Size matters …and so does scale

Star-Forming Region S106 Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

My latest piece for the Irish Times Bang! magazine plus some essential links below the post to further reading on the subject of size, scale and our universe!

How big, how far, how small, how much? These are the questions about our universe, and everything in it, that have fascinated us humans for millennia. And science helps us answer them, writes MARIE BORAN.

Ever since mankind gazed up at the night sky, it has inspired questions that form the basis of modern science: how big, how far, how small, how much? If twinkling stars appear to be nothing more than tiny shimmering lights in the sky, how can we tell how big they are or what distance they are from Earth?

It’s all a matter of working out scale, as Ted patiently explains to a perplexed Dougal in Father Ted. Holding up a plastic toy cow while simultaneously pointing to a herd of cattle outside the window, Ted says: “These are small . . . but the ones out there are far away.” This is obviously a silly example. We know how big something is when we hold it on our hands.

Simply put, it is either roughly bigger or smaller than our hand. In fact, this is how the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians first measured objects in the third millennium BC. A cubit was the distance from the forearm to the tip of the middle finger, and a half-cubit was the span of the hand.

As time went on this evolved and changed into the standard inch, foot and yard that we use today.

Thousands of years later, in the third century BC, the Greek astronomer and mathematician Aristarchus took one giant leap and attempted to work out the distance to the moon. He did this by observing the size of the Earth’s shadow in relation to the moon during a lunar eclipse.

Aristarchus also estimated that the moon was a quarter the size of the Earth, and was about 60 times the radius of Earth, which is fairly close to modern calculations. He wasn’t so successful with his guess on how far we are from the sun but he was ahead of his time – and 17 centuries ahead of Copernicus. He suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe but instead moved around the sun.

Unlike physically measuring something in cubits, these kinds of calculations showed that it was possible to infer the size or distance of an object indirectly by using information about related objects. Unfortunately there is only so much you can observe and calculate with the naked eye.

The next great leap in understanding the scale of the world around us came with the invention of the telescope and microscope. These instruments appeared around the same time in the 17th century, when Dutch lens-grinder Jan Lippershey is documented as having made the first telescopic device. Galileo, however, was the Steve Jobs of his time: while he didn’t invent the telescope he was the one who made it popular, and improved upon its design.

Galileo was not only busying himself with bringing us beyond the solar system by unveiling the Milky Way, he also turned the lens down upon more earthly things with the microscope. Illustrations of the legs, wings and other body parts of bees from 1625 are the first documented use of this scientific instrument.

Besides asking how big the universe is we were now asking how small things were. The first measurement for things smaller than the human eye was the micrometer, which was scientifically quantified in the mid 18th century.

The micrometer fits into a scale of universal measurements alongside the millimetre, the centimetre and so on. It can be difficult to conceptualise micrometres and even smaller subatomic measurements but you can use order-of-magnitude reference objects to visualise very small or very large scales.

Imagine you are 1mm tall, even tinier than the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels . The eye of a needle now becomes a doorway and a single hair is as thick as a tree trunk. If you were to pick up red blood cells they would be the size of MMs.

Another quick way to visualise scale is to substitute microscopic objects with stuff you have lying around the house. Take those MMs again and think of them as red blood cells, roughly 10 um (micrometers) in size. If you placed a sugar grain beside the MM that’s what a bacteria would look like in comparison.

Additionally, a hair from your head would be the size of a poster tube and an actual sugar grain would be the size of an A4 cardboard box.

The reason we can “see” so much of the universe is because of powerful telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This telescope was launched into space on April 24th, 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery and is almost the size of a large school bus.

It is so powerful that it can lock onto a target within the accuracy of 7/1000th of an arcsecond, or the width of a human hair seen from one mile away.

Hubble not only sees many magnitudes farther than the human eye but also sees wavelengths not visible to us: near ultra-violet to near infrared wavelength. It has given us staggeringly beautiful images of galaxies billions of light years away and allowed scientists to observe the birth of stars and the prevalence of black holes.

The telescope, and the astronomer it’s named after, Dr Edwin Hubble, helped us learn more about the size of our universe, that it is expanding, and introduced us to the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang theory tells us that between 12 to 14 billion years ago the universe was only a few millimetres across but expanded in a hot dense state into all matter in the known universe today.

Studying this matter helps us understand how the universe came about and this means going small. The job of particle physicists is to examine a world we cannot see: the subatomic world of quarks, leptons and bosons.

If you remember protons from class then imagine that this is comprised of smaller particles: two up quarks and one down quark to be precise.

On this scale, it becomes tricky to quantify matter. Scientists don’t know exactly how small quarks are but because 99.999999999999 per cent of an atom’s volume is empty space, if you were to scale an atom’s diameter to the length of 30 American football fields, electrons and quarks would be less than the diameter of a human hair.

Calculating anything on the back of an envelope

Physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was famous for his back-of-the-envelope calculations. He delighted in thinking up tricky mathematical problems and working out approximate answers with a pencil and paper. These are now known as Fermi questions.

A Fermi question uses limited data and asks further questions in order to work out a fairly accurate answer that doesn’t require any specialist scientific knowledge. For example, what is the circumference of the Earth?

The most famous Fermi question, and one the physicist posed to his students, is the piano tuner problem. He challenged his class to work out the number of piano tuners in Chicago given a single piece of information: the city’s overall population.

Back in those days you couldn’t do an internet search for such an obscure question, which was just as well because Fermi was teaching his class to become scientists and mathematicians by using the most powerful computer in their possession: the human brain.

Fermi knew from census figures that Chicago had a population of about 3 million. He then assumed that the average family has about four members, which makes 750,000 families in Chicago. If we assume that one in five families owns a piano there are 150,000 pianos in the city.

The average piano tuner would: 1. Service four pianos each day; 2. Work a typical five-day week; 3. Take two weeks of holidays a year. We can now begin calculating. In one year the average piano tuner would service four (pianos) x five (days) x 52 (weeks) minus the 10 days off (40 pianos-worth). That’s 1,000 pianos serviced in a year. If there are 150,000 pianos in the city then 150,000/1,000 gives us 150 piano tuners to meet demand.

Using this method you can work out the circumference of the Earth in a few minutes. First, we take something we already know. Using an atlas we can see that the distance between New York and Los Angeles is roughly 3,000 miles. In those 3,000 miles we pass through three different time zones. From this we work out there are roughly 1,000 miles per time zone. But how many time zones are there in the world? There are 24 because there are 24 hours in the day.

