Archive for category Science

The Book of Nothing

May 4

Posted by Ken in Science

I’ve just completed The Book of Nothing by John D. Barrow, which as you may guess is a book about nothing. The book is really divided into two parts - the first describing the history of the number zero in maths and the second looking at nothing (the vacuum) in science.

The book looks at different numeral systems and the advent of the number zero. It took a surprisingly long amount of time for zero to appear - to have a digit which represents nothing.

The first half of the book goes into a lot of detail about how number systems evolved in different cultures - roman numerals, "modern day" arabic numerals, and numbers in different base systems (e.g. Mayans and base 60).  

There’s a lot of stuff to get you thinking. I particularly liked the Zeno paradox. It goes a bit like this:

There is a man and a turtle. The man walks at 400 metres per hour. The turtle walks at 40 meters per hour.

The turtle starts the race 400 meters in front of the man.

By the time, the man has travelled 400 metres, the turtle will have travelled 40 meters so will be 40 meters ahead.

The man travels another 40 metres, but by then the turtle is 4 meters ahead.

The man travels another 4 metres, but the turtle is 0.4 meters ahead.

And so on…

The man can therefore never overtake the tortoise.

The trick of this paradox is that we’re tending towards a certain point (444.44m) in increasingly small amounts. We can iterate the above statements an infinite number of times, each time the difference in length tending towards zero.

The second part of the book focuses on zero or nothing, in science. It talks about the vacuum and the ether in history, but goes on to discuss "vacuum energy" or dark energy, and how it can answer some of the fundamental questions about our universe.

This book combines a lot - mathematical history, religious philosophy and scientific theories. Barrow goes to quite a bit of length to try and show the beauty of zero and mathematics - there are quotations and poetry dotted all over the place. 

I personally found the first half of the book much more interesting than the second; the end of the book was quite technical and the book lost me a few chapters before the end. Which half of the book you enjoy will probably depend on your own area of interest, but this is certainly a book of two halves.

An enjoyable and interesting book.

Tags: , ,

4 Comments

Lunar Eclipse

May 4

Posted by Ken in Science

Eclipse

It was, of course, the lunar eclipse last night. I took some pictures at 5 minute intervals and created an animated gif out of them.

See larger version of animation. 

The first frame was taken at 9:53 PM GMT and the last at 10:33 PM GMT.

Taken using a handheld "point and shoot" Canon camera at 4x optical zoom so the quality isn’t too good, but I still think it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

I’m not sure why but the moon actually appeared blue around 10:18. The animation actually shows the moon becomes yellow, then blue, followed by red. Images were taken on a 1/350 exposure. 

Anyone else go out to see the eclipse? 

2 Comments

Relativity

May 4

Posted by Ken in Science

A little post about Einstein’s theories of relativity.

Special Relativity

With Special Relativity, Einstein updated the laws for motion which were set out by Newton, the laws that we learn today in maths lessons.

Einstein’s special relativity said that we are all moving at the speed of light, all of the time. There are of course the 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. At the moment you’re probably sitting on a chair in front of a computer, and unless you are one of those people who swing your chair from side to side, you’ll be stationary.

Time Travel is possible!

According to Einstein, that means you are moving through time, at the speed of light. It’s difficult to imagine that because we don’t experience the dimension of time like we do with space.

Imagine you were moving at half the speed of light - your speed of movement through the dimension of time will actually be the remaining half the speed of light. Time is not a constant!

An real-world analogy with a bike

We can try to explain the above behaviour using some trigonometry - imagine somebody on their bike, riding northwards at 5mph. If we resolve their motion in the northerly direction, they move at 5mph; in the easterly direction they move at 0mph.

Now imagine they were moving North East at 5mph. If we resolve their movement in the North direction, it could be 3mph, in the East Direction it could be 4mph. The bike still moves at 5mph, but because some of the motion is now directed in the East direction, it moves more slowly through the North direction.

General Relativity

A few years after his theory of special relativity, Einstein came up with general relativity. This was a theory of relativity which also took gravity into account.

Imagine you are sitting on a Boeing 747, cruising at 570mph. Aside from looking through the windows and occasionally feeling turbulence, you can’t actually tell that you’re moving. I suppose what Einstein said was that you could claim that actually the whole world was revolving around you, and that would be a perfectly valid thing to say.

But when you feel turbulence, you know your definitely moving. You can feel it. Similarly when your taking off - you couldn’t claim that you were stationary. You feel the g-forces pushing you into the back of the seat.

You can feel accelerated motion and accelerated motion will influence the laws of physics and the behaviour around you. However, once you are moving at a constant speed, the laws of physics are exactly identical to if you were totally stationary.

