Science and Politics

Science Budget: the White House Proposal

Following up on John’s post, the Obama administration has released a detailed budget proposal. (John was talking about the House Republicans’ proposal.)

Without going into any judgments, the White House budget is much more favorable for science. Here are summaries for the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. Here are some highlights; for simplicity I’m just comparing the actual amount spent in 2010 vs. the proposed budget for 2012. (2011 is confusing because we’re currently operating under a continuing resolution, not a real budget.) So keep in mind that these percentage changes are spread over two years.

  • DoE discretionary spending would increase by 11.5%, from $26.5 billion to $29.5 billion. Much of that is for clean energy research. Science would increase by 9%, from $5.0 billion to $5.4 billion. If you dig into the details (pdf), we find High Energy Physics taking a 5% cut, from $842 million to $797 million. That’s been the story for quite a while now; flat or slowly declining budgets, which means that programs are being worn away by inflation.
  • NSF would get a 13% increase, from $6.6 billion to $7.6 billion. Most of this is real research money. There is $40 million to train new K-12 and undergraduate science teachers.
  • NASA’s budget stays flat at $18.7 billion. But the science budget would increase by 11.5%, from $4.5 billion to $5.0 billion.

Overall, not too bad for science. Keep in mind that this is only a proposal, and it won’t go through Congress unscathed. Given that Republicans have a majority in the House, you have to expect that the final agreement will be a compromise, so it’s still very possible that basic research will be gutted in the final budget. HEP would seem to be hurting no matter what, but I don’t know how much of that can be traced to the planned Tevatron shutdown.

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The Scholar and the Caliph

Kudos to Physics World for trying out an interesting experiment — publishing a work of fiction. No, I’m not being snarky about some science article I think is woefully misguided; they really did publish a short story rather than a more conventional feature. It’s by Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer I’ve never met, but she looks really cute. (Maybe I should shoot her an email?)

The story is about Ibn al-Haytham (sometimes Latinized to Alhazen), a pioneering Muslim scientist from around the year 1000. A story is appropriate because we just don’t know too many details of al-Haytham’s life. What we do know is that he was placed under house arrest in Cairo after disappointing the Caliph by failing to control the floods of the Nile.

There was an unanticipated advantage to house arrest, at least in Jennifer’s retelling — al-Haytham was denied his precious books, so he couldn’t engage in the usual work of scholars, which was taken to be commenting on classic texts. Instead, he hit upon the idea of doing experiments on his own. The amazing result was a seven-volume Book of Optics. Long story short, this was the work that really established the idea that sight relies on rays of light stretching from objects to the eye, as well as introducing the camera obscura and discussing the physical mechanism of sight.

After ten years of arrest, the Caliph died and al-Haytham was released. But he didn’t slow down, producing “scores” (according to Wikipedia) of other works on physics, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Kind of makes my own C.V. seem pretty puny by comparison; better get back to work.

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Good Sentences

Timothy Ferris, in The Science of Liberty:

In 1900 there was not a single liberal democracy in the world (since none yet had universal suffrage); by 1950 there were twenty-two.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has an ongoing series of posts in which he highlights “good sentences.” At first the conceit bugged me a bit, as how good can a single sentence be? It’s not like you have space to develop a sensible argument or anything.

But that’s the point, of course. A really good sentence packs a wallop because it fits an enormous amount into very few words. One technique for doing that is to exhibit an underlying assumption that is a remarkable claim in its own right. If I were to have tried to make the point that Ferris makes above, it would have been something like this:

Liberal democracies were established in fits and starts over a period of hundreds of years. The first major steps happened in countries like Britain, the United States, and France, where aristocratic systems were replaced (with different amounts of violence) by rule by popular vote. But I would argue that a true liberal democracy is one that features universal suffrage — every adult citizen has a right to participate. By that standard, there weren’t any liberal democracies in existence in the year 1900; but fifty years later, there were twenty-two.

Makes the point, but it’s a somewhat ponderous collection of mediocre sentences, rather than a single one of immense power. That’s the difference between someone who writes things, like me, and a true writer. I’m trying to learn.

Ferris’s book seems excellent, although I’ve just started reading it. It has a provocative thesis: the Enlightenment values of liberal democracy and scientific reasoning didn’t simply arise together. The emergence of science is rightfully understood as the cause of the democratic revolution. That’s the kind of thing I’d be happy to believe is true, so I’m especially skeptical, but I’m looking forward to the argument.

