Ask An Astronomer Anything At All About Astronomy (VI)

Resuming after holidays and suchlike. As always, the complete list is found on the Q&A page.

I really wish blogger had proper support for internal links. As it is I have to edit the html, which is simple enough but unnecessarily tedious. I'd probably have started this as a wiki if I'd known how incredibly simple wikis are to setup. Problem is that deep down I'm very shallow. I like seeing the number of likes and views a page gets, and wikia doesn't support that. So I'm keeping this as a blogger page for the foreseeable future.


1) How can photons live for billions of years ?
Easily.

2) Do photons get chilly ?
No.

3) Can you really rip a hole in the space-time continuum, cap'n ?
Possibly.

4) Do neutron stars and proton stars repel each other ?
No, because proton stars are not a thing.

5) Could the Sun spit out a mini-Sun ?
No, but asteroids might spit out mini asteroids.

6) Could we find new elements on other planets ?
Probably not, but we might find much weirder stuff than other elements.

7) Would a positively charged black hole and another positively charged black hole repel each other ?
Yeah, but charged black holes probably don't exist.

Night at the Museums

Prague's things-that-not-only-the-tourists-visit attractions are dirt cheap at the worst of times. Prague Zoo* costs a paltry 200 CZK (about £5). Large museums are similarly priced. But if even this meagre sum is too princely, every year they open their doors for free from 7 PM to 1 AM. Due to the sudden and unexpected** dropout of a mutual friend I ended up spending the evening with a total stranger. A surreal start to a surreal evening.

* I've been there three times but somehow forgotten to write about how awesome it is. Huh. I'll remedy that at some point.
** As in "seriously, how the hell did you manage that ?"

We began with the Technical Museum. My ever-helpful guidebook says :

If you are put off by the rather uninspiring name, then don't be, as a visit to Prague's Technical Museum is a rewarding experience. Without doubt, the most impressive displays are found in the large Transport Hall, crammed full of  vintage planes, trains and automobiles. Among the many exhibits here are examples of Czech engineering at its best - Skoda for example was one of the foremost engineering companies in Europe before WWII.

Oh, great. A big room full of old Skodas. Sounds like Top Gear's ultimate nightmare. But, having been told by several people that the Technical Museum is really very good, I wanted to see it. I've been spoiled by the Smithsonian, but still.

And actually, yes, it is good. We didn't have to queue much to go in but it got very busy inside, and hot. Having lost all my climate adaptations this became unpleasant so we only saw the main hall. But it was worth seeing. It's always helpful to remember that what is now the Czech Republic - viewed in Britain, if I'm totally and unpleasantly honest, as somewhere of basically no real importance to anyone - was once Bohemia, the industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bohemians were producing planes, trains and automobiles practically as soon as they were invented. They were experimenting with weird alternative ways of generating lift*. They were even involved in German shipbuilding.

* Actually the model on display had circular rotating wings, facing upwards. I have no idea how that was supposed to work.

They also have a Spitfire, since there were many Czech pilots who joined the RAF. I Mentally recalled the Dambusters theme tune just because I wanted to troll myself. As one does.

The recently installed monument to the Czechoslovak pilots is fairly badass and makes Pegasus look a bit wimpy.

Oh, and there were Jawas.

After the Technical Museum we tried to go to the Coffee Museum. I don't even like coffee but it was something my unexpected friend wanted to do. So did an awful lot of other people, because the queue was probably about 100m long (the queue for the Technical Museum was by now two or three times longer than that) and static. So we avoided that one and instead headed for the Museum of Historical Chamber Pots and Toilets, which was something that all three of us had voted for. And with good reason :

"The collection includes about 2,000 objects and is the largest of its kind in the world. The aim of the exhibition is to present the artistic and utilitarian level of the objects themselves and the field of human waste disposal, and present to the public aspects of this neglected part of human culture. Among the unique items in the collection are chamber pots made for Napoleon Bonaparte, the Titanic, the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, the Chinese Emperor Chi-Lung and many others."

Who could possibly resist the opportunity to see where Napoleon himself took a poop ? Surely, I thought, this would make my French housemate green with envy. Well apparently a lot of other people had similar ideas. This was by far the longest line for a toilet I've ever seen, especially for one you can't actually use. The line wasn't even moving.

NAPOLEON'S POOP BUCKET IS CALLING TO ME !!!!

I mean crap that's a long queue.

So we gave that one a miss too and went through a series of smaller exhibitions by various Faculties of Sciences departments. I do not remember which ones exactly, apart from the Botanic Gardens which were separate. The gardens are worth a look, but not at all designed for night viewing. In some places we had to use phone torches to see where we were going. So I only took the one photo inside.

Fortunately the other exhibitions, though mostly in Czech, were rather well done. Science outreach in the Czech Republic, from what I've seen, looks to be of high quality and people are enthusiastic about it*. There were still queues for the Faculty of Medicine at midnight.

* Cynical unexpected Czech associate says that they're enthusiastic because it's free.

Although we missed Napoleon's toilet, we did manage to see Napoleon's dinosaur. At least I assume that's what the reference "Bonaparte" is about, and no amount of proper citations will convince me otherwise.

Yes, it's got a saddle on its back. That's because Napoleon was very ahead of his time and planning to ride it into battle against the British at Waterloo (rather satisfyingly, this week sees the 200th anniversary of the battle). Cue the internet doing what it does best.

