The Blindness of Science

Left: Sir John Kendrew assembles a molecular model of myoglobin. Right: A computer-rendered 3-D model of myoglobin. Kendrew photo courtesy of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Used under a CC BY 2.5 license. Myoglobin image by Aza Toth. Public domain image.

What we do not see determines what we know at least as much as what we do see. Science is no exception to this rule. It is as subject to the vagaries of social, political and other contingent forces as any other subject.

One of the classic examples of how expectations shape outcomes is the “invisible gorilla” experiment, in which subjects are asked to count basketball passes between two players. During the passes, a person in a gorilla suit walks onscreen, looks at the camera, and pounds her chest before exiting the scene.[i] Only about half the people who watch the video see the gorilla. The demonstration gave rise to the term “inattentional blindness” – that is, people see what they expect to see, often at the cost of noticing more compelling information.[ii]

The study of science’s history and institutions is replete with examples of a given viewpoint resulting in a particular set of practices or interpretations. Both material and social factors play a role in shaping these viewpoints.

Materiality has a profound effect on science. Christoph Meinel points out that three-dimensional stick-and-ball models, which were ubiquitous in molecular research before the advent of sophisticated computer programs, were a translation of the chemist's vision as a “builder of a new world out of man-made materials.” Eventually, the models took on a greater sense of the “reality” of molecular structure for these researchers than the actual chemicals.[iii]

The predominance of physical molecular models had a major impact on the graphics programs that replaced them. X-ray crystallographers demanded the ability to manipulate the structures they were working with in real time, and computer developers took pains to build this sense of physical manipulation into their programs. Now, as then, crystallographers incorporate a strong sense of embodied ownership into the work they do on molecular structures. No one, they feel, can know their molecules the way they do. The tacit knowledge they gain from their projects is something to which other scientists, who eventually come to work with these same molecules, are blind.[iv]

Blindness finds its way into the scientific process through social structures in many forms. Any student working in a lab toward a Ph.D. soon discovers that, throughout her undergraduate years, she has been presented with experiments that reinforce the notion that science is straightforward work with a high success rate. These impressions are dashed when she begins doing independent work and finds out that the majority of day-to-day science fails.[v]

Science historian Robert E. Kohler argues that the cultural spaces of science laboratories themselves actively shape what goes on inside them, and can be broken down broadly into distinct early modern, modern, and postmodern styles that broadly reflect the elite social sensibilities of the times in which they are built and used.[vi]

Language and the social milieu very much inform the impressions people have about seemingly scientific phenomena. Definitions have practical implications. The term “child abuse,” for instance, was not invented until the early 1960s. It eventually won out over the term “battered child syndrome.” The latter term did not include actions commonly recognized as abuse today, such as sexual touching or neglect. The meaning of “child abuse” has therefore been able to expand to encompass many more types of activity than previously used terms, and has shifted significantly since its inception the moral, judicial, and medical reactions used to deal with it.[vii]

Material and social characteristics often shape the practice of science simultaneously. As in the transition from moveable molecular models to manipulable computer graphics programs, social judgments about how a procedure “should feel” can introduce path dependency into new technologies.

Early music synthesizer technology demonstrated this phenomenon particularly well. Two rival inventors, Robert Moog and Don Buchla, created machines to reproduce musical sound. Buchla did not standardize his synthesizers, seeing them as a means for an exploration of the avant-garde. Moog made his inventions easy-to-use, and even built them so they could play using the familiar piano keyboard. Moog's more recognizable device succeeded, whereas Buchla's faded.[viii] Moog's success had nothing to do with technical superiority; he simply paid more attention to what other people wanted and allowed those social forces to modify his instrument.

Even historical judgments about the practice of science change depending on which aspects one pays attention to. The “distortionist” camp of science historians, for instance, tends to portray the militarized science of the Cold War period as fundamentally perverting the scientific process. Yet this was not the case for seismology, as science policy expert Kai-Henrik Barth points out. While military programs invested heavily in the field, the research agenda for seismology remained largely unchanged before, during and after this influx. As Barth notes, the distortionist view assumes a normative position based on unknowable speculation about how science would have progressed without military patronage.[ix]

With the myriad opportunities for science to be blinded, should we therefore lament that we cannot be absolutely sure of anything we know? No. The foundation of science is provisional truth; its success rests on the constant reevaluation of seemingly resolved questions. This is where new vistas open, where discoveries challenge former dogmas. In those moments, the gorilla suddenly becomes visible.