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Climategate

I keep meaning to write something substantive about the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, but my day job does sometime intervene. (Over six hundred postdoc applications in theoretical physics, but not to worry — only about 400 of them are in areas related to my interests.) There are some good discussions at Time and Foreign Policy, and you can’t poke your nose into the science blogosphere without reading someone’s take on the issue.

My own take is: what in the world is the big deal? Indeed, I would go so far as to ask: what could possibly be the big deal? Most of the noise has simply been nonsensical, focusing on misunderstandings of what scientists mean by the word “trick” and similar deep issues. And some people got upset when a dodgy paper was accepted by a journal, and they discussed giving the journal a cold shoulder. Cry me a river.

But I don’t really want to defend the scientists involved, because I’m not informed enough about who they are and what they did. For all I know, they may be very nasty and unethical human beings. (Actually that’s not true; I know Michael Mann, and he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.) And I see no reason not to do a thorough investigation, and hand out appropriate sanctions if there’s real evidence of wrongdoing.

What baffles me is the idea that this changes the conversation about climate change in any way. This isn’t a case like Jan Hendrik Schon, the rogue physicist who rose to prominence on the basis of falsified data, and was later exposed. The job of monitoring the climate is one that has been taken up by more than just one or two groups of people. There have been thousands of peer-reviewed papers that have provided evidence of global warming. Not to mention common sense; when the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has shot up dramatically over the last century, and the temperature has done the same thing, it takes some willful stubbornness to avoid the obvious conclusion. All of the noise we’re hearing about “Climategate” is based on politics, not on science.

And that’s what really puzzles me. I understand the non-scientific motivations of certain climate denialists; in the abstract, they don’t want to accept that the unfettered actions of capitalism can ever have any deleterious effects, and in the concrete, many of them are paid by oil companies. (See this charming “letter to the American Physical Society,” whose handful of signatories includes “Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil.”) Those are powerful incentives to ignore the evidence.

But what is the incentive on the other side supposed to be? What exactly is the motivation for the nefarious conspiracy of people who are supposedly plotting to mislead the world about global warming? What do the people counting oysters get out of this?

Are there a lot of people out there who think that scientists as a group (since the vast majority of scientists appreciate the problems of global warming) have knee-jerk reactions against technology and industry? Let me propose another motivation for whatever corners the East Anglia group might have contemplated cutting: they’ve seen the data, they know what’s happening to the planet, and they’re terrified of what the consequences might be. They know that the other side is motivated by non-scientific concerns, and they want to fight back as hard as they can, both for the good of humanity and for the integrity of science. There’s no question that scientists can go overboard, pulling the occasional shenanigans in the pursuit of their less lofty goals. (Like, you know, other human beings.) But nobody wants to believe that we’re facing a looming global ecological catastrophe. They believe it because that’s what the data imply.

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Apparently Astronomy is Un-American

John McCain has a twitter account. Yes, that’s horrifying enough, but then there’s the actual content of what he writes. At least he is using in creative and productive ways! No, he isn’t. Yesterday he announced:

Tmr I am gonna tweet the TOP TEN PORKIEST PROJECTS in theOmnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass

Love it when Senators play cool. Love it. So today is the big list, and guess what comes in at number two?

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii – because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy

Sure, earmarks are dumb, and it would be nice to have a rational way to decide how best to prioritize federal spending. But don’t deny the obvious: when Republicans hear “science,” they think “something to be mocked in the service of burnishing our just-folks credentials.” Ask Bobby Jindal. Or, for that matter, John McCain.

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The Varieties of Crackpot Experience

Frank Tipler is a crackpot. At one point in his life, he did very good technical work in general relativity; he was the first to prove theorems that closed timelike curves could not be constructed in local regions of spacetime without either violating the weak energy condition or creating a singularity. But alas, since then he has pretty much gone off the deep end, and more recently has become known for arguments for Christianity based on fundamental physics. If you closely at those arguments (h/t wolfgang), you find things like this:

If life is to guide the entire universe, it must be co-extensive with the entire universe. We can say that life must have become OMNIPRESENT in the universe by the end of time. But the very act of guiding the universe to eliminate event horizons – an infinite number of nudges – causes the entropy and hence the complexity of the universe to increase without limit. Therefore, if life is to continue guiding the universe – which it must, if the laws of physics are to remain consistent – then the knowledge of the universe possessed by life must also increase without limit, becoming both perfect and infinite at the final singularity. Life must become OMNISCIENT at the final singularity. The collapse of the universe will have provided available energy, which goes to infinity as the final singularity is approached, and this available energy will have become entirely under life’s control. The rate of use of this available energy – power – will diverge to infinity as the final singularity is approached. In other words, life at the final singularity will have become OMNIPOTENT. The final singularity is not in time but outside of time. On the boundary of space and time, as described in detail by Hawking and Ellis [6]. So we can say that the final singularity – the Omega Point – is TRANSCENDANT to space, time and matter.