This means that it takes 24,000 (24 x 1,000) miles to travel around the Earth. From class, you will remember that the formula for the circumference of a circle is 2 Pi r where r is the radius and Pi is 3 (we’re using rough numbers here because we’re doing it with pencil and paper). So we have: 24,000/6 = r = 4,000. The diameter is twice the radius, so the diameter of the Earth is 8,000 miles. The scientifically accurate diameter of the Earth is 7,901 miles so for the back-of-an-envelope calculation you can be pretty accurate.

Further Reading

Siri, AI and robots

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Here’s a piece – iRobot – that I wrote for Bang! science magazine in the Irish Times. It’s on one of my favourite subjects: robots.

Tell me a joke Siri. ‘Two iPhones walk into a bar . . . I forget the rest.”

It turns out that Siri, the new virtual digital assistant on the iPhone 4S, has a (bad) sense of humour. Does the ability to tell jokes make Siri intelligent in any sense of the word? Or is it just a clever piece of software with a vast bank of canned responses?

Can machines think?

Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, addressed this question as far back as 1950 when he asked, “Can machines think?” To devise the first measure of machine intelligence, Turing tweaked a Victorian parlour game, where the player had to guess, based on the responses, whether they were talking to a man or woman who remained concealed behind a curtain.

If you converse with someone behind a computer screen and you can’t tell if this is a person or a machine, then the machine has truly demonstrated “artificial intelligence”, he concluded. This became known as the Turing Test and is still used to gauge how naturally an artificial agent can converse.

Each year the Loebner Prize competition gathers a panel of expert judges to see if they can be tricked by AI (artificial intelligence) software known as chatbots, which are programmed to mimic human conversation. To date, despite using quite sophisticated programming, these chatbots tend to give away their silicon-based nature. Their responses range from slightly off to utter gibberish, and most humans can spot that their sentence structure isn’t quite right.

Try that for size!

Here’s an example of one of the many bizarre exchanges that a judge had with a chatbot known as Do-Much-More at the 2009 Loebner Prize contest. Judge: “What do you make of the Arctic Monkeys?” Do-Much-More: “Well, here’s a clue: I make what a keeper in a zoo would make. Try that for size!”

Despite his seemingly playful nature Do-Much-More hasn’t spotted that in this context the judge was talking about a band, and the brave chatbot doesn’t even consider admitting to the judge that it doesn’t understand. It simply ploughs ahead.

This is because a test like this is about guesswork and trickery rather than gauging true intelligence, according to Jason Hutchens, an academic who entered the Loebner Prize twice. There are, however, many other measures of machine intelligence and the iPhone’s Siri doesn’t just try to hold conversations. The AI behind Siri is quite complex and its roots lie in US military research.

Adam Cheyer created Siri after working as the chief architect at Calo (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises), one of the largest artificial intelligence projects in US history. Siri listens to voice commands and tries to make sense of them. The first step is voice recognition software but once Siri “hears” what you’re saying it must then make sense of it. This is where the AI comes in.

Siri like to learn

The information passed along to Siri is put in the context of a process or request that it must evaluate and carry out, which is not very different from how most computer programmes work. On the surface intelligent agents like Siri are making decisions, or at least that is how the complexity of the programming makes it appear.

Perhaps the most important piece of AI that Siri has is adaptability.

Explaining how it works on Quora.com Cheyer said: “Siri learns over time (new words, new partner services, new domains, new user preferences, etc).”

Robots that walk the walk

Artificial intelligence, however, isn’t all about the software. Some intelligent agents talk the talk while others walk the walk. The most interesting and cutting edge robots of this kind aren’t just programmed to walk; they’re programmed to learn to walk.

Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont in the US has designed robots that start out a bit like human babies; they begin by crawling, slithering or dragging their bodies along the floor. Over time, they learn to balance better, graduate to walking confidently on two legs and can travel much faster.

Interestingly, these robots experience a form of “super evolution”: in the beginning they are using anguilliform locomotion (they wiggle like fish or eels) but then progress to many legs and finally two.

One of the more famous real-life robots is decidedly more appealing due to its humanoid form. Asimo is a robot developed by Japanese company Honda Robotics and was first created in 2000. Its name is an acronym for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, which is appropriate as it can both walk and run.

The most recent version of Asimo was unveiled earlier this month and is probably one of the most advanced robots in the world. Standing at a mere 4ft tall, this Hobbit-like robot has advanced AI that allows it to navigate around people by predicting where they will move next. This is something that you and I do without thinking every day when we walk down a crowded street but is an amazingly complex task for a robot.

Due to both a tactile sensor and a force sensor embedded on the palm and in each finger Asimo can now open bottles and pour drinks. Intriguingly, it now has the ability to run backwards and hop on one or two legs. When this diminutive robot eventually becomes available to buy it will be like having Rosie the maid from the Jetsons but with legs instead of a set of wheels.

Honda Robotics has suggested that we are now one step closer to having an office robot as Asimo can perform simple tasks while being able to navigate around a stream of people walking about.

Emotional and mechanical

But what about that which makes us human? Something that no robot, it seems, may ever be able to replicate is human emotion. Emotion is hard wired into the human experience and is evolutionarily advantageous in terms of species survival.

For humans to really bond with machines they must connect on an emotional level says Dr Cynthia Breazeal, a roboticist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1999 Breazeal created Kismet, the first emotionally intelligent robot. Kismet doesn’t have a body but its head is kitted out with sensors, cameras and motors. It not only interprets what you are saying but also reacts in quite a human fashion. The robotic head swivels towards the human participant and depending on the movement of its lips, eyebrows, ears and even how it hunches or hangs its head will convey surprise, happiness, anger or disgust.

Kismet’s AI is busy interpreting the tone of your voice, your eye movement and body language to figure out the emotional context of your conversation. It then attempts to respond in kind.

These fields of robotics will have therapeutic benefits, according to Breazeal: children with autism can experience pressure-free social interaction with Kismet-like creatures.

Uncanny likeness

If robots are too human-like, however, we can enter what is known as the Uncanny Valley, a phrase coined by Japanese roboticist Dr Masahiro Mori. This is a situation where robots look almost but not quite human.

Psychologically speaking, this kind of robot tends to scare or disgust us more than something that looks like Optimus Prime or WALL-E.

