Imaginary Potential

I’m currently spending my time earning a “Scientific Scuba Diver” certification.   For those not in the know, this is a professional qualification, proving that you can collect data and rescue scientists and cope with setting up equipment in cloudy water and navigate and so on.   It’s a 100 hour course and I’m doing it over two weeks, here in San Diego.   It’s fun - both classroom stuff and lots of tasks to complete on various dives.   It is possibly the last place that I expected to learn anything about physics.

Even recreational dive courses contain sections on the physics of diving.   It’s fairly important to understand at least the gas laws and the effect of pressure on solubility, since you breathe air at the pressure of the water around you, thereby ensuring that your lungs don’t collapse when you’re at depth.    I didn’t know that before I started to dive and it’s really pretty cool.    It causes all sorts of problems if you go down deep for long periods of time… but I digress.    The first scuba manuals were written in the fifties and sixties, back when imperial units were especially popular.   And so the dive manual states “There are four temperature scales:  Farenheit, Celsius, Kelvin and Rankine”.   Rankine?   As I rather arrogantly pointed out at some point (although I really didn’t intend it that way), I have 3 degrees in physics and I have never heard of the Rankine scale of temperature.      It turns out that it’s the absolute temperature scale for farenheit.   -459.67 degrees F is 0 R.   I suppose it’s a perfectly obvious analogy, but it had genuinely never occurred to me that it might exist.   Has anyone out there heard of it?

I think that the long-term aim should definitely to be to convert all the dive manuals (and diver thinking) to Centigrade, but I accept that this takes time and that an extra conversion stage when teaching ideal gas laws might confuse some people.   Most people in the US think in farenheit when it comes to practical experience and diving in 50 degrees F water is definitely an experience.  However, I have to give the course credit for having taught me something that I did not know from the history of my subject.

I have a new job.  I have advanced from the trivial consideration of a single bubble or even two bubbles at once (although that was only every other Thursday, when I’d been good) to a better place.   At my new level, which is physically in Rhode Island although mentally stranded out in an Atlantic storm,  cogitation and comprehension of millions of bubbles at once are required.     Cogitation is rather my thing, and I have been happily absorbing information on storms and bubbles and particulates and a mysterious thing called Langmuir circulation.   It’s amazing how quantitative you can make all this stuff, but it’s really only background for the main project, which is counting and sizing millions of bubbles at once by looking at their effect on the acoustic resonances between two circular plates.     You put radio hiss (a.k.a. white noise) into one plate, let it pass through the bubbles caused by the storm overhead and then watch with interest and popcorn while the other plate responds to all this fuss.  And then science is supposed to occur.

In learning the background for all of this, I have read a lot about turbulence.   The best thing to do with turbulence, according to the clever people who make a living out of this, is to measure eddies and make a Hilbert transform.    But what does Hilbert transform into?   And what is it of Eddy’s that is being measured anyway and does he know about it?   These are important questions for the tired mind.   Perhaps Hilbert is a small blue confused-looking animal with a skill for hiding in car glove compartments.   The day he transforms into something with sharp teeth and a taste for fingernails, you’d better watch out.    I don’t even want to think about Eddy and his potential measurements.

It is possible that although I’ve only been in Rhode Island for a week, I’ve already got cabin fever.  After a whole year I’ll probably be stalked by a small pack consisting of a Fourier (like a terrier but with more fur), two Laplaces (these are definitely blue, but only half of them exists) a few Hartleys (more sharp teeth, I’m afraid) and a small Identity (who has a monobrow and a permanently puzzled expression).    This sounds terrifying (or should that be Fourifying?).

If you happen to see my mind lurking about under the sofa, please post it back to me…

A few weeks ago, while I was in a discussion about young academics and why they choose to stay in science or not, I made a point which I think is perfectly obvious, but which was snorted at by the older academics present.   I said that when a postdoc looks at the people ahead of them in the system, they see stressed tired people who regularly work evenings and weekends, who have to fight continually for their funding (i.e. their job security), and who not make a lot of money for their effort.   This is not something that most people want to look forward to.    The people my age in the group remained quiet and listened to the older ones there pooh-pooh the idea.   The more senior academics asked me, “do you personally see that problem ahead of you?”.  And I said “yes”, and described the unhealthy work ethic that I sometimes see around me.   And the discussion stopped there.   Because the loudest snorter of them all actually said “well, you’re from Britain - you’re not used to working as hard as we do here.    You don’t have money for the really big projects.   And you stop for tea three times a day!”.   I pointed out that it’s only twice a day, but my serious point about the work was no longer taken seriously.