Gravity

With general relativity, Einstein combined gravity and relativity. He said that gravity is the exact same thing as accelerated motion. We feel our weight on the ground is because gravity is pulling us towards the Earth. That’s the same thing as acceleration, thus why we can have zero-g flights in the sky.

When a plane is in freefall and moving at it’s terminal velocity, air resistance upwards is equal to gravity downwards. The resultant force is zero, so you feel weightless.

Newton and the Apple

We have already said that anybody moving at a constant velocity can claim they are stationary, and the laws of physics will back them up.

Objects which are accelerating or under the influence of gravity cannot.

With general relativity, Einstein dismissed the idea of an absolute space or absolute time. They’re both relative. We can move through space at different velocities or through time at a different speed, and observe that everybody else is moving relative to us.

However, he also introduced absolute spacetime. If an object moves at constant velocity without acceleration or gravity, that object can claim that it is stationary.

So lets go back to Newton, and the infamous apple which struck him on the head. Newton feels the force of gravity, so he cannot claim that he is stationary. The apple, however, is in freefall. Assuming it reaches terminal velocity, the apple can claim it is stationary.

What does this mean? No, the apple did not fall and hit Newton on his head. In fact, it was Newton’s head which rose and struck the apple!

1 Comment

Are Particle Accelerators Worthwhile?

May 4

Posted by Ken in Science

In particle accelerators such as those at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and Fermilab in Chicago, IL, scientists accelerate particles to high speeds with huge amounts of energy, colliding particles, to probe the building blocks of matter - the quarks, bosons, leptons, the neutrinos.

Just recently, scientists at the Tevatron in Fermilab, Chicago believe they have finally found the elusive Higg’s boson, the one member of the standard model of particle physics which, to date, hasn’t yet been found. The Higg’s boson is believed to be the particle which gives particles mass.

Large Hadron Collider

Right next to Geneva airport in Switzerland, sits CERN. It’s a huge particle physics research laboratory with a massive particle accelerator. CERN is funded by the 20 countries which are signatories of the CERN convention.

CERN 

The picture shows a circular ring which is the particle accelerator at CERN, and Geneva Airport is in the foreground. The Large Hadron Collider, as it is now known as is located about 100m underground and has a circumference of 27km. It even crosses the border between France and Switzerland; several times!

The Large Hadron Collider is set to go through engineering tests next month and to open later this year. It cost around $2.5billion USD to build. Considering that one of the reasons the LHC was built was to look for the Higgs boson, the Europeans will surely be pretty pissed if the Americans pipped them at the post with a fairly old piece of kit.

The Future?

Although the LHC isn’t even yet complete, scientists are already planning upgrades and improvements.

Physicists are already campaigning for a successor to the LHC - the International Linear Collider (ILC). The cost is estimated at $10bn with an aim to develop a Grand Unified Theory of everything combining the forces of nature: electromagnetism, gravity and the nuclear forces.

Is it worth it? 

Though I personally think it’s be great to develop a unified theory, I do wonder whether it’s worthwhile to spend $8.2billion on a particle accelerator. It might tell us a little bit more about why there is so much matter and so little antimatter around, and the conditions in the first seconds of our universe, right after the Big Bang.

But is there any use in knowing that? I certainly understand the desire simply to discover and to find out something, simply for the knowledge. But at the day, how do we benefit from understanding sparticles, muons or string theory?

At the same time, $8.2billion could do so much good elsewhere. Maybe we can develop treatments for cancers or AIDS, which could save millions of lives. We could find a solution for global warming: a problem which will affect each and every one of us, every day.

So I suppose I’d like to put out this question:

Is it worth pouring over $8billion into a project which ultimately will not lead to any practical benefit or technology? Should we be putting so much money into a new particle accelerator when we’ve just built one at great expense, even though it turns out that we may not have needed it after all?

Edit: This article originally incorrectly stated $2bn was spent on the LHC. The actual figure is closer to $10bn according to The Economist. 

Tags:

16 Comments

Facebook leads to lower grades!?!

Apr 21

Posted by Ken in Science

'Red Spiral'
Creative Commons License photo: ishrona

In what must be one of the most ridiculously alarmist and inaccurate articles I’ve read in a while, career website Milkround is claiming that Facebook users could risk having lower grades as a result of their usage of the social networking site. Unfortunately, it looks like another instance of a journalist falling for the “correlation implies causation” fallacy.

According to Milkround:

Researchers at Ohio State University found students who enjoy communicating via cyberspace spend less time studying and risk getting a whole grade lower than their peers as a result despite more than three quarters of Facebook users claiming their interaction with friends on the site didn’t interfere with their work.