“There are good reasons why robots shouldn’t look too human,” says futurologist Prof Michael Hulme. “Recent research on avatar images showed that we prefer to look at faces that look clearly like an avatar rather than a pale imitation of a human being.”

An example of a creepy-looking humanoid robot is the Actroid, developed by Osaka University. Robots like this may mimic blinking, nodding and even breathing but it is likely that we will always know that there is something not quite human about them.

The future of robots…

Robots and other artificially intelligent machines will come in various different forms in 10 years’ time says Prof Michael Hulme: “I’m very interested in the notion of specific robots for specific purposes; the idea of a robot as a companion, or one that helps with housework. Take guide dogs for example, they’re very important to the individual and perform a single task extremely well; this is how I see robots fitting into society in the future.”

There will also be emotional robots in the future, he says, but they will be context-based. Science fiction scenarios of robots programmed with emotions often end in disaster, the most famous being HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps HAL should not have been given emotions or the ability to acquire feelings; Hulme says that emotional behaviour will inevitably be assigned to robots that need them as part of their function.

One of the most important issues in 10 years’ time will be the world’s aging population and this is where caring, emotionally aware robots come in. We’re all living longer and part of elderly healthcare will inevitably involve robot aides.

“Given the demographics this is one of the areas where robotics will become very significant,” Hulme says.

There are already prototype units that can carry people up stairways, issue reminders to take medication and take blood pressure. There are also robots like Paro, a robotic baby seal who promotes social interaction among the elderly and is being tested by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Hulme also thinks that AI will come into its own in the era of TMI (too much information). New research predicts that the total amount of information created in 2011 will reach 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion).

If this data was stored on a 32GB Apple iPad it would fill 57.5 billion units; enough to build the Great Wall of China comprised of these iPads, but at twice the height of the original. In 10 years’ time we may not be able to cope with this data but we could have intelligent agents doing so on our behalf.

This AI would be “representative of the individual” and “almost performing as if it was part of the human being”, says Hulme, asking me to imagine a virtual facsimile of myself that will find the information you want on your behalf.

This kind of complex AI is more likely 50 than 10 years down the line but has its roots in the kind of “recommendation” systems like the one Amazon uses.

Will we have truly intelligent machines in 10 years time? Probably not, although the computer scientist who coined the phrase “artificial intelligence” estimated that it could be anywhere between “five to 500 five years” before real AI would emerge. So while we will have our robot butler just don’t expect it to be any good at telling jokes.

Irish science podcasts and radio shows

I listen to quite a few science podcasts but up until about a year ago they were mostly British or US-based. Since then I’ve got involved in the Scibernia podcast with Lenny Antonelli, Triona O’Connell, Sylvia Leatham, Gavin Byrne and several other enthusiastic contributors. I’ve noticed that there is a good handful of Irish-based science podcasts and radio shows around and I hope educators are giving them a listen and maybe bringing them into the classroom.

Here’s my list and I’d like others to add to it and then I can split it off as a tab on this website and share it with others for reference.

 

 

Irish science podcasts and radioshows

Scibernia: A weekly science podcast (that I work on!) produced at Near FM in association with Discover Science and Engineering

Science Chat: An independent podcast by science communicator Sean Marshall

Futureproof: A weekly Newstalk radio show presented by Jonathan McCrea every Sunday at 6pm

Science Spin: A weekly show on 103.2 Dublin City FM from science journalist Sean Duke

Icons of Irish Science: A radio series produced by RTE and available for download through iTunes

Science Gallery: Sadly no longer being made but there is a good archive of previous podcasts

The Skeprechauns’ Podcast: A regular podcast from Skeptic Ireland

Science Safari: This is a series of podcasts to accompany a walking science tour of Trinity College Dublin

Surgery Now: A new podcast from the Royal College of Surgeons that “aims to help surgeons access the latest information about clinical practice and surgical technology”.

The Green Scene: An environmental magazine-style programme aimed at the general public. Broadcast on Phoenix FM every Wednesday at 8pm

 

 

Here comes the brain again

This is a reproduction of a piece I wrote recently (June 9, 2011) for the Irish Times. It’s taken from here.

The next time you find yourself in a taxi, ask the driver to tell you about the last movie he watched. If he has a foggy recollection, you can always blame it on how his brain is wired.

It is not that taxi drivers have especially bad memories. Like everyone else, their brains are “wired” as a direct result of repeated behaviour and experiences and this can have interesting results.

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A famous brain-imaging study by Dr Eleanor Maguire, formerly of University College Dublin and now at London City University, looked at a group of London taxi drivers and observed that parts of their brain literally grew due to their job.

“The study suspected that because these men had to get to know London streets like the back of their hand, parts of the brain responsible for this function might be larger than in the average person,” says Dr Richard Roche, lecturer in psychology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

It was found that a part of the brain known as the posterior hippocampus was larger than average, especially in the right half or right hemisphere of the brain. Roche explains that as this area grew, it expanded into a nearby part of the brain.

“As a result, when these taxi drivers were asked to recall the plot of a film, they weren’t as accurate as the average person. There is a bit of a cost when you enhance a particular brain function and the neurons expand into another area,” Roche says.

Plastic Fantastic

This shows that the brain is not a hard-wired organ that is incapable of change. It is plastic and the wiring is changed slightly every time we perform a new thought or action, says Dr Kevin Mitchell, neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin.

Experience literally shapes the brain, says Mitchell. “The major function of the brain is to adapt itself to the environment, form memories of what has happened in the past and better predict the future. This happens at the level of brain cells connecting with each other.”

We know that neuroplasticity occurs early in development when the young brain is organising itself, says Dr Lorraine Boran, lecturer in cognitive psychology at Dublin City University.

This plasticity continues throughout our lives in response to learning, and also in the case of brain injury where rehabilitation focuses on compensation of lost function or maximising spared function, she says.

“Brain connections form and reform in response to our environment,” explains Boran.

Cells that fire together wire together

In order to describe how connections are formed and fixed in the brain, Boran, Mitchell and Roche all use the mantra: cells that fire together wire together.

Roche says that the phrase “use it or lose it” also applies. He explains that one of the reasons that people seem to experience cognitive decline as they get older is because their brains aren’t getting the same workout as they used to.

“A lot of people get to retirement age and cognitively, they hang up their boots. Something as simple as reading can keep neurons firing.”