This annoyed me.   So when I went back to my office, I looked a few things up.   Thomson (the academic publishers) publish tables every year of the total number of scientific papers published by each country and also the “Total papers among the one per cent most cited in all fields”.   I then looked up the current populations of each country and so got to the numbers of papers per capita.   Here are the results:

Total papers per capita:    USA:  9.6 per thousand people per year     UK:   10.9 per thousand people per year.

Papers in the top 1%:  USA:   0.18 per thousand people per year.   UK:   0.17 per thousand people per year.

Now, I’m happy to admit that simple statistics may not tell the whole story.   But I’m also pretty confident that this is a strong indication that taking two 15 minutes breaks a day to consume cups of tea and eat biscuits is not doing us any harm at all, thank you very much.   And next time anyone tries to snort at my view of working hours on that basis, I will politely share these data with them and offer to induct them into the world of the tea break.   If they’re nice, I might even give them a biscuit.

I had a Eureka moment this week. Fortunately I was not sitting in a bath at the time and so I did not have to decide whether to suppress the urge (apparently written into the laws of physics for moments like this) to run around the streets naked, shouting happily about my discovery. Thinking about it though, if I’m ever going to try that, it should be while I live in southern California near the beach. In my neighbourhood, such behaviour would probably just count as part of the social background noise rather than anything significant.

The Eureka itself was to do with how bubbles behave acoustically when fragmenting in turbulence (for example underneath a breaking wave). It turns out that some bubbles are disguising themselves acoustically as other bubbles (because the dominant resonance is not at their natural frequency). This explains a gap in the data which was previously unexplained, and I am very happy because my model matches the data pretty well. Or, it matches it pretty well up to now. There are still lots of things to be tested, but the fact that it explains this major feature is very encouraging. So I worked all this out, plotted most of the relevant stuff and hopefully this is sufficient for the time being to exorcise the bubbles-on-the-brain demons. Just before I worked out what was going on, piles of ideas were sitting untidily round in my head, overflowing into corners that they really didn’t belong in (for example, the ones associated with eating yogurt and inventing cocktails). They jostled each other and squeaked and squawked and squeezed and generally wouldn’t leave me alone. So now they’ve been put in order and I can get on with some other things. Good ideas. Sit. Stay…

I went to a discussion about women in science last week. I don’t normally do things like that, since such events have been known to bring on side effects such as the Horrified Hiccups and mysterious aches in the Being Patronised (or should it be Matronised) Brain Cell. When compared to women throughout the ages, I am very privileged in the attitude that my co-workers have to my gender, i.e. that it is a non-issue. I recognise that there are not as many women doing science as men (for reasons which are many and complicated), but I really don’t think that it’s due to prejudice any longer. There may well be isolated cases when this is true, but I can’t quite believe that they are at all representative. However, this change in attitudes is still newly hatched, and this is my only explanation for the persistance of “Women In Science” workshops when I was a teenager. I felt patronised at all of them. And I felt that women were almost being told to have problems, when really the issues being discussed could apply just to much to men as women. Not all men are assertive and confident and they will have problems when dealing with over-assertive and excessively confident co-workers, just as shyer females might. The problem is with the way people are, not their gender.

So. I have not been to any of these events since, and I thought it was about time to see how things have changed. And it was very interesting. The women there found it extremely difficult to come up with instances where they had been discriminated against, even though they were being actively encouraged to talk about them. Now, there is obviously one very important difference between men and women. Women can bear children and men, however much they want to help, do not have to go through the physical process associated with this. The point where the number of women in science really drops off is at the point where they have a family and have tended not to come back to science aftewards. I believe that this is the only time period that really matters in the gender debate. I also have a theory on this, based on talking to other female scientists. Institutions no longer stand in the way of new mothers coming back to work as they once did. But science itself has problems for researchers at that stage that apply both to men and women. Ask any postdoc. We look at the PIs in our departments and we see very stressed people, who work far too many hours on weekdays and on weekends, who have to struggle for funding, fight for lab space and also deal with teaching responsibilities and committees and so on. It’s not just women who look at this mess and question whether their love of science is enough for them to carry on. Men do too. No-one wants a permanently stressed lifestyle and a guaranteed heart attack at 55. But I think that partly because of having some time off to have children and getting some perspective on it all, and partly because they are used to talking about problems more than men, women look at it and decide to do something else. Men still have a bit of a macho attitude to problems and tend to deny them and just keep struggling along, feeling as though it would be failing to admit to the struggle. Women tend to be a bit better about admitting problems. And science shouldn’t be like this. The system should not punish enthusiastic and intelligent people for being enthusiastic and intelligent. So I think that the gender split during the postdoc years has more to do with
the big problems in how science works and the unfair pressure that researchers are often under, at least until they get tenure. This is not to do with prejudice against women in science. This has to do with women identifying the problems in science and refusing to play by those rules. You only have one life. Why should you be miserable in it, just because someone else defines that misery as success?

