies of genes. The best genes become more frequent in the gene pool.

Genes are sitting in bodies at any one time. But because of sexual reproduction they jostle with each other and vie with each other to get into the next generation's gene pool.

The frequencies of genes in the gene pool change as generations go by, and that is evolution. That was a big leap forward.

Do you get to interact much with readers of your books?

Yes — I meet hundreds of people in book signing queues, and they nearly all say something nice as they get their book signed.

I find that moving and humbling. Some say, "I became a scientist because I read 'The Selfish Gene'" — quite a lot say that actually. Some say, "I gave up religion when I read 'The God Delusion,'" or "I'd already given up religion, but you gave me the courage to say so."

Can science and religion coexist?

Obviously they can, because they do — in the same individual brains, in many cases. But I personally find it mysterious that they do.

Do people ask you about that a lot?

All the time, yes. I get a bit fed up with it.

What scientific work are you particularly interested in today?

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

What do you think of projects that sequence entire genomes? Can having all that data change the study of molecular biology and evolution?

I think they're fascinating. Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy. Darwin relied on comparative anatomy — how organisms' bodies differed — to know that we were closer to African apes than to Asian apes.

Nowadays you can do the same thing, but by comparing DNA. It's hugely more data to work from. You really can compare letter by letter. The complete tree of life should be gettable, if only we could sequence everything, and that's limited only by money and time.

What have we learned about evolution by studying genes?

There have been some surprises. One was the discovery through genetic evidence, a decade or so ago, that whales come off from right in the middle of the cloven-hoofed animals. They're especially close cousins of hippos.

At some point there was a branch, and the hippos went one way, and a similar animal went the other way, into the sea. All the other cloven-hoofed animals staying on land remained pretty much the same — pigs and cows and deer and antelope and camels and sheep and goats.

Whales just took off like a balloon, heading off with no need to worry about gravity anymore, supported in the water. Totally different structure, different skeleton. Everything changed.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

GoldiBlox recruiting girls as engineers

"GoldiBlox: The girls' toy commercial sweeping the Internet"

by

Susan Rohwer

November 21st, 2013

latimes.com

If you haven’t seen it, check out the commercial for GoldiBlox that’s sweeping the Internet. It’s an ad for a set of interactive toys and books that encourages girls to build their own castles rather than wait for princes to come do it for them. In an age when girls’ toys painfully adhere to gender stereotypes, the message in this commercial is clear: Girls want more than princess toys for Christmas.

The commercial opens with three girls watching TV and looking unimpressed with what they’re seeing: other little girls in precious party dresses dancing around a tea set. They switch on their record player, grab their hard hats and tool belts and get to work on a Rube Goldberg apparatus assembled with household items and typical girls’ toys (everything from a tea set to a tiara and a baby doll cradle). The record player plays the Beastie Boys song “Boys,” but it’s been rewritten as “Girls” and it’s now a rallying cry against princess-toy culture: “It’s time for a change, and we deserve to see a range, ‘cause all our toys look just the same, and we would like to use our brains.”

GoldiBlox CEO Debbie Sterling invented the engineering toys tailored specifically to girls after being frustrated by the lack of other female students in her undergraduate engineering program at Stanford University. She spent a year researching how she could create a building toy for girls beyond making it pink. Her research led her to the conclusion that girls tend to have strong verbal skills, that they want to have stories and characters rather than to build for the sake of building. She incorporated these findings into her toy design and GoldiBlox was born.

The goal of GoldiBlox is to “get girls building.” And that is no small task. Women are vastly outnumbered by men in fields such as science and technology, making up only 11% of the world’s engineers. According to a report on women in science and engineering from the National Science Foundation, girls tend to lose interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) between the fourth and eighth grades. Discouraging messages from the media, parents and teachers can squash curiosity in STEM. Fostering an enthusiasm in these subjects can spark an interest that could turn into a career.

Studies have shown that the way toys are marketed has an enormous impact on reinforcing gender roles, and toy companies are woefully behind on offering gender-neutral toys. Gender gaps are closing in certain areas, according to a study of more than 4,000 kids in 12 countries done by Marketing Store Worldwide — except in the realm of toys. Boys are much more likely to have construction toys and girls are much more likely to have dolls and stuffed animals.

Although there are toys like the Easy Bake Oven that are now (and only after very pubic pressure) being marketed as gender neutral, some would argue that in the last decade the toy industry has actually increased its gendered marketing. Elizabeth Sweet, a doctoral candidate at UC Davis, researched the gendered marketing of toys in 20th century Sears catalogs and found that although the 1970s showed an increase in gender-neutral marketing of toys, this trend reversed in 1990s. By the end of the 20th century, the gendered marketing of toys had crept back to levels not seen since the 1950s. As Sweet argues, it is even more extreme today.

As any parent who has braved the toy aisles knows, girls and boys are sold vastly different kinds of toys. Girls’ aisles are brimming with pink toys, often geared toward domestic pursuits or beauty, while boys are sold action figures, construction sets and toy guns. But in a sign of a growing unease with such blatant gendering, Toys R Us in Britain recently declared that it would blend all toys together and get rid of the signs indicating boys and girls sections.