Dr Niall Pender is head of the department of psychology and principal clinical neuropsychologist at Beaumont Hospital. He works with a “memory clinic” that involves older people who are not suffering from cognitive decline such as vascular dementia but who are pre-empting this by getting involved in activities that will keep the brain as active as possible for as long as possible.

He explains that it’s not just crosswords or brainteasers that keep the mind active. Exercise and socialising and especially learning new skills keep neurons firing and create new neural pathways in the brain.

A finely tuned orchestra

Forming new connections is the key to recovery in stroke patients and others who have suffered brain trauma of some sort, explains Pender. Borrowing an analogy from psychologist Barbara Wilson, he says we should think of the brain as a finely-tuned orchestra.

If the string section disappears there are two choices: the rest of the musicians can improvise and attempt to play the same piece of music or they can adapt the sheet music to work with the remaining orchestra.

Similarly, when sections of the brain are damaged or destroyed by an injury, this does not spell disaster. “The brain is very plastic and its capacity to recover from damage is vast,” says Roche. “This is contrary to what people thought until relatively recently. For a long time the received wisdom was that if you damaged your brain there wasn’t much you could do.”

“Use it or lose it” comes into play when the brain has been damaged, says Roche. “The more active your brain is pre-stroke, the more resilient it will be afterwards.”

How the brain is pre-wired also has a profound effect on how each individual processes information and approaches problems.

Wired differently

Mitchell says: “When the brain has developed in a different way the wiring is different than normal. This is most likely what happens in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. “If that’s the case, you’re probably not going to be able to fix the problem itself but you can compensate,” he says.

With autism, there are some differences in areas of the brain that are wired to mediate social cues, explains Mitchell. People with autism can find it difficult to maintain eye contact. They may not look at people simply because their wiring means that they are not interested in looking at people.

Mitchell emphasises that because the brain is pre-wired to behave in a certain way does not mean this cannot be changed consciously. “It is possible for those with autism to compensate by learning social rules in an intellectual fashion.”

Despite all our current knowledge, we are still learning how the brain works, says Pender. There are many different parts and they all have a role to play – from keeping us breathing and waking to high-level executive skills and the parts that give us a sense of humour.

We also have to take into account elements of our genetic history and our environment. We are born with certain predispositions that help shape our personality and intelligence, and experience changes this further.

People often ask if some brains are wired better than others, says Mitchell. “Not better but they are certainly wired differently.”

Bad to the bone?

DO WE CHOOSE a life of crime or does it choose us? Dr Kevin Mitchell, neurogeneticist at the department of genetics in Trinity College Dublin, says that certain individuals are more likely to end up behind bars because of the way their brain is wired.

Psychopathic individuals in particular are estimated to make up 20 per cent of the prison population and are three to four times more likely to re-offend than the average criminal. They don’t respond particularly well to rehabilitation either.

The psychopath is defined by a particular personality profile, explains Mitchell. “They are superficially charming, egocentric, calculating, manipulative and have a deficit in what you might call moral reasoning or a conscience. “Someone with a psychopathic personality knows the difference between right and wrong but doesn’t feel it,” he adds.

Research in neuroscience and genetics has found that this behaviour is due to underlying structural differences in the brain.

The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are parts of the brain that are responsible for impulse control and emotional responses such as empathy. In the brain of the psychopath these regions have been found to be reduced in size.

“When we are shown faces of other people expressing fear, a part of the brain known as the amygdala becomes active as we feel sympathy. This area does not activate in the brain of a psychopath,” Mitchell points out.

“Brain imaging shows that people classed as psychopathic don’t even show an emotional response to pain they might receive themselves such as an impending electric shock.”

Mitchell talks about a psychopath who was asked why he didn’t care if he caused pain to others. “He said he could sense pain as physical stimulus but it didn’t carry negative emotional weight. It was something to avoid but not in a visceral way. “Brain imaging would seem to support this clear disconnect between the intellectual and the emotional,” says Mitchell. Psychopathy may be the result of faulty brain wiring but it is not all that rare. It is estimated that about 1 per cent of the general population have this condition, so you’re probably on first-name terms with one.

Thankfully, most psychopaths aren’t like Dexter. “In fact, many do very well in jobs where these kinds of personality traits are seen as useful,” adds Mitchell.

What lies beneath

This is a copy of the piece I wrote for the Irish Times on all the strange and wonderful microbes found in the human body.

Forget what the ads for cleaning products would have us believe, bacterial micro-organisms are crucial for our wellbeing, writes MARIE BORAN

THE HUMAN BODY is a busy place teaming with alien life. Right now there are about 100 trillion micro-organisms inside you, tiny creatures that are living, dying, feeding, fighting, multiplying and happily occupying your inner space.

It is not one or two varieties but a whole host of organisms, known as microbes or micro-organisms to scientists but bugs to the rest of us.

“Microbes are virtually anything of microscopic size: parasites, moulds, yeast, and bacteria,” says Prof Colin Hill from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College Cork. “To date we’ve categorised over 2,000 of these wild and wonderful creatures that live in the average healthy human body.”

These microbes, mostly bacteria, are not harmful to the human body. In fact we enjoy a co-operative relationship with our native microbes. We provide them with a warm environment and food. In exchange they help us digest our food in order to absorb certain nutrients. “If you had no microbes you would be a very unhealthy individual. You wouldn’t be able to digest food and your immune system would be extremely weak. They live in harmony with us and with each other. One species can break down certain materials in the digestive tract and the other will harvest this.”

It’s not all harmony, however. There is a constant battle being waged inside all of us, says Dr Stephen Smith from Trinity College’s department of clinical microbiology.

“Thankfully most of us have a healthy immune system that protects us on a minute-by-minute basis. Every time we brush our teeth we introduce outside bacteria to the bloodstream but they are killed almost instantly.”

The immune system differenciates between friendly microbes, or “commensals”, and the disease-causing ones known as “pathogens”. Bacteria reside outside the protective layer of cells on the human body and once they start invading it sets off danger signals, says Smith.

Our body also naturally flushes out potentially dangerous microbes. This is one of the reasons we have tear ducts, explains Dr Conor O’Byrne from the Bacterial Stress Response Group at NUI Galway. “The surface of the eye is not a particularly great place for microbes to live because our tears contain antibacterial substances. Otherwise our eyes would become cloudy with bacterial growth.”

The importance of the good bacteria living inside us is highlighted when pathogenic bacteria make us ill. Many bacterial infections are treated by broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill the bad guys but a lot of the good guys too, says Dr Christine Loscher from the school of biotechnology at DCU.