---

[i]           Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2009), http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/, 8-23-13; http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html, 10-5-13;

[ii]

          Manohla Dargis, “What You See Is What You Get,” The New York Times (July 10, 2011), AR13, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/movies/why-difficult-movies-are-more-um-difficult.html?pagewanted=all, 10-5-13;

[iii]

         Anna Maerker, "Review: Why Do They Look Like That? Three-dimensional Models in Science," Social Studies of Science 37 (2007), 961-965, http://sss.sagepub.com/content/37/6/961.full.pdf+html, 10-23-13;

[iv]

         Natasha Myers, "Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography," Social Studies of Science 38 (2008), 163-199, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25474573, 10-23-13;

[v]

          Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson, "Doctoring Uncertainty: Mastering Craft Knowledge," Social Studies of Science 31 (2001): 87-107, http://www.jstor.org/stable/285819, 10-24-13;

[vi]

           Robert E. Kohler, “”Lab History: Reflections,” Isis 99 (2008), 761-768, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595769, 10-5-13;

[vii]

        Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), 253-288, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1343837.pdf, 10-18-13;

[viii]

       Trevor Pinch, "Technology and Institutions: Living in a Material World," Theory and Society 37 (2008), 461-483, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40345597. 10-18-13;

[ix]

         Kai-Henrik Barth, “The Politics of Seismology: Nuclear Testing, Arms Control, and the Transformation of a Discipline,” Social Studies of Science, 33, 5 (Oct. 2003), 743-781, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3183067, 10-11-13.           

Experiment Says Neutrinos Obey Speed Limit After All

Photograph by Christophe Delaere. Some rights reserved.

Neutrinos do not travel faster than light, according to the first independent attempt to verify the results of an experiment from 2011 that found the subatomic particles breaking the speed limit of physics.

The new evidence, which comes from an experiment called ICARUS and was published March 15 to the pre-print server arXiv.org, clocked neutrinos at roughly the speed of light and no faster.

ICARUS is located in Gran Sasso, Italy, the same location as the OPERA experiment that found the faster-than-light neutrinos. Both experiments detected pulses of neutrinos being sent from CERN 731 kilometers away.

The team at OPERA in September released controversial findings showing that neutrinos had arrived at their detector 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light would allow. At the time, they were skeptical but could not find any flaws in their experiment despite six months of checking. They asked the wider community for help.

The first major doubts were cast over the OPERA results in February, when the team found two potential sources of error in their equipment. The first was a bad connection from a fiber-optic cable that sends signals from a synchronizing GPS system into the master clock. This error would tend to speed up the timing of the neutrinos, giving results that were too fast.

However, the second source of error involved an internal oscillator that was not properly calibrated and would tend to make the results of the experiment slower than expected.

ICARUS's results are particularly compelling because, except for the detector itself, almost all of the equipment in the experiment are shared with OPERA. The two even shared the same beams of neutrinos; ICARUS is located in the same facility, mere meters away from its rival detector.

The OPERA team is still moving forward with plans to test its earlier results with more measurements of neutrino speeds this spring. ICARUS and two other experiments at Gran Sasso will also make additional measurements.

"Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny and inviting independent measurements,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci in a press release. “This is how science works.”

The Inanity of Ethnicity

My wife was born in Uruguay, a Spanish-speaking constitutional republic with one of the most historically stable governments in South America. Uruguayans live in an European culture; all of the native populations were long ago eradicated from the Eastern banks of the Rio de la Plata.

My wife can trace her own family's lineage back to Spain, France, and other areas in Western Europe.

After a childhood in the capital of Montevideo, she spent significant portions of her youth in Italy and England, studying at Cambridge before coming to the United States.

