Start of Year Shenanigans

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Athene Donald

Having returned from a few days of holiday, I am feeling frivolous. So here is a sketch representing the

Start of the Academic Year at the Department of Paintballing

The main characters in this sketch are described in a previous post in which the Department of Paintballing was introduced, with further information about its place in the University given here. 

The start of year staff meeting in the Department of Paintballing was a lively occasion this year. Everyone seemed to have come back from their various summer activities full of enthusiasm for a diverse range of new initiatives, and all were brimming over with their ideas ready to speak loudly over the top of everyone else. It was a cacophonous meeting, chaired with his usual aplomb by Professor Passive-Aggressive.

First to enter the fray was Dr Ogle (a relative newcomer whose youth showed), who had spent most of the summer, it would seem, lazing on the beach studying beachball games. He was full of ideas about how the standard way of paintballing, now revealed as very dangerous for young women with breast implants, could be modified so that those  same young women could scamper around in scanty clothing merely tossing brightly coloured beachballs at each other. ‘So much safer for the fairer sex’ said Dr Ogle, with something of a snigger. The chair merely raised an eyebrow at this and waited quietly for one of the women in the room to react.

Sure enough Dr Longwinded (Dr Philibuster hadn’t returned from the vacation yet, so she was standing in)  jumped into the breach with an irate diatribe about equality, respect and the importance of preserving the purity of paintballing, not dumbing it down with beachballs.  At the same time she demonstrated her awareness of the tabloid press, by pointing out the owners of the site had said in future anyone with gel implants would be provided with extra padding to prevent a similar accident happening in the future. (During all this, Dr Jobsworth was getting more and more agitated about the health and safety implications for the department, but did not manage to get a word in edgeways; she saved the memory up for a later date when she could introduce the idea of high speed impacts on gels with maximum effect to derail someone or other’s pet project.) While Dr Longwinded had airspace she decided to introduce her own ideas after her weeks in the Highlands communing with nature in a very wet and ill-protected tent which kept blowing over. The force of the wind had struck her, well, forcefully and made her realise that what the department needed was a large wind tunnel to explore the impact of adverse weather conditions on paintballing accuracy.

At this, Dr NIMBY could control himself no longer.

No!

he yelled,

We do NOT need a wind tunnel. I know what will happen. I will be expected to give up my own large laboratory space to make way for this totally unnecessary piece of equipment. It will destroy my project on paint formulations, which need fume cupboards.

(Dr Jobsworth stirred uneasily again, as the word fume cupboards always reminded her of a particularly nasty accident with mercaptan which had rapidly spread a foul stench not only around their own department but into the neighbouring department of Strategies and Policies in Computer Wargame Development. She had never really understood why anyone had authorised its use in the first place, and was quite convinced she should have been kept informed with one of the requisite triplicate forms being filed in her very own filing cabinet.)  Dr NIMBY turned to Professor Passive Aggressive, looking for support.

I have a new student funded by Akzo Nobel starting next month, which has the potential to have major impact, pushing up their sales in paints for paintball operators significantly…..

There was a collective, heartfelt groan at the word impact, a wheezing and shivering as people remembered the dreaded REF, something most of them had managed to bury throughout the summer months but which suddenly rose spectre-like in front of them. They all knew that they would be being asked to start sketching case studies soon, that they had been advised to give the matter careful thought over the break from teaching, and not a soul had heeded that advice. Dr NIMBY was stopped in mid-flow, the groan momentarily causing him to lose momentum in his screeches.

For once, this gave Dr Mouse a chance to speak up. This was a very rare occurrence, so rare indeed that everyone just stopped and stared.

I think what we need to do is create a version of paintball suitable for the over 70’s,

she stammered in her barely audible voice.

That generation can’t go rushing around in the woods, their arthritis or hearts won’t let them, we need to create a new, gentle form that allows them to exercise both mind and bodies in a fashion suitable to their venerable years. We all know how much Baroness Greenfield would approve of such brain-training…

She got no further. Professor Passive Aggressive had swiftly switched into his utterly irate mode at the mention of the Baroness’s name. It had been bad enough when Akzo Nobel had been mentioned (well, to be fair, any industrial sponsorship was inclined to get under his skin, as he had never managed to bring in a penny from such sponsorship in all his years in the department), but Susan Greenfield’s name was like a red rag to a bull ever since he had once been overheard by a local journalist sounding off about her leather skirts and been publicly pilloried as a result. There was a loud explosion of wrath as he got into his stride

That woman hasn’t a clue about paintballing. Why bring her name into it? It is an absolute disgrace that you should think about such a thing. We are a purist department who value what we do…’ He stopped suddenly, to everyone’s amazement.

