Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain.

But pretty often I get the chance to see them at their best. In the Physics department at Imperial, we interview students who are on the boundaries between final “degree classifications”, the British system of awarding degrees as First Class, 2.1, 2.2, etc. Last week, I was on the panel for this year’s cohort. And it was a pleasure to sit in front of a few of our students and watch them, in real time, thinking like physicists. Of course this means making the occasional mistake, but it also means that delicious “aha!” moment when they figure something out and (this is the best part) they know that they have, whether it’s finding a sign error in their derivation of the motion of a pendulum, or a thought experiment explaining why Einstein’s relativity makes sense.

For the interviews, I was paired with one of our external examiners, UCL particle physicist and fellow-blogger Jon Butterworth. On the same day as our interview, the Guardian published Simon Jenkins’ latest in a series of risible anti-science screeds, and Jon decided to take him to task neither with reasoned argumentation nor with a counter-polemic, but with parody. As with many great ideas on the internet, this one got picked up and built upon, so that the Guardian, to its credit, eventually gave Jon his own space to reply. Jenkins likely thinks we’re producing too many scientists (Imperial only trains scientists, doctors, and engineers, after all!) but I hope that Jon was pleased with the ones he saw.

So my congratulations to this year’s graduating students, and the best of luck to them whatever they go on to do. Pace Jenkins, the world needs more well-trained scientists like them, not fewer.

I first encountered Cristina Odone as one of the more strident contributors to the BBC Radio 4 Today Show’s “Thought for the day”, a daily three-minute slot inexplicably (to me) handed over to some religious believer.

In her blog post for the Telegraph today, however, Odone has opened up an ad hominem attack on the Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, inarguably the single loudest voice for science in the UK Parliament. She calls him “Dr Death” for the fact that he “believes in euthanasia — … really believes”. I assume by “believes”, she means “supports the legalization of under some circumstances”, and by “really”, well, I’m not sure. Perhaps she is implying he thinks that lots and lots of people should be killed outright. That’s because, she says, “The Lib Dems are now the most secular party in the Britain — and not in a good way. There’s something sinister about a movement that, in my view, doesn’t hold all life precious.” I’m not sure what the “movement” here is, but it is an unfair and illogical leap from support of euthanasia and (as she mentions elsewhere) abortion, a position that plenty of religious people — even Catholics — hold. This isn’t “sinister”, it’s intellectually nuanced, the ability to judge competing values and goods in the complicated real world in which we live.

Luckily, Evan Harris himself, along with many others, have responded to this vile attack. I wouldn’t expect an apology, however, since I assume this is what she “really believes” about us secular types.

(In the interest of fairness, I will say that Odone is on the right side of at least one issue, championing Simon Singh in his fight against the chiropractors.)

Many different strands of the discussion of the UK science budget are coming together, starting with last week’s announcement of STFC’s restructuring. This week the Royal Society released its report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity”, arguing that this is a crucial time to emphasize and invest in science, rather than pull away from it. “Science is one of the jewels in our crown but it yields its dividends over decades.” (I believe that the US National Academy of Sciences has said similar things in the past, even more strongly, but I haven’t been able to find the appropriate document.) Even the Conservatives say they want to increase the science budget, endorsing a report from vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur James Dyson (although it is clear that they are even more focused on economic “impact” than Labour).

The parties also engaged in the continuing Science Debate (trending at #scivote on Twitter). Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, tweeted to Manchester Prof, ex-popstar and BBC presenter Brian Cox, who is becoming a very effective media spokesperson for science, “I believe that under Labour, the UK will be the best place in world to do science. Up to us to convince u during election.” I should also say that Drayson, although I don’t always agree with him or trust his electioneering promises, ought to be commended for his openness on Twitter and elsewhere. He is currently canvassing his Twitter followers for ideas for Labour’s “Science manifesto”. Remind him that blue-skies research (such as cosmology — full disclosure, I am not a disinterested observer) pays off — intellectually, culturally, and yes, maybe even financially, in the end.