Found somewhere on Pintrest. Author unknown.

Upstairs in the same building there were app-based demos. A big Bond-esque display continuously displayed the number of people alive. Meanwhile volunteers designed islands for the citizens of the New Order to live on once the rest of the planet was rendered uninhabitable... by which I mean there was an app which could translate hand-drawn contours plots into 3D relief maps. My island looked like a sheep. There was also one that could age you 30 years in a few seconds. Fortunately I never got the email of the picture so readers are spared The Horror.

Then I had a drink of something with extra science. I think it was supposed to be vodka mixed with something else (the green things are lime globules). However, since the bottle of vodka was nearly empty, the nice young lady decided to replace the mixer with more vodka.

After that we ventured into the creepy displays of anatomy and biology. This next part may not be for the squeamish. There are things floating in jars here. Let's start with something gentle, like the artificially deformed skulls from the Dark Ages.

Or how about death masks ?

Amongst the racks of human and gorilla skeletons there was also a complete gibbon floating in a jar.

Few things say "mad scientist's laboratory" than a monkey floating in a jar.

In the next room there were Egyptian mummies (whole ones plus heads), racks of skulls, and human foetal skeletons. If the monkey was too much for you, I strongly urge you to stop reading at this point.

Like the Bone Church, there's not really any way of presenting this that isn't macabre. You wouldn't need to do anything to convert this into the set for a horror movie. Well, at least I wouldn't anyway. Which is probably why I'm not a biologist.

Consensus and Conspiracy

This post expands on my recent Google+ post (for which there is some text overlap at the start) and draws on my all-purpose philosophy of science article.

Recently American presidental hopeful Rick Santorum has used the "I'm not a scientist" defence to justify why he's allowed to disbelieve in human-caused global warming. Sounds bizarre ? That's because it is. Especially since Rick has expanded this to justify why the Pope shouldn't talk about it (because he's not a scientist), but apparently Rick should (because he's not a scientist).

"Fox News host Chris Wallace pushed Republican presidential candidate to expand on his criticism of Pope Francis for talking about climate change.... “if he’s not a scientist, and, in fact, he does have a degree in chemistry, neither are you …So, I guess the question would be, if he shouldn’t talk about it, should you?” "

It's not often I agree with Fox "News" about anything, but I've been saying this for a while. The "I'm not a scientist" defence is fine provided you don't then express an opinion about scientific matters - or at the very least also state that your opinion isn't as valid. You don't somehow magically become more qualified to have a scientific opinion by not being qualified to actually do science. That's not how it works.

Just to clarify, the Pope doesn't exactly have a degree in chemistry, but he does have something more than a high school qualification. Still, he isn't a scientist. But that's not really the point - the point is that Rick Santorum certainly isn't a scientist at all. He's a lawyer. Even weirder, apparently it's OK for him to go against the scientific consensus, whereas the marginally more qualified Pope is somehow making a mistake by agreeing with most scientists. Cue confused animal meme.

"To that Santorum essentially said that politicians have to talk about things they’re not experts in all the time so anything is fair game. ...  And Santorum pushed back that fighting action on climate change is about defending American jobs."

Yes, politicians have to talk about things they're not experts in. But you wouldn't formulate a financial strategy without consulting the bankers. Rick, you're either saying that a) you're more qualified than the experts but non-experts shouldn't talk about science, which is self-contradictory, or b) you understand the scientific consensus but just don't care about it. Which is like saying that if a team of engineers have told you a dam is about to burst and flood a town, you don't need to evacuate that town.

At this point, Rick, I see no way to avoid labelling you as an idiot.

"At one point, Wallace notes that “somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent of scientists” who have studied the issue agree. But Santorum is having none of it, calling it a “speculative science” and saying that he doesn’t believe anyone who is so sure of their facts. “Any time you hear a scientist say the science is settled, that’s political science, not real science, because no scientists in their right mind would say ever the science is settled.”

Yes Rick, I agree you shouldn't believe anyone who says an issue is settled. But perhaps you should believe everyone if they say an issue is settled. If a single engineer says the damn will burst, then perhaps you've got a problem or maybe you've just hired an incompetent engineer. If, however, 45 out of a team of 50 engineers say the dam will burst, treating that opinion as mere speculation is a recipe for disaster.

Note what we mean by "settled" here. Amid the continuous furore about whether there's been a slowdown in global warming in the last 15 years or not, or whether it's ocean temperatures or ground temperatures or whatever that we should be monitoring, or individual scandals and allegations of fraud, there's been one single shining constant statement that pretty much every climate scientist has agreed on for decades : it would be a good idea to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as quickly and as much as possible. The rest is just detail.

I'm going to try and avoid climate change specifically for much of the rest of the post, though there will be a few references. Really I'm more interested in the implication that it's OK to disagree with the scientific consensus.

Well, of course it is - up to a point. Scientific consensus does not claim to be the definitive truth, set in stone for all time. It does, however, claim to be the best, most-well informed conclusion possible. Decisions which ignore the consensus view aren't necessarily wrong, but they are based on inferior lines of reasoning (we'll get back to how science achieves and justifies such an exalted status shortly). Even the very word "consensus" implies that some scientists disagree, but when a non-expert chooses to act in a way that goes against the mainstream grain, they ought to have a very good reason for doing so.

The problem is that in practise they usually don't. The two main alternatives to following the consensus are to claim that either scientists are, against all evidence to the contrary, stupid, unqualified and ignorant, or that there's a conspiracy.

