Dimensional Reduction

Dimensionally reduced scientist.

“Science is the only news,” Steward Brand wrote. My reading of this sentence is that science, the exploration of nature and natural law, is the ultimate source of inspiration. Developing a model and studying its properties can be like discovering a new world, and the discoveries that are the most fascinating are the ones that are surprising and unintuitive.

Probability amplitudes and wavefunctions are examples of such surprising and unintuitive properties, examples that are now a century old and that have changed the way we think about the world. Holography is a more recent example. And, gathering momentum in the quantum gravity community right now, is dimensional reduction.

Dimensional reduction means that on short distances the dimension of space-time decreases. To quantify what this means one has to be very careful with defining “dimension.”

The way we normally think about the dimension of space is to picture how lines spread out from a point. How quickly the lines dilute into their environment tells us something about the spheres we can draw around the point. The dimension of these spheres can be used to define the “Hausdorff dimension” of a space. The faster the lines dilute with distance, the larger the Hausdorff dimension.

The notion of dimension that is relevant for the effect of dimensional reduction is not the Hausdorff dimension, but instead the “spectral dimension.” The spectral dimension can be found by first getting rid of the Lorentzian signature and going to Euclidean space. And then to watch a random walker who starts at one point, and measure the probability for him to return to that point. The smaller the average return probability, the higher the probability he’ll get lost, and the higher the number of dimensions. One can define the spectral dimension from the average return probability.

Normally, for a flat, classical space, both notions of dimension are identical. However, there have been several approaches toward quantum geometry that found that the spectral dimension at short distances goes down from four to two. The return probability for short walks is larger than expected. One says that the spectral dimension “runs”, meaning it depends on the distance at which space-time is probed.

Surprising. Unintuitive.

This strange behavior was first found in Causal Dynamical Triangulations (hep-th/0505113), where one does a numerical simulation of an actual random walk in Euclidean space. But in other approaches one does not need a numerical simulation; it is possible to study the spectral dimension analytically as follows.

The behavior of the random walk is governed by a differential equation, the diffusion equation, in which there enters the metric of the background space-time. In approaches to quantum gravity in which the metric is quantized, it is then the expectation value of the operator that the metric has become which enters the diffusion equation. From the diffusion equation one calculates the return probability for the random walk.

This way, one can then infer the spectral dimension also in Asymptotically Safe Gravity (hep-th/0508202). Interestingly, one finds the same drop from four to two spectral dimensions. Yet another indication comes from Loop Quantum Gravity, where the scaling of the area operator with length changes at short distances. It is somewhat questionable whether the notion of a metric makes sense at all in this regime, but if one nevertheless constructs the diffusion equation from this scaling, one again finds that the spectral dimension drops from four to two (0812.2214). And Horava-Lifshitz gravity is maybe the best studied case where one finds dimensional reduction (0902.3657).

Surprising. Unintuitive. It is difficult to interpret this behavior. Maybe a good way to picture it, as Calcagni, Eichhorn and Saueressig suggested, is to think of the quantum fluctuations of space-time hindering a particle’s random walk and slowing it down. It wouldn’t have to be that way. Quantum fluctuations could also be kicking the particle around wildly, thus increasing the spectral dimension rather than decreasing it. But that’s not what the theory tells us. One shouldn’t take this picture too seriously though, because we’re talking about a random walk in Euclidean space, so it’s not an actual physical process.

It seems strange that such entirely different approaches to quantum gravity would share a behavior like this. Maybe our theories are trying to teach us a lesson about a very general property of quantum space-time. But then again, the spectral dimension does not say all that much about the theory. There are many different types of random walks that give rise to the same spectral dimension. And while these different approaches to quantum gravity share the same scaling behavior for the spectral dimension, they differ in the type of random walk that produces this scaling (1304.7247).

So far, this is an entirely theoretical observation. It is interesting to speculate whether one can find experimental evidence for this scaling behavior. In fact, this recent paper by Amelino-Camelia et al aims to “explore the cosmological implications” of running spectral dimensions. At least that is what the first sentence of the abstract says. If you read the second sentence though you’ll notice that what they actually explore are modified dispersion relations. And while modified dispersion relations lead to a running spectral dimension, the opposite is not necessarily the case. But is there any better indication for a topic being hot than that people use it in the first sentence of an abstract to draw the readers interest?

A star-rating for scientific news?

Garry Gutting's recent post What Do Scientific Studies Show? at the NYT blogs is utterly unremarkable. Or so I thought, being clearly biased because the guy is a professor of philosophy, and I - I'm at the other end of the circle. But then he puts forward a proposal I think is brilliant: A labeling system for scientific news "that made clear a given study’s place in the scientific process", ranging from the speculative idea and preliminary results all the way to established scientific theory.

I like the idea because it would be an easy way to solve a tension in science news, which is that what's new and exciting, and therefore likely to make headlines, is also often controversial and likely to be refuted later. The solution can't be to not report what's new and exciting, but to find a good way to make clear that, while interesting and promising, this isn't (yet) established scientific consensus.

23andMe has a star rating to indicate how reliable a correlation between a genetic sequence and certain traits/diseases is, based on what has been reported in the scientific literature. (See my earlier blogpost for screenshots showing how that looks like.) They have a white paper laying out the criteria for assessing the scientific status of these correlations. The 23andMe rating serves a similar purpose as the proposed rating for science news. It is handy as a quick orientation, and it is a guide for those who can't or don't want to dig into the scientific literature themselves. It doesn't tell you to disregard results with few stars, just to keep in mind that this might turn out to be a data glitch, and to enjoy or worry with caution.

I think that such a label indicating how established a scientific result or idea is would be easy to use. Writers could just assign it themselves with help from the researchers they have been in contact with while working on a piece. That might not always be very accurate, but undoubtedly bloggers would add their voice. There would most likely be a service popping up to aggregate all ratings on a given topic/press release (probably weighted by the source). I am guessing it would be pretty much self-organized because we're all so very used to these ratings for other purposes.

Do you think such a labeling would be helpful? If so, what criteria would you require for zero to five stars?

Basic research is vital

Last month I had the flu. I was down with a fever of more than 40°C, four days in a row. Needless to say, it was a public holiday.

While the body is struggling to recover from illness, priorities shift. Survive first. Drink. Eat. Stand upright without fainting. Feed the kids because they can’t do it themselves. Two days earlier, I was thinking of running a half-marathon, now happy to make it to the bathroom. Forgotten the parking ticket and the tax return.

We see the same shift of priorities on other levels of our societies. If a system, may that be an organism or a group of people, experiences a potential threat to existence, energy is redirected to the essential needs, to survival first. An unexpected death in the family requires time for recovery and reorganization. A nation that is being attacked redirects resources to the military.

The human body’s defense against viruses does not require conscious control. It executes a program that millions of years of evolution have optimized, a program we can support with medication and nutrition. But when it comes to priorities of our nations, we have no program to follow. We first have to decide what is necessary for survival, and what can be put on hold while we recover.

The last years have not been good years economically, neither in the European Union, nor in North America. We all feel the pressure. We’re forced to focus our priorities. And every week I read a new article about cuts in some research budget.

“Europe's leaders slash proposed research budget,” I read. “Big cuts to R&D budgets [in the UK],” I read. “More than 50 Nobel laureates are urging [the US] Congress to spare the federal science establishment from the looming budget cut,” I read.

An organism befallen by illness manages a shortage of energy. A nation under economic pressure manages a shortage of money. But money is only the tool for the management. And it is a complicated tool, its value influenced by many factors including psychological, and it is not just under national management. In the end, its purpose is to direct labor. And here is the real energy of our nations: Humans, working. It is the amounts of working hours in different professions that budget cuts manage.

In reaction to a perceived threat, nations shift priorities and redirect human labor. They might aim at sustainability. At independence from oil imports. They invest in public health. Or they cut back on these investments. When the pressure raises, what is left will be the essentials. Energy and food, housing and safety. Decisions have to be made. The people who assemble weapons are not available to water the fields.