The rest of the group turned to see what/who it was that had done the unthinkable and shut Professor Passive Aggressive up in mid-rant. Of course, only one person who could do that – the Chair of the Faculty of War Games had entered the room.

I see it’s business as usual here,

she said.

I’m sorry to see you aren’t properly focussed on the most important topic of the moment. Which Unit of Assessment do you want to be entered in for the REF? I’ve heard rumours that you’re not content simply to be entered into Sport and Exercise Science, but some of you think you belong in General Engineering – not even the same panel. Huh!

And with that, and a withering look at the subsiding Professor Passive Aggressive, she left the room again. There was an embarrassed silence before Professor Passive Aggressive, with what dignity he could muster said

Shall we return to the agenda?

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Some Things Never Change

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Athene Donald

One of the enjoyable consequences of carrying out reading tasks for publishers, is that often one can be paid ‘in kind’ with a miscellaneous collection of books up to some market value considerably more than any cheque they might otherwise put in the post. I recently had the pleasure of receiving a motley (but carefully selected) collection of books from Princeton Press, having just completed such a task of reviewing a synopsis for a proposed book  (and a very good book this particular outline has the potential to be).  I have just finished reading the first item from this parcel of goodies. It is a rather old book, having been written in 1976, with the title The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History by David Elliston Allen.  It’s a wonderful mix of historical tidbits, a serious study of how the different component parts of natural history developed in their own distinct ways and a description of the increasing tension between professionals and amateurs over the past 150 or so years. I have no intention of providing a serious review – after all I’m 35 years too late, although I’d certainly recommend the book  – but I just wanted to tease out some strands which may resonate with the modern reader.

There are intriguing remarks dotted throughout the book which illustrate that, whatever we may currently feel about funding crises, the heavy-handed policies of our funders or partiality for a particular (sub-)discipline or individuals, these are nothing new. I’ll pull out some quotes to try to cheer us all up that the present period may actually be no worse than many others for those pursuing scientific endeavours.  On the other hand, some things are very different! Of the Rev John Mitchell, who retired from the Woodwardian Chair of Geology in Cambridge in 1764 because he wanted to marry (impermissible for college fellows at the time) it is said that thereafter

Unfortunately, due to modesty or mere inertia he published next to nothing; and these invaluable results [on stratigraphy], for all the arduous work he put into them, were lost to the generation that particularly needed them – a story, alas, which in the history of science is only too familiar!

Publish or perish had not yet entered the lexicon and, as Mitchell had left academia, even if the RAE/REF had been invented, he could have cocked a snook at it.

A later Woodwardian Professor, Adam Sedgwick, appointed in 1818, had no experience of geology when he took up the post (he had been trained as a mathematician and theologian) and is reported to have said

Hitherto I have never turned a stone; now I will leave no stone unturned.

which seems a rather neat epithet.  He made good on this promise, as he went on to become one of the founding fathers of modern geology. In this case, the faith of the ‘funders’ – in the form of the electors to the Chair – in an individual, regardless of his CV, seems to have been amply justified. However the reality was the Chair had, up until then, been regarded as a sinecure, so they probably hadn’t in actual fact worried overmuch whether or not he knew any geology, or had any intention of doing any in the future, when they appointed him.  A modern CV would have to show at least a nodding acquaintance with the subject.

During the Victorian era naturalists developed an acute desire to collect data in all its forms. Allen is hard on these guys, seeing them as mere functionaries, strong on staying power, weak in ‘speculation and insight’ and in general, as Darwin’s ideas started to spread, not very keen on the idea of evolution rather than stability.

Not very surprisingly, a noticeably high proportion of the key people of this period – Dawson Turner, JE Bowman, Edward Forster, GS Gibson, William Brand, even Yarrell in his early years – earned their daily bread by working in a bank.