“When you take these antibiotics orally they go straight into the gut. They tend to wipe out a lot of the friendly bacteria there. This is why many people experience cramping, digestive problems and suffer from diarrhoea afterwards.”

Not all good bacteria are wiped out and they rapidly multiply to repopulate your digestive system, Loscher says. “Dairy foods, especially yogurt, can help maintain the balance of good bacteria. This is something humans have been aware of on some level since ancient times. Fermented foods containing bacteria were eaten for this purpose.”

Modern science further understands the role that many of these microbes play in human health by profiling their DNA, the genetic material from which they are composed.

“Because of advancements like the Human Genome Project it has become easier to extract DNA from organisms. This is a bit like collecting evidence at a crime scene,” says Hill, explaining part of his work at the Pharmabiotic Centre. “If you want to examine bacteria from the gut or mouth you take a swab or a biopsy or perhaps scrape plaque off teeth. Putting it crudely what you then do is take the live sample, smash open the microbes, extract genetic material and sequence this to identify them.”

In the past microbial samples were placed separately on agar plates in a lab, but Hill says that this missed out on the complex interactions happening between different species. “These micro-organisms inside our bodies work together so when we separated them in the lab they didn’t grow.”

Microbiologists thought they had inner space figured out but were wrong, says Hill: “We thought we knew what was there but it was much more complicated than we expected. You could say microbiology has had a big shock over the last 10 to 15 years.”

One of the reasons for studying the behaviour of these microbes is that it could lead to the development of therapies or treatments, says Hill. These bacteria produce things and communicate with the immune system. “If we can extract these compounds and try to reproduce them in the lab maybe they can be used in development of new drugs.”

Despite all of this, bacteria get a lot of bad press, especially in commercials for cleaning products, says Prof Wim Meijer from the Conway Institute at UCD. “People don’t seem to realise that without microbes we wouldn’t even be here.”

Your body – a colony for trillions

IF YOU’RE ONE of those people who doesn’t like sharing your dessert keep this in mind next time a friend reaches over for a forkful. Each bite of chocolate cake you take is also being enjoyed by more than 100 trillion others, the microscopic life forms living happily in your gut.

Micro-organisms don’t just live in our digestive tract. They’re found in every nook and cranny of the human body from our eyelashes to between our toes. There are more than 2,000 known species and they have been colonising us from the moment we were born.

The vast majority of these microbes (more than 99 per cent) are strains of bacteria and most of these live somewhere in our digestive tract. There are also some viruses, fungi and protozoa too.

Overall there are thought to be about 1,000 different species present in the gut alone. They are so many microbial cells in the human body that they outnumber our own cells 10 to one.

“They’re everywhere. It doesn’t make a difference if you frequently wash your hands. The entire surface of your skin is teeming with them,” says Prof Wim Meijer from the Conway Institute of Biomolecular Biomedical Research at University College Dublin.

This does not mean that they pose a threat to our health. The opposite is true. “Our body’s native species are quite beneficial and provide us with certain vitamins and amino acids as well as forming a protective layer against disease-carrying micro-organisms,” he says.

“If you were somehow able to remove all of these microbes from the gut you would die rapidly and horribly,” Meijer points out.

We could theoretically survive without these co-operative micro-organisms if it were possible to live in a completely sterile, germ-free environment. This would bring on its own problems, however.

“The immune system would begin to misbehave and you would be hypersensitive to disease,” says Prof Colin Hill from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College Cork. “You’d also have to eat 50 per cent more food just to maintain energy because these microbes help us break down food and extract nutrients.”

Not all of our fellow travellers are harmless or beneficial, however.

“The most negative impact of microbes living in the oral cavity is the damage they cause to your teeth,” says Dr Conor O’Byrne from the Bacterial Stress Response Group at NUI Galway.

It’s not sugar that causes tooth decay. Bacteria love to “eat” sugar, producing tooth-unfriendly acids as a result, explains O’Byrne. The less sugar they find, the less acid is produced – another reason to share your dessert!

Nanoscience summer school for science teachers

Please forgive me for copying and pasting a press release but this is an extremely interesting opportunity from CRANN for second level science teachers in Ireland. The CRANN centre is offering a summer work placement to one lucky teacher. The successful applicant will learn about nanoscience and have a chance to develop transition year educational material while there. Details are in the press release below.

CRANN OFFERS UNIQUE WORK PLACEMENT OPPORTUNITY FOR SECOND LEVEL SCIENCE TEACHER

26th May 2011– CRANN, the Science Foundation Ireland funded centre, is offering a six week work placement for a science teacher this Summer, offering a unique opportunity for the successful applicant to learn more about nanoscience in the world‐class facility. The successful applicant will help to develop materials for Transition Year classes, based on CRANN’s new educational DVD, “Nano in My Life”.
The science teacher will have access to researchers in CRANN who took part in the DVD and have the opportunity to spend time in their laboratories and view world-leading electron microscopes. Ireland is ranked 6th in the world for nanoscience research and 8th for materials science, with CRANN responsible for most of the publications that have resulted in these rankings.

The support materials will provide a resource for science teachers to conduct a number of Transition Year classes on nanoscience, e.g. Nano and Health, Nano and IT. Materials will include PDFs containing background reading for teachers, activities for students and PowerPoint presentations. The aim is to link these materials into both the Junior Cycle and Senior Cycle curricula. Although nanoscience is not currently on the curricula, this is set to change and the successful applicant will have the opportunity to find out more about nanoscience in Ireland’s leading research institute ahead of the curricula changes.

Commenting on the opportunity, Diarmuid O’Brien, Executive Director, CRANN, said, “We are looking for a teacher who is enthusiastic about science and can help to create educational materials which will engage students in the classroom. Key to developing a Smart Economy is creating a pipeline of graduates and we have to inspire school students to pursue some of the fantastic opportunities at third level. By bringing nanoscience to life in a relevant fashion in the classroom, students will be able to relate it to their everyday lives and also draw a clear line between what they study in the classroom and can ultimately pursue at university.”

Interested applicants should contact Mary Colclough, Communications and Outreach Manager in CRANN: colcloum@tcd.ie or telephone: 01‐8963022. The closing date for applications is Friday 3rd June.