How vital is science?

We all know that progress depends on scientific research. Somebody has to develop new technologies. Somebody has to test whether they are safe to use. Everybody understands what applied science does: In goes brain, out comes what you’ll smear into your face or wear on your nose tomorrow.

But not everybody understands that this isn’t all of science. Besides the output-oriented research, there is the research that is not conducted with the aim of developing new technologies. It is curiosity-driven. It follows the loose ends of today's theories, it aims to understand the puzzle that is the data. Most scientists call it basic or fundamental research. The NSF calls it transformative research, the ERC frontier research. Sometimes I’ve heard the expression blue-skies research. Whatever the name, its defining property is that you don’t know the result before you’ve done the research.

Since many people do not understand what fundamental research is or why it is necessary, if science funding is cut, basic research suffers most. Politicians lack the proper words to justify investment into something that doesn’t seem to have any tangible outcome. Something that, it seems, just pleases the curiosity of academics. “The question is academic,” has to come to mean “The world doesn’t care about its answer.”

A truly shocking recent example comes from Canada:

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value," John McDougall, president of the [Canadian National Research Council], said in announcing the shift in the NRC's research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems "commercially viable". [Source: Toronto Sun]

Oh, Canada. (Also: Could somebody boot the guy, he’s in the wrong profession.)

Do they not understand how vital basic research is for their nation? Or do they decide not to raise the point? I suspect that at least some of those involved in such a decision approve cutting back on basic research not because they don’t understand what it’s good for, but because they believe their people don’t understand what it’s good for. (And they would be wrong, if you scroll down and look at the poll results...)

I suspect that scientists are an easy target, they usually don’t offer much resistance. They're not organized, for not to say disorganized. Scientists will try to cope until it becomes impossible and then pack their bags and their families and move to elsewhere. And once they’re gone, Canada, you’ll have to invest much more money than you save now to get them back.

Do they really not know that basic research, in one sentence, is the applied research in 100 years?

It isn’t possible, in basic research, to formulate a commercial application as goal because nobody can make predictions or formulate research plans over 100 years. There are too many unknown unknowns, the system is too complex, there are too many independent knowledge seekers in the game. Nobody can tell reliably what is going to happen.

They say “commercially viable”, but what they actually mean is “commercially viable within 5 years”.

The scientific theories that modern technology and medicine are based on – from LCD displays over DVD-players to spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging, from laser surgery to quantum computers – none of them would exist had scientists pursued “commercial viability”. Without curiosity-driven research, we deliberately ignore paths to new areas of knowledge. Applied research will inevitably run dry sooner or later. Scientific progress is not sustainable without basic research.

As your mother told you, if you have a fever, watch your fluid intake. Even if you are tired and don’t feel like moving a finger, drink that glass of water. The woman with the flu who didn’t drink enough today is the woman in the hospital on an IV-drip tomorrow. And the nation under economic pressure who didn’t invest in basic research today is the nation that will wish there was a global IV-drop for their artery tomorrow.

And here’s some other people saying the same thing in less words [via Steve Hsu]:



I know that on this blog a post like this preaches to the choir. So today I have homework for you. Tell your friends and your neighbors and the other parents at the daycare place. Tell them what basic research is and why it’s vital. And if you don’t feel like talking, send them a link or show them a video.

What do "most physicists" work on?

It always amazes me how skewed the image of physics research in the popular press is. To begin with, the amount of coverage is totally unrepresentative for the actual amount of research on a given topic. Controversial and outright fantastic topics are typically hotly discussed, so is everything that captures the public imagination. On the other hand, down-to-earth research like soft condensed matter or statistical mechanics rarely makes headlines.

The field I work in myself, quantum gravity, is among the over-represented fields. If you believe what you read, the quest for quantum gravity has become the "holy grail" of theoretical physicists all over the planet, and we're all working on it because the end of science is near and there's nothing else left to do.

Since coverage by the media is driven by popularity and not by relevance, one can expect such a skewed representation. It probably isn't much different in other areas of our lives. (Who actually wears those wacky clothes that fashion designers celebrate?) What bothers me much more than the skewed selection of topics is how their relevance is misrepresented even in these articles. I must have read hundreds of times that "many physicists" believe this or that, while in reality most physicists couldn't care less and probably have no opinion whatsoever.

Here are some examples:

"According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science."

Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe.

"The team’s verdict, published in July 2012, shocked the physics community."

Zeeya Merali, in a recent nature issue, Astrophysics: Fire in the hole!. We note in the passing that the article doesn't have much, if anything, to do with astrophysics.

"Most physicists believe that space is not smooth, but it is rather composed of incredibly small subunits, much like a painting made of dots. This micro-landscape is believed to host numerous black holes..."

Mihai Andrei, in an article titled Finding black holes at a quantum scale about a deeply flawed paper by Jacob Bekenstein. (Which, depressingly, got published in PRD.)

But why limit ourselves to physicists, let's be bold:

"Many scientists claim that mega-millions of other universes, each with its own laws of physics, lie out there, beyond our visual horizon. They are collectively known as the multiverse."

George F. R. Ellis, Scientific American, Does the Multiverse Really Exist? "They" presumably refers to the "other universes," and not to the "many scientists".

So then let's try to quantify "most physicists" by estimating an upper bound on the fraction of physicists who are working on these topics, a sub-area of quantum gravity. The topics under question here tend to appear on the arXiv under hep-th cross-linked to gr-qc or the other way round. That there is no subject category for "quantum gravity" should already tell you that there aren't all that "many" people working on it. First let us have a look at the arXiv submission rates

The left graph shows the total number of submissions, the right shows the percentage. Blue, which presently accounts for about 10%, is high energy physics and collects hep-th+hep-ph+hep-lat+hep-ex. Note that for historical reasons hep is likely to be over-represented in the arXiv statistics relative to the actual distribution of researchers. In hep, pretty much every paper goes on the arxiv, but the same is not true in other areas (at least not yet). Also, hep tends to be a very productive and communicative field, so looking at the number of arXiv submissions rather than researchers is probably an over-estimate. Be that as it may, the topics we are looking for almost certainly occupy less than 10% of researchers.

More data that tells you that the vast number of physicists aren't working on anything related to quantum gravity can be obtained from the number of members in sections of the German Physical Society. The section on Particle Physics (which includes beyond the standard model physics and quantum gravity) has about 2,500 members. The section on Quantum Optics and Photonics has more than 3,000 members, Physics of Semi-conductors 3,800, Low Temperature Physics 1,450, Atomic Physics together with Hadronic and Nuclear Physics come to about 3,000, Material Physics together with Chemical and Polymer Physics and Thin Films another 3,500. Not all sections have membership numbers online, so this doesn't cover the full spectrum. But this already tells you that "most physicists" don't even do high energy physics, certainly not quantum gravity, and have no business with multiverses, firewalls, or "micro-landscapes of black holes".

But we can try to get a better estimate by seeing how many papers are cross-linked from hep-th to gr-qc, assuming that the opposite cross-linking is similarly frequent. For this, we look at the submission statistics of gr-qc for the first four months of the year 2013. It lists the submissions as well as the cross-lists. Click on any of the months, select "show all" and count the number of times "cross-list from hep-th" appears on the page. The numbers I get for January to April are: 70,71,52 and 67. If you look at the titles, you'll note that the papers you find this way fit well to the topics we're looking for.

Comparing these numbers with the total arxiv submissions per month (about 7500), we can estimate that it's about 1%. Multiply by two to account for gr-qc cross-linked to hep-th.

Now this is a rather crude estimate and I have mentioned several reasons why it's inaccurate: 1) Some fields of research are not as well represented on the arXiv as is hep-th. This means 2% is still an over-estimate. 2) Some fields might be more productive in paper output than others. If hep-th is on the more productive side, this means the 2% is even more of an over-estimate. 3) Not every paper in the area we're looking for might be hep-th cross-linked to gr-qc or vice-versa. This leads to an under-estimate. 4) On the other hand, not every paper cross-listed as such is about quantum gravity or related topics. 5) There are probably more people following the literature than actively working on it, which also leads to an under-estimate.