1) Scientists don't understand science.

This is what the first argument boils down to. It's essentially saying that scientists understand things just enough to come up with a clever theory, but then somehow they decide to abandon all the logical thought that got them there and jump off the cliff of sanity and be eaten by the Sharks of Madness. Or that every single one of them has somehow just plum forgot about some "obvious" piece of the puzzle that some dude on the internet has been smart enough to uncover. Essentially, the argument goes, scientists don't understand their own theories. It's a mind-wrenchingly silly idea that's somehow very popular with certain Republican politicians.

Basically, this is saying that the people who discovered electricity, created particle accelerators and the internet, discovered how to cure diseases and pretty much made the modern world have no idea how the thing works. Apparently it was all just blind luck with no understanding of theory at all.

Creationism provides a superabundance of such absurdities. Apparently, scientists are clever enough to measure radioactive decay and cunning enough to use atomic theory to flatten cities, but aren't clever enough to realise that it means the Earth is only 6,000 years old. They can design instruments capable of measuring distant galaxies, but don't realise that those galaxies are either very much closer than they think and/or that the speed of light has altered just so as to make the Universe still be only 6,000 years old. Or they think that scientists are just clever enough to understand that time is relative, but don't realise that this too means the Universe is 6,000 years old.

Sadly this line of thinking is by no means limited to Creationists. Most people with radically different alternative ideas espouse much the same thing - which is why I came up with the idea of Wegener's Law*. Anyone comparing their idea to Wegener's (initially ridiculed) idea of continental drift ought to instantly loose the argument. Much like Godwin's Law (anyone who mentions the Nazis instantly loses the argument), you can prove anything you like with extreme examples. Most of the time it's a false comparison.

* Well, guideline, like any debating tactic. But "Wegener's Guideline" lacks pazazz. 

2) It's a cover up !

A conspiracy can take many forms with many different proposed motivations. All of them have one thing in common : they allow you to claim anything. If you think people are simply lying about something, you can make up whatever you like in its place. Which, at a stroke, makes rational debate impossible.

The most blunt form of this is that They don't want you to know The Truth. That form of un-thinking is usually safely confined to the internet where it belongs. However, a much more subtle variety of conspiracy theory has very successfully embedded itself into mainstream thinking : scientists aren't being truthful about climate change because they don't want to expose how badly they've got things wrong, or because their funding depends on following the herd (a false consensus), or even that there is no consensus at all and that's the conspiracy.

The first option is to totally misunderstand the scientific method. Disproving ideas is the heart and soul of discovery. Yes, people who've invested a lot of time and effort into one idea aren't going to be particularly keen on overturning their own work - that's human nature. But by the same token, there most certainly will be people interested in overturning their competitor's work. That's part of the reason peer review (see link for a personal experience) is so important : scientists like to disagree with each other. Something which can stand up to your rival trying to shoot it down is a lot more likely to be correct. Peer review isn't perfectly objective, it's just a damn sight more objective than not doing it at all.

The second option - trying to follow the herd for funding - is by far the most dangerous, because it's the only one that comes close to plausibility. There is a real danger of establishing a false consensus. That's why it's so important that scientists pursue alternative ideas and that there is always some level of funding for this. Indeed, if the alternatives weren't examined, it wouldn't be science at all. But consensus doesn't just magically happen - it happens because lots of people disagreed with each other, considered lots of ideas, had a big row and eventually, largely independently, reached the same conclusion. You don't reach a consensus without at least considering the alternatives first.

In the specific case of climate change there's another factor - absolutely no-one in their right mind would want humans to be the cause of global warming. So the claim here is that thousands of scientists who all want to disprove each other and have no interest in seeing humans destroy the planet must be trying to fool everyone into this awful conclusion to justify their own funding. Yeah, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, oil companies. Now of scientists and oil companies, who do you suppose has the most money at stake ?

The third option - that the existence of a consensus is a lie - is similarly ridiculous. If there wasn't a consensus, there'd be an awful lot of angry scientists who'd be shouting quite loudly about it if people were falsely proclaiming that there was. There aren't, so there is. That still doesn't mean the consensus is necessarily correct, but denying that there is one is an act of desperation.


How a consensus is reached

Slowly and painfully. It is not a democratic process where everyone votes for what they think is most likely and decide to run with it. Unlike electing a government, there is (ideally) no constraint that everyone has to play ball and Obey The Consensus whether they want to or not. Nor does it involve everyone having a big discussion to try and sort things out. A consensus, when done properly, is what most people honestly think is the most likely explanation. It isn't The Truth, it never claims to be the final answer, but it still claims to be the best source of information on which to make a decision - precisely because it isn't reached in a democratic way.

A consensus is reached by everyone brutally attacking everyone else's ideas until all the other ideas have slunk away to lick their wounds and soothe their battered, aching limbs. A consensus isn't the winner of some Athenian democratic election. It's more like a Roman gladiator who's faced down vicious tigers and hordes of screaming barbarians and had his limbs hacked and face mutilated but keeps going.

Image source.

Now in this analogy it's very rare indeed that the victorious gladiator actually kills all of his opponents. He may have cut their legs off or knocked them unconscious but generally they're all still very much alive. And it's just about possible that someone is going to surgically replace the missing limbs of one of the apparently broken theories with a machine gun, and said theory will rise again to blast our unfortunate gladiator into smithereens. Is this likely ? No, you twerp. They didn't have machine guns in Roman times. If you were to bet on a fight between the gladiator and one of his wounded opponents, you'd be wise to choose the gladiator.