The message of toy marketing is that some toys are “naturally” for boys and some for girls, which has a powerful effect on young people. When girls are told they should play only with tiaras, baby dolls and play kitchens, it can reinforce the idea they are meant to be only domestic caretakers, not doctors or scientists. Sadly, the more educational toys — such as construction and science kits — are largely marketed to boys. This is the niche that GoldiBlox is hoping to fill.

As a girl growing up in the 1980s, I was obsessed with princesses and Barbie, but (thanks to my brothers) I also played with LEGOs and GI Joes. Pink princesses aren’t all bad, but girls should have choices about what they want to play with, and it only takes one trip to the toy store to see that the options are stark.

As a mom of a baby girl, I am heartened by the message and mission of GoldiBlox. Even if my daughter wants nothing to do with a construction set, it’s encouraging to know she has the option of having one. As best put in the commercial: “Don’t underestimate girls.”

"Will the Goldieblox ad make little girls dream of being engineers rather than princesses?"

The combination of a Rube Goldberg machine and a reworked Beastie Boys track is certainly fun. With any luck, this ad will raise some girls' aspirations as well as a smile or two

by

Jane Martinson   

November 21st, 2013

The Guardian

US toy company Goldieblox was founded by Stanford engineer Debbie Sterling last year because "girls need more choices than the pink aisle has to offer". The latest ad features three young girls using a selection of pink and pretty toys to set up an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption - of the kind popularised in recent years in videos by the band OK Go - which runs through the house into the garden outside.

The words, set to the tune of Beastie Boys' Girls, turn the original lyrics on their head: "Girls, you think you know what we want. Girls. Pink and pretty is, girls. Just like the 50s, it's girls."

OK, it's a commercial, selling an interactive book and construction set starring Goldie, a blonde girl who "loves to build". When it launched on YouTube one commenter declared: "I am NOT buying in to the feminist marketing that is in demand". Just Google "girls toys" if you want to see how much that demand is really being met. The top toys are Barbie's "Hairtastic", a Barbie cash register and a Monster High toy that allows children to "add detail to the monster's hair, clothing and skin". Grooming and money, what more could a girl want?

Goldieblox toys are no panacea to the stereotyping of childhood. For a start, the toy is based on the idea that girls need more than just construction to keep them interested, a story about helping friends, say, and there is also quite a lot of pink and purple in the product itself.

But with so much research suggesting that engineering and computer science - two fields becoming more and more important in our digital age - are increasingly male dominated, any effort should be welcomed. A report from the National Science Foundation in America found that 18.2% of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 2010 compared with 29.6% in 1991, while 18.4% of engineering graduates were women in 2010 compared with 15.5% 19 years earlier.

When girls as young as eight start saying that building and construction isn't for them, a toy that shows that they can make cool stuff too can't be a bad idea, can it?

"GoldieBlox Crushes Girl Stereotypes With Jaw-Dropping Engineering Toys"

by

Eliza Murphy

November 20th, 2013

ABC News

Move over Barbie, there’s a new toy in town.

Judging by the insanely instant viral success of GoldieBlox’s new commercial, it’s safe to say the toy company promoting strong, smart, engineer-focused girls with a passion for building is here to stay.

The undeniably catchy re-worked lyrics to Beastie Boys’ 1987 hit, “Girls,” was certainly instrumental in the hugely successful commercial featuring three adorable little girl engineers creating one of the coolest, most elaborate mechanical toys the Internet has ever seen. But the true driving force behind the video was simply the company’s message: “To show the world that girls deserve more choices than dolls and princesses,” and that “femininity is strong and girls will build the future — literally.”

GoldieBlox founder Debbie Sterling is a Stanford engineering grad who was inspired to create toys for girls that offered more options than what is typically found in the “pink aisle.”

After she found herself isolated as one of the few female engineering majors at Stanford in 2005, she had a conversation with a friend, one of the only other females in mechanical engineering, and decided it was time for a change.

That’s when GoldieBlox, the interactive book series and construction set starring Goldie, a kid inventor who loves to build, was born.

“In our culture, the sad truth is that math and science and engineering is a boys’ club, and it starts at such a young age,” Sterling, 30, told GoodMorningAmerica.com. “There’s Bob the Builder, Bill Nye the Science Guy and all these other boy geniuses, but I wanted a role model, a strong character girls can relate to.”

GoldieBlox is single-handedly crushing the typical female stereotypes, working to  increase the miniscule 11 percent of women in engineering today, which Sterling says is “one of the fastest-growing jobs in America.”

“The response has been wonderful,” she explains of her brilliant campaign highlighting the young girls, six engineers and Brett Doar, the mastermind behind OK Go!’s Rube Goldberg machine, turning a normal house in Pasadena, Calif., into a “massive, magical contraption.”

“Girls love it. They are building all kinds of cool things with it,” Sterling added. “It’s bringing a lot of people to tears. So many moms say, ‘I was really good at math,’ or ‘I could have done this, too. My daughter can do anything, but let’s give her the choice I didn’t have.’”