However, even if you'd add up all these errors, you would still be left to conclude that the above quoted uses of "most physicists" or "physics community" are extremely inaccurate and misleading.

What is a microfiber cloth and how does it work?

Microfibre cloths have become really popular during the last years. I just got one as an advertisement gift from the phone company. They’re handy to clean glasses, all kinds of screens, windows, mirrors and plastic surfaces, quickly and without the use of water. If dirty, put the cloth in the laundry, add detergent, and they’re as good as new.

But what are microfibers and what can they do that a Kleenex can’t?

Cotton cloths or paper wipes are mostly made of cellulose. Cellulose is a polymer, a long molecule that repeats a shorter structure up to some thousand times. Cellulose is hydrophile, meaning it likes to bind to water molecules. What it doesn’t like though is binding to fat molecules, which are themselves hydrophobic and don’t like to bind to water.

Cotton and paper tissues thus work badly for removing fatty stains, such as finger prints from glasses. If you want to get rid of these you have to use water and detergents on the cloth. Detergents are made of molecules that allow mixing water with fatty substances. With the detergent, the wet cotton cloth does a good job with the grease. Except that then it takes a long time to dry because now all the water molecules are attached to the cellulose polymers.

Cross-section of single microfibre,
electron microscope. Image Source.

Microfibers are also polymers, but that’s where the similarities end. Microfibers are synthetic polymers and usually much longer than the cellulose fibers won from organic materials. They are also about an order of magnitude thinner, typically only a few micrometers.

The microfibres used for cleaning cloths are normally a mixture of polyester and polyamide. Polyesters like to bind to fat, which is why the cloths can be used to wipe away grease without adding detergents. Polyesters however don’t like to bind water. Some polyamides do, but the water absorption of the microfibre cloths comes mostly from a clever production technique that increases the surface area of the fibres and allows for capillary action to suck up the water.

This technique works as follows. The long microfibers are not produced separately, but in a mixture of polyesters and polyamides that are arranged as alternating wedges, much like pieces on a cake. These mixed fibres are later split up by high pressure water jets (the image above shows the result). This procedure allows to produce much finer fibres than would be possible to produce directly, and since the microfibers are thin to begin with, it creates very porose materials that have a large surface in a small volume.

Cross-section of microfibre cloth, electron
microscope image. Source: hotrodworks.net

These splitted fibres are then woven or pressed into textiles (see image right). The resulting cloth is lightweight and binds to fat so you can wipe those fingerprints away easily. The material sucks up water, but since most of the water is stored in the pores between the fibres rather than binding directly to them (as is the case with cotton), microfibre cloths dry much faster than cotton.

Microfibres are not a new invention. The production technique goes back to research in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the early 90s that they were marketed to households, a trend apparently started by the Swedes. During the last decade or so, microfibers have become quite common, especially for cleaning purposes, and, because they dry quickly, for sport and outdoor clothes.

So the next time you wipe the earwax off your display, I hope you appreciate the science behind this not-so-simple cloth.

Interna

Lara, putting on her shoes.

May 1st is a national holiday both in Sweden and in Germany. A good opportunity, I thought, to update you on our attempts at normal family life.

Lara and Gloria are now talking basically non-stop. Half of the time we have no idea what they are trying to say, the other half are refusals. Gloria literally wakes up in the morning yelling "Nein-nein-nein". Saying it's difficult to get her dressed, fed, and to daycare makes quantizing gravity sound like an easy task. Yesterday she insisted on going in her pajamas. Good mother that I am, I thought that was a brilliant idea.

Gloria is proud of her new hat.

Lara isn't quite as difficult as Gloria, but she is very easily distracted. If I ask her to get into the stroller, she'll first spend five minutes inspecting the stones by the road or take off her shoes and put them back on, just because.Time clearly flows very differently when you're two years old than when you're forty. I try to use the occasions to check my email. Time flows through my iPhone, I'm sure it does.

We finally made progress on our daycare issue, which is presently only half a solution. A new daycare place opened in the area, and due to my time spent on the phone last year, asking people to please write down my name and call me back if the situation unexpectedly changes, somebody indeed recalled my name and we made it top of the list for the new place. So there'll be another adaption phase at another place, but this time it's a full-day care that will indeed cover our working hours. It is also, I should add, considerably less expensive than the present solution with a self-employed nanny. This, I hope, will make my commuting easier for Stefan to cope with.

I'm really excited about the workshop for science writers that I'm organizing with George. We now have an (almost) complete schedule, I've ordered food and drinks and sorted out the lab visit, and I'm very much looking forward to the meeting. Directly after this workshop, I'll attend another workshop in Munich, "Quantum Gravity in Perspective", where I'll be speaking about the phenomenology of quantum gravity. I have some more trips upcoming this summer, to Bielefeld and Aachen and, in fall, to Vienna to speak at a conference on "Emergent Quantum Mechanics."

I was invited to take part in this KITP workshop on black hole firewalls but I eventually decided not to go. Partly because I'm trying to keep my travels limited to not burden Stefan too much with the childcare. But primarily because I don't believe that anything insightful will come out of this debate. It seems to me there are more fruitful research topics to explore, and this discussion is a waste of time. I also never liked SoCal in late summer; too dry for my central-European genes.

Lara and Gloria, eating cookies at a visit to the zoo.

We'll be away for the next couple of days because Stefan's brother is getting married. This means a several-hours long road trip with two toddlers who don't want to sit still for a minute; we're all looking forward to it...

Book review: “Time Reborn” by Lee Smolin

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
By Lee Smolin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 23, 2013)

This is a difficult review for me to write because I disagree with pretty much everything in Lee’s new book “Time Reborn,” except possibly the page numbers. To begin with there is no “Crisis in Physics” as the subtitle suggests. But then I’ve learned not to blame authors for title and subtitles.

Oddly enough however, I enjoyed reading the book. Not despite, but because I had something to complain about on every page. It made me question my opinions, and though I came out holding on to them, I learned quite something on the way.

In “Time Reborn” Lee takes on the seemingly puzzling fact that mathematical truth is eternal and timeless, while the world that physicists are trying to describe with that mathematics isn’t. The role of time in contemporary physics is an interesting topic, and gives opportunity to explain our present understanding of space and time, from Newton over Special and General Relativity to modern Cosmology, Quantum Mechanics and all the way to existing approaches to Quantum Gravity.

Lee argues that our present procedures must fail when we attempt to apply them to describe the whole universe. They fail because we’re presently treating the passing of time as emergent, but as emergent in a fundamentally timeless universe. Only if we abandon the conviction, held by the vast majority of physicists, that this is the correct procedure, then can we understand the fundamental nature of reality – and with it quantum gravity of course. Lee further summarizes a few recent developments that treat time as real, though the picture he presents remains incoherent, some loosely connected, maybe promising, recent ideas that you can find on the arXiv and I don’t want to promote here.

More interesting for me is that Lee doesn’t stop at quantum gravity, which for most people on the planet arguably does not rank very high among the pressing problems. Thinking about nature as fundamentally timeless, Lee argues, is cause of very worldly problems that we can only overcome if we believe that we ourselves are able to create the future:

“We need to see everything in nature, including ourselves and our technologies, as time-bound and part of a larger, ever evolving system. A world without time is a world with a fixed set of possibilities that cannot be transcended. If, on the other hand, time is real and everything is subject to it, then there is no fixed set of possibilities and no obstacle to the invention of genuinely novel ideas and solutions to it.”

I’ll leave my objections to Lee’s arguments for some other time. For now, let me just say that I explained in this earlier post that a deterministic time evolution doesn’t relieve us from making decisions, and it doesn’t prevent “genuinely novel ideas” in any sensible definition of the phrase.