A consensus arises not because all alternatives have been disproved (though a few might be) but because they have been shown to be much less likely than the main idea. People often keep researching unlikely ideas long after most people have discredited them - and that's a good thing. We have to have disagreements to make progress, by definition. And, crucially, experts in a field have to be allowed to investigate alternatives - but just because they are doesn't mean that there isn't a consensus.

An expert is like someone sitting in the front row of an arena. They're the ones prepared to fork out the most cash (in realty : invest years of their lives studying to understand something as fully as possible) to get the best seats and look at the action in all its gory detail. They might - on occasion - spot a wounded competitor reaching for a dagger. The people further away are progressively less and less interested and/or able to understand what's going on. And there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe those people aren't much interested in gladiatorial combat [science] but are huge fans of mock naval battles [errr... architecture, sure, why not].

The point is that just because some members of the audience are at the back when one particular show is on in the arena, doesn't mean they couldn't be in the front when something different is happening. And vice-vera. When science is under scrutiny, it's the scientists opinions that matter most. When it's social work, you tell the scientists to shove off and you listen to the social workers instead. Being expert in one area doesn't make your opinion on other subjects more important than anyone else's... but it does mean that your opinion counts for more in your specialist area.

Thus, the people at the back can hardly see anything of what's going on in the arena itself. If they're sensible, they'll bet on the gladiator if he's ordered to keep fighting. Sometimes they might hear people in the front start cheering for someone else. At that point they should expect to find that perhaps one of the competitors isn't so wounded after all, or perhaps someone new is entering the arena : the consensus is changing. But unless that happens, it would be foolish to bet on anything other than the consensus. The people at the front, by and large, are cheering for the least-wounded gladiator.

This even holds if you include the effect of the crowd's support on the contestants. Experts might shout out useful advice ("he's behind you !") and so give a theory a way to stave off death for another minute. Non-experts cheering may at least encourage the gladiator to keep going a little longer. But, if a bigger, stronger, faster gladiator enters the arena, then no amount of cheering will save the once-proud hero. He's doomed. The better theory always wins eventually, though it can take considerable time.

Occasionally, audience members (even experts) can be so blinded by the heroic efforts of one fighter that they'll persist in cheering for him when he is, in fact, quite dead. They live in the optimistic hope that he's merely unconscious, but no amount of cheering will revive him. Eventually, even these devoted fans have to admit defeat - though usually their numbers first dwindle to such small levels that the rest of the audience has forgotten about them by that point.

Finally, no human gladiator can last forever. It's interesting to consider whether the trend thus far of inventing better and better theories - bringing on bigger, better gladiators - will last forever, or whether one day we'll reach a Final Gladiator. Some sort of robotic uber-mech with a nuclear power source, able to sweep away whole ranks of human gladiators with lasers for eyes, perhaps. Or maybe our theories will just keep getting better and better, never reaching ultimate truth.

MEW MEW MEW !

Conclusion

If you aren't an expert in something, but need to make a decision on a specialist area, by far and away your best bet is to go with the consensus. Consult many experts. If they're all saying something very similar, then the chances are that you're on sound footing. It's not certain - there are almost never any guarantees - but this is the best source of information you've got. Anything else is using an inferior source of knowledge.

Experts aren't omniscient. The price of being the best source of information is that that's limited to a very narrow field of expertise, and specialist knowledge takes a long time to acquire. Those experts who think they are somehow an elite because they happen to know a lot about a very small area of research ought to go back to the Apology* :

"Last of all I turned to the skilled craftsmen. I knew quite well that I had practically no technical qualifications myself, and I was sure that I should find them full of impressive knowledge. In this I was not disappointed. They understood things which I did not, and to that extent they were wiser than I was. But, gentlemen, these professional experts seemed to share the same failing which I had noticed in the poets. I mean that on the strength of their technical proficiency they claimed a perfect understanding of every other subject, however important, and I felt that this error more than outweighed their positive wisdom. So I made myself spokesman for the oracle, and asked myself whether I would rather be as I was - neither wise with their wisdom nor stupid with their stupidity - or possess both qualities as they did. I replied through myself to the oracle that it was best for me to be as I was."

* Seriously, why isn't this compulsive reading in all primary schools ?

So, to finish, let's return to climate change. I am not a climate scientist, so my opinion is at best equivalent to someone cheering from the second tier of an arena. Or in this case booing since I would desperately like the idea that humans are causing global warming to be false. Yet that theory still stands. It's been jeered at by scientists and is still being jeered at by the public, but it still stands. Could it be, therefore, that all of these scientists who'd prefer it to be false, who take a lot of stick from the public for defending a very unpleasant theory, who are continuously defending it against rich oil companies and politicians... could it just possibly be that they're doing this because they really believe the theory is correct ?

That doesn't tell us that it is correct. But the alternatives, as we've seen, are that scientists have a very peculiar and wholly implausible kind of incompetence, or are lying. Neither of these looks remotely likely. Attempts to confuse the issue by drawing attention to every petty disagreement look, to me, like attempts to discredit something people would rather was not true because they'd rather it was not true, not because of what the facts really say. That's why for me, although I'm not a climate scientist, I side with the consenus. I hope I'm wrong... but in the worst case :

Perverts Of The Carribean ?