Now here’s a new way to abuse bankers I haven’t seen in the modern press; Allen added that

there was something about the counting house mentality, with its punctilious sense of order and its skill in executing business with complete correctness and despatch, that made it well suited to the ceaseless roster of minor, yet demanding and sometimes back-breaking tasks in the intellectual housekeeping that forms so large a part of the work of natural history.

These people, if Allen is to be believed, were however swayed by the idea that bigger is better, with, for instance,

the general swing among botanists to a much larger type for vasculum [for holding their plants] for ordinary, everyday purposes

They were also concerned about their dress being appropriately standardised

In place of the frock coat in the field came the shooting-jacket popularised by sportsmen

with

 ample cross pockets outside, on the hip; also several breast pockets, particularly two (at least) very small ones, for glass vials containing spirits to stand upright in.

As Allen notes, the forerunner of the anorak (and all that that word implies) was created.

The unimaginative Bankers with their tickbox mentality and suitably attired in anoraks, was shaken up not only by the new ideas about evolution, but by one of its chief exponents in the form of Thomas Huxley, a professional scientist, in the sense that eventually he received a stipend. Stipends were a bone of contention in the Victorian era, paltry because they weren’t really meant to keep body and soul together. Posts that sounded really grand appear actually to have meant (as the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology was when Sedgwick was appointed to it) simply to provide a formal title for gentleman rather than be serious academic research and teaching posts and paid accordingly. So Edward Forbes, a leading naturalist who was Professor of Botany (although really a zoologist) at King’s College London with the princely salary of £100, combined this role with simultaneously being Curator to the Geological Society so that he could earn a further £150. He ended up saying

Both offices are hard work, no play and little pay.

So maybe things haven’t changed that greatly in academia, although we have to be content with only one (paid) post in general.

Huxley was the absolute antithesis of the amateur banker-cum-naturalists whose love was collecting things. He specifically said

I never collected anything and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business.

He worked tirelessly to improve the nation’s science education at all stages (a battle, some might say, that has still not been won despite the headlines this year about the surge in numbers doing sciences at both GCSE and A level). The Natural Sciences degree, that excellent training ground for scientists which is still going strong in Cambridge, was instigated in 1851; my very own Cavendish Laboratory was founded in 1874, also as testament to the push to improve scientific training. Nevertheless, the language Allen uses about Huxley should make us realise that things could be worse:

Year after year he spoke and wrote and lobbied to secure for science a greater share of the country’s educational resources and, as a minimal measure, some instruction in at least its rudiments as a standard item in the school curricula. The lethargy that confronted him, however, was great and there were numerous entrenched positions to overcome. Science and scientists were distrusted…

Plus ça change?

 

 

 

Posted in History of Science, Life in Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Athene Donald

This book review first appeared in Times Higher Education on September 1st 2011.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

By Lisa Randall
Bodley Head, 464pp, £20.00 ISBN 9781847920690 Published 1 September 2011

I would imagine that most physicists can remember where they were when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at CERN. I certainly do: sitting on a Research Assessment Exercise panel in a hotel in a very wet Lake District. The excitement around the table was palpable as we all followed what was going on via the BBC website on our laptops. I don’t suppose any of us were sitting there on the edge of our seats waiting to see if a black hole was going to swallow up Geneva, followed swiftly by the rest of the world, but no doubt there were people elsewhere fearing the worst. This book by the eminent US theoretical particle physicist Lisa Randall discusses, among other things, why physicists were so certain that a black hole was not going to consume us when the beam was first switched on (or at any point subsequently). It is a book written by a leading proponent of that highly technical branch of physics known as string theory, but one in which she attempts to make these tricky subjects accessible to everyone, without an equation in sight (barring the occasional E=mc2).

Her self-stated aim is to describe “experimental research at the LHC and theoretical studies that try to anticipate what they will find. It also describes research in cosmology – how we go about trying to deduce the nature of the universe, and in particular that of dark matter hidden through the universe.” But she has other ambitious aims here, too – exploring “more general questions that pertain to all scientific investigations”. Thus there are several different strands permeating the book and, as Randall says, “in some respects it is two books in one – but books that are best read together”.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door is clearly very timely. As I write this review, the search for the so-called Higgs Boson, aka the God particle, has once again been in the news as both the LHC and the US high-energy accelerator, known as the Tevatron, ramp up their energies to produce data that may – or may not – show tantalising hints of this elusive particle.