Parents Convince Kids Their Dinosaur Toys Come to Life in Magical ‘Dinovember’

The product is really resonating with dads, too.

“So many dads are looking for ways to really connect with their daughters,” said Sterling. “Sometimes it’s hard or awkward for dads to play with dolls, and they can really bond with their girls over toys like this.”
The music video commercial has already amassed more than 3.5 million views since the company posted it to YouTube on Nov. 17.

“You make something and put it out in the world and cross your fingers,” Sterling said. “The video we made was so ambitious and really hits on this message I wanted to send. We don’t want to bash girls or make them feel ashamed for playing with dolls and playing dress up. I did that when I was little too, but just know there are more options out there for you to explore.”
 
Toys R Us ad...

[NOTE: Once again someone complained and the commercial was pulled. Never trust a link for stability.]

CEO Debbie...

Sheldon Cooper would not approve.

Acceptance without scrutiny...sientific statements

"Science and Its Skeptics"

by

Gary Marcus

November 7th, 2013

The New Yorker

Science has been taking a lot of punches lately. A recent cover story for The Economist argued, with cause, that “modern scientists have done too much trusting, and not enough verifying.” A few days ago, the science writer-provocateur John Horgan wrote a dark reflection, in Scientific American, on a litany of failures in science that he has seen over his thirty-year career. Reporting on an “archaeological dig into the strata” of his career, which he says justifies why he’s “so critical of science,” Horgan finds himself struck

    by all the “breakthroughs” and “revolutions” that have failed to live up to their hype: string theory and other supposed “theories of everything,” self-organized criticality and other theories of complexity, anti-angiogenesis drugs and other potential “cures” for cancer, drugs that can make depressed patients “better than well,” “genes for” alcoholism, homosexuality, high IQ and schizophrenia.

All of this is true. String theory hasn’t yet lived up to its promise (and may never). Complexity theory hasn’t, either. People still get cancer and the antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.s help far fewer people than the early hype suggested. The locution a “gene for X” is, in most cases, a verbal sloppiness that leads only to false expectations. Scientists, and those who would report on them, have sometimes promised more than they can deliver.

Yet some depressed patients really do respond to S.S.R.I.s. And some forms of cancer, especially when discovered early, can be cured, or even prevented altogether with vaccination. Over the course of Horgan’s career, H.I.V. has gone from being universally fatal to routinely treatable (in nations that can afford adequate drugs), while molecular biologists working in the nineteen eighties, when Horgan began writing, would be astounded both by the tools that have recently been developed, like whole-genome-sequencing, and the detail with which many molecular mechanisms are now understood: reading a biology textbook from 1983 is like reading a modern history text written before the Second World War. Then there is the tentative confirmation of the Higgs boson; the sequencing of Neanderthal DNA; the discovery of FOXP2, which is the first gene decisively tied to human language; the invention of optogenetics; and definitive proof that exoplanets exist. All of these are certifiable breakthroughs.

The problem with some of these critical observations is not that they are wrong, but that they are one-sided. When Horgan writes that “the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years—and one that caught me by surprise—is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten,” it’s not just that he is arguably overstating things, it’s that he’s missing half the story.

There is a crisis in replicability, as both Horgan and The Economist suggest (and as I noted last December). But there is also a huge, rapidly growing movement to address it. When I revisited the topic a few months later, I reported at least five new efforts focussed on increasing replicability. Since then, the list has continued to grow. There were at least three new announcements in the last few weeks: a new initiative to validate the fifty most important studies in cancer biology; a new pilot program that allows critical comments to be published at pubmed.gov (one of the leading portals for scientific research); and a new badge system for papers that share their materials and data, designed to promote replicability, at a leading journal. As the Cambridge (U.K.) scientist Rogier Kievit put it to me in an e-mail: “the avenues for (constructive) criticism of science are so much better now than they were even five years ago…. The half-life of nonsensical findings has decreased enormously, sometimes even to before the paper has officially been published.” The wholesale shift in the culture of how scientists think about their craft is at least as significant a meta-story as the replicability crisis itself. But the prophets of doom never let their readers in on this happy secret.

It is absolutely correct for onlookers to call for increased skepticism and clearer thinking in science writing. I’ve sometimes heard it said, with a certain amount of condescension, that this or that field of science “needs its popularizers.” But what science really needs is greater enthusiasm for those people who are willing to invest the time to try to sort the truth from hype and bring that to the public. Academic science does far too little to encourage such voices.

At the same time, it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before. You can both love science and question it. As my father, who passed away earlier this year, taught me, there is no contradiction between the two.

No evidence, but pubically accepted...Richard Feynman's "cargo cult science"

"More on the crisis in research: Feynman on 'cargo cult science'"

by

Michael Hiltzik

October 28th, 2013

latimes.com

After reading my weekend column about the crisis in life science research, Hajime Hoji of USC's linguistics department reminded me of the late Richard Feynman's brilliant deconstruction of the flaws and pitfalls of science as it's done in the modern age.