The study claims Facebook users averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.

By implication of the article and study, a typical student would do 4 times more work if they didn’t have Facebook and on average would achieve one grade higher.

College Football
Creative Commons License photo: rdesai

Here’s an explanation which is much more likely: More extroverted people who go to more parties and get involved in more societies are much more likely to use Facebook. The people who constantly work 24/7 are the people who are more likely to refuse to get a Facebook account or will have little use for a Facebook account. The likelihood of a student having a Facebook account depends on his participation in college life and how hard working he is.

Of course, students do use Facebook as a procrastination tool - I won’t argue with that. But correlations prove nothing. As a more rigiourous technique to test this hypothesis, we’d need to compare student’s results before they signed up to Facebook and results after signing up to Facebook (assuming a constant level of how hard-working or social the students are). Alternatively, you’d need a control group of people who are social and roughly as hard-working as the Facebook group but don’t use Facebook (good luck finding one).

Tags:

No Comments

Getting an informed, balanced political debate about science

Mar 28

Posted by Ken in Science

What can be done to ensure an informed and balanced public and political debate of Science and Technology?

We're at the tipping point for climate change (bonus: face in the clouds)
Creative Commons License photo: kevindooley

The Oxford English Dictionary describes science as “…the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”1 But science is much more than that: most scientists enter the profession, and most scientific research is funded, because they believe science can greatly improve society. Usually, these goals of learning more about the world and improving society are coupled. However, new and cutting-edge research has been raising ever-increasing concerns about whether the research is benefitting or destroying society.

Scientists occasionally argue that their work should be judged on a purely scientific basis without consideration for the ethics and consequences of the research; but this neglects science’s responsibility to the community at large. As issues that affect all of us, it is important that a public debate is held about these topics and that scientists properly engage in it.

I believe there are three main barriers to a reasoned public debate.

Emotional responses blinding a scientific debate

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of scientific controversies involving ethical issues of “playing God”. These include stem cell research, cloning and genetically modified “Frankenstein” foods. For many people, the initial emotional response is that of disgust2 - something dubbed the “yuk response”. In order to have the more productive debate about the science, consequences and ethics behind the work, we must get past this initial emotional response.

Surgeons at work
Creative Commons License photo: salimfadhley

In one study, psychologist Philip Tetlock asked people to comment on the proposal to set up regulated markets to trade organs3. For most people, the response was that of moral outrage at treating sacred body parts as secular commodities to be traded. However, when the debate was reframed to neutralise the moral outrage (e.g. by exploring how organ trading would lead to a greater number of scarce organs being available to save more sacred lives), 40% of people toned down their opposition. Neutralising the moral outrage encouraged people to critically analyse the arguments in the debate and come to a more reasoned decision.

On many scientific issues, the “yuk response” is preventing a reasoned scientific debate from happening in the first place. As scientists, we should not ignore our moral guidance, but we must not allow the debate to be blinded by it.

Ensuring the media covers the debate accurately

The media plays an important role in informing society about issues which may affect them7. However, two factors lead to poor and inaccurate coverage of scientific issues:

1.       To maximise readership, the press likes to present scientific issues as a series of horror stories. We’re told that cloning will lead to designer armies of obedient soldiers and that nanotechnology-robots will turn the entire world into a blob of “grey goo”45. These poignant scenarios lead people to make their mind up before considering the scientific uncertainties, risks and benefits to the detriment of a good debate.

2.       To provide “balanced” coverage, journalists will try to cover both sides of the story. In a political or social dispute, such as whether the UK should join the Euro, it is reasonable that both sides should be treated equally and receive equal press coverage. However, it is inappropriate to treat the arguments of both sides in a “scientific-fact” controversy as equal. For example, the weight of evidence in favour of climate change is much greater than that against. Attempts by journalists to be “balanced” and present both sides equally give an inaccurate impression that there is still a great deal of scientific controversy about climate change6.

The Louvre
Creative Commons License photo: L.Brumm Photography

Scientists should be aware of the importance of the media in shaping debate and public opinions and that communicating the science can be as important as the science itself.

Engaging the people: Capturing the popular imagination

Because of cultural differences8 between science and art (e.g. science being concerned with truth; art about opinions), scientists tend to avoid the arts. However, given debate is all about opinions, scientists should not be afraid to utilise the arts to catalyse debate about issues of scientific importance.

For example, Dan Brown’s book “The Da Vinci Code” inspired a large amount of “real world” interest, television documentaries9 and archaeological research about the Holy Grail in Christian theology. In the same way, the arts can provoke discussion about important scientific issues10.