In summary: Lee’s book is very thought provoking and it takes the reader on a trip through the most fundamental questions about nature. The book is well written and nicely embedded in the long history of mankind’s wonderment about the passing of time and the circle of life. You will almost certainly enjoy this book if you want to know what contemporary physics has to say, and not to say, about the nature of time. You will almost certainly hate this book if you're a string theorist, but then you already knew that.

The Enantiomers’ Swimming Competition

Image Source.

The spatial arrangement of some large molecules can exist in two different versions which are mirror images of each other, yet their chemical composition is entirely identical. These mirror versions of molecules are said to have a different “chirality” and are called “enantiomers.” The image to the right shows the two chiralities of alanine, known as L-alanine and D-alanine.

Many chemical reactions depend not only on the atomic composition of molecules but also on their spatial arrangement, and thus enantiomers can have very different chemical behaviors. Since organisms are not chirally neutral, medical properties of drugs made from enantiomers depend on which chirality of the active ingredient is present. One enantiomer might have a beneficial effect, while the other one is harmful. This is the case for example for Ethambutol (one enantiomer treats tuberculosis, the other causes blindness), or Naproxen (one enantiomer treats arthritis pain, the other causes liver poisoning).

The chemical synthesis of molecules however typically produces molecules of both chiralities in approximately equal amounts, which creates the need to separate them. One way to do this is to use chemical reactions that are sensitive to the molecules’ chirality. Such a procedure has the disadvantage though that it is specific to one particular molecule and cannot be used for any other.

Now three physicists have shown, by experimental and numerical analysis, that there may be a universal way to separate enantiomers

Separation of chiral colloidal particles in a helical flow field
Maria Aristov, Ralf Eichhorn, and Clemens Bechinger
Soft Matter, 2013,9, 2525-2530 

It’s strikingly simple: chiral particles swim differently in a stream of water that has a swirl to it. How fast they travel with the stream depends on whether their chirality is the same or the opposite of the water swirl’s orientation. Wait far enough downstream, and the particles that arrive first will almost exclusively be the ones whose chirality matches that of the water swirl.

They have shown this as follows.

Molecules are typically of the size of some nanometers or so, and the swimming performance for molecules of different chirality is difficult to observe. Instead, the authors used micrometer-sized three-dimensional particles made of a type of polymer (called SU-8) by a process called photolithography. The particles created this way are the simplest example of configurations of different chirality. They labeled the right-handed particles with a blue fluorescent dye, and the left-handed particles with a green fluorescent dye. This allows taking images of them by a fluorescent microscope. Below you see a microscope image of the particles

Next you need a narrow channel through which water flows under some pressure. The swirl is created by gratings in the wall of the channel. The length of this channel is about a meter, but its height and width is only of the order 150 μm. Then you let bunches of the mixed chiral particles flow through the channel and photograph them on a handful of locations. From the amount of blue and green that you see in the image, you can tell how many of each type were present at a given time. Here’s what they see (click to enlarge)

This figure is an overlay of measurements at 5 different locations as a function of time (in seconds). The green shade is for molecules with the chirality that matches the water swirl orientation, the blue shade is for those with the opposite chirality. They start out, at x=32.5mm, in almost identical concentration. Then they begin to run apart. Look at the left tail of the x=942.5 mm measurement. The green distribution is almost 200 seconds ahead of the blue one.

If you aren’t impressed by this experiment, let me show you the numerical results. They modeled the particles as rigidly coupled spheres in a flow field with friction and torque, added some Gaussian white noise, and integrated the equations. Below is the result of the numerical computation for 1000 realizations (click to enlarge)

I am seriously amazed how well the numerical results agree with the experiment! I’d have expected hydrodynamics to be much messier.

The merit of the numerical analysis is that it provides us with understanding of why this separation is happening. Due to the interaction of the fluid with the channel walls, the flow is slower towards the walls than in the middle. The particles are trying to minimize their frictional losses with the fluid, and how to best achieve this depends on their chirality relative to the swirl of the fluid. The particles whose chirality is aligned with the swirl preferably move towards the middle where the flow is faster, while the particles of the opposite chirality move towards the channel walls where the flow is slower. This is what causes them to travel at different average velocities.

This leaves the question whether this study of particles of micrometer size can be scaled down to molecules of nanometer size. To address this question, the authors demonstrate with another numerical simulation that the efficiency of the separation (the amount of delay) depends on the product of the length of the channel and the velocity of the fluid, divided by the particle’s diffusion coefficient in the fluid. This allows one to estimate what is required for smaller particles. If this scaling holds, particles of about 120 nm size could be separated in a channel of about 3cm length and 3.2 μm diameter, at a pressure of about 10⁸ Pa, which is possible with presently existing technology.

Soft matter is not anywhere near by my area of research, so it is hard for me to tell whether there are effects at scales of some hundred nanometers that might become relevant and spoil this simple scaling, or whether more complicated molecule configurations alter the behavior in the fluid. But if not, this seems to me a tremendously useful result with important applications.

Listen to Spacetime

Quantum gravity researcher at work.

We normally think about geometry as distances between points. The shape of a surface is encoded in the distances between the points on in. If the set of points is discrete, then this description has a limited resolution.

But there’s a different way to think about geometry, which goes back about a century to Hermann Weyl. Instead of measuring distances between points, we could measure the way a geometric shape vibrates if we bang it. From the frequencies of the resulting tones, we could then extract information about the geometry. In maths speech we would ask for the spectrum of the Laplace-operator, which is why the approach is known as “spectral geometry”. Under which circumstances the spectrum contains the full information about the geometry is today still an active area of research. This central question of spectral geometry has been aptly captured in Mark Kac's question “Can one hear the shape of a drum?”

Achim Kempf from the University of Waterloo recently put forward a new way to think about spectral geometry, one that has a novel physical interpretation which makes it possibly relevant for quantum gravity

Quantum Gravity on a Quantum Computer?
arXiv:1302.3680

The basic idea, which is still in a very early phase, is the following.

The space-time that we live in isn’t just a classical geometric object. There are fields living on it that are quantized, and the quantization of the fluctuations of the geometry themselves are what physicists are trying to develop under the name of quantum gravity. It is a peculiar, but well established, property of the quantum vacuum that what happens at one point is not entirely independent from what happens at another point because the quantum vacuum is a spatially entangled state. In other words, the quantum vacuum has correlations.

The correlations of the quantum vacuum are encoded in the Greensfunction which is a function of pairs of points, and the correlations that this function measures are weaker the further away two points are. Thus, we expect the Greensfunction for all pairs in a set of points on space-time to carry information about the geometry.

Concretely, consider a space-time of finite volume (because infinities make everything much more complicated), and randomly sprinkle a finite number of points on it. Then measure the field's fluctuating amplitudes at these points, and measure them again and again to obtain an ensemble of data. From this set of amplitudes at any two of the points you then calculate their correlators. The size of the correlators is the quantum substitute for knowing the distance between the two chosen points.

Achim calls it “a quantum version of yard sticks.”

Now the Greensfunction is an operator and has eigenvalues. These eigenvalues, importantly, do not depend on the chosen set of points, though the number of eigenvalues that one obtains does. For N points, there are N eigenvalues. If one sprinkles fewer points, one loses the information of structures at short distances. But the eigenvalues that one has are properties of the space-time itself.

The Greensfunction however is the inverse of the Laplace-operator, so its eigenvalues are the inverses of the eigenvalues of the Laplace-operator. And here Achim’s quantum yard sticks connect to spectral geometry, though he arrived there from a completely different starting point. This way one rederives the conjecture of (one branch of) spectral geometry, namely that the specrum of a curved manifold encodes its shape.

That is neat, really neat. But it’s better than that.

There exist counter examples for the central conjecture of spectral geometry, where the shape reconstruction was attempted from the scalar Laplace-operator's spectrum alone but the attempt failed. Achim makes the observation that the correlations in quantum fluctuations can be calculated for different fields and argues that to reconstruct the geometry it is necessary to not only consider scalar fields, but also vector and symmetric covariant 2-tensor fields. (Much like one decomposes fluctuations of the metric into these different types.) Whether taking into account also the vector and tensor fields is relevant or not depends on the dimension of the space-time one is dealing with; it might not be necessary for lower-dimensional examples.