The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of the Government) has announced “new arrangements” for STFC (press-release version here or here) . Basically, the government will try to insulate grant funding from two big sources of uncertainty. First, BIS would [attempt to] protect STFC from fluctuations in international currency rates which impact the cost in pounds sterling of being a member of international organizations like CERN, ESO and ESA (although the latter would eventually be moved into the nascent UK Space Agency). Second, the costs of running “our large domestic facilities, Diamond, the Central Laser Facility and ISIS” would be separated from the grants — the money for doing physics. This is crucial since these facilities actually don’t themselves do very much physics at all — rather, they use physics to probe the properties of matter in order to do biology, materials science, chemistry and more. So we physicists shouldn’t be saddled with the costs of running these machines.

Alas, these changes, although positive, may be too little, too late, despite the cliché. The amount of money available for grants still seems to remain significantly below the level of a few years ago. There may be perfectly reasonable arguments for decreasing the amount of physics being done in the UK, but we have not had them. Rather, this entire process began with the creation of the STFC, before the financial crisis, with what seemed at the time to be a toxic combination of mistakes and mismanagement. Since then, we’ve been fire-fighting, dealing with sharp cuts without being told about the long-term financial strategy. There have been several “consultation exercises” and “programmatic reviews” but in the curious we-don’t-talk-about-money way that seems to pervade the UK, the community was never really given enough financial information (which, as far as I can tell, should be absolutely all of it) to give truly useful input. Instead, the community just gives “peer review” of the science, but all of the real decisions are made by the so-called Executive — whom, in so doing, have utterly and completely lost the confidence of their community. Indeed, today’s changes, welcome though they may be, seem to have come not because of the Executive, but despite them.

[As usual, Paul Crowther is the best clearinghouse of information; Peter Coles has already weighed in with similar sentiments; and Roger Highfield of New Scientist takes a slightly more positive view, as does the BBC.]

Today I went to a talk by Chris Rapley, a Professor at UCL and currently director of the Science Museum in London (across the quad from Imperial), “Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?”.

In a department full of academic scientists (including a few working on the climate, such as our head of department, Professor Jo Haigh) there was a sense of preaching to the converted: we’ve already evaluated the evidence, or, at least, done our best to evaluate those presenting the evidence — even scientists don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to go back to the original data in all cases.

Rapley reminded us of the basic cycles moving carbon around the planet, and transporting heat from the sun to the earth and, over time, back out to space (one important fact is that we need the greenhouse effect to make the Earth livable to begin with — the airless, carbon-dioxide-free moon is about 30 degrees colder than the earth) in a careful balance that we have adjusted our civilization over millennia to take advantage of — it may not be the best of all possible climates, but it is the one that many, many trillions of dollars and billions of lives depend on. (In 1997, Costanza et al, Nature 387, 256, estimated that the ecosystem was “worth” about $33 trillion per year, almost twice global GDP.)

To boil this down, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme has created a unified “Climate Change Index” which attempts to summarize the climate in the same manner as the Dow Jones or FTSE indices do for the stock market, combining global average temperatures, sea level, and arctic ice cover (physicists will complain that these each have very different units, so that there is some arbitrariness to the combination, but it does reduce the noise inherent in any one of these indicators).

Meanwhile, The NY Times argues that climate change is real, despite isolated mistakes in the IPCC report, and despite the evidence from the (possibly illegally hacked) University of East Anglia emails that scientists are, indeed human. (As Rapley put it, it would likely be illuminating to trawl 10,000 emails from the climate-change deniers.) Unfortunately, the upshot seems to be that we scientists must be “above reproach” whereas the deniers can lie through their teeth (or at least misrepresent the facts, seemingly wilfully or not).

Finally, leaving my office this evening, I noticed this poster:

I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics.

For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is something like £70 million in the red. When all this started about two years ago, one of the main criticisms of the STFC management (beyond wondering how they could have got themselves — and us — into this predicament to begin with) was that they started to impose solutions that seemed to bear little resemblance to what the scientists themselves wanted. Trying to either genuinely ameliorate this, or at least give themselves good cover, they’ve spent much of the last year gathering input from various groups of physicists and astronomers, through a series of reports produced by scientist-led panels. These panels released their results this autumn, and STFC has supposedly used them to make decisions about the next five or so years of funding.

I was selfishly relieved to see that our work with the Planck Surveyor Satellite is rated “alpha 5”, and that our other local grants don’t appear directly affected (i.e., we weren’t drastically cut). However, STFC has “requested” (not sure what that means in this context) that even these projects reduce their costs by 15%. Other programs were not even this lucky — a not-quite-complete list of the cuts is on the STFC site. The cuts (a.k.a. “managed withdrawal”) include the UKIRT telescope, the LOFAR array, future work at the low-background facility at the Boulby mine, and future science exploitation of the XMM and Cassini missions (among many others). Alongside this, there will be a 25% cut in studentships and fellowships, although the details of this have not been revealed.