"Cargo Cult Science" was adapted from Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Caltech, where his spirit reigns as one of that institution's two certified saints. (The other is Robert A. Millikan, Caltech's first president.) The text appears in his 1985 book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Here are some excerpts, but the talk is worth reading in its entirety, both for Feynman's lucid, engaging style and the depth of his thinking.

In the talk, Feynman discussed how much laypersons and scientists themselves take for granted about research results. "We really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science," he said. "Cargo cult science" was his term for research that never seemed to yield provable results, but acquired public acceptance because they possessed the veneer of rigorous methodology.

What cargo cult science lacked was something that, he observed, was never actually taught to Caltech students. "It's a kind of scientific integrity...that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it....Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them....If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it."

One suspects that Feynman, who died in 1988, would be appalled by the current standards of research publication, which critics say favor audacious claims instead of the painstaking, judicious marshaling of evidence he advocated. It's even more striking today to ponder his confidence in science's ability to weed out factitious or mistaken findings.

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out," he told the students. "Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right.... And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

The truth is that the testing of experimental results by other experimenters is exactly what may be lacking in today's publication-driven science world. And as some scientists recognize, getting a paper published in a prestigious journal can do a great deal for one's reputation, even if it's later shown to be wrong.

Even then, Feynman acknowledged that desperation for research funding was driving a tendency by scientists to hype the applications of their work. Otherwise, a friend told him, "we won't get support for more research of this kind." Feynman's reaction was characteristically blunt. "I think that's kind of dishonest," he said.

Omni Magazine will be back soon

"Omni Magazine is coming back to life!"

by

Charlie Jane Ande

August 8th, 2013

io9

Omni Magazine influenced a generation of science fiction-fans and scientists, and it had a huge role in inspiring io9. So it's amazing news that investor Jeremy Frommer is bringing the magazine back to life online, with science writer Claire Evans as the new editor.

According to the Verge, Evans stumbled into editing the new Omni by accident:

The chain of events began in April, when she wrote an effusive piece on Omni for Motherboard. A few weeks later, her editor approached her about investigating the recently resurfaced Omni archives. "As I was interviewing my current employer, Jeremy Frommer, about the collection, he essentially just offered me the job," she says. "That was a little bit over a month ago."

It sounds as though Omni will be updated weekly, and will include fiction by original Omni contributors like Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling alongside science writing. Can't wait!

Omni Magazine [Wikipedia]
 

Omni Magazine Collection [to date...196 items]

Inseperable...philosophy and science

Abstract...

In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy; in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive (if incomplete) perspectives that should be helpful in developing a synergetic relationship between the two. I will review three lines of reasoning often employed in arguing that philosophy is useless for science: a) philosophy’s death diagnosis (‘philosophy is dead’) and what follows from it; b) the historic-agnostic argument/challenge “show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don’t know of any”; c) the division of property argument (or: philosophy and science have different subject matters, therefore philosophy is useless for science).

These arguments will be countered with three contentions to the effect that the natural sciences need philosophy. I will: a) point to the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism (or: ‘in order to deny the need for philosophy, one must do philosophy’) and examine the role of paradigms and presuppositions (or: why science can’t live without philosophy); b) point out why the historical argument fails (in an example from quantum mechanics, alive and kicking); c) briefly sketch some domains of intersection of science and philosophy and how the two can have mutual synergy. I will conclude with some implications of this synergetic relationship between science and philosophy for the liberal arts and sciences.

"Science and Philosophy: A Love Hate Relationship" by Sebastian de Haro

Eternal questions...maybe no answer

"A Quantum of Solace" 

by

Dennis Overbye

July 1st, 2013

The New York Times

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and philosopher-king of quantum theory, once said that great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth. This pretty much captured the spirit of those elusive rules that govern the subatomic world, where light can be a wave — no, a particle — well, actually, whatever you need it to be for your particular experiment.

It also seems to me to sum up much of the history of science and philosophy, in which the learned consensus keeps swinging between the yin-and-yang theories of existence: free will and fate, change and eternity, atomicity and continuity.

These bipolar themes have been on my mind lately. This spring the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin published a new book, “Time Reborn,” reopening a debate supposedly settled by Einstein and his acolytes a century ago: whether time is real or an illusion.

Meanwhile, other physicists have been arguing recently that the only way to understand the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, and perhaps the mass of the newly discovered particle believed to be the Higgs boson as well, is to postulate that our universe is only one in an almost infinite ensemble of universes, each with different properties.

The reality of time and the plurality of worlds are only two of the eternal (so to speak) questions. Bob Dylan once wrote a song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” that consisted entirely, he said, of the first lines of songs he thought he would never have time to write. In that spirit I’d like to blurt out some of the Bohr-like questions about this vat of stars that I’ll never be able to answer before my own time runs away.

Is nature discrete or continuous? Is the universe infinite or finite? Is life inevitable, or is it a lucky accident? Will we ever find company in the cosmos?

Is the truth of the world to be found in the ways things change, like the river that you cannot step into twice, or the ways they remain the same, like the law of gravity or, indeed, the name of that river?

I could go on all day. Feel free to write in with your own.