My policy on censorship has always been one of extreme caution. Controlling access to knowledge is to control how people think, and it's tough to imagine any more dangerous form of the old maxim "knowledge is power". But I've never actually been censored myself until now.

So you can imagine my surprise when, on a holiday to the UK, my efforts to access my recent post about the size of different stars resulted in the following message :

That's right, this now-mostly-science blog was blocked because it's (apparently) pornographic and can therefore only be accessed after 9pm by anyone who gets internet access from Sky.

For the benefit of international readers, this isn't something my parents have voluntarily installed to protect certain younger relatives. It's something the ISPs have been forced to install by the previous Conservative-Liberal coalition government. In this case, the clash of the Tory conflict over traditional family values vs personal liberty was resolved in favour of the former.

Now, this blog covers a wide range of topics and occasionally, it's true, I do mention pornography and even prostitution. I have no more interest in making this a child-friendly science blog than I Fucking Love Science does. Why should I ? That's not how I want to express myself*. And sometimes** I use pictures of attractive actresses*** not wearing all that many clothes to illustrate a quite unrelated point, because I quite like attractive actresses not wearing all that many clothes. But cleavage does not equal pornography. I checked, and articles about porn (e.g. Wikipedia) aren't blocked, nor are pictures of cleavage. It's only full-frontal nudity and the like that's blocked.

* Conversely, while I don't have any moral objections to it, I have no more wish to display pornography on my blog than I do pictures of Tolstoy or chicken farming or David Beckham's hair.
** Often.
*** Occasionally men as well for balance or if it's funny, but since I'm not that way inclined these tend to be much fewer in number.

Sky say websites selected to be blocked are chosen by a third party. Whether anyone is actually checking the content (highly unlikely) or this is done by an algorithm, I don't know for certain. But I'd like to think that no-one reading this blog could ever label it as equivalent to watching actual porn, except for a few weirdos who literally fucking love science. Best not to go there.

In any case, this turned out to be a simple mistake. An email to Sky (never in my life did I think I'd ever have to use the phrase, "it is not pornography, it's an astronomy blog" but there we are) solved the problem without any dispute. So, no harm done ?

Well, I also discovered that the Hola extension simply doesn't work before 9pm (the watershed after which Sky allows you to watch porn again). That got me a little worried and I soon found that other websites are blocked on the grounds of being file sharing sites.

I'd heard about these filters while in Prague, but I never realised just quite how scary they actually are.

First, pornography. OK, parents may not want their children to view it. I get that. But net filters have existed almost as long as the internet itself, and it should be the parent's job to install parental controls if they want them. That's called, "being a parent". Of course, some adults don't want to see porn either and I get that too, but again there's nothing stopping them from installing a filter for their own benefit. Anything other than this is enforcing the moral values of the government upon people who are old enough to make their own damn choices, thank you so very much.

The problem with this being explicitly a porn filter (if you'll pardon the pun) is that no-one will protest too much about it. Pornography has an obvious stigma (link is worth reading) attached to it, and many people don't like it. But many (probably almost all) of my generation, the first who've actually grown up with the internet, simply don't agree. That's another topic entirely, which fortunately I've already examined in detail.

To be fair, some ISPs have adopted a different way of introducing the filter. Some have made it an opt-in scheme : if you want the filter, you have to tell them (or you may have to choose whether you want it or not) or you won't get it. Sky, however, have gone for an opt-out approach : if you do want porn, you have to tell them. Which is very much an attempt to make people feel guilty about something a lot of people think they shouldn't have any guilt about.

A very good friend of mine, who is even more of a militant feminist than I am, suggested the correct response would be to troll the ISPs. Phone them up, she said, and really make sure the filter's off. "Well can I get anal ? What about bondage ?"

I'd better stop there in case more ISPs decide to block me.


Anyway, as I said, no-one will protest too much about porn, especially as it's not really a block, just a restriction you can lift. Which is fairly insidious, but the real danger comes in that the filter is also being used to prevent access to file-sharing websites. Or, to put it another way, access to information is now being controlled by corporations in order to increase profits.

That's frickin' terrifying.

And I do mean information, not just the latest entertaining developments in Westeros. I mean that such filters inherently restrict access to things like Pandora's Promise or, far more profoundly, India's Daughter. Sure, it can be tricky to judge where entertainment ends and documentaries begin, and mistakes (like with this blog) are bound to happen in any system of censorship. Does that mean we shouldn't try to censor anything at all, even the most violent ultra-extremist material ?

I don't think so. Most people would accept that there have to be some restrictions on free speech - you can't allow people to discriminate on the basis of race when hiring an employee, for example. I don't think it's unreasonable to try and say, "this is permitted, but this is not" - though I am extremely worried by the government's plans to censor the TV networks. A combination of blocking pornography, file sharing websites and now a proposal to censor TV programs begins to looks very much indeed like a slippery slope.

Exactly like this, only with a huge hungry shark in the water.

Anyway, the issue of what should be censored and what should not is a huge topic and I won't try to tackle that here. What I will say is that while blocking file sharing may ostensibly be about reducing piracy, if that's really the case then there's a far better way : remove location blocking. The whole point of the INTernet is that it's INTernational. The clue is in the name. Stop it from being international and you've just made it a regular network again, which is far less powerful. The "world wide web" is just nowhere near as useful.