In his paper, Achim suggests that to study whether the reconstruction can be achieved one may use a perturbative approach in which one makes small changes to the geometry and then tries to recover these small changes in the change of correlators. Look how nicely the physicists’ approach interlocks with thorny mathematical problems.

What does this have to do with quantum gravity? It is a way to rewrite an old problem. Instead of trying to quantize space-time, one could discretize it by sprinkling the points and encode its properties in the eigenvalues of the Greensfunctions. And once one can describe the curvature of space-time by these eigenvalues, which are invariant properties of space-time, one is in a promising new starting position for quantizing space-time.

I’ve heard Achim giving talks about the topic a couple of times during the years, and he has developed this line of thought in a series of papers. I have no clue if his approach is going to lead anywhere. But I am quite impressed how he has pushed forward the subject and I am curious to see how this research progresses.

Excuse me, where is the mainstream?

More than once I went away from a discussion, confused about what exactly my conversation partners meant with “physics mainstream”. The “mainstream,” it seems, is typically employed as reference point for why some research projects get funded and others not. If it’s not “mainstream physics”, I gather, it’s difficult to get it funded. But can we come up with a good explanation for what is “mainstream”?

My first attempt to define the “mainstream” would be by the context it is most often used, the ease by which a research topic can be funded: the easier, the more mainstream. But on second thought this is not a helpful definition because it’s not based on properties of the research itself, which makes it circular. We could as well say a topic attracts funding easily because it’s mainstream, and so we are none the wiser. What is it that puts a research area into the main of the stream to begin with?

Reference to “mainstream science” is often made by pseudoscientists who are using the term in an attempt to downgrade scientific research and to appear original. (Ironically they then often boldly use and abuse vocabulary from the unoriginal mainstream. Google for quantum healing to see what I mean.) In that case the “mainstream” is just all that deserves to be called scientific research.

The way that pseudoscientists use the expression is not what I want to discuss today. It’s the way that researchers themselves speak about the “mainstream” that has left me wondering if it is possible to make this a meaningful, and useful, terminology. The way the expression is used by researchers it seems to have connotations of popularity, fashionableness, timeliness, and attracting large numbers of people. Below I have tried to make sense of each of these properties, and then I’ll offer the best definition that I could come up with. I invite you to submit your own!

Public attention

At any given time, some topics are popular. In physics there is presently direct detection of dark matter, quantum computing, topologic insulators and cold atom gases, for just to mention a few. But in many cases these popular topics constitute only a small fraction of the research that is actually happening. The multiverse, to name another example, is in reality a fringe area of gr-qc that just happens to capture public attention. The same is the case for the black hole firewall. In fact, in many cases what makes headlines in the press are singular or controversial findings. It’s not the type of research that funding agencies have on their agenda, which is why popularity is not a good defining property for the mainstream.

Fashionableness

High energy physics is a very fad-driven area of physics and quite often you can see a topic appearing and gathering momentum within a matter of months, just to then exponentially decay and hardly be mentioned some years later. Anybody remembers unparticles? The pentaquark? The so-called OPERA anomaly? These fads aren’t as extreme in other areas of physics (or so I am told) but they exist, if less pronounced.

Fashionableness indeed seems to some extent correlated with the ease of getting funding. But a trend must have been around for a while and have attracted a base of research findings to appear solid and worthy of funding, so that cannot be the whole story. This brings me to the next point.

Occupation number

The more people work on a topic, the easier it is to make a case that the topic is relevant and deserves being funded. Thus the number of researchers in an area seems a plausible measure for it being mainstream. Or does it?

The total number of people is in fact a highly misleading quantity. A topic may attract many researchers because it’s very rich and there is a lot that can be done. Another topic might just not support such a large number of researchers, but this says more about the nature of research in an area than about its relevance or its promise.

String theory is an example of a research area that is very rich and supports many independent studies, which I believe is reason it has become so dominant in quantum gravity – there’s just a lot that can be done. But does that make it mainstream research? Nanoscience is another example of a research area that attracts a lot of people, but does so for an entirely different reason, that being the potential of developing patents and applications. Throwing them both together doesn’t seem to make much sense. The total number of people does not seem a good defining property for the mainstream either.

The important factor for the ease of obtaining funding is not so much the total number of people, but the amount of tangible open problems that can be attacked. This then leads me to the next point.

Saturation level

A refinement of the occupation number is the amount to which a research area attracts people that study presently open questions on the topic. Mainstream physics, then, would be those areas that attract at least as many researchers as are necessary to push forward on all presently open questions. Since this is a property relative to the number of possible research projects, a small research area can be mainstream as much as a large one. It has some aspects of fashionableness, yet requires a more solid base already.

This definition makes sense to me because ease of funding should have something to do with the availability of research projects as well as their promise, which would be reflected in the willingness of researchers to spend time on these projects.

Except that this definition doesn’t seem to agree with reality because funding usually lags behind, leaving research areas overpopulated: It is easy to obtain funding for projects in areas whose promise is already on the decline because funding decisions are made based on reports by people who work in the very same area. So this definition, though appealing at first sight, just doesn’t seem to work.

Timeliness

Thus, in the end neither popularity, fads, the number of people, nor the availability of promising research topics seem to make for a good definition of the mainstream. Then let me try something entirely different, based on an analogy I used in the Nordita video.

Knowledge discovery is like the mapping of unknown territory. At any time, we have a map with a boundary beyond which we do not know what to expect. Applied research is building on the territory that we have mapped. Basic research is planning expeditions into the unknown to extend the map and with it the area that we can build on.

In either case, building on known territory and planning expeditions, researchers can take small steps and stay close to the known base. Or they can aim high and far and risk both failure and disconnect from colleagues.

This image offers the following definition for mainstream research.

Mainstream research is the research that aims just far enough to be novel and contribute to knowledge discovery, but not so far as to disconnect from what is already known. It’s new, but not too new. It’s familiar, but not too familiar. It’s baby steps. It builds on what is known without creating uncomfortable gaps.  It uses known methods. It connects. It doesn’t shock. It’s neither too ambitious nor too yesterday. It’s neither too conservative nor too tomorrow. It is what makes the community nod in appraisal.

Mainstream research is what surprises, but doesn’t surprise too much.

We previously discussed the relevance of familiarity in an entirely different context, that of appreciating musing. There too, you want it to be predictable, but not too predictable. You want it to have just the right amount of complexity.

I think that’s really the essence of what makes a field mainstream: how tight the connection is to existing knowledge and how well the research is embedded into what is already known. If a new field comes up, there will be a phase when there aren’t many connections to anything. But over the course of time, given all goes well, research on the topic will create a map of new territory that then can be built upon.

Proximate and Ultimate Causes for Publication

I am presently reading Steven Pinker’s “Blank Slate”. He introduces the terms “proximate cause” and “ultimate cause,” a distinction I find enlightening:

“The difference between the mechanisms that impel organisms to behave in real time and the mechanisms that shaped the design of the organism over evolutionary time is important enough to merit some jargon. A proximate cause of behavior is the mechanism that pushes behavior buttons in real time, such as the hunger and lust that impel people to eat and have sex. An ultimate cause is the adaptive rationale that led the proximate cause to evolve, such as the need for nutrition and reproduction that gave us the drives of hunger and lust.” ~Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, p 54.

It is the same distinction I have made in an entirely different context between “primary” and “secondary” goals, my context being the use of measures for scientific success. In Pinker’s terminology then, enhancing our understanding of nature is the “ultimate cause” of scientific research. Striving to excel according to some measure for scientific success – like the h-factor, or the impact factor of journals on one’s publication list – is a “proximate cause”.

The comparison to evolution illuminates the problem with introducing measures for scientific success. Humans do not, in practice, evaluate each of their action as to their contribution to the ultimate cause. They use instead readily available simplifications that previously proved to be correlated with the ultimate cause. Alas, over time the proximate cause might no longer lead toward the ultimate cause. Increasing the output of publications does no more contribute to our understanding of nature than does deep-fried butter on a stick contribute to health and chances of survival.