A final answer to any of these questions would be a landmark of human progress. But it might be in the nature of being human that we will never answer them but have to hug them both in a kind of Hegelian surrender. And so we live in the tension between opposites.

Take, for example, the history of cosmology. Only a century ago the universe was held to be eternal and unchanging. Then came the expanding universe and the Big Bang, an origin almost biblical in nature, like a girl bursting out of a cake, in the words of the cosmologist Fred Hoyle.

Hoyle and his colleagues cooked up a version of eternity, the Steady State universe, in which matter was created in the voids left as the galaxies sped away from one another, so over all the cosmos remained the same. The Steady State idea died in the 1960s and the Big Bang won.

Now a new version of the Big Bang, known as eternal inflation, is ascendant, in which there seem to be an endless number of universes bubbling violently forth from a background of primordial energy — “false vacuum,” in the jargon.

And so it goes, restless change manifested as immortality. Which part of the picture you think is most meaningful might depend on who you think you are — a citizen of this planet and universe, or a creature of the endless possibilities of existence somewhere, at some time. Is there solace to be found in the vision of places and people we can never know or reach?

For we need solace. The latest cosmological wrinkle is dark energy, which is speeding up the flight of galaxies from one another. And the great question is whether this dark energy is going to suck the light and energy out of the universe so completely that some day billions of years from now nothing is left: no memory even of Homer, Jesus, Mozart, Elvis or Nelson Mandela, not to mention the rest of us.

Is this, then, the end of time, at least in our lonely corner of the multiverse, as it is known?

In the four-dimensional reality of Einstein’s relativity, other times — from the Big Bang to the Big Freeze — are as real as other places. Nothing changes; we’re just passing through. As Einstein once wrote, “People like us, who believe in physics, know the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Dr. Smolin, like many philosophers, complains that this coldblooded mathematical formulation doesn’t do justice to the experience we all have of being in time. Moreover, the only way to understand why the laws of physics are as they are, he says, is to imagine them changing — like the Darwinian evolution of species — in cosmic time. Real time. But neither he nor anyone else can say how it would work.

The party line among many theoretical physicists recently is that time (and space) are “approximations” that emerge out of a more primal entity, maybe information in some quantum process. You may wonder who cares what time is and whether it is worth your tax dollars. It’s not a question that moves the markets, but as Bohr understood, it moves our hearts.

John Archibald Wheeler, the visionary Princeton physicist who was Bohr’s disciple, once pointed out that the future and the past are theory. They exist only in records and the thoughts of the present, a fulcrum, in which all stories end and begin.

A single moment of insight or beauty or grace — like hitting a perfect towering drive off the eighth tee — can illuminate eternity.

It all depends on how you look at it.

Go ahead and "think outside of the box"...it's healthy

Abstract...

Any ambitious construction project requires architects for its design and engineers who apply the design to the real world. As scientific research shifts towards large groups which focus on the engineering aspects of linking data to existing models, architectural skills are becoming rare among young theorists. Senior researchers should mentor qualified students and postdocs to think creatively about the big picture without unwarranted loyalty to ancient blueprints from past generations of architects.

"On the Importance of Conceptual Thinking Outside the Simulation Box" by Abraham Loeb

Innovation in science gone?

Abstract...

This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in decline. After centuries of great achievements, the exhaustion of new forms and fatigue have reached our culture in all of its manifestations including the pure sciences. Our society is saturated with knowledge which does not offer people any sense in their lives. There is a loss of ideals in the search for great truths and a shift towards an anodyne specialized industry.

"The Twilight of the Scientific Age" by Martin Lopez Corredoira

Women’s History Month...making a difference in science and technology innovation

ENERGY.GOV...

Women @ Energy

STEM [Science, Energy, Technpology, and Mathematics] [Wikipedia]


Women of science in the Renaissance

Science, the public, the history of science, historians, and philosophers of science

"Science, the public and the history of science"

What made historians and philosophers of science get all of a flutter on Twitter yesterday?

by

Rebekah Higgitt   

December 21st, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Some Twitter-types may have noticed that the New Statesman editorial by Brian Cox and Robin Ince on science [see below], evidence and policy provoked some discussion and debate between the authors and various people loosely within the fields of History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies.

One interesting post on the piece has been written by Jack Stilgoe here in the Guardian. Let me say straight up that, like Stilgoe, there was plenty I agree with in the piece. Particularly the meat of their article, in paragraphs 4 to 7, including the clear acknowledgement that science is work-in-progress and that it cannot be the only thing that policy-makers take into account.

Likewise, most of those engaged in the Twitter discussion would have been in complete agreement that science is an excellent way of producing evidence vital for informed policy and that the scientific evidence on climate change is clear.

So why the fuss? It was an opinion piece that discussed the nature of science and the role of science in society. These are areas that people in HPS and STS have devoted their careers to researching. The view of science that was presented here does not chime with the current consensus within these disciplines, and that naturally provoked a reaction – just as scientists are provoked to react by those who reject or ignore their research.