All of the signs of classic crackpottery are present; the vague and misplaced appeal to technical terminology, the spelling mistakes and capital letters, the random use of “must” and “therefore” when no actual argument has been given. Two paragraphs later, we get:

Science is not restricted merely to describing only what happens inside the material universe, any more than science is restricted to describing events below the orbit of the Moon, as claimed by the opponents of Galileo. Like Galileo, I am convinced that the only scientific approach is to assume that the laws of terrestrial physics hold everywhere and without exception – unless and until an experiment shows that these laws have a limited range of application.

Compares self with Galileo! 40 points! There is really no indication that the person who wrote this was once writing perfectly sensible scientific papers.

Perhaps you will not be surprised to find that Tipler has now jumped into global-warming denialism. In just a few short paragraphs, we are treated to the following gems of insight (helpfully paraphrased):

People say that anthropogenic global warming is now firmly established, but that’s what they said about Ptolemaic astronomy! Therefore, I am like Copernicus.

A scientific theory is only truly scientific if it makes predictions “that the average person can check for himself.” (Not making this up.)

You know what causes global warming? Sunspots!

Sure, you can see data published that makes it look like the globe actually is warming. But that data is probably just fabricated. It snowed here last week!

If the government stopped funding science entirely, we wouldn’t have these problems.

You know who I remind myself of? Galileo.

Stillman Drake, the world’s leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book “Galileo: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called “natural philosophers”), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The “out-of-the-mainsteam” Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo’s fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these “scientists” tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo’s fellow “scientists” called in the Inquisition to silence him.

One could go on, but what’s the point? Well, perhaps there are two points worth making.

First, Frank Tipler is probably very “intelligent” by any of the standard measures of IQ and so forth. In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.

Second, the superficially disconnected forms of crackpottery that lead on the one hand to proving Christianity using general relativity, and on the other to denying global warming, clearly emerge from a common source. The technique is to first decide what one wants to be true, and then come up with arguments that support it. This is a technique that can be used by anybody, for any purpose, and it’s why appeals to authority aren’t to be trusted, no matter how “intelligent” that authority seems to be.

Tipler isn’t completely crazy to want “average people” to be able to check claims for themselves. He’s mostly crazy, as by that standard we wouldn’t have much reason to believe in either general relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics, since the experimental tests relevant to those theories are pretty much out of reach for the average person. But the average person should be acquainted with the broad outlines of the scientific method and empirical reasoning, at least enough so that they try to separate crackpots from respectable scientists. Because nobody ever chooses to describe themselves as a crackpot. If you ask them, they’ll always explain that they are on the side of Galileo; and if you don’t agree, you’re no better than the Inquisition.

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Steven Chu Nominated to be Secretary of Energy

Steven Chu This is fantastic news. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics for his work in laser cooling of atoms, has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration. (Thanks to Elliot in comments.) This post is enormously important for science in general and physics in particular, as the DOE is responsible for much of the funding in physics and a lot of other R&D work. It’s also, needless to say, a crucial position for determining the country’s energy policy at a time when strong and imaginative leadership in this area is crucial.

I can’t imagine a pick for the job that would make me happier. Obviously Chu is a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, which is not bad. Almost as obviously, he’s an incredibly smart and creative guy. For evidence, look no further than his group’s web page at LBL. You’ll see atomic physics, for which he won the Nobel, but there are also very serious efforts in biophysics and polymer science, just because he thinks those things are interesting. (Apparently he has not devoted much thought to advanced HTML design.) I got to talk with him at the launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange — he also cares about the public perception of science — and it’s clear that he has a wide-ranging, creative intellect, which is what we need to tackle the problems of energy production over the years to come. Chu has recently become intensely concerned about the challenge of global warming, and is serious about doing something to fix things. He and Craig Venter are teaming up to make microorganisms that turn carbon dioxide into strawberry ice cream, or something like that. I wouldn’t bet against them.

Let’s be clear: just because Chu is an accomplished physicist, this doesn’t mean that researchers should expect a bonanza of new funds. The previous administration has left the budget and the economy in shambles, and nominating a Nobel Laureate to head DOE doesn’t magically bring new money into existence. But it means the hard choices that inevitably will be made will be made intelligently by people who understand the significance of what is going on. We can never ask for more than that.