It is, of course, possible that by the time this book hits the shelves in the UK and this review appears, there will be some formal claim that the Higgs has been seen, but it seems improbable. The understandably reticent recent statements from CERN suggest that enough statistics for possible “events” that will reveal the existence of the Higgs are unlikely to be recorded before the end of 2012. Until then, all we will have from the LHC (and presumably from the Tevatron, too) will be more hints, suggestions and tantalising inconclusive signatures. So with reasonable certitude, I think I can say that this review will appear before anything hard and fast is proved. But this book gives an admirable description of what the Higgs particle is, and why the possibility of its discovery is viewed with such excitement.

Particle physics and cosmology are fields far removed from my own brand of physics, which is much more concerned with the physics of the everyday world (such as that contained in our cells, our food and the search for new materials for sustainable energy generation). Thus I read the book, if not as a layman, at least as very much a nonspecialist. I found Randall’s description of the Higgs to be very clear. Older readers may remember that back in 1983, William Waldegrave, the science minister of the day, issued a challenge to the particle physics community to explain, on a single sheet of paper, what the millions of pounds the UK government was pouring into CERN’s search for the Higgs were being spent on. Randall may have taken considerably more than one piece of paper for her explanation, but it is admirably lucid.

Nevertheless, I would concur with Randall that this book represents two different books; indeed in some senses I think there are three, as I’ll explain below, and they don’t always sit well together. She is at her best in the book’s early sections, where she discusses what scientists do, how they measure things and the limitations of those measurements, their approach to tackling and modelling problems, and how they deal with uncertainty and risk. These chapters are beautifully written, clear and honest discussions of how scientists approach their work. Indeed, they are chapters that should be recommended to anyone over the age of about 12 to explain the processes that enable scientists to make discoveries, and to state with what certainty some hypothesis or theory is “true”.

With all the anxieties over climate change, for instance, the importance for everyone to grasp what the science does and doesn’t say, and where science stops and politics and societal issues start, cannot be overstated. The damaging furore over “Climategate” rested to a large extent on a lack of comprehension about what the various leaked emails from researchers at the University of East Anglia really meant, because much of the (tabloid) press has little idea – or apparent interest in finding out – what the scientific methods and analysis involved actually implied. These chapters are an impressive overview of what scientists (of any kind) get up to, how they work and why science is an inherently creative endeavour, just as much as poetry or art.

The second “book within a book” here deals with the LHC itself and the experiments that are currently being carried out there. These sections are more uneven. There are parts that are almost lyrical, notably Randall’s description of the construction of the LHC: “The complexity, coherence and magnitude, as well as the crisscrossing lines and colour are hard to convey in words. The impression is simply awe-inspiring.” It is a machine larger in scale than anything man has attempted before, and just about every part of it can be described only by superlatives. For instance, to give an idea of scale, there are 1,232 cylindrical dipole magnets, each of them weighing 30 tonnes and using about 40,000 times the current of a typical light bulb.

But as Randall gets into the detail of all the different types of particles that we know about, and how we’ve learned about them – things I’m sure that she is totally on top of, but is trying to describe in simple language – the writing becomes a bit more laboured and turgid. At times things seem to get repetitive, and yet she never really manages to describe the absolutely fundamental theory that is the Standard Model in a straightforward way, although it is constantly referred to. It is almost as if it is taken as read, which seems quite out of keeping with the rest of the book.

The third “book” I identified within this book is a section on cosmology, the other extreme of length scales from the ultra-small that the LHC will reveal – although, as Randall shows, there are strong linkages between the two. I understand the motivation for including this fairly brief section towards the end of the book, but it still felt like an afterthought that could have been dispensed with. She couldn’t do it justice and the book is already long.

So Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an impressive but not quite perfect book. Parts are wonderful and I would recommend them enthusiastically to anyone. Other parts will be of interest to the reader who wants to understand what the fuss about the LHC is all about, but arguably they could have been trimmed for greater impact. Nevertheless, Randall has done a tremendous service to the physics community in devoting her considerable talents to writing such an accessible text.

 

Posted in Communicating Science, Research | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Where is Physics Barbie?

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Athene Donald

This article first appeared in Times Higher Education on 25th August 2011. The title is as it appears there.