Both sides of this discussion have more in common than not, and the criticism was made in good faith and with a genuine belief that science, science communication and the use of scientific evidence in government policy, would benefit. We aim to aid, not to jeopardise understanding of scientific evidence, by following the evidence uncovered by our disciplines (and, yes, there are other kinds of evidence than scientific).

Broadly, my objections fall into two categories:

1. The piece suggests that science is separated from the "moral, geopolitical and economic components", even if they rightly acknowledge that it must be part of policy-making

2. Some large and a-historical claims are made regarding changing attitudes to science and technology

On the first, I agree with what Stilgoe has written: "Climate science cannot be separated from climate politics", for scientists are people and they are funded by people. Choices about scientific research and its interpretation are also influenced by geographic, economic, moral and other frameworks. Failing to acknowledge this places an impossible burden on science and its practitioners and inhibits good discussion around different kinds of evidence and opinion.

While there are lots of good phrases about this in the piece, it remains the case that we have scientific evidence on one side of the equation and everything else on the other. It is right to say that scientific evidence "should not be seen or presented … as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged", and yet it and "the scientific method" are given a unique place in this discussion. It is the only thing placed as an "adjudicator above opinion", and they explicitly see a border between science and politics, even if it is portrayed as an unclear one.

The second issue arises in the article's framing, especially the big opening: "The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The foundation for these changes is the scientific method". This was bound to get the historical and philosophical radar twitching, even if it seems peripheral to the focus of the piece.

"[U]nparalleled human advances" is questionable, for almost any other 100-year period can give a similar sense. In the West in recent centuries, science and technology have certainly played a huge part in those changes, but claiming that the kind of technological innovations Ince and Cox are referring to are due to "the scientific method" is something most scholarship in the history and philosophy of science rejects. Firstly, there are many scientific methods and many, when studied in detail, are not particularly methodological. Secondly, new technology tends to lead to new scientific research, rather than vice versa.

This is fairly trivial in the context, however galling to those who carry out research that demonstrates these points. However, more problematic is the fact that the piece goes on to claim that our cushy life and unquestioning consumption of incomprehensible technology is leading us to be less impressed by and accepting of such novelties. Apparently we are devolving:

    The technology and advances in knowledge that cosset us have removed, to a large extent, the need to use our ingenuity and to think rationally. Believing complete drivel was once selected against; now it gets you an expert slot on daytime TV.

In fact, historical research suggests that levels of "believing complete drivel", like those of greeting innovations with "excitement and awe" or boredom or suspicion have not changed a great deal. There is no evidence that "humbug and charlatanism are able to creep into our lives with greater ease", and I have yet to find anyone arguing that "we are no longer obliged to continue the scientific exploration of nature" or that "scientific progress is no longer desirable or necessary".

It is untrue and unhelpful to claim that those who question or ignore certain scientific findings are opposed to science in general. Such statements set up unnecessary dualisms and a "you're either with us or against us" feeling. Frankly, if people only accept part of the package, better that than none. We need to avoid situations where people, who for whatever cultural, religious or personal reasons are unconvinced by scientific arguments in one area, find themselves forced into taking sides in a science/anti-science dichotomy.

How are we to proceed? We should simply accept that "It is not logical to challenge the findings of science unless there are specific, evidence-based reasons for doing so". But the trouble is that people do challenge, and being told that they can't isn't likely to stop them. There is no call here to improve communication with those who have doubts about the message. In the end, we are left simply with "Believe us".

Finally, I do think that scientists are better at science than me, and that successful science communicators are better at communicating science (to a large audience, if not to all audiences). I also think that when scientists, rightly, get involved with discussing the nature of science (philosophy) and its role in society (history, social sciences) they might accept that there are other realms of scholarship that have thought about these things long and hard, and have important things to add to the conversation.

"Brian Cox and Robin Ince: Politicians must not elevate mere opinion over science"

Climate science is just one area that has become controversial for primarily non-scientific reasons. Controversies like this risk undermining confidence in the very idea of science.

by

Brian Cox and Robin Ince

December 18th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The foundation for these changes is the scientific method. In every room in your house, there are innovations that in 1912 would have been considered on the cusp of magic. The problem with a hundred years of unabated progress, however, is that its continual nature has made us blasé. We expect immediate hot water, 200 channels of television 24 hours a day, and the ability to speak directly to anyone anywhere in the world any time via an orbiting network of spacecraft. Any less is tantamount to penury. Where once the arrival of a television in a street or the availability of international flight would have been greeted with excitement and awe, and the desire to understand how those innovations came into being, it is now expected that every three months you’ll be queuing outside the Apple store for a new wafer-thin slab of brushed metal, blithely unaware that watching a movie in the palm of your hand has been made possible only through improbable and hard-won leaps in the understanding of the quantum behaviour of electrons in silicon.

With each new generation, the memory of appallingly high child mortality rates, tuberculosis and vast slums grows fainter and fainter. As the past becomes hazy, we start to believe that there can be no other sort of world. We become nonchalant about vaccines, to the point of seeing them as a lifestyle choice akin to a decision to eat only organically farmed fruit, because we attend fewer and fewer funerals of those who died too young. The technology and advances in knowledge that cosset us have removed, to a large extent, the need to use our ingenuity and to think rationally. Believing complete drivel was once selected against; now it gets you an expert slot on daytime TV.