So I think that women here are in a position to help both themselves and the men in science. Let’s face up to it and sort it out. Let’s change this system where the only security comes with tenure, when the best years of your life are behind you. It’s not a “gender” issue. It’s right at the core of how science is organised. We should find ways to fix it. Systems are huge, but their rules are not written in stone. There is hope.

Right, I’ve made my political point. Back to the cheerful flippancy next time….

I was reading a book called “The Revenge of Anguished English”, and although the content doesn’t live up to the promise suggested by the title, there was a nice physics typo mentioned near the end: “He got his degree in unclear physics”. The question is whether that tiny letter substitution makes that much difference to most people who might be reading a newspaper biography of someone. Are nuclear and unclear synonyms to everyone who doesn’t have a physics degree? I would guess that for all practical purposes they could often be interchanged. I don’t want to be snobbish about it - I’m sure that I wouldn’t blink at an article about”More sculpture” when it was meant to be about “Moore sculpture”. Perhaps nuclear physicists should be upfront about it and just go with it. An “unclear power station” sounds quite aesthetically pleasing, as if it faded into the background on sunny days. And at least G.W. Bush could talk about such an entity without inducing a snigger from every science graduate (and indeed every literate person) in the English-speaking world.

Well, I suppose that I should take Dave up on his invitation to reveal all about “the saddest missed opportunity in science popularization, ever. “ .   And he was indeed very sad at the time.    Almost in tears, in fact.

Our story begins almost three years ago in 2005, labelled the “International Year of Physics”.   I was involved in a bmx stunt to launch this year  (the Einstein Flip) and so for a while my name was in the media a lot, and if you’d been looking for a random physicist you’d have found me.     A month afterwards, my office mate took a phone message for me from “the PR company for Cirque du Soleil”, which was a respectable start.   I phoned them back, and spoke to someone who wanted a physicist to get involved in publicising a performance.   They were a bit cagey about exactly what sort of performance it was, so I told them that I’d need to know more about what it was before I committed to getting involved.     They said that they’d send me an e-mail, rather reluctantly.   The e-mail finally arrived.   They wanted to publicise Immodesty Blaize, a burlesque dancer.    You can look her up - I’ve since heard her on the radio, talking about the serious side of her act (to do with how women are perceived in society).    I think that the act itself might have involved a reverse strip-tease (putting clothes on in a sensual way, rather than taking them off).  Anyway.   The e-mail said that one of the major features of her act was that she could make her nipple tassles rotate in opposite directions at the same time.   In order to promote her act in the newspapers, they wanted a physicist to “do some experiments” associated with the physics of this process, and then splash this story across all the papers in the UK.   The papers that they mentioned were the sort of newspapers that go in for sensation and headlines that take up half the page.   The e-mail finished with an offer of ten free tickets to one of her shows and an invitation to come and meet her and “get a feel for what’s going on”.   I kid you not.  Those were the words used.     The e-mail also included a picture of Immodesty and her sidekick Walter (who was wearing a very fetching bowler hat).

So.   I have talked about a lot of physics to a lot of people.   I believe that you can’t dictate to people what they should and shouldn’t want to pay attention to - you have to engage them with something that genuinely interests them.   Physics is never mentioned in this sort of newspaper.     On one hand, it would be a great opportunity to show readers of such papers that there are female physicists out there and to demonstrate how relevant physics is to everyday life (not that I counter-rotate my nipple tassles every day, cough)  On the other hand, it’s very much just cheap publicity without any real substance, very frivolous.    It’s not that physics can’t be fun, but you don’t want to cheapen it.

The way the e-mail was written was a little bit odd.   I still wonder whether it was a practical joke - if so, it was an exceptionally good one.  On balance, I think not - I think it’s just that the person who wrote it only scraped a pass in their English exams.   Immodesty’s website did have a cartoon of her with nipple tassles, and when you moved the computer mouse over them, they rotated faster and faster (and in opposite directions, of course).    Male friends of mine were amazingly fascinated by this - it’s in the top ten best ways I have ever seen of keeping a bloke quiet.   I spoke to the PR people on the phone again.   In the end, I told them that if they wanted to do spoof physics, they should get a spoof scientist.    Dave cried because he was not going to get one of the free ten tickets to her show (and I had a lot of male friends who altruistically volunteered to help me make use of those tickets).