Public dialogue and the modern scientist

Image courtest of Flickr user nicmcphee via Creative Commons licensing


What does communicating to the public mean for the average scientist? Well, this has changed much over the past few decades. Once seen as something that might perhaps damage a science career, good science communication is now viewed as “no less than a duty” (Gregory and Miller 1998) and seen as a positive career step. In fact some scientists have pursued the goal of communicating effectively with the public as a career choice in and of itself – take Dr Ben Goldacre or Prof Brian Cox as two prominent examples of “popularisers” (Bucchi 2004); the former endeavours to help us see facts and figures as they really are without the distortion that the media and life in general can cause, while the latter brims with enthusiasm for our universe and encourages us to gaze upwards. The new role of the modern media-savvy scientist, it seems, is to help us, the public, ask questions again as we did when we were children and not be afraid of finding out.

The public, of course, is not just one uniform entity. There are more variants of publics than there are hydrogen-bonded crystals falling from the sky on a cold Winter’s day. Natalie Angier (2007) illustrates this well in her retelling of an interview with Michael Rubner, a materials scientist at MIT. He tells her a joke about famous physicist Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle that says you can know either the position of an electron or its velocity but never both at the same time.

Heisenberg is giving a lecture at MIT and because he’s late he is pulled for speeding. The cop says: “Do you know how fast you were going?” to which Heisenberg replies, “No, but I know where I am!”

Rubner says that the joke would bomb at a cocktail party but an audience of eighteen-year-olds at MIT would raise the roof with laughter.

Filling in the blanks

So how does the scientific community educate (and entertain) the public at large and how simple or complicated should science communication be? I think this is summed up well by geophysicist Robert M. Hazen and physicist James Trefil – as quoted by Gregory and Miller (1998, location 270*) – when they say that newspaper headlines such as “Genetically Engineered Tomatoes on Shelves” leave members of the public with a need to “fill in whatever blanks have been left by [their] formal education” if they are to understand the implications of such science on their lives.

And as Habermas would tell you, the post-industrial public sphere is not just a receptacle for information but a vibrant arena where information is passed around, picked apart, created and modified.

So the scientific community cannot expect a mute audience to receive information without question (the traditional “sender-transmitter-receiver” model of communication), and it doesn’t. More recently science communicators have been actively looking at a method of public engagement that aims to bring in the public at the early stages of science: “upstream” communication.

We’re all swimming upstream

But before I go into the nuances of upstream pubic engagement we need to understood why it came as a breath of fresh air. Up until 2004 the public understanding of science chiefly operated on the deficit model – that is, it approached the Public Understanding of Science (PUS) from a position where scientists were trying to deliver information to an ignorant public. Wilsdon and Willis (2004) take this three-letter acronym of PUS and explain how it was “clogging the cracks and pores that might have allowed genuine dialogue to breathe”.

The chief problem with PUS – aside from assuming that the great unwashed is also the great uneducated, unwitting, unenlightened and uninformed – is that it takes the three key words of ‘public’, ‘understanding’ and ‘science’ and doesn’t always consider their complicated and dynamic definitions. If we go back to Habermas’ definition of the public sphere then the public we are concerned with is that of “active, independent, and responsible citizens, with power, wealth, and influence, armed with the latest information and debating the conditions of their social existence and interests” (Gregory and Miller 1998, locations 2,057-87).

And science itself is by its very nature fluid and ever-changing … but what if we were to bring the public on this dynamic journey – and not just at the later stages when papers are published and policies implemented?

This is the thinking behind what the Royal Society did in 2004 in order to increase the public understanding of a newly emerging field of science – nanotechnology. The Royal Society brought together a panel of experts or working group to look at how nanotechnology would impact upon society at large and for the first time this panel was not just comprised of the scientific elite. The public was involved and represented:

For inquiries of this nature, such voices are often called to give evidence, but for them to sit as equals alongside ʻrealʼ scientists is rare. (Wilsdon and Willis 2004, p. 3)

What this meant was that besides professors of physics, chemistry, medicine and engineering there were also representatives from the fields of environmental science and social science as well as someone acting on behalf of the consumer.

One of the most important reasons for needing this new form of engagement is because “blind faith in the men in white coats is gone and hasn’t come back” as Ben Page (2004), chief executive of UK research powerhouse Ipsos MORI put it.

Mad cows, misinformed public

One case study that puts forward the case for upstream public engagement has to be the media coverage of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis) or “mad cow disease” in the UK in the early nineties and how scientists communicated or failed to communicate with the public.

The public were told repeatedly that British beef was safe, as was milk, only to have various trading restrictions put in place that conflicted with these messages. For example the Ministry’s chief veterinary officer Keith Meldrum told the public that there was no risk of BSE transmission through milk but little under a year and a half later milk from BSE-infected cows was banned from sale (Gregory and Miller 1998).

Meanwhile the deputy minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food could not have been more condescending:

The thing that annoys me is that we have published all the facts about BSE …. When you get into a situation where people don’t want reassurance and want to scare themselves to death there’s nothing you can do about it. Commonsense and science seem to have gone out of the window. (Craig and Francis 1990, p. 5)

The British government was stating categorically that beef was safe while most scientists expressed their concern that this was not a scientifically proven fact one way or the other and the president of the National Farmers’ Union aptly said that the public can tell when there are “voids in communication”.

This led to what was described as civic dislocation or a breakdown in communications between the UK public and their public institutions.

Only the interested

This is something we can learn from. Craig and Francis, in their conclusion, cite Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School in the US, who thinks that it is possible to have a discreet and insulated decision-making process where the experts call the shots and the public are included in a downstream fashion but when a set of background conditions exist.

These conditions preclude uncertain and contested science by definition in that there exist “objective facts” and easily identifiable expert knowledge on the subject. What I am saying is that the Royal Society made a good decision to include the public in an earlier stage of engagement and have dialogue around the subject of nanotechnology because opening up the debate is infinitely better for the greater public understanding of science than aiming to close down the debate as the BSE incident showed.

I will leave my views on upstream public engagement with a few negatives to add to all the positives: it will always be a great challenge because there is a balance between engaging the interested and hooking new customers (although “gateway drugs” like science fiction movies have their uses!).

Increasing the public understanding of science is a noble and indeed important pursuit because the modern citizen – whether working, learning, purchasing, voting or creating – has a right to information on existing science and technology as well as the ongoing research and innovation that so profoundly shape our lives.