The arts will, of course, never replace the rigour of peer-reviewed papers and the scientific process; but as a complement can outline the major issues to the public in an interesting and engaging way without undermining the practice of science itself.

Conclusions

As science affects the whole of society, scientists have a moral obligation to inform, involve and engage the public in a debate about science. This should be achieved by focusing the debate on the important issues, ensuring they are portrayed accurately and inspiring discussion about them.

References

1.       Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Science
Online edition. Available from: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/science?view=uk. (Retrieved 1 March 2009)

2.       New Scientist: Immoral advances: Is science out of control?
Jones, D. New Scientist, issue 2690, pp. 22-33. Available from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126905.100-immoral-advances-is-science-out-of-control.html?full=true

3.       Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions
Tetlock, Philip E. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7 issue 7, pp. 320-324. Available from:
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/Vita/Philip%20Tetlock/Phil%20Tetlock/2001-2003/2003%20Thinking%20the%20unthinkable….pdf

4.       The Guardian: Brave new world or miniature menace? Why Charles fears grey goo nightmare
Radford, Tim. The Guardian, 29 April 2003. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/apr/29/nanotechnology.science

5.       Institute of Physics Press Release: ‘Grey goo’ misconceptions could harm poor in developing world
Institute of Physics Press Release, 27 January 2004. Available from: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-01/iop-gm012704.php

6.       The Independent: Reporters feel the heat over climate change
Ward, B. The Independent, 10 March 2008. Available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/reporters-feel-the-heat-over-climate-change-793586.html

7.       Public Opinion Quarterly: The Agenda-Setting Role of the Mass Media in the Shaping of Public Opinion
McCombs, M. Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 36, pp. 176-187. Available from: http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/extra/McCombs.pdf

8.       The University Blog: Science vs. Art
Blog. 14 March 2008. Available from: http://theuniversityblog.co.uk/2008/03/14/science-vs-art/. (Retrieved 1 March 2009)

9.       Priory-of-sion.com: Da Vinci Code Documentaries
Website. Available from: http://priory-of-sion.com/dvc/documentaries.html. (Retrieved 1 March 2009)

10.   The Guardian: ‘Space flight can be as luminous as any novel’
Radford, Tim. The Guardian, 11 April 2008. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/apr/11/highereducation.comment

Notes

This essay was originally prepared for an essay writing competition at my college. I have decided to share it here as I feel it could be of interest to regular readers. Comments and thoughts very welcome.

Tags:

1 Comment

“Carbon cost” of Google search same as boiling a kettle

Jan 13

Posted by Ken in Economics, Environment, Science

Google Lego 50th Anniversary Inspiration
Creative Commons License photo: manfrys

The BBC reports today on a study by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. Wissner-Gross claims that performing a standard Google search on a desktop computer produces 7g of CO2. A quick session with two searches will produce 14g of CO2 - the same as that from boiling a kettle.

From the BBC article:

Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.

Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people’s home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.

“Google isn’t any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that’s going to take extra energy to do so,” he said.

According to Google Web History, I’ve performed 9,308 Google searches and it’s only counted the searches I’ve performed whilst I was logged on.

I’m guesstimating I perform about 40 searches a day; that’s 15,000 Google searches per year (sounds scary when you put it like that). My annual Google carbon footprint would be 105kg of CO2 (0.15 tons).

Google have disputed this figure; saying that a search only produces 0.2g of CO2.

I’m not able to comment on what I think of the methodoly as I don’t know how either figure was reached. But I think it is important to point out the difference between average cost and fixed cost.

As an example, imagine a server farm which was responsible for 100g of CO2 emissions every day. If ten people perform searches, the average carbon cost of a search is 100g divided by 10 searches = 10g of CO2 per search. This is the average cost of the search.

Beijing smog
Creative Commons License photo: kevindooley

Whereas, the marginal cost would be the CO2 cost of performing one more search. If we then performed an 11th search, the CO2 emissions of the server farm stay the same (we assume it’s running with spare capacity). The marginal cost of performing a search of zero grams of CO2.

With eleven searches, you could claim each search had a carbon cost of 9g. But that’s a bit unfair - considering the CO2 output of the server farm if you had made the search and if you had not, you find the CO2 output it exactly the same. Your search had a marginal cost of zero grams of carbon.

Whether Wissner-Gross and Google stated the average cost or the marginal cost I don’t know (although I suspect the first may have been the average cost and the second the marginal cost).

With Google’s server farms, we know that they will be running regardless of whether we perform searches or not. The important thing then is the marginal cost of a search - this being so close to zero, I don’t think any of us should feel a guilty conscience from using Google.