In his independent response, the Science Minister, Lord Drayson, says “we are investing record amounts into scientific research, but it is absolutely right that it is the scientists themselves, through the Research Councils, that decide how best to spend this money.” Of course we scientists don’t necessarily feel that our voices have been heard. The prioritized list of projects is available from STFC, and although it generally correlates with both the inputs from the various sub-panels and the financial outcome (in particular, many of us were pleased and relieved to see the much-criticised MoonLITE project at the bottom of the heap), there are some striking differences from at least my understanding of the panel recommendations, such as the “alpha 4” grade given to the Aurora human spaceflight program.

However, Drayson does seem to understand some of the issues: “…there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control. I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.” Not sure what this means, but even if we are grasping at straws, it’s the only promising news of the day.

I’ve got 11 browser tabs open just to get myself up-to-date. Here are some of them:

• An excellent summary of the situation before the announcement is at To the Left of Centre.
• Paul Crowther’s page has become the canonical clearing-house for information on the astronomy side of the “STFC Funding Crisis”.
• Blogs from Andy Lawrence and Peter Coles are both well-wrought and likely feature commentary from the opinionated luminaries of UK astronomy.
• The Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society respond.
• The BBC talks about the cuts with Lord Drayson.
• Physics World summarizes the situation as “savage cuts”.
• Our US counterparts get in on the commentary at Science magazine.
• There’s a web campaign to help save astronomy in the UK.

The Institute of Physics is weighing in on the issue of climate change, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try to dumb things down as much as possible. The basic science behind climate change is well-understood:

1. The mean temperature is increasing, with significant variation superposed from place to place and year to year.
2. This is caused largely by the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due to the very well-understood and uncontroversial physics of the carbon-dioxide molecule.
3. Significant further increase would be societally bad for many people.
4. Lowering our greenhouse-gas emissions can slow or halt the increasing temperatures.

At this coarse level, both the data and the theory underlying these conclusions are almost incontrovertible and ought to be uncontroversial, although each of these has been questioned by the politically-motivated or ignorant deniers sceptics. Significant questions remain at a more detailed level, of course: what is the precise correlation between greenhouse-gas emissions and temperature? How much of the increase is due to emissions, and how much to other effects (e.g., solar irradiance variations)? Most importantly, what will the temperature increase be in the future, for various amounts of future carbon emission. These are important details, but the main point — the earth is warming due to our activities — is settled.

(Scientific American has an excellent rebuttal of the main points raised by the so-called sceptics.)

What I’ve never quite understood is the politics of climate change. It is an observational fact that climate change deniers tend to be from the (mainstream and libertarian) right. I can certainly understand political differences regarding the solution to climate change — a true free-marketeer wouldn’t want a carbon tax or even a cap-and-trade system (although, of course, either of these attempt to estimate the true cost of future emissions, rather than their purely short-term economic benefit). But why do politics trace our opinion of the science? The only explanation for this I can come up with is the right’s longstanding association with big business — in particular the oil business — which, even today, retains a vested interest in denying the simple truth of climate change.

In one of my earliest memories, I’m about four years old, at nursery school, sitting on the floor looking up at what must have been a small black and white television sitting on a table. The teachers were all terribly excited, and we little kids were always happy to watch television. But this wasn’t Sesame Street. This was a rocket launch, a rocket to the moon. (I suspect it was Apollo 14.)

I was hooked immediately, and although I wasn’t well-suited to becoming an astronaut, I’ve managed to channel that impulse into science (and of course I finally got to see a rocket launch up close).

So without human spaceflight I probably wouldn’t be who I am, doing what I do.

But does space travel help us answer any of the “Big Questions”? Whither humanity in the long run? Will we stick to our crowded but beautiful planet or eventually spread our metaphorical wings and move on up?

Unfortunately spaceflight nowadays isn’t about the long-term future of humanity, but aerospace contracts, cool pictures, and good PR (except, of course, when something goes wrong). As I’ve said, that PR is certainly important, but it is very hard to know what exactly we’re getting for that considerable investment.