Against this rather depressing introductory backdrop, however, there are faint glimmers of hope, because science, rational think-ing and evidence-based policy-making are enjoying a revival. Part of the evidence for this statement can be found on the pages of a certain type of newspaper, where the idea that there may be an adjudicator above opinion is treated as an affront to the ideology of the columnist. The adjudicator in question is nature, the universe beyond the Notting Hill basement kitchen, and the wonderful thing about nature is that opinions can be tested against it. The key to science is in this simple statement from the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman, who once remarked: “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

The assertion is surely uncontroversial, but implementing it can be prohibitively difficult, primarily because it demands that everything be subordinate to evidence. Accepting this is fraught with cultural difficulty, because authority in general rests with grandees, gods, or more usually some inseparable combination of the two. Even in a secular democracy, a fundamental tenet of the system is that politicians are elected to reflect and act upon the opinions of the people, or are at least given temporary authority by the people to act upon their own. Science is a framework with only one absolute: all opinions, theories and “laws” are open to revision in the face of evidence. It should not be seen or presented, therefore, as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged; the effect of this would be to replace one priesthood with another. Rather, science is a process, a series of structures that allow us, in as unbiased a way as possible, to test our assertions against Nature.

Let us take the politically controversial issue of climate change as an example. Climate scientists make measurements of observable properties of our planet, such as sea surface temperatures and the area of Arctic sea ice. Over many years, these measurements have formed a large data set. The only grounds for arguing with the data would be specific technical issues with the measurements themselves. One could assert that the satellites measuring sea temperatures were not calibrated correctly, or that there was a methodological error in the measurement of the area of the sea ice. Such criticisms are relatively rare. A more common criticism is of the interpretation of the data using computer models.

All models are, by nature, an approximation to reality. But they are the best we can do, given our current understanding and the power of our computers. The important words here are “the best we can do”. There is no other way of predicting the probability of weather in the future. The only legitimate criticisms would be of specific issues with specific models, or of specific inferences drawn from them. It would certainly be wrong to assert that the ensemble of climate models from various research groups around the world encompassed all possible uncertainties about the future, but it is not logical to attack climate science as a whole, because to do so is to attack scientific method.

The loud criticism of climate science is motivated in the main not by technical objections, but by the difficult political choices with which it confronts us. This is important, because there must be a place where science stops and politics begins, and this border is an extremely complex and uncomfortable one. Science can’t tell us what to do about our changing climate. It can only inform us that it is changing (this is a statement based on data) and tell us the most probable reasons for this given the current state of our understanding. For a given policy response, it can also tell us how likely that response is to be effective, to the best of our understanding. The choice of policy response itself is not a purely scientific question, however, because it necessarily has moral, geopolitical and economic components.

Climate science is one of a series of areas that, for primarily non-scientific reasons, has become controversial; and these controversies risk undermining confidence in the very idea of science. Others are the use of genetically modified crops, vaccination policy and even (God help us) the teaching of evolution in schools. These socio-political-religious controversies risk damaging public confidence in science, partly because of the tactics employed by their advocates, which, if unchecked, will have grave consequences because we live in a society dominated by science. People who rail against science risk becoming disenfranchised, because many of the most important decisions we face as a society have a scientific component. And the larger and more vocal the disenfranchised minority, the less likely we are to make decisions based on the best available evidence and understanding.

Science is the framework within which we reach conclusions about the natural world. These conclusions are always preliminary, always open to revision, but they are the best we can do. It is not logical to challenge the findings of science unless there are specific, evidence-based reasons for doing so. Elected politicians are free to disregard its findings and recommendations. Indeed, there may be good reasons for doing so. But they must understand in detail what they are disregarding, and be prepared to explain with precision why they chose to do so. It is not acceptable to see science as one among many acceptable “views”. Science is the only way we have of exploring nature, and nature exists outside of human structures.

We live in exciting times; our access to knowledge has never been greater, but this also means that humbug and charlatanism are able to creep into our lives with greater ease. We cannot afford to sit back and enjoy the achievements of previous generations, and decide that we are no longer obliged to continue the scientific exploration of nature. Fortunately for us, Michael Faraday was not dazzled by the convenience of gaslight. We must not use our comparative comfort and luxury to elevate opinion above science or, even worse, to argue that scientific progress is no longer desirable or necessary. It would be a gross mistake to assume, for the first time in human history, that there are no great discoveries left to make.

[Robin Ince is a writer and comedian. Brian Cox is a broadcaster and professor of physics at the University of Manchester.]

Physics' labs in a budget crunch

"Physics labs face fiscal fireworks"

by

Dan Vergano

December 29th, 2012

USA TODAY

Atom smashers drill down into the recesses of the innermost regions of reality. But fiscal reality is that they cost money, and some may be casualties of the federal budget fight.

The recipe for an atom smasher requires physicists, their machines, atoms and money. And money, it turns out, is the hardest part of the ingredient list to solve.