Don’t know, don’t care

One of the problems inherent in this noble pursuit, says Angier (2007) is that sometimes she gets the feeling that people are not listening or, if they are, they’re not understanding. She relays a story about the weekly science section of the New York Times that the chief editor of the overall paper claims to love before sending out a thank you note to the staff that shows he’s not even sure what day it’s printed on. “Oy, it hurts!,” she says. Scientists are increasingly been encouraged to fit into this role of science communicator, all the while wondering if it is a form of lip service and hoping that the science supplement doesn’t get thrown out with the free catalogues. I remember one of the first times a story of mine was published – it was on robotics – and I was sitting behind a businessman on a flight to the UK. He had the newspaper in his hands and I was waiting for the thrilling moment when he would turn to my story and hopefully learn something new. He reached the technology section, ripped it out and dumped it on the floor before turning to the finance section. Oy, it hurts.

There is however, always plenty of hope in science, and upstream offers huge opportunities to science communicators to get excited about scientific research and convey this to the public. Upstream science journalism, says academic and writer Alice Bell (2010), “swaps that cliché of ‘scientists have found’ for ‘scientists are doing’” so it feels as though a brand new paradigm is evolving whereby we can shrug off the mantle of archaeologist in favour of explorer.

But there is another great reason to engage the public in science and that is to bring research out into the open and ensure greater transparency when it comes to data. In Europe the public desire for greater accountability and transparency had an opening around the time the European Union was developing Framework 7, which proposed to increase its R&D budget from €17.5bn to €40bn. This was obviously quite a large amount of money and various NGOs and other organisations decided that they wanted more say as European citizens in how the money was being spent and wanted it to be for the public good i.e. in areas including public health and social issues (Stilgoe et al 2005).

This came to pass when the objectives of FP7 were categorised as follows:  cooperation, ideas, people and capacities and was answerable to the public on issues such as how citizens or SMEs could benefit from this R&D fund that expires in 2013 (The main objectives of FP7: Specific programmes 2007).

While this was a welcome step it can only go so far when it has its limitations when it comes to scientific misconduct, for which funding represents the weakest link. Institutions of research and education are operating in an increasingly competitive environment where hundreds of research scientists are vying for the same funding, data must be protected until a paper is ready to be published and there is the temptation to fudge numbers in order to ensure your research is earning its keep.

In this context one of the biggest science stories and indeed one of the biggest controversies of 2010 involved climate change scientists and the allegations that some scientists were involved in professional misconduct and has manipulated data. Thousands of private emails between the scientists involved were published on a Russian website and spread across the web and these emails were framed in the context of fudging numbers. On the one hand the scientists were cleared of the alleged misconduct while on the other hand it was pointed out that there was a lack of “openness” to the wider scientific community and the public (de Bias 2010, p. 29).

The Harvard definition of scientific misconduct recognises that honest error or differences of opinion do not fall into this category:

“Research misconduct” or “misconduct in research” includes fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results (Harvard, 2009)

Sokal and his lo-cal “morphogentic field”

Then there is the famous case of Sokal and his quantum quackery. Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, decide to write a fictional paper comprised of academic buzzwords and terminology that in effect made no sense at all. It was an experiment to see of it would pass the rigours of peer review by virtue of being in with the in-crowd. Transgressing the frontiers was published in a journal called Social Text and Sokal went about exposing the “intellectual laziness and weak scholarship” he observed (Bucchi 2004, location 1787).

So there is an insular nature to the scientific community that perhaps cannot be penetrated by the public sphere but there are increasingly initiatives from scientists to reach out to the public and this can be a good form of self-regulation. The advent of the Internet meant that organisations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the UK Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology (COPUS&T) could reach a wider audience.

Would you like science with that?

In fact the number of American science centres that provided informal environments for the science-hungry public rose from 17 to 300 from 1972 to 1997 (Gregory and Miller 1998, locations 4,678-738) and concepts such as the science museum flourished.

These are good initiatives but the public does have an impact on scientific conduct or misconduct. In fact the increasing publicity surrounding research fraud since the late 1960s combined with the fact that more and more funding is coming from private enterprise has led to a paradigm shift in how research ethics are kept in check (Montgomery & Oliver 2009). In fact the various publics create the norms of research integrity. This paper shows the evolution of research integrity from a time when self-regulation was seen as the norm and science was simply the pursuit of truth.

This changed in the early 1970s when it was viewed in the context of preventing scientific misconduct following the public awareness of several highly unethical studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Milgram experiments in group conformity – studies that would never be allowed today. Then the public sphere played an even greater role from the 1990s onwards as research integrity defined itself by how it engaged with those outside the scientific community and how open and transparent they were seen to be. This was also informed by ‘post-academic science’ where research had begun to take place in an industrial setting and private funding.

An interesting editorial in the February 2010 issue of Science shows what the science community today thinks of research ethics and outright states that scientific misconduct or even the accusation of such “weakens the bridge between science and society” but goes on to say that this bridge can be strengthened with better public engagement and “vigourous enforcement of scientific behavioural norms”. But what are those norms?

Sociologist Robert Merton defined them in the forties with what he called CUDOS says Stilgoe et al (2005): communalism, universal, disinterested, original and scepticism. This does not exactly hold true today and communalism never really has as many scientists will keep data to themselves before publishing a paper, and why not if it could be stolen and published by another?

I think that public engagement is rapidly become one of the influencing factors of scientific behavioural norms and it is worth saying that several publics are involved in keeping science on the straight and narrow, including the media and the legal system. The public needs all the facts before they can make an informed decision and these two institutions can play crucial roles.

Mind the gap

To paraphrase Irish comedian and former student of theoretical physics Dara O’Briain, what science doesn’t know or hasn’t proven yet cannot be conveniently filled with pseudoscience and hokum that preys on people’s lack of understanding.

UK journalist Simon Singh (2008) brought chiropractic into the mainstream after writing an article debunking its scientific legitimacy. When sued by the British Chiropractic Association he raised important issues around British libel law and free speech but this indirectly raised public awareness of science versus pseudoscience.

Similarly Ben Goldacre, another British journalist and qualified medical doctor, exposed Gillian McKeith – a “nutritionist” who was making a living promoting her healthy eating regimes based on her claim that she was a doctor of nutrition. Goldacre brought it to public attention that the term “nutritionist” was not protected in the way that “dietician” is and also proved how easy it was for McKeith to get her title of doctor by sending away for the same title in the post for his cat/ His cat now shares the same title of “doctor of nutrition” as McKeith and is equally qualified to advise us on our eating habits so that we don’t make a dog’s dinner of our diets.