If you’d like to hear — or say — more about this, that’s exactly the question being asked at the latest instalment of Imperial’s “Big Questions” debates — Human Spaceflight: Science or Spectacle? Please come over to Imperial on Thursday night (but register in advance).

OK, if you are bored with my occasional forays into politics or religion, I apologize for this post on a subject about which I know even less. I was preparing a long post on my expatriate view of the US healthcare system versus the UK NHS (and I’ve even had a few years under the Canadian single-payer system — as Nate Silver reminds us, not all “socialist” [sic] countries are alike). But apparently I’m not the only blogger interested in comparing and defending the NHS against the US insurance system. So just a few bullet points:

• For those interested in the details of the UK system of controlling costs (AKA “rationing”) I highly recommend this podcast interview with Sir Michael Rawlins, head of the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) So yes, there is rationing: some treatments, in some cases, are deemed too expensive. But it is not a simple calculation based on the cost of treatment. (And there is nothing to stop anyone from buying “top-up” insurance in the UK.)
• The most entertaining exchange has been the Investors Business Daily’s contention that [UK resident and citizen] Stephen Hawking would be denied health care if he, er, lived in the UK, which he, um, does. Alas, they’ve taken that particular part of the editorial down, but not bothered to actually change the rest of their specious argument. Hawking himself has responded in a Guardian interview: “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
• The US system probably is better than the NHS if you’re upper-middle class in a high-paying white-collar job with good benefits (the infamous example being members of Congress). In that case, you’re likely in a very good insurance plan, mostly paid for by your employer, which lets you have any procedure that you want (or, somewhat more precisely, that you can get a doctor to recommend). But the vast majority of American either have a significantly less generous plan (if any), or pay significantly more of their own money towards it.
• The UK system is not perfect: rather than being denied access to expensive procedures, the much more common complaint is that of waiting times. This applies to long waits in emergency rooms, as well as to occasional many-month delays between diagnosis and required surgery or tests (in 2002, the US had four times as many MRI scanners per person as the UK).
• The UK was number 18 in the World Health Organization’s year 2000 list, while the US was 27.

Finally, it’s important to remember that a UK-style NHS isn’t actually on the table in the US; rather, even the “public option” is more similar to the Canadian single-payer system, albeit as one of many “payers”. On balance, in any case, I think I prefer the UK system, in which a safety net is deemed more important than encouraging competition. The rationing seems to me at least no worse than what is done by insurance companies in the US. Sure, some very expensive health plans essentially write you a blank check for any procedure recommended by any doctor. But many do not: there is a complicated system of gatekeepers, bureaucracy, and lists of covered procedures created specifically to cut down on the cost (to the insurance company!). Some of this is more or less explicitly rationing, while others are usually much more arbitrary and capricious (such as the recision of coverage even in the absence of fraud) — for its faults and occasional failures, at least the NICE rules are out in the open.

In school, Freeman Dyson became one of my heroes when I read his first memoir, Disturbing the Universe. It was an incredibly honor to meet him when he came to speak at my school — one of the advantages to growing up in New Jersey. He wrote and talked movingly of war, peace, science, books, and had an amazingly wide-ranging career, from quantum field theory to nuclear power (and nuclear-powered rockets) and a sufficiently optimistic outlook about the future of humanity to worry about how we might harvest all the energy of our own sun when we use up the more local sources in a few thousand, or million, years.

So I’ve been somewhat puzzled and a little saddened the last few years hearing about Dyson’s skepticism over climate change, which was highlighted last weekend in a New York Times profile. Dyson is smarter than most people any of us know, and probably does know more about climate science than most of us, too. But not as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nor, I fear, as much as the Goddard Institute’s Jim Hansen, despite what Dyson (perhaps correctly) thinks of as Hansen’s over-reliance on big climate models. As John Conway put it on Cosmic Variance, greenhouse-gas-generated global warming seems pretty solid; what’s less clear (and more frightening) is exactly what this will mean, and what we can do about it.

On a related note, I enjoyed Ed Brayton’s take on some of the more recent manifestations of the supposed climate change controversy and why sometimes even scientists like us have to take “cognitive shortcuts” — trying to work out which experts are right without doing all of the research or even the background reading ourselves. In this case, unlike Freeman Dyson I do side with Jim Hansen and the IPCC and their more pessimistic outlook.