Tags:

2 Comments

Evolving the Mona Lisa by natural selection

Dec 9

Posted by Ken in Science

Fantastic experiment and write up by Roger Alsing. Using an evolutionary algorithm, Roger wrote a programme that would attempt to paint the Mona Lisa using 50 transparent polygons. The “fitness” of each permutation was tested by comparing it pixel by pixel to the actual Mona Lisa. Wonderful.

Richard Dawkin’s “The Blind Watchmaker” is a fantastic book to read if you’re interested in evolution. I read it fairly recently; he writes a computer programme to simulate evolution and the results are fantastic. Worth a read.

No Comments

Predicting the future popularity of a web page

Nov 27

Posted by Ken in Science, Uncategorized

Balloons in Trafalgar Square
Creative Commons License photo: wili_hybrid

New Scientist reports this week that a new tool developed at HP Labs could potentially predict the popularity of a web page in 30 days time. Essentially they say that by looking at the rate at which a web page picks up views in the first few days can predict the subsequent popularity of the page 90% of the time. It doesn’t seem too radical an idea - after all the pages which are more popular in the first few days are likely to get bookmarked more, linked to more, higher place on Google, etc.

The research focused around the sites Digg and YouTube so it would be interesting to see how it could be applied to other sites. You can download the paper online at arXiv.org.

On a similar note, I’ve found that I’ve been able to get some incredibly stunning useful information from the popularity of webpages on my site. For example, one of my posts about MSN Messenger downtime gets a lot of hits whenever MSN Messenger goes down. When the number of visitors for that page is significantly above normal, I know that MSN is actually down. If the number of visitors is normal, it’s typically just an issue with my connection or my local server. In fact, I’ve found this method much more reliable than using Microsoft’s own service status page for the Messenger service. Similarly, I found a huge spike in the number of visitors to my post on the possibility of VAT cuts straight after the recent pre-budget report. If only there was a way of exposing these statistics in a useful way!

Tags: , ,

No Comments

Could Free Starbucks Win the Election for Obama?

Nov 3

Posted by Ken in Science

barack obama
Creative Commons License photo: patrick dentler

The day of the US presidential election is approaching. There is an expected turnout of 80%. Both parties have worked very hard to register as many new voters as possible and companies such as MTV and Starbucks have been encouraging people to register to vote.

Starbucks is offering a free cup of coffee to those who vote on November 4th. How could this distort the results of the election?

Well, It seems pretty logical that the people who feel strongly about whether they are Republican or Democrat or have a strong preference for either Obama or McCain are the people who would vote anyway, regardless of incentives such as free coffee. So this promotion probably wouldn’t affect whether they would vote.

Swing and undecided voters, on the other hand, may not vote without an additional incentive such as free coffee. If, say, undecided voters mostly lean towards Obama - the incentive of free coffee at Starbucks would benefit Obama in the polls by encouraging the undecided voters to go to the polling station and to vote for him.

Two shots of espresso please!
Creative Commons License photo: aubrey arenas

It would certainly be an interesting research to see whether this promotion or other incentives may distort the results of the election. The “Starbucks Stores per Capita” differs immensely between each of the states. The District of Columbia for example has 1.18 Starbucks for every 10,000 people - nearly 22 times as many Starbucks stores per capita to Arkansas which has 0.054 Starbucks for 10,000 people. Swing state Virginia has the 11th highest “Starbucks per Capita” of the states. If the Starbucks promotion does have an effect on swing voter turnout, we would expect the biggest effects to be in a) the states with the highest concentration of Starbucks and b) cities (which are of course more liberal than small town America) where people are more likely to have a Starbucks nearby.

I’m exaggerating the effects of a free cup of coffee on the election results you say. Perhaps so. But research has shown it can be quite easy to “prime” people to affect who and what they vote for. For example, research found that people who used a church as their local polling station were less supportive of gay marriage.

Another piece of research looked at a 2000 ballot initiative in Arizona to increase spending on education:

The authors…divided the precincts between schools and non-schools, and found that voters who voted in a school had a marginal preference (3 points) for the initiative.

I am all yours...
Creative Commons License photo: HAMED MASOUMI

And when I spoke to some local activists for the Labour Party (UK) earlier this year, they suggested that the Gordon Brown calls an election before 2009. Not because they believe he is more likely to win: they believe that Gordon Brown losing the next general election is already a done deal. It’s because the local elections are also due to be held in 2009. And having the general election at the same time as the local one would mean Brown’s personal unpopularity would rub off onto the rest of the Labour party and their local councillors.

There are many subtle ways of affecting the results of an election. Could free Starbucks have a significant one?

Tags:

1 Comment