In some ways, her time in Europe has distanced her from others who were born in Uruguay. Her accent is unaccountable - a truly global amalgam cobbled together of grade-school English lessons by Spanish-speaking teachers, training in the formal British style, and extended exposure to American idiom.

In other ways, though, she retains the vestigial traditions of her youth. When Uruguay's players became the only non-European team to advance to the semi-finals at the World Cup in 2010, she was as glued to the games as any fan at the Plaza Independencia. (Soccer is huge in Uruguay - they hosted and won the first-ever World Cup in 1930.)

At Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ during the annual cherry blossom festival.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

I am, on the other hand, more of a mutt. Although the bulk of my ancestors come from a virtual continental tour of northern and Western Europe, my father's side of the family also contains a dab of Native American. By any genealogical standard, my wife is the "dominant" European-American, and I am the ethnic minority.

Yet that is not how our society perceives us. I have pale skin, light brown hair, and a southern New England lilt. She has (slightly) darker skin, black-brown hair, and that inexplicable-but-unmistakable accent.

In this country, she receives the designation of "Hispanic," and I get labeled as the Caucasian. Never mind that neither of those terms has any logical meaning - we have to put something on the Census form.

When people meet us they immediately tailor their questions to their presumptions about our backgrounds. This occurs whether we're speaking with other "Hispanics" or "Caucasians."

Does that make us part of the growing trend of "interracial" marriage in the United States? As it is, first-generation Hispanic immigrants tend to view themselves as "white" at a higher rate than their own children do, making the question that much more intractable.

That these arbitrary (and often inaccurate) characterizations are still so entrenched into and codified by our institutions bothered me long before I got married, but they’ve grown more irksome to me since then. I didn’t fall in love with a Latina – I fell in love with a specific human being, unlike any other.

It is vital that we retain a historical memory of our past traditions, of course. It is helpful to know where you come from in order to understand the circumstances into which you are born.

But I also believe that each of us should be free to chart our own course from there. Ethnic identifications assure you of nothing about a person. I was born in Connecticut, yet I drink yerba mate, a caffeinated drink that's as popular in Uruguay as coffee is here. My wife, however, prefers uncaffeinated chamomile tea. Q.E.D.

Mineralogy at Sterling Hill

This is the first of three pieces about the Sterling Hill Mining Museum. This article focuses on the mineral collection. The next post will explore the history of the mine, and the final installment will explain what visitors can expect to find at the museum today.

I am fortunate to be married to someone who shares my enthusiasm for science. This year, my wife and I spent a weekend at the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, NJ for our two-year anniversary.

The museum is located on the grounds of what was formerly one of the most productive zinc mines in the state. It is also the “world capital” of fluorescent minerals – the area has produced over 80 varieties, and others may still be buried, undiscovered, in sections of the hillsides.

When operation costs drove the mine out of business in the 1980's, it was converted into a center for education about history and science. The primary focus is on geology and mineralogy, but there are displays to teach visitors about such things as chemistry, and the Ellis Astronomical Observatory also makes its home on the property.

In addition to minerals from the local mines, Sterling Hill hosts a huge collection of rare and interesting minerals from all over the world, many of them fluorescent.

On Friday night, we were treated to a tour of the mines by longtime museum volunteer Bill Kroth, followed by a session at the telescope he runs. On Saturday, we again visited the museum.

Willemite (Zn2SiO4) is the most common fluorescent mineral found in the Sterling Hill mine. Indeed, the predominance of this form of zinc silicate ore makes the Franklin and Sterling Hill mines unique.

A large sheet of willemite (green) with fluorescent calcite (red) from the mine.

A slab of sphalerite (ZnS), garnet and hornblende found 900 feet below ground in the Sterling Hill mine. Sphalerite is one of the main precursors of willemite. It is transformed through one of two means: by oxidation in a siliceous (silicon-rich) environment, or by alteration from hydrothermal veins. New Jersey's willemite was made via the latter process.

Willemite lining the walls of the mine.

Scheelite (CaWO4) from Trumbull, CT. The fluorescence is due to tungstate ions.

Meionite (Ca4Al6Si6O24(CO3)) from Grenville, Quebec. It fluoresces yellow in short-wave ultraviolet (UV) light, and red in long-wave UV light.