As Congress squabbles over millionaires' tax rates this weekend, a quieter collision is playing out in one part of the U.S. scientific enterprise, three U.S. labs that look at the humblest element of the universe, the atom.

On Jan. 7, a Department of Energy advisory panel headed by Texas A&M physicist Robert Tribble will weigh in on the future of three facilities that right now are the reason the USA leads the world in nuclear physics research. Nuclear physicists seek to understand how the innards of atoms, such as protons and neutrons, interact with each other. The field is essential to nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as well as our basic understanding of nature.

Science fans likely know these labs from discoveries that re-created matter unseen since the Big Bang, or that probed the proton, the positively charged physics particles packed into the center of atoms. One lab shocked physicists in 2009 with the discovery that these goobers aren't perfectly round.

"Just as we are poised to reap the bounty of a tremendous investment in nuclear physics in research and technology, we are looking at shuttering facilities, which seems tremendously wasteful, in addition to the loss of U.S. leadership in this vital area of science," says Steven Vigdor of Brookhaven National Laboratory, which hosts one of the threatened labs, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The others are the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Va., and Michigan State University's planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a $615 million lab, which has already received $153 million from the Energy Department and $31 million from the university.

Now, the Tribble committee faces "projected constrained budgets," with federal budget cutbacks ahead, as the Energy Department and National Science Foundation put it in an organizational letter, meaning it essentially could decide the fate of the labs. The labs' futures were first mapped out in 2007 before the economic crash, along with the rest of the U.S. nuclear physics effort. That effort is largely funded by the Energy Department to the tune of about $550 million a year. (To put that in perspective, that is about one-tenth of the cost of one of 12 nuclear-armed SSBN-X subs that the Defense Department now has on its shopping list, despite the Cold War ending two decades ago.)

You may be surprised to learn there are any big U.S. atom smashers left at all, with Europe's CERN lab and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) getting all the attention this year for its detection of a Higgs boson (better known as the "God particle" to the dismay of physicists). Once upon a time, U.S. leadership in high-energy physics was assured, too, before it was overtaken by CERN, but in 1993, President Clinton killed the gigantic atom smasher in Texas that almost undoubtedly would have found the "God particle" about a decade ago, if it had been built (it was partly the victim of another fight over the budget deficit).

As the Tribble committee heard at a September fact-gathering meeting, the U.S. labs are building on the findings at CERN. For example, RHIC smashes together the centers of gold atoms at nearly the speed of light to create "quark-gluon" plasma, a super-heated fluid of the sub-atomic particles normally hidden inside atoms, which represents how things looked in the billionths of a second after the universe started. RHIC and the other lab will sweep up behind the LHC's higher-energy Higgs boson results, plumbing interesting areas of nuclear physics suggested by its findings as well as exploring many still-mysterious facets of atomic behavior.

The shortfall in funding facing all three labs, and the rest of U.S. nuclear physics, is about $100 million total in 2013. (The overall shortfall adds up to about $900 million over five years from 2014 to 2018.) So far, it looks like one of the three labs won't be funded, Vigdor says. If the fiscal cliff "sequestration" of federal funds goes through next year, the Energy Department faces a 7.7% cut in funds, and perhaps two labs will be shut down. "That will likely end U.S. leadership in this area, which we have enjoyed since World War II," Vigdor says. Other nations, such as China and India, are making plans to expand such research, even as the U.S. cuts back. "Our leadership is being drained to other countries," he says.

Of course, things are tough all over. A White House report in September said that sequestration would trigger $417 million in cuts at NASA, $2.5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $7.5 billion in Defense Department research. "Please do not turn away from your commitment to the scientific research our country so vitally needs," read a Dec. 18 letter from 21 Nobel Prize-winners to President Obama, decrying the planned NIH cuts. The letter noted that every dollar invested in research tends to pay off many times over, a finding that economists have made for decades. Atom smashers, as one example, have played a role in the development of lasers, the World Wide Web and nuclear medicine, which uses radioactive isotopes as medical tracing devices in diagnoses and surgeries.

One irony of the cuts coming to science is that the 2007 build-up of nuclear physics came as a result of congressional concern over a National Academy of Sciences report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The report trumpeted fears of the lost U.S. leadership in science and a resultant economic decline. So, the "Long-Range Plan" for U.S. nuclear science, just as in many other areas of research, made promises that look empty now with Washington's focus turned to cutting budgets.

"Everyone can understand the U.S. budget situation and the reality of the deficit," says Vigdor, who is retiring this week. "But all this is just a symptom of the poor budget planning of the U.S. government that has been going on for a long time." If lab bosses knew cuts were coming, Vigdor says, they could have planned things better, instead of facing the boom-and-bust spending that characterizes congressional decision-making.

The good news for the committee contemplating the future of U.S. atom smashers is that they are to submit two plans, one for flat funding (effectively a cut due to inflation) and one for slight growth in the budget for nuclear physics (effectively a flat line in funding for the same reason). By Jan. 7, when their report comes due, the fight over the fiscal cliff may have resolved enough to tell us which path the nation ends up following for the future of U.S. nuclear physics, and the rest of the scientific enterprise.