There is an interesting opinion piece, “Impacting our young” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (ht Jorge) that reflects on the impact that the use of measures for scientific success has on the behavior of researchers:

“Today, the impact factor is often used as a proxy for the prestige of the journal. This proxy is convenient for those wishing to assess young scientists across fields, because it does not require knowledge of the reputation of individual journals or specific expertise in all fields… [T]he impact factor has become a formal part of the evaluation process for job candidates and promotions in many countries, with both salutatory and pernicious consequences.

Not surprisingly, the journals with the highest impact factor (leaving aside the review journals) are those that place the highest premium on perceived novelty and significance. This can distort decisions on how to undertake a scientific project. Many, if not most, important scientific findings come from serendipitous discovery. New knowledge is new precisely because it was unanticipated. Consequently, it is hard to predict which projects are going to generate useful and informative data that will add to our body of knowledge and which will generate that homerun finding. Today, too many of our postdocs believe that getting a paper into a prestigious journal is more important to their career than doing the science itself.”

In other words, the proximate cause of trying to publish in a high impact journal erodes the ultimate cause of doing good science.

Another example for a proxy that distracts from recognizing good science is paying too much attention to research coming out of highly ranked universities, “highly ranked” according to some measure. This case was recently eloquently made in Nature by Keith Weaver in a piece titled “Scientists are Snobs” (sorry, subscription only):

“We all do it. Pressed for time at a meeting, you can only scan the presented abstracts and make snap judgments about what you are going to see. Ideally, these judgments would be based purely on what material is of most scientific interest to you. Instead, we often use other criteria, such as the name of the researchers presenting or their institution. I do it too, passing over abstracts that are more relevant to my work in favor of studies from star universities such as Stanford in California or Harvard in Massachusetts because I assume that these places produce the “best” science…

Such snobbery arises from a preconceived idea that many scientists have –that people end up at smaller institutions because their science has less impact or is of lower quality than that from larger places. But many scientists choose smaller institutions for quality-of-life reasons…”

He goes on to explain how his laboratory was the first to publish a scientific finding, but “recent papers… cited only a more recent study from a large US National Institutes of Health laboratory. Losing this and other worthy citations could ultimately affect my ability to get promoted and attain grants.”

In other words, using the reputation of institutions as a proxy for scientific quality does not benefit the ultimate goal of doing good science.

Now let us contrast these problems with what we can read in another recent Nature article “Beyond the Paper” by Jason Priem. He wipes away such concerns as follows:

“[A] criticism is that the very idea of quantifying scientific impact is misguided. This really will not do. We scientists routinely search out numerical data to explain everything from subatomic physics to the appreciation of Mozart; we cannot then insist that our cogitations are uniquely exempt. The ultimate judge of scientific quality is the scientific community; its judgements are expressed in actions and these actions may be measured. The only thing to do is to find good measures to replace the slow, clumsy and misleading ones we rely on today. The great migration of scholarship to the Web promises to help us to do this.”

This argument implicitly assumes that making use of a quantifiable measure for scientific impact does not affect the judgement of scientists. But we have all reason to believe it does because it replaces the ultimate cause with a proximate cause, the primary goal with a secondary goal. (Priem's article is otherwise very interesting and readable, I recommend you give it a closer look.)

I’m not against using measures for scientific success in principle. But I wish people would pay more attention to the backreaction that comes from doing the measurements and providing people with a time-saving simplified substitute for the ultimate goal of doing good science.

Black holes and the Planck length

According to Special Relativity, an object in motion relative to you appears shortened. The faster it is, the shorter it appears. This is effect known as Lorentz-contraction. According to General Relativity, an object that has a sufficiently high mass-density in a small volume collapses to a black hole. Does this mean that if a particle moves fast enough relative to you it turns into a black hole? No, it doesn't. But it's a confusion I've come across frequently. Take Craig Hogan's recent "paper", where he writes:

"[B]elow the Planck length... it is no longer consistent to ignore the quantum character of the matter that causes space-time to curve. Even a single quantum particle of shorter wave-length has more energy than a black hole of the same size, an impossibility in classical relativity..."

The wave-length of a particle depends on the motion you have relative to it. For every particle there is a reference frame in which the wave-length of the particle appears shorter than the Planck length. If it was true what Hogan writes, this would imply that large relative velocities are a problem with classical general relativity. Of course they are not, for the following reasons.

A black hole is characterized by the existence of an event horizon. The event horizon describes the causal connectivity of space-time. It's a global property. Describing an object from the perspective of somebody moving relative to this object is a coordinate transformation. A coordinate transformation changes the way the physics appears, but not the physics itself. It just makes things look different. You cannot create an event horizon by a change of coordinates. Ergo, you cannot create a black hole just by looking at a particle that is moving rapidly relative to you.

There are three points I believe contribute to this confusion:

First, one can take the Schwarzschild metric for a black hole and describe it from the perspective of an observer moving relative to it. This is known as the Aichelburg-Sexl metric. The Aichelburg-Sexl metric is commonly used to handle black hole formation in particle collisions. The argument about the Planck length being a minimal length makes use of black hole formation too. But note that in these cases there isn't one, but at least two particles. These particles have a center-of-mass energy. They create a curvature which depends on the distance between them. They either do or don't form an horizon. These are statements independent on the choice of coordinates. This case should not be confused with just looking at one particle.

Second is forgetting that black holes have no hair. Leaving aside angular momentum, they're spherically symmetric which implies there are preferred frames. Normally one uses a frame in which the black hole is in rest, which then leads to the normal nomenclature with the Schwarzschild radius and so on.  But you better don't apply an argument about concentrating energy inside a volume that you'd have in the static case to the metric in a different coordinate system.

Third is a general confusion about the Planck length being called a "length". That the Planck length has the dimension of a length does not mean that it behaves the same way as a length of some rod. Neither is it generally expected that something funny happens at distance scales close by the Planck length - as we already saw above, this statement doesn't even have an observer-independent meaning.

The Planck length appears in General Relativity as a coupling constant. It couples the curvature to the stress-energy tensor. Most naturally, one expects quantum gravitational effects to become strong, not at distances close by the Planck length, but at curvatures close to one over Planck length squared. (Or higher powers of the curvature close to the appropriately higher powers of the inverse Planck length respectively.) The curvature is an invariant. This statement is therefore observer-independent.

What happens in the two particle collisions is that the curvature becomes large, which is why we expect quantum gravitational effects in this case. It is also the case that in the commonly used coordinate systems these notions agree with each other. Eg, in the normal Schwarzschild coordinates the curvature becomes Planckian if the radius is of Planck length. This also coincides with the mass of the black hole being about the Planck mass. (No coincidence: there is no other scale that could play a role here.) Thus, Planck mass black holes can be expected to be quantum gravitational objects. The semi-classical approximation (that treats gravity classical) breaks down at these masses. This is when Hawkings calculation for the evaporation of black holes runs into trouble.

For completeness, I want to mention that Deformed Special Relativity is a modification of Special Relativity which is based on the assumption that the Planck length (or its inverse respectively) does transform like the the spatial component of a four-vector, contrary to what I said above. In this case one modifies Special Relativity in such a way that the inverse of the Planck length remains invariant. I've never found this assumption to be plausible for reasons I elaborated on here. But be that as it may, it's an hypothesis that leads to consequences and that can then be tested. Note however that this is a modification of Special Relativity and not the normal version.

First Issue of the New Nordita Newsletter!

The Nordita Newsletter has gotten a major technical upgrade and the first issue of the new version is now online at

www.nordita.org/news 

Most notably, you can now subscribe and unsubscribe yourself and we have rss feeds for the different Newsletter categories.

Subscribing to the Nordita Newsletter might be interesting to you if you are interested in the research we do, want to be informed about job opportunities and other application deadlines like program proposals or PhD visiting fellowships, want timely information on which upcoming conferences, schools or programs you can now register for, or if you work in physics or related field anywhere in the Nordic countries and are interested in our "Nordic News" about research in this part of the world.