One of several unusual malachite (Cu2(CO3)(OH)2) samples. This piece originated from Lubumbashi in the Haut-Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area is known for its copper, in which malachite typically forms.

Fluorite (CaF2) embedded in calcite (CaCO3) from the Nikolaeskiy mine in Dal'negorsk, Primorskiy Kray, Russia.

This calcite specimen comes from the Romanian mining town of Cavnic.

Posting More of Less

I never intended this blog to be a professional endeavor. I created it for finished thoughts, essays, and tidbits that didn’t fit neatly elsewhere.

As a result, my posting is sporadic. Most months, I might add two or three pieces. So far in 2011, there were no updates for February or April.

Thinking about this has led me to a now-common conundrum. As a writer, I prefer to toil in privacy, revising and retooling until the work is as precisely organized I can manage. But if I want to be noticed in the digital culture, I need to be putting out more material in places like this more regularly.

More material doesn’t mean better material; even the best blogs sacrifice finely tuned artful writing for roundups, updates, and links. It doesn’t mean that they’re badly written, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re useless. But they do exhibit an “unfinished” quality that was largely discouraged in the days of print culture.

Scarce resources used to restrict authors and publishers from putting anything out that hadn’t been vetted by multiple parties. That’s changing now that everyone with an Internet connection can type up unending missives for free.

The rise of Internet speech has cluttered the field for professional writers of all sorts, making competition stiffer and creating a feedback loop that increases demand for content.

There’s a limit to how much one person can do; past a certain point, even the best writer’s work will begin to suffer if he or she is too stretched.

Many of us cut corners to meet the new demands: a journalist spins one story into five different versions for various platforms. An author blogs parts of the book that he or she is working on, thus drumming up interest in advance of its release.

But most of this content would have been considered a kind of offal in an earlier era. The repetitions, reconfigurations and drafting all used to be part of the private process that would, after much effort, result in a finished public piece. Most of the time, those earlier notes and drafts would get tossed or filed on a dusty back shelf. Today they are front and center – and will be open to scrutiny for as long as the web lasts.

I’ve resisted contributing to this milieu partially because my thinking follows the print paradigm; I want my work to be the best it can be before anyone sees it (except perhaps a trusted advisor or relative).

Perhaps I should change my methodology, though. It may be too twentieth century.

If You Can Read This, You're Pretty Damned Lucky.

Inquiry:

Do you want to hear a frightening statistic? 27% of today's high school graduates in America are "functionally illiterate," according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That means that at least 1 out of every 4 new young adults lacks the ability to grasp the meaning of what you are currently reading. And recall that we are only speaking of graduates. When one factors in the growing number of students who drop out, the implications become more dire.

Compare this with Western Europe. Norway has a 100% literacy rate. So does Luxembourg. And Denmark. Most of the nations of Europe have rates that hover at or only slightly below 100%. Canada's in the same league. So is Japan. In fact, compare the United States with almost any other developed nation, and the troubles with our system are obvious.

All of these uneducated masses are being unleashed in a sagging, struggling economy. The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is growing, and this is partially due to the fact that these people lack the skills necessary for not just one specific job, but to adapt to changing conditions, to manage money, and so on. They also lack basic argumentative and negotiation skills - so that even though they have voices, they are powerless to use them properly.

In the end, this drags our entire infrastructure down. We throw money at welfare programs, educational measures, and all manner of other patch-ups at the overall expense of everybody, and the numbers continue to sag.

Don't get too comfortable when considering all of this. America may have an inordinate amount of power in the world right now, but mere might has never kept an empire afloat, and the kinds of phenomena we are currently witnessing have historically preceded the downfalls of most major powers. Stability is always more important than brute force, and with America's cracking institutions, it is not inconceivable that we could follow the Greeks, the Romans, or the Soviet Russians.

You and I have a stake in this. Even people who live in other nations have a stake in it. Cynicism and disenchantment with the system may be natural given the current climate of our nation, but that will not solve these still-fixable problems. It takes a village to raise a child, and it will take a global village to bring our nation and its youth into a functional maturity.So do something, and do it intelligently. It's your fate, too.