You see, scientific misconduct can also include the existence of pseudoscience that is a blight on the scientific community. The pubic can play an active role in rooting out this kind of misinformation and the public should be actively involved even if the media is often seen as a ‘dirty mirror’ and the public are frequently approached from the diffusionist method of science communication.

In conclusion I’ll leave you with a quote from science historian Michael Shortland who questioned scientific elitism in favour of public understanding and engagement.

“What role for lesser mortals? To clap from the sidelines?”

Bibliography

Agre, P & Leshner A. 2010. Bridging science and society. Science, 327

Angier, N 2008. The beautiful basics of science, London: Faber and Faber.

BBC World Service 2010. Discovery. Science and libel [Online], 11 December.

Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009xbbw [Accessed 17 January 2011].

Bell, A. 2010. Taking science journalism “upstream” [Online]. Available from: http://alicerosebell.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/taking-science-journalism-upstream/ [Accessed 19 January 2011].

Bucchi, M. 2004. Science in society: an introduction to social studies of science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

de Blas, A. 2010. ‘Science, ‘sceptics’ and spin: Framing the climate change debate’, Ecos, 156, pp. 28-30.

Gregory, J. & Miller, S. 1998. Science in Public: Communication, culture and credibility, New York: Basic Books.Harvard 2009. Procedures for responding to allegations of misconduct in research [Online]. Available from: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~research/greybook/misconduct.html [Accesed on 18 January 2011).

Nature Publishing Group 2010. Combating scientific misconduct [Online]. Available from: http://www.nature.com.remote.library.dcu.ie/ncb/journal/v13/n1/full/ncb0111-1.html [Accessed 18 January 2011]

Singh, S. 2008. Beware the spinal trap. The Guardian [Online], UK, Saturday 19 April. Available from: http://svetlana14s.narod.ru/Simon_Singhs_silenced_paper.html [Accessed 19 January 2011]

Singh, S 2010. The Mass Libel Reform Blog – Fight for free speech! [Online]. Available from: http://www.simonsingh.net/Blog_Post.html [Accessed 19 January 2011].

Stilgoe, J., Wilsdon, J. and Wynne, B. 2005. The Public Value of Science: or how to ensure that science really matters, Demos.

Willis, R. & Wilsdon, J. 2004. See-through science: why public engagement needs to move upstream, Demos.

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What is science?

Some rights reserved by Sergei Golyshev via Flickr

As a scientist or science communicator it is quite easy to glide through life assuming that scientific norms have always been there. We take for granted that scientific fact explains the world around us but do we ever stop and wonder where the discipline arose? Science is the search for truth but is there only scientific truth? What makes a scientific fact? How do we know something holds true?

The scientific status quo that we operate within was not always so. It has evolved throughout history to bring us to where we are now.

I’m taking a module in philosophical perspectives on science and our lecturer started at the very beginning (a very good place to start). He took us through the beginnings of modern science and philosophy by taking us back to ancient Greece where reason was held up as the ultimate truth and mysticism was cast aside as a valid explanation. So I suppose thunder is not Thor throwing a hissy fit and rain is not the tears of flying monkeys.

Thales uber alles

The ancient Greeks emerge as the first proper scientists. “Lets see if we can reason this out,” they thought. It all started with Thales, known as the father of science. He was the first philosopher and the first scientist because there wasn’t really a distinction between the disciplines; both were interested in seeking truth through logic. Thales believed that the universe is ordered and explicable. And he didn’t just sit around in a toga ruminating over life, the universe and everything. He actually predicted a solar eclipse.

How do we predict things? Observation. The objective scientist observes measurable phenomena and tries to make sense of it by applying a series of logical steps. Then this is tested rigourously. Thales obviously saw patterns in the movements of the sun and was able to deduce when an eclipse would again happen. This is pretty groundbreaking. It’s paradigm-shifting.

Xenophanes and the truth bubble

I was just beginning to become settled, thinking that order and logic ruled when along came Xenophanes and popped my truth bubble. This guy said that all knowledge is relative.

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods’ shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

Aside from getting a strong visual image of a cow painting little stick cows with its clumsy hoofs or thinking about how a horse would ever be able to use a touchscreen phone I couldn’t help thinking the idea of being able to find an absolute is rubbish if we just go and see everything from our own point of view. Actually Xenophanes did believe in a universal truth but thought that us mere mortals would never grasp it with our stubby five-digited paws.

The real brain twister was Parmenides. His view of reality was that change is illusory and that time was a trick of the senses. If something is it cannot not be. Nothing comes from nothing. I remember juggling these concepts as a child and being fascinated with the idea of nothing and forever and infinity. Although Parmenides frustrated me during the lecture he is the one philosopher that I am looking forward to reading up on.

Wait. I thought we were talking about science?

Obviously this blog post is not answering the question “what is science?” but this is not the purpose. The purpose is to question what it means to be reasonable, objective, empirical while questioning the notion of scientific “fact” or universal truths.

I think most scientists would agree that science is not a collection of forever-established and unchanging facts. Science is fluid and what was once considered to be an explanation for the way the world works – be it Thales’ view that everything began with water or Anaximenes who believed everything was composed of air (and wasn’t really far off modern physics thinking) – is replaced by a new set of axioms.

The most famous of the Greek philosophers were undoubtedly Plato and his student Aristotle. I like the notion of Plato’s forms, or perfect true blueprint of any object that exists in the real world. He believed that a table, for example, was a real world knock-off off some perfect embodiment of “tableness” that existed outside our realm of being. Then Aristotle came along and said “Woah there. I think these forms are actually only inside our minds. They don’t exist away from the object itself. We have a concept of ‘tableness’ in our heads that we attach to a table if and when we see it. It’s our way of making sense of a table and being able to recognise one when we see one.” (I may be paraphrasing slightly)

Our lecturer wrapped it all up by saying that modern science could be said to be split between Platonic and Aristotelian viewpoints. The former being idealism and the general and the latter being more grounded in reality and specific. While Plato would say that our senses cannot be trusted to give us the truth and that we must seek truth within the mind, Aristotle would say that what we touch and see is what is real.

xkcd: String Theory

How does that apply to modern science? Science is empirical if nothing and we have standard measurements of distance, time and temperature – things we can see and feel and that appeal to the senses. On the other hand it takes a leap of faith into the abstract world of mathematics to “know” String theory (a Time magazine article on Einstein that explains the basics of String theory) or seek a Grand Unified Theory.