Here is Steven Chu talking about Science Debate 2008. Berkeley’s loss is Washington’s gain, but in this case the country will be better off for it.

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Will NASA Rise from the Ashes?

mars_phoenix.jpg NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, which some time back scraped up direct evidence of water on Mars’s surface, is slipping gently into the night. Not a surprise; the mission was always scheduled to last just a few months, and at this time of Martian year there just isn’t enough sunshine to keep the batteries charged.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on November 2, the space agency said.

Rumor has it that the signal read “Yes We Can!”

The future of NASA is going to be one out of approximately 50 million pressing challenges faced by the new President. Under the previous administration (what was that guy’s name again? I seem to have repressed it), the agency drifted, ranging from embarrassing ideological scandals to hopelessly inept planning to blatant censorship on climate change to a depressing de-emphasis of real science. Obama, and whoever he appoints as NASA administrator, will have a very difficult job balancing competing pressures: rebuilding a science program that has been devastated by funding cuts, while also restoring our capacity to send astronauts into space, and doing so in a time of tremendous budgetary pressures. Darksyde at Daily Kos has a good post about what some of these challenges are, and some of the struggles of current administrator Michael Griffin. It will be very interesting to see what direction the agency takes; in a multipolar world, the U.S. won’t be the only important player in space exploration and space science, but hopefully we won’t just sit on the sidelines, either.

(Did you notice the link to an article on Discover at the beginning of that paragraph? That’s because, when I cut open a vein to sign our new blogging agreement in blood [don’t worry, it wasn’t my vein], part of the contract was that we would link back to the site in every single blog post we do. I’m sure nobody will notice.)

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Where They Stand on Science

Not to give in completely to nepotistic back-scratching, but Jennifer has done the thankless task of combing the web sites of John McCain and Barack Obama for statements about science, and reports back on what she found. This comes on the heels of Obama’s answers to a set of questions from ScienceDebate2008 — McCain hasn’t answered yet, but he’s expected to soon.

I would never have the patience to do something like this myself, as stuff that appears in prepared statements on websites is likely to be bland and inoffensive, right? (One could go even further and comb through their legislative records, but that’s a truly Herculean task better left to superhumans like hilzoy.) But as it turns out, you can learn things.

Nowhere is the difference between the two candidates more stark than in their stated policies on education. McCain predictably champions No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when every educator I know considers the program to be a major FAIL. Beyond that, his education policy is inexplicably vague and obsessed with giving parents greater control over where their kids attend schools — so much so, that I suspect it’s a bit of a “dog whistle,” i.e., code for something else that only those tuned to that particular frequency can hear. There is no specific mention of math and science education. At least he recognizes the potential for online learning through virtual schools, and offers financial support to help low-income students pay for access to those online resources.

But again, Obama also supports online educational tools, with far broader financial support for educational opportunities of all kinds, and offers many point-by-point specifics. He supports the need for accountability in schools, but recognizes that NCLB has failed in large part because funding promises weren’t kept by the Bush Administration. His policies seek to address not just teacher training and retention, but also high dropout rates, soaring college costs, and the need for high-quality childcare to assist working parents (particularly single moms). And he wants to make math and science education a national priority.

I don’t especially enjoy constantly bashing the modern Republican Party and contrasting them unfavorably with Democrats. There certainly is a respectable intellectual case to be made for small-government conservatism, and even if I didn’t agree with all of the particulars, it would be interesting and worthwhile to engage in policy debates from the perspective of mutual intellectual respect. Nor do I especially think that Democratic politicians, as a group, are anything to be that excited about. But at the current moment, the Republicans have so cheerfully given into anti-intellectualism and cultural backwardness that there isn’t much to have a debate about.

Better conservatives, please. It would be good for the country.

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Pocket Change

I made a chart! This is the kind of thing you do when you return from a long trip and are jet-lagged.

rd-vs-lost.jpg

These are the 2008 research budgets for physical sciences, in billions of dollars, for the main funding agencies in the U.S.: the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For helpful comparison purposes, I’ve also plotted the $14.9 billion that has been misplaced over the course of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Not the cost of the war itself, which has been over $500 billion so far and will be well over a trillion when all is said and done. Just the funds that were … lost. Embezzled, whatever. Labels are so confining.

Readers with interests outside science funding are welcome to suggest their own comparisons.

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