To stop movie piracy in its tracks without restricting free speech, allow people to pay for services regardless of where they're based. Stop trying to force a completely artificial restriction on the liberating ability to freely and instantaneously copy and distribute information. It's not difficult. Look, film-makers, I know your business model was sensible in the 1930's when you had to take a steamship across the mighty Atlantic ocean to transmit movies to other counties, but that's no longer the case. It hasn't been the case for twenty years. Time to deal with reality, not suppress it.

And people will pay for services if they can, make no mistake. Why ? Because the quality and reliability of a service like Netflix is much, much higher than most illegal streaming websites (which are often advert and malware-ridden). People will also pay more for downloads than streaming, because a download gives you permanent ownership of a file that streaming does not. And yes, they'll pay for downloads rather than freely but illegally accessing them because when it comes to something like Game of Thrones my response is :

I understand that making high quality drama is a skill like any other and I totally get that it can't be done without a great deal of money. Now perhaps certain actors earn rather more money than I think is sensible, but if I like the show then I really don't care. If I have to give them a modest amount of money to ensure it continues, fine by me.

I want to give studios money for things I like. What I don't want is to pay for a subscription to a whole channel which has relatively few shows that I actually watch. I want an alternative option to pay on a per-show basis, or subscribe to a large site that Netflix where there's always something I can watch. Without any adverts. And I don't want to suffer unnecessary discrimination based on where I currently happen to be.

That's not so difficult, is it ?

Oh The Humanities !

The internet is awash with excellent articles on the importance of critical thinking, of how we judge evidence, confirmation bias, and all that jazz. In an age where so much depends on science, the importance of skeptical analysis has never been greater. But very recently I realised something that probably should have been blindingly obvious, but somehow wasn't.

I didn't learn critical thinking in University physics courses. I learned it in high school English.

That's perhaps quite a bold statement, so let me break it down a bit.

(First a note for international readers. In British parlance, "high school" generally means up to age 16, the limit of compulsory education (GCSEs). It can also overlap with "college", which is a term not often used but usually refers to education between the ages of 16 and 18 (A levels). Degree courses are almost exclusively taken at universities. Since college is such a rarely used term, I shall be referring to high school, A levels, and university.)


Science Education

I'd like to point out that I was the kid who accidentally lit the gas tap instead of the Bunsen burner. No, not the one who did it deliberately and claimed it was an accident. The one who actually did it accidentally and got the shock of his life.

Of course, I did learn about the scientific method in pretty much all science education, from primary school upwards. You can't have a science class that doesn't include the idea of formulating a hypothesis and testing it. But critical thinking was largely limited to being an implicit part of science education. In English, and to a lessor extent history, it's very much more explicit.

I want to make it quite clear that I don't want to belittle high school science education, which was totally solid. It certainly never forgot to emphasise the importance of having evidence to reach a conclusion or the importance of control experiments. But what it was lacking was the idea of critical, skeptical inquiry. This is perfectly sensible when you're dealing with things like equations of constant acceleration. Questioning them doesn't make any sense - it's far more important, and at that stage difficult, to understand the mathematics and work out how to use them correctly.

Things got a bit more unsteady during A levels, when you go from the idea of the atom as a miniature solar system to a much weirder notion of probability clouds of electrons which don't really exist. At that point you start to become aware that much of what you've been taught in science is a lie to children, a simplified version of the truth that's much more pedagogical* than it is literal. You can't teach 10 year olds quantum theory, you have to build up to it.

* No, I don't know how to pronounce it either.

Going into university, however, there's not all that much more development in terms of teaching skeptical inquiry. I'm not saying there was none - certainly the concept of a paradigm was explained, and there was a lot of explaining the evidence for contemporary ideas. Some courses did, very explicitly, get us to consider very alternative, non-mainstream ideas like panspermia, the Orion drive, and modified gravity. Most critically of all, we learned about statistics and selection effects. But generally, the focus remained on understanding equations and ideas.

Is that a good thing ? Generally, yes, though it really depends what you want to do with your degree afterwards.

At a PhD level things are different. You're compelled to think critically - though no-one actually teaches you - because you've got to test your own results to destruction. If you don't, if your analysis has a flaw then someone else is sure to spot it. And, hopefully, by experiencing the problems that occur and the imperfect solutions that sometimes have to be used, you come away with a much greater level of skepticism for everyone else's results too. Which does not mean you think everyone else is utterly gormless, only that you have a much better understanding of which bits of their results to trust and which bits you might want to question them about a bit more.

Oh, the Humanities !

Education in English (particularly literature), history, and PSE is an altogether different kettle of fish. I want to make it quite clear that I do want to belittle high school PSE and history education, which was, quite simply, utterly shite. To give an example : the existence of the British Empire was not mentioned. There's only one valid reaction to that.

I could wax lyrical on the horrors of British high school history education c1995-1999, but I'm not going to. Anyway while the attempt to actually teach us history - the story of how we came to be - was an omnishambles, it did do one thing very well. It taught us about the nature of proof and (primary and secondary) evidence. It taught us how to interpret evidence and how to critically assess it, how to form a conclusion based on data and (more implicitly) to be aware of the limits of the evidence.

Unfortunately it did so in the most ridiculous way possible, by randomly giving us assignments that had absolutely no connection whatsoever with what we'd previously learning about (e.g., the murder of Thomas Becket after several weeks of studying native American culture).