A big benefit of the upgraded Newsletter is that individual news items can now easily be shared, which we're hoping will make this information more useful to pass on via social media.

The highlight of this issue is this little video that we produced about the institute:


Part of the shots were made during last year's programs on holography in October and the on Cosmology program in November so you might recognize a few faces here or there. Jump to 2:42 and see if you recognize the guy to the right. 3:16 onward, anybody looks familiar? 3:08 and 5:22, that was during the program I organizied.

And in another video you can meet Oksana, who you got to know earlier in my blogpost about Nematic Films. Here she explains her research in her own words:

Twitter Enthusiasm Dwindling

I've spent Easter in bed with a high fever. After a few days of this my brain is deep fried, my inbox a disaster, and I'm not in the shape to do anything besides occasionally scrolling through my news feeds. On the search for something to write that doesn't require much brain use, let me offer a self-observation.

I've pretty much stopped using Twitter. Years ago it seemed like a useful platform to aggregate and share information quickly and easily. But it's turned out to be pretty much useless when it comes to organizing information. My Twitter feed is inevitably dominated by a handful of people who don't seem to be doing anything else than tweeting, at a frequency 100 times higher than everybody else. I did create a few lists to circumvent the problem, but it's cumbersome and also doesn't really solve the main issue, that most tweets are just not of interest to me. They're replies to somebody's reply, or comments on somebody's comment. Ordered by time, not by topic. And needless to say, there's things that don't fit into 140 characters. This guy has made a similar self-observation of Twitter tiredness.

Which is why, these days I'm pretty much relying on facebook for my social networking. I've looked at G+, but not much seems to be going on there, or at least not among the people in my circles. And that what's going on seems to be an echo of what they're doing on facebook. My main news source is still RSS feeds, but facebook does a good job with the interesting and amusing bits that pass through the network. And it has the big benefit that commenting is easy, so it's turned out to be a comfortable platform to discuss those recent news, more so than Twitter or Blogger.

So how about you? Still using twitter?

Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us

Headache. Image source: Mupso.

In an opinion piece from December, Brian Cox and Robin Ince argued that opinion must be separated from science when it comes to policy decisions:

“[T]here must be a place where science stops and politics begins, and this border is an extremely complex and uncomfortable one. Science can’t tell us what to do… The choice of policy response itself is not a purely scientific question, however, because it necessarily has moral, geopolitical and economic components.”

I used to say the same, that politics unfortunately mixes up scientific questions with unscientific ones, and that informed decision making requires us to first distinguish these. But then I went down a windy road trying to understand where science ends and where decision making begins. This eventually lead to my paper on the measurement of happiness. It also lead me to the conviction that the “extremely complex and uncomfortable border” doesn’t exist. Cox and Ince come to the right conclusion, but for the wrong reasons.

What is and what isn’t in the realm of science, and what is the role of science is in our political system are questions I care about deeply. And so I could not avoid noticing Sean Carroll and Lubos Motl recently discussed whether morals can be reduced to science. They come down, in rare agreement, on the side of “no”. It’s a variant of the “boundary” Cox and Ince touched on, so let us see what they had to say.

Sean and Lubos start by elaborating on what is and what isn’t a scientific statement. A scientific statement, they say, is one that could be false and whose truth value could at least in principle be empirically evaluated. The problem is then that the statement that morals can’t be reduced to science itself isn’t scientific. It isn’t because a definition for “moral” is lacking. Then, all answers to this question are just opinion so why bother with it? Lubos alludes to this by saying that whenever one could answer the question one way or the other somebody might just change the definition of moral

“Imagine that you find some quantity M encoded in the equations of M(orality)-theory in the future and you will claim that it measures morality… The problem is that even with this nice and well-defined formula, one may always legitimately refuse such a measure of morality and choose a completely different one.”

This lack of proper definition is an example for what I complained about in my recent post, that many philosophical questions are a waste of time if one doesn’t know what one is talking about to begin with. So let’s not debate the meaning of words and instead identify the real issue behind it.

What people really want to know is where science leaves them the freedom to make decisions. That’s why they are looking for a border between scientific and unscientific questions, the former can be answered by science, the latter presumably can only be answered by humans. In other words, they’re asking for their space to exercise free will.

Free will is an illusion that people hold on to quite stubbornly and that they protect vehemently, so the debate about the unscientificness of morals shouldn’t come as a surprise. The thought that science might tell people what they should or shouldn’t do is a great threat to free will, one that gets addressed in a forward defense. But that’s a misunderstanding. Science has never and will never tell anybody what should or shouldn’t be done because “should” is another one of these ill-defined words. “Should” implicitly necessitates a goal or a purpose.

“Science can’t tell us what to do”, as Cox and Ince write - correctly. But science can in principle tell us what we do. To understand how let’s have a look at what people mean when they refer to “morals” or “values”.

Humans are self-aware complex systems that have to process a lot of information to make informed decisions. Human self-awareness however is limited. We are not normally aware how the detailed processes of our thoughts proceed. In fact recent research in neuroscience seems to show that what we think of as “I” is primarily an aggregating mechanism of various deeper level systems whose detailed procedures the “I” does not normally take note of.

Thus, “we” don’t consciously know the details of how we make decisions. Moreover, a central element of human decision making is ignorance and oversimplification. The one thing that the human brain is really good at is energy efficiency. Which is why the default is to avoid thinking if unnecessary.

What we do instead of monitoring all that information from the input that we receive is learning to construct models of behavior that make use of simplified patterns and categories. Then we explain our decisions and those of others in terms of these simplified patterns. You chose this job because independence is important to you. You think polygamy is immoral and should be punished. These are rough summaries of longwinded thought processes which made use of experience, evolutionary traits, and random noise. They classify decisions in values like “independence” or morals like “faithfulness.”

Morals and values are thus just categories that people use to classify and explain the way they make decisions. Over time, using these simplified models, the higher level “I” system becomes good at predicting what will happen, and interprets this as an exercise of “free will.”

That having been said, if you believe in reductionism, morals and values are just emergent patterns in highly complex systems. It is clearly impractical and anyway presently impossible, but in principle one could define morals in this way. Imagine you’d do this. Now you have a definition for moral. An individual one, one that depends on cultural history as well as genetic ancestry. Here you have it. These are your morals.

You might then go and say that’s not what you mean with moral. And that would be fine with me because I don’t want to argue about words, so just call these emerging patterns something else. The point is that they’re what people make use of when they make decisions, and recall that this is the question we really want to address: What decisions are humans free to make because they’re allegedly unscientific?

If you have such a definition for morals then would science then tell you what you should do? No. It would in the best case simply tell you what you do. The best case being one in which scientists would be able to construct a complete model for human behavior. Depending on your attitude you might call that the worst case.

But while in principle possible, it is questionable that such a model is feasible to construct at all. It seems plausible to me that the process of thought is irreducible in the sense that if you tried to predict it you’d have to create an almost perfect copy of the original system and watch it in real time, in which case you’d just duplicate rather than predict decisions.

In other words, while the “border” between scientific and unscientific questions does not exist in principle, it does exist in practice. And it’s located where our ability to model complex systems ends, an end that might shift somewhat in the future but quite possibly will never entirely recede. The best way we presently know to find out what decisions humans make is to ask them. The best way we know to find out what the global climate does is not to ask humans but a computer model.

What does this have to do with happiness? Well, striving to achieve happiness is a human universal, so much so that you might want to raise the maximization of well-being of conscious beings to a universal goal. Having defined such a goal it would fill in the blank of the “purpose” and the “should” that was previously missing, or at least it seems so.

The problem is however that happiness is a byeffect of natural selection, it’s a simplified response to behavior that has in the past been beneficial for reproduction. Elevating happiness to an end unto itself is a circular definition of purpose, it’s fundamentally meaningless. Which is why, in my paper I argued we should forget about trying to define happiness and its maximization as a proxy to understand human behavior. Instead we should look for a properly defined quantity that has predictive power to describe the evolution of our economic, politic, and social systems, and the suggestion I made was maximizing the number of possible decisions that we (think we can) make. Which might or might not be correct. A scientific question that’s waiting to be answered.

Summary: Ill-defined questions are unscientific, but uninterestingly so. Once a question is well-defined science is in principle able to answer it, but not necessarily in practice. A scientific definition for morals might exist, but quite plausibly we will never be able to construct it. And even if we could, it wouldn’t tell us what should be done, but simply what is done. Opinion begins where our ability to model complex systems ends. This border will inevitably shift over time and it’s this “shift” that makes it uncomfortable. And no, I don’t believe in free will.

Apps I’d like to see

I learned this morning that in the drawer of pessimists, I lie in the corner of existential pessimists:

“Pessimists are of two types, the catastrophists, that is to say the types who look up in the starry heavens and see (metaphorically) only asteroids in the sky racing towards us to wipe us out as the dinosaurs were wiped out; and existential pessimists, that is to say those who see dissatisfaction as the permanent condition of mankind because of his inherent makeup, his contradictory desires and emotions, dissatisfaction that is perfectly compatible however with a great deal of enjoyment of life.” [Source]

Which is why I totally appreciate the internet in all its glory, and yet I am doomed to always complain about something that isn’t quite as good as it should be. Why, for example, doesn’t gmail mark messages that I have already replied to, which a program as dumb, clumsy, and stupid as Windows Mail could do for me? And why does facebook roll out a search function that nobody needs and nobody wants, instead of allowing me to simply search my timeline for a keyword. (Don’t tell me to use CTRL+F on the activity log while scrolling, I tried that and it didn’t work.) If I could assign tags to links posted on fb it might actually become a useful archiving system, but usefulness is clearly not Zuckerberg’s vision. And why, oh why, did Google have to kill the Google reader?

Leaving aside my complaints about current affairs, here’s something I would like to see in the future:

Scientific Seminar Channel

I’d really like to see that all institutes with a good AV equipment lifestream their seminars, and that all their seminar announcements are collected in some common channel. I could browse there for areas of interest, mark upcoming talks I’d like to listen to, and get a timely reminder, no matter where on the planet the talk takes place. And needless to say, there would be a way to log in and virtually “raise hand” to ask a question. I’m visualizing that in the back of the room there’s a screen showing avatars or video streams of people logged in from remote places. The technology is clearly there, so where’s my seminar channel?

Shopping cart for seminar speakers

Something that I’ve wished for whenever I organize a conference is a simple way to find people who could give talks on a specific topic, ideally filtered by location. The way I do this presently is by browsing my memory, personal referral, or searching the arxiv for keywords and then looking up author names on Google, hoping they have a descriptive webpage. This isn’t only time-consuming, but also ineffective. I am thinking this could be useful also for reasons of science outreach. You could look up on such a website speakers on topics of current interest in your area and invite them for a public lecture or a coffee house talk. Ideally, people could also upload slides or videos of some representive talks so you could form an impression on what to expect from them. Maybe one would want to add a possibility to rate speakers.

Remote Robot

This isn’t so much something I’d like to see, but something I think we will see. The intelligent robot that will do your household while you’re at work is still science fiction, and it will remain so for quite a while. But once you can construct a robot with a similar mobility as a human, it would be handy to have one at home that you could move around while you’re physically absent. Put the laundry from the washing machine into the dryer. Close the window. Water the plants. It seems to me that the technology for this is almost there. The economy probably isn’t.

Gamified PhD Life

You might have heard of the recent trend to gamification, inventing games around peoples’ self-set goals that they can use to collect points and virtual rewards whenever they make good decisions. Healthy living for example. You gained two points by not adding salt. The life of a PhD student would make for a good gamification. You gain points for each talk you give, conversation with your supervisor that you survived, group meeting that you didn’t fall asleep in, and if you have amassed 10.000 points you’re ready for the final battle.

Two apps that really exist and that you might appreciate: The particles app for the iPad and GmailTex.

What app would make your life a little better?

The Philosophie of Gaps

“And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, “Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?”

~Steven Pinker in “The Blank Slate”

Philosophers and physicists, especially those working on fundamental questions of nature, have a difficult relationship. I know a lot of physicists who use the word philosophy as an insult, and even those who have sympathy for the quest of the philosopher tend to give them a hard time.

And understandably so. I’ve heard talks by philosophers about the “issue” of infinities in quantum field theory who had never heard of effective field theory. I’ve heard philosophers speaking about Einstein’s “hole argument” who didn’t know what a manifold is, and I’ve heard philosophers talking about laws of nature who didn’t know what a Hamiltonian evolution is.

But on the other hand, I’ve met remarkably sharp philosophers with the ability to strip away excess baggage that physicists like to decorate their theories with, and go straight to the heart of the problem. No wonder the relation between both sides can be uncomfortable.

This has left me wondering what is the role of philosophy in physics, or in modern science more general.

I will admit that I have a limited attention span for philosophical arguments. To begin with, philosophers (as apparently everybody in the humanities) have the annoying tendency to throw around names rather than proper definitions. The introduction of a cosmology paper in philosophy style would not contain the Friedmann equations, but instead two conflated paragraphs on the Friedmannian paradigm and its contextual appropriation of the cosmological principle, subsequently adapted as the concordance model.

Leaving aside the name-throwing and over-abundance of multi-syllable words, the issue of lacking definitions is a deep one for me. If somebody can’t write down a definition for expressions they are referring to, I lose interest. Because then their whole argument is in the end just empty words. I am interested in verbal arguments only to the point that they precede the construction of a mathematical model.

Having said that, here is where philosophy plays a role in physics: To develop these verbal arguments that have not yet been possible to cast in a more stringent form. This means though that when science progresses, when our knowledge expands, the room where philosophy is useful inevitably shrinks. The role of the observer in quantum mechanics, horizons in general relativity, or infinities in quantum field theory might once have been philosophical question. They no longer are. Presently popular topics for philosophers in physics seem to be the nature of time and the multiverse. Personally I think these are already topics that are close enough to existing theories that they can and should be cast into a mathematical language. Topics that are further off presently existing theories, and still more clearly playground for philosophers, are for example free will or the role of mathematics in science in general.

This tension between philosophers and scientists doesn’t only exist in physics. Another area where you find frequent displays of this confrontation is neuroscience. Consciousness used to be the field of the philosophers, but no longer so. Yet, philosophers are slow to get off the turf.

A recent display of this can be found in a NYT opinion piece that discusses “famous thought experiments” by philosophers. One of these famous arguments that philosophers discuss to make a living seems to be based on confusing the brain perceiving the color red as a result of photons of a certain wavelength hitting the retina, with the brain knowing about the process of perceiving the color. You might be forgiven for confusing knowledge about perception with the perception itself if you didn’t know anything about the brain, but in the last decade we have learned a lot about how the brain is wired and processes input. Or at least some of us have.

It seems clear to me that consciousness and self-awareness are areas that philosophers will have to clear in the soon future. That is correct: I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious about self-awareness, and nothing about it that we won’t be able to understand with some more research on complex systems and neural networks.

But what about science at large? Does this mean that we have a philosophy of the gaps much like we have a god of the gaps, filling in the spaces where currently knowledge is missing, but inevitably on the retreat?

For most of science this is a thorny question (previously discussed here), that being whether or not there is an end to the knowledge about nature that mankind can gather. It’s a question I don’t know how to answer.

But regardless of the answer to this question, for as long as there will be conscious beings thinking they will always be left with the question whether there are limits to what they can think of. And a more pragmatic, though related, question is how science works and how it progresses. These I believe are areas where philosophy will always play a role: to analyze the process of thought and inquiry, and its realization in the scientific endeavor. And as long as we have fundamental questions  about nature, it is good to keep philosophers around to catalyze the process of making soft science into hard science. Even if they are sometimes a little annoying.