I truly pity religionists

A scientist working on an astronomical observations says, “The other team was actually correct, and we were fully contrite in that way" [1].

The day any religionist says something similar about a religion that he or she does not subscribe to, people may come and talk to me about how science is also religion, how religion responds to questions that science cannot, all that NOMA (Non-Overlapping MagisteriA) stuff as propounded by Stephen J Gould, and justify the general schadenfreude that religion exhibits when science acknowledges its failures.

There is a whole lot beyond science, but there is nothing in religion. Now you know why I pity religionists. They do not know when they are wrong and they do not know that they do not know.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Reference

1.       A Supergiant Star Goes Missing, and a Supernova Mystery Is Solved, John Matson, Scientific American, August 22, 2013 

Vibrate and resonate

This post is centered on the following extract, in the context of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly, from what a popular pop-guru wrote in a book of high credibility.

“Jammed together, the imaginal (my emphasis all through) cells begin to share energy and information with one another.  As a result, they begin to vibrate and resonate at the same frequency, intensifying their strength....”

As soon as I cut-and-paste the above, the red squiggly lines duly appeared under “imaginal”. That shows the limited imagination of the software. I readily understood what the author could have meant by “imaginal” – not “imaginary”, but real-yet-not-real, about-to-become-real. These “imaginal” and real cells reside side-by-side in the caterpillar as the real caterpillar cells transform themselves into real butterfly cells. “Imaginal” is a half-way house. There is some metaphor residing in this, somewhere. You may locate it, but if you do not, I am not the person to approach.

Why not? Because I speak “just like a scientist.” One needs, at the very least, to “tend to speak like a poet” to locate a metaphor. I can’t; therefore, I can’t.

There is something called “level confusion”. Explanations for a phenomenon can be found at different levels. This truism was made clear to me a long time ago, in the 1960s, as I was standing at Luz Church corner in the then Madras. There was a large electric ticker tape type of board carrying the news of the day. What was it, really? “Nothing but” a cluster of light bulbs? An electric circuit, directing each bulb on and off in a definitive sequence? The English letters that appear and vanish? The words, the sentences? Or, the news content? It all depends on at what level you are talking. No matter, all these levels are interconnected.

Do not get it into this argument as you will descend into the bottomless pit of unending debates on reductionism. But, do try to locate a level for “metaphor”. It is my guess you cannot. Even if you do, it would carry no continuity with the other levels.

I am not opposed to metaphors per se; I am not that scientific. But when metaphors use what at first sight look and feel like terms of science, yes, there is something grating. That gets me to “resonate” in the quoted passage earlier (emphasized in italics). The term has a very sharply defined meaning in science. It can be accommodated, if at all, in a non-scientific context only by diluting the meaning to almost nothing.

While I can explain resonance through science, at the level appropriate to this post, I would rather loosely say it is a spike in a response to a stimulus under specific conditions that in the normal course of things one would not expect. The phrase “intensifying their strength”, implying smooth progression, just does not convey any such sudden shift, a spike. The author must have known this. Yet, he used “resonate”, adding connected scientific terms such as vibrate, frequency. Why?

I have the freedom to be cynical. He wanted to imbue his statement with some amount of scientific authenticity. If I translated the above in his own words, it would read as, “wanted his words to resonate with science”! I am not opposed to his using metaphors, but I do have the liberty to speculate on his motives.

By the way one of the best metaphors of recent times is Dawkins’s Selfish Gene. And, I know how much trouble that got him into!  

In the small extract given at the beginning, a pop-guru is taking illegitimate recourse to a scientific term to gain credibility while his readers and followers are blissfully unaware of such nefariousness. What exactly are the “imaginal” cells doing if not resonating?

Well, I have no answers. But, if you want to know how, as the cells of the growing fetus divide and multiply they know what type of cells they have to become and where should they be located, please read about hox genes.

Your mind will resonate with science then, with and without metaphors. Science aids valid metaphors and faux metaphors cannot displace science.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Crisis in science and no opportunities

It is said that crisis begets opportunities.

Rahm Emanuel, the erstwhile Chief of Staff of the US president Barack Obama, and the current mayor of Chicago had this to say about crises: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” This was in the context of Lehman Brothers sinking just as the US was in the middle of its presidential election circus. And, election results proved that Rahm was up to the task he set up for himself. Obama camp effectively leveraged that crisis.

Now, it is that season again, just further up the craziness scale. And, nature appears to have some built-in sympathy for the incumbent. Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the US when there remained just about a week for the current crisis edition. Again, the Obama tent is all over the place and it all seems going swimmingly well, what with the Republican Governor of New Jersey heaping praise on Obama and following suit, we see the mayor of New York, another Republican, Bloomberg, as rich as the other presidential contender, Romney.

Where politics goes, can science lag behind? No. Sandy got out those who