Diversity matters, be it in the make-up of Parliament, among our television presenters or in our boardrooms. It matters in science and technology, too. However, particularly in the physical sciences and engineering, the numbers of women remain persistently low.  Articles about the lack of  senior women in science abound, with a recurrent visual motif of a leaky pipeline out of which young women spill in depressingly large numbers.

However, in subjects such as my own – physics – or engineering or mathematics, the problem is compounded by the fact that, too often, women never even enter it in the first place. The contrast is stark with subjects such as biology and chemistry, for which the undergraduate cohort is approximately 50:50, even worse in comparison with veterinary medicine or nursing, where the undergraduate population is overwhelmingly female (which in itself is hardly healthy).

Nevertheless, for subjects with a substantial undergraduate intake, the leaky pipeline remains an apt metaphor: as you lookfurther up the career ladder, for each of these subjects there is a steady decline in the number of women.

We need to ask not only why the pipeline spews out the women as they progress, but also why some subjects are never seen as attractive in the first place to our brightest young girls. Maybe there is an element of nature in this debate, but I’ll leave that hotly disputed topic aside. It is remarkably difficult to construct clean experiments to resolve the issue, ones in which no hint of cultural bias can enter into experiments to work out whether male and female babies really do differ in their reactions to people and objects (the split that researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen like to make).

But whether such a difference exists or not, undoubtedly our society – as in most developed countries – conveys not-so-subtly different messages to boys and girls about cultural norms.

Wander into a toyshop and it is obvious that toy manufacturers want to segregate toys by gender, which sets a tone of differentiation between what boys and girls are expected to do and be from the earliest age. Never mind the ridiculous body proportions of a Barbie doll, most of her “career options” are stereotypically female, and even the computer engineer version’s laptop and clothes are unremittingly pink.

Boys’ toys also promote a very narrow range of apparent career options, with no “action” vet  nor nurse on display. Advertisements for boys’ toys stress words such as “power” and “battle”, for girls it’s “love” and “magic”, implying an unhealthy degree of passivity.

Maybe  it’s progress that Barbie is at last allowed to aspire to be a computer engineer, but she hasn’t spread her wings far enough in my view. Stroll next door to the Disney shop and you’ll find numerous “princess” dresses to fuel a young girl’s imagination to grow up to be, well, a princess. Hardly a realistic career aspiration for the majority, Kate Middleton apart.

Go online to buy a T-shirt for your daughter and you can find one with the catchy slogan “I’m  too pretty to do math” blazoned across the front in fetching pink letters. The message is clear to young girls and they appear to be heeding it. Society expects them to be wafting around with long hair, long Snow White dresses adorning impossible figures, and ignorant of how to work out their credit card interest or the mpg of their nippy little car, let alone get to grips with relativity or design a bridge. What they are allowed, even encouraged, to do is to cuddle a cute kitty (hence, I would assert, the large number of female vet students and biologists), or exhibit their nurturing side in preparation for a lifetime as a nurse or childminder.

Why are we as a society so inert in accepting these gendered (and other) stereotypes that permeate the way we bring up our children? Some scientists may be geeks, but female geeks should be just as acceptable as male ones.

Some scientists may be scruffy, but if you’re pretty (or handsome, nicely gendered words there) and like clothes, it doesn’t disqualify you from being a scientist. Female scientists can have families, you’re not excluded from that either. In short, we need to celebrate the fact that scientists and engineers, collectively, are smart, interesting people with rich lives whose other attributes are just the same as the rest of the population.

Recent statistics show that boys in England are twice as likely as girls to do the combination of physics, chemistry and biology at A level, and (if only a single science is taken) five times as likely to do physics on its own. Girls taking a single science overwhelmingly opt for biology.

Choices at A level clearly determine what university courses can be taken. By 18 it is too late to rectify this imbalance. If we are convinced that diversity matters, we need to work a lot harder at overturning cultural stereotypes, and try in every way we can to ensure that girls believe the full spectrum of opportunities is open to them.

We must identify and promote new role models to alter the resolutely passive and decorative young women who represent “success” as girls encounter it each day through their TV screens, and ensure that work-experience placements offer them the full breadth of opportunities. Only then can we be sure that their aspirations are not limited and thereby their choices implicitly curtailed.

Posted in Education, Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments