Another pair of aphorisms with a scientific bent to liven up your day.

Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn’t. Sir Arthur Eddington

Eddington, famed as a champion of relativity, points out the flaw in the idea of a natural ‘law’. I do sometimes think one of the greatest mistakes in terms of public understanding of science is the term ‘law’ which implies something more fixed in concrete and certain than science can ever offer.

If no one had ever framed ‘laws’, we wouldn’t have all those ‘just a theory’ arguments, nor such dire misunderstanding of how science works.

Science is simply common sense at its best. Thomas Huxley

Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, made a comment that manages to be so right and so wrong simultaneously. When talking about evolution by natural selection, he is spot on. It’s hard to see, once you have the basic concept, how it can fail to be true.

When talking about (say) quantum physics, he is (as the saying has it) not even wrong. He’s so far away from right to have disappeared beyond the event horizon.

I suspect Huxley’s statement is a quantum superposition of wrong and right.

No, not a French egg. Thank you for the kind comments on my describing my feelings on letting another book out into the wild.

Just for amusement’s sake, here is what my current body of work looks like:

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The less numerically challenged among you (those who don’t count on their fingers) may wonder how this represents 31 books. Although what you see are all unique, they do include different editions and translations. I’ve never done a headcount of these before, but it amounts to 112 in all.

Thank goodness I’ve never bothered to read them.

I’ve just finished a book. Now, I know this doesn’t sound impressive – voracious readers can a finish a book a day, but I mean finished writing one.

Like many authors, I sometimes wonder why I do it. Practically every part of the process is painful. Okay, there’s a teensy bit of ‘wow, I did that’ when you get you hands on the finished product, or see it on a bookshop shelf, but a lot of stages along the way are more unpleasant than enjoyable. I’m yet to meet a writer who isn’t an excellent procrastinator, doing almost anything to avoid getting down to committing words to paper or disc. (Some even resort to writing blogs to avoid getting on with a book.)

The answer to ‘why I do it’, I suspect, is because I have to. I can’t not write. It’s just a part of my nature. (I wonder what the kind of people who are now driven to write did before they invented writing? I’m not sure it’s enough to say they were storytellers. It’s a different thing.)

So tomorrow morning, book number 32 (ulp) is on its way to the publisher, and I will be in that painful state that accompanies this part of the process. ‘Will they like it?’ I’ll be thinking. ‘Is it rubbish?’

Luckily I have a suitable distraction from the worries. Here goes number 33…

The first in an occasional series of postings contemplating some of the great witicisms and one liners on the subject of science (yes, there are some). Here are two for starters:

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes. W. H. Auden

Before any scientists feel rather special after reading this, I think it relates rather well to a subject oft discussed on Nature Network – bad science communication. This can leave the listener feeling inadequate, like old W. H. But if it does, it’s the communicator who is in the wrong, not the listener.

I watched a piece last night on our local TV news about a new design of inhaler that uses technology based on the way puffball spores are dispersed. In the one clip where the scientist was allowed to speak he managed to squeeze in so many jargon words that his bit to camera did not move the story on one bit, apart from to make the viewer feel ‘he’s clever, isn’t he?’

Surely scientists should have got the message by now. Using big technical words doesn’t impress anyone, any more than Alan Sugar’s Rolls Royce. They’re both symbols of inadequacy.

Second quote:

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford

Sorry, couldn’t resist this one given the high occurance of biology types on Nature Network. Next time you’re baffling me with your biology technology in-jokes, I shall mutter Rutherford’s remark with deep satisfaction.

While I wouldn’t necessarily normally turn to the pupils of Winchester College for words of wisdom, I was very impressed with the challenge one of them presented to Germaine Greer when she gave a talk there recently.

Apparently Ms Greer told the assembled boys gathered to hear her that she had ‘seldom, if ever, found herself standing in a room amid so much masculine beauty.’

At question time, one of the pupils commented that if she were not a 69-year-old woman addressing a group of boys but a 69-year-old man addressing a group of girls, such a statement would be considered highly inappropriate.

Alledgedly Ms Greer was lost for words. I think there could be some re-worded old aphorism here along the lines of ‘what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.’

See the full story

I’ve just received a chain email, with the usual request to send it onto everyone you know. I have a pathological dislike of chain letters/email and won’t forward them on principle. But I thought the issue it raised was worth discussing. I have included the whole email below (I’m assuming I won’t be sued a la J K Rowling), if you wish to see the nuances.

The originators are attempting to find a way to get oil companies to reduce petrol prices, and the cunning plan is to get everyone to boycott two of the biggest name chains. That way, they argue, prices will have to be brought down, but we can still get our petrol.

What do you think? Leaving aside the dodgy chainmail maths, is this a sensible tactic? Is its stated goal (to reduce petrol prices in the UK to order of 69p a litre) a reasonable one? With our green hats on, should we even be trying to reduce petrol prices? I’m genuinely unsure.

Another question – the originators suggest we buy petrol from supermarkets etc. – I presume supermarkets get their petrol from oil companies. So could buying at (say) Tesco put money in (say) Esso’s pocket anyway? I don’t know.

The text:
See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it

We are hitting 108.9p a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying £1.10 a ltr.

Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the ‘don’t buy petrol on a certain day campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t
continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT,whoever
thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here’s the idea:

For the rest of this year DON’T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It’s really simple to do!!

Now, don’t wimp out at this point… keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it
to
at least ten more (30×10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at
least ten more (300×10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the
message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached
over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and
pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it… ..

THREE HUNDRED MILLION
PEOPLE!!!

Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all.(and not buy at ESSO/BP) How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8days!!! Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes
sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE

It’s easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons Jet etc. i.e. boycott BP and Esso.

I observed a fascinating demonstration of how science doesn’t come naturally to most people yesterday.

There were five adults present along with a two-year-old. The two-year-old had a toy that shone a picture in yellow light onto the surface it was pointed at.

Someone suggested the child shone the picture on their (black) trouser leg. I pointed out it would show up better on their white sock. ‘Surely,’ came the reply, ‘yellow would stand out better against black than white?’

Three out of five adults were Cambridge graduates – but still the immediate consensus without thinking about it, apart from me, was that a yellow light would show up better projected on black than on white.

After a little thought, at least one came round to my line of thinking, but the rest put up a defence. ‘What colour is a movie screen?’ I asked. ‘That’s different,’ they said. ‘That’s in the dark.’

What this little encounter made me think is that we are inudated with art in kindergarten and primary school. Art tells us that yellow will show up better on black than white. But we get very little thinking about science – so don’t really question how limited this view is. Similarly we get told the primary colours are red yellow and blue, not red, blue and green.

I’m not suggesting we stop youngsters playing with paints, but I do think we should give them more science-based toys to play with so they discover more at the same age how light acts. Arguably also we should teach colour first from a light-based view and then consider pigment, rather than the other way round.

Whether or not you agree with that, the reaction of those in the room with the two-year-old was a salutory lesson. C. P. Snow would be turning in his grave.

All the evidence has been given in the J K Rowling court case but the trial potters on as the judge deliberates.

J K Rowling is upset because someone has put together an unoffical book about her work. She doesn’t want anyone else to make money out of what she’s done. Why is it always the multi-millionaires who get upset about someone else making money?

The fact is she seems not to know about the rich tradition of fan writing in science fiction and fantasy. Books like this won’t stop one single Harry Potter book – or official book about Harry Potter – being sold. If anything they increase sales of other references. If you’re a fan, you buy whatever comes out.

Worse still, her attitude seems to say that it’s not acceptable to write anything about other people’s work. That’s just crazy.

Excuse me if I’ve mentioned this before, but it really gets up my nose.

Apparently she thinks it will clear the way for ‘countless rip-offs of her books.’ Sorry, this is rubbish. A book about another book (or a TV show, or a scientific breakthrough) is not a rip-off it’s a tribute. She’ll be saying it’s not acceptable to write biographies next.

We are told in the hagiographies of Rowling of how the poor single mother scrawled her first work in a railway station buffet, hoping to earn a crust. But perish the thought anyone else should…

Shortly after leaving university, doing my first job, I was having a great time. I was working in Operational Research, a subject that on my Masters course had only used computers in passing. But in the company where I was applying it – British Airways – almost all the OR was done with computers.

Initially wary, I soon discovered I had an affinity for the things, and discovered the genuine creative joy of programming.

I can still remember the gut-wrenching horror I felt when seeing an advert for a new piece of software. My memory distantly labels this as ‘The Last One’. That could be memory playing tricks, but I have found this reference to it so I could be right.

Whatever it was called, the advert promised that it would mean companies could do away with programmers. No more programming. Just tell it what you wanted and it would write the program for you. And having just discovered I had something of a skill, plus a real passion for this programming thing, I was gutted.

Luckily for me, ‘The Last One’ was anything but what it says on the tin. With hindsight, this was predictable, but at the time it sounded a real possibility.

In science and technology, journalists find it particularly easy to fall for the lure of ‘The Last One’. How often have we heard something will mean ‘the end of…’ only to find days, months and years later things haven’t changed that much?

Is it that there are always fresh faced young things like I was back in 19 blah-di-blah, easily taken in by the latest promise? Or do we all secretly long for the magic wand that will take away something at a stroke? Perhaps that’s why Harry Potter is so popular…

I watched last night on the UK’s Channel 5 a Discovery Channel documentary on the opening of a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

It was interesting stuff, but what struck me particularly was the sheer fun and joy of the archeologist opening a jar that had been sealed for so many years. It was real and it was infectous.

Now, she had reason for this – it was the first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun’s. Yet what struck me is how different she was to the way scientists usually are on the TV.

Normally the media either gives us deadpan, emotionless scientists, or people with LOADS of enthusiasm that strays well into the artificial.

What was different here was that it was genuine emotion. She was chuckling and happy, throwing comments about with her fellow workers – of course there was enthusiasm, but it was much than the forced excitement of the typical science broadcaster.

I know it’s difficult when cameras come into the lab as we’ve seen elsewhere in Nature Network blogs (can someone provide me with a link, I’m feeling lazy) – but I do believe science needs much more of this in its public face. Real fun, and real disappointment. Human reactions. Maybe then we could break through the stereotypes.