But, for all its many, many faults, history education did quite explicitly teach the importance of assessing evidence. PSE education was also dreadful, but in that case simply because the standard of teaching was abysmal. What they were trying to teach - morality, why we think some things are moral and some are not - was commendable, but PSE was treated very much as a "meh, who cares" subject by those in charge. Which was a shame, because when it was done well it taught us to examine our own beliefs and biases far more than any other course.

Fortunately, English lessons had none of the faults of history or PSE. We didn't spend a lot of time learning about nouns and pronouns and verbs and all that gubbins. Instead, we analysed things. We sought to understand what in the world Shakespeare was on about and why A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been oh-so-achingly-funny back in the day. We read contemporary poetry and tried to interpret it. Most pertinently of all, we analysed adverts and tried to assess how they were attempting to manipulate us. We were marked not so much on what our conclusion was, but in how well we were able to explain it and what evidence we had to support it.

English education covered something that science (at that level) simply could not : understanding what articles really mean, and what their intended effect is. When hearing someone expound the latest scientific theory, understanding if and how you're being manipulated is every bit as critical as understanding what the evidence itself suggests. That's something science classes never cover.

The humanities classes, then, form an essential part of teaching the scientific method - when they're done correctly. Being able to analyse a poem isn't the point - the point is you're taught to analyse meaning and assess implication. Or, in its simplest form, not to take things at face value.


Bad Astronomy

Or rather, bad science journalism. Given how good English lessons were at teaching critical thinking, the obvious question is : why are there so many bad science articles ? How come all these journalists seem to do such a dreadful job at explaining things to the public ?

One particular example really stands out. Without going into details, the acceleration of the Universe is thought to be increasing. An alternative idea has it that we're actually in a large void, which can mimic the effect of this acceleration. A few years ago a press release claimed that the void idea had been disproved*. On the very same day, another website used that same press release to pronounce that we do live in a void so there's no acceleration !

*I don't know if this has stood the test of time or not but it's not relevant here.

A more recent example : one press release claiming that dark matter is even darker than we thought, followed just two weeks later by one claiming that dark matter is not so dark after all. Ho hum. Neither of these is accurate. Nor is the one about a tidal wave in space, which is taking enormous liberties with what is already a highly ambiguous phrase.

If you read press releases quite often you're sure to recognize the following stock phrases :
- "Scientists baffled"
- "Mystery solved"
- "... than was previously thought".
"Now, researchers think they have the answer"
The last two are merely uninspiring. But from the first two, according to the media, scientists are either perpetually baffled or continually solving ever more complicated mysteries.

There are times when these phrases are appropriate. In astronomy the last really startling - baffling, if you will - discovery was that the Universe appears to be expanding faster and faster. That was seventeen years ago. Of course, less outrageous unexplained phenomena do come up all the time in science - because that's what it's there for. Any scientist who is in a continuous state of genuine bafflement is probably in the wrong profession, because not knowing the answer is the whole point of doing the job. You've got to be curious, but if you're going to just throw up your hands in bewilderment and say, "I just can't even..." then science isn't for you. Consider becoming an accountant instead, or take up golf.

Although why you'd want to do that is pretty baffling.

OK, "boffins baffled" is probably no more than a newspaper stock-phrase, much as politicians have "robust conversations". Much worse is the idea that scientists are continuously solving mysterious mysteries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even disproving ideas is an extremely rare event, let alone proving what's actually going on.

Take, for instance, this recent article about galaxies being "strangled" (an accepted bit of jargon meaning removing their outer gas reservoirs) to death. It has the wonderful headline, "Murder Mystery Solved". Even from the press release it's clear that it's nothing of the sort :

"The scientists found that dead galaxies had much higher amounts of metals than live galaxies did. This finding is consistent with how strangulation would lead galaxies to evolve over time, Peng said."

Consistency isn't proof. It's consistency. That's why there are two completely different words that mean completely different things. Nothing in the article suggests they've ruled out any other ideas, yet the article also does nothing to clarify that the headline is, in fact, completely wrong.

Furthermore, reading most articles, one gets the impression that "scientists" are some sort of huge homogeneous group, and whenever a mystery is "solved" everyone is instantly content and moves on to something else (apart, presumably, from those unfortunate enough to be perpetually baffled). Of course outside this media fantasy land, proof almost never turns up, and trying to convince everyone that any one idea is better than another is a bit like trying to teach cats synchronised swimming.

Calling something "solved" when it's merely "more likely" isn't something I'd have been allowed to get away with in GCSE English, but it's de rigueur is mainstream science journalism.

The source of this sensationalism is hard to track down, and probably has a wide variety of causes. Most fundamentally, a lot of non-scientific problems are relatively easy to solve. Who was the killer ? Did a politician take a bribe ? Was the weather forecast accurate ? Will the construction project be on time and on budget ? "Real world"* problems like these at least can have decisive, clear-cut answers.

* A nonsense term considering that vastly more than 99% of the Universe is utterly uninhabitable to us. "Petty human world" would be better.

But it isn't like that in science, particular in astronomy where we can't fly off to distant galaxies to really check our answers. All we can do is make the best guess we can with the evidence we've got at the time. And that's not something you're really taught (in science or the humanities) until you study science beyond high school level. One would have hoped, though, that this is something science journalists would be aware of.