But the whole story raises some interesting questions.   Was I too shy or too stuffy?   Should I have seized this opportunity to get physics and physicists some free publicity and to show that we’re not all non-human nerds in white coats?   It wouldn’t really have done me any harm, although I suppose it would have been a joke among all my friends for a very long time to come.   Physicists have to be approachable.   Nipples are apparently very approachable.    What do you think I should have done?

p.s.   Something interesting that came out of this is that when you tell this story to females and you look very carefully, you can quite often see them moving their shoulders a bit, as they’re subconsciously wondering how the counter-rotating nipple feat is achieved.                                                                    

I’m just getting involved in SciVee, a project which allows scientists to make a short video associated with a paper that they have published recently. The website is here: www.scivee.tv The concept is brilliant - the video (which can be filmed in a lab or an office, or be done more professionally) is shown with the text of the paper next to it. The author talks about the paper - emphasising the main points in their own words and showing their enthusiasm for the concept and the future of their project. So it’s supplementary to the paper, but it’s an amazing addition to it. As the video plays, the sections of the text that they’re talking about are highlighted by the side, and there are links to supplementary information. The video can show the experimental apparatus, talk about the motivation for the paper… and best of all, you get an idea of the personalities behind the research and a much better idea of the reasons that they think it’s important. I’m convinced that it’s really a tool of the future in publishing scientific papers.

To start with, I’m getting involved in the process of getting more scientists to make these “pubcasts” about their research, and I’ll make a pubcast myself soon too. The project is in the very early stages - it’s just had its first birthday, but the website is impressive even though it’s currently not overflowing with content. It also has a video section where anyone can post a scientific video that doesn’t have to be linked with a specific publication, and for example there are schoolkids on there, making videos about their scientific projects. It will also be a great tool for kids to see some scientists in action and give them a chance to have a go themselves (even though the scientists will be talking at the level of their peers, and not necessarily for a non-scientific audience). As someone who has a bit of a bee in my bonnet about how scientists communicate with each other and the public, I’m very excited about being involved.

Would you use this? Would you make a video yourself? Personally, I would love to see and hear the authors of papers that I’m reading talk about their work. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of online technology since I first saw skype. Are you excited too? Have a look. I’d be fascinated to hear your comments.

This week I discovered the short videos of talks from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences at www.ted.com . As a consequence, internet “timewasting” has turned into internet “time-well-spent”. The organisers say this about the aims of the conference:

“The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

It’s brilliant. 18 minutes (and many are shorter) is a great way of making these amazing people convey the point of their thinking without all the fluff. There are jugglers, writers, politicians, scientists… such a variety of stuff. And it’s all available as audio or video podcasts.

However, my favourite bit was some video of ocean creatures, which entirely justifies (as far as I’m concerned) my recent leap into the ocean sciences (even though I’m doing the physical bits and not the biological bits). Below is the link to the coolest underwater video footage I have ever seen. Watch it. Now. The best bits are after the first minute or two, so keep going through those.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/206

How could anyone eat octopus after seeing that? I never have, and I think it’ll stay that way. Let the amazing things roam the ocean, undisturbed.

I read somewhere the other day about Second Life, an apparently popular virtual reality online, in which you can meet and chat to people, move about, buy things and even hold physics conferences. The last one is really why I bothered - in the same week I read about physics connections made through Second Life I also found a Second Life group on the Nature Network. So I thought that I’d better have a look. I agonised for a while over the choice of an appropriate name (and I think that I’m proud of what I finally chose), and then set about exploring. The introductory location is on an island, and the disadvantage of this is that you can fall in to the surrounding water. Fortunately you don’t drown, so you can have a bit of a swim and then climb out again. Then my computer crashed and I gave up for the day. I tried again just now and I managed to buy a chain mail shirt (gotta be useful, right?), before it all slowed down and started responding like a reluctant dog being led to the bath. When it finally relaxed and speeded up, I found that I had fallen into the water again. After a few more attempts which all ended in the cryosphere, I gave up. If it won’t run even with all the other programs switched off and nothing fancy enabled, I guess it’s trying to tell me something. Something along the lines of “No MacBook Pro? Not even a dual-core processer? Pah. We don’t need your sort around here”

So I won’t get to the virtual physics conference, but maybe since I’m in sunny California and it’s February, I’ll go surfing instead. Real surfing. With real people. I may yet emerge from my first life crysalis to face the second stage, but for the time being it’s quite nice in here. Now, where did I put my wetsuit?