There's another, far more prosaic reason for sensationalism : it sells. Or more accurately, since not all news sites make a profit, it draws an audience (and yes, sometimes it's simply the scientists themselves clamouring for attention). Which naturally leads to clickbaiting : giving an article a title designed to elicit an emotional reaction strong enough that you're likely to click on a link. E.g., "These Ten Snuggly Kittens Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity", or "This Snuggly Kitten Went Outside And You Won't Believe What Happened Next"*. Being taught to recognize how you're being manipulated is a hair's breadth from understanding how to manipulate others**. Critical thinking is a double-edged sword.

* I have a sudden urge to write a post entitled, "Learn This One Weird Trick That Will Make Any Snuggly Kitten Teach You Astronomy".
** Also worth mentioning : even an article composed of nothing but facts can be manipulative. If I write an article comprised of nothing but anecdotes about reformed prisoners, you might come away thinking that the prison system is a model institution. If, however, I give you the larger statistics...

One final point : there seems to be a tremendous lack of interest in the journalistic world into actually bothering to check the press releases and get more details. While the sandwich-eating abilities of politicians are microscopically scrutinised by every news agency in existence, most science articles are little more than carbon copies of the press release. Which doesn't make a lot of sense because whenever anyone bothers to ask, it's very hard indeed to get most scientists to shut up about their research.

"I just get so lonely !"

Conclusion

Science education is great. English education is great too, though history education is dreadful. The humanities (when taught correctly) are at least as important in developing a rational, inquiring mind as science education is. School-level science has to be primarily about knowing facts and mathematical techniques; it's the humanities which provide a much better vehicle for teaching critical analysis at that stage.

But somewhere along the line something has gone badly wrong. Understanding what makes a good emotional article doesn't make for a good science article. Getting a lot of hits doesn't mean you've written a good article if your article is full of - literally - schoolboy errors. It just means you've written an article that got a lot of hits.

All too often, for a variety of reasons, science articles just aren't treated with the same level of respect or rigour that other stories are. Even mainstream media often simply regurgitate the information provided and stick the science article at the end of the programme : "... and that's how George the tortoise overcame his fear of toenail clippings. In other news, scientists announced a revolutionary breakthrough in solar power....". It's a weird phenomenon indeed when science is simultaneously trivialised and, paradoxically, sensationalised. There can be no clearer indication that science is not really understood.

Afterwards, George became a star on late-night SyFy channel movies.

Worse than this, even the official press releases - written by scientists in concert with a professional press officer - are sometimes able to use ridiculous terms like "tidal waves in space". When it gets to this stage, we've really got a problem. (Well, OK, it's not quite that bad - the press release was only using that as an analogy. To be fair the problem is almost entirely with secondary sources, e.g. the periodic reports about whether the Universe is a hologram - hint : it isn't.)

Some level of sensationalism is healthy. It's fun to speculate about the latest development in physics and where technology could take us. But we seem to have a culture of nothing but sensationalism, with some of the most popular (and high quality) science blogs being heavily devoted to debunking such nonsense.

A teacher once told me that the summer students we got at Arecibo were freaks of nature - meaning that they were the few for whom long tedious lectures were interesting. His point being that current teaching methods for science aren't a natural way for humans to learn. Perhaps we need to reconsider what we class as "dumbing down" and use more interesting, playful techniques to teach science, because clearly people are being lost along the way. Maybe.

For now, and for whatever it's worth, here is my advice to science journalists that may help improve at least the accuracy of their articles. It could equally be used as advice to readers.

• Anyone claiming proof is probably lying. If they don't make this claim, don't make it for them. Don't imply a solution with "mystery solved" - no, not even by using "quotation marks". And if they do claim this, then try as hard as you can to get them to admit their level of confidence.
• Always get a second opinion. Even if the scientists doing the research don't back down, chances are you can find another expert who will most likely not entirely agree with them. If necessary, ask the scientists for people to ask for a more skeptical opinion. It's your job to decide how many levels of counter-responses you want.
• Ask what it would take to get real proof. There is usually some "wiggle room" for alternative ideas with most theories - try and find out what those are. In some cases proof is impossible.
• Remember the unknown unknowns. It wouldn't be research if you knew what you were doing (Pratchett, Science of Discworld). Science is hard, and sometimes entirely new ideas or discoveries render previous theories irrelevant. But don't go nuts. There are facts in science, it's not all probabilities. No amount of quackery will ever disprove that the Earth is round.
• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, generally speaking. Or rather, be extra vigilant if scientists are claiming a major breakthrough. So NASA are building a warp drive, are they ? Which bit of NASA ? How much thrust is their engine producing ? Has anyone else had a look at it ?
• Think through the implications of the research. You may find it "odd" that it may be possible to produce meat or cheese without a cow, but potentially that means the elimination of huge herds of methane-producing cattle. "Odd" scarcely does it justice - if it pans out. 
• Avoid sensationalism. Just because a discovery could one day revolutionise energy production doesn't mean it will, or will anytime soon. Speculation is healthy; implying immediate massive effects makes everyone look pretty stupid.
• Avoid trivialisation. Chances are that any science story is more important than anything Kim Kardashian will ever or can ever do.
• Be careful with analogies. They're great for explaining complicated issues, but make it clear that they're only analogies (and if necessary state what their limits are).
• In short, remember your high school English lessons. Don't sensationalise. Don't trivialise. Be critical, be skeptical, be uncertain, be inquiring, but above all be reasonable. There's no reason - no reason at all - that being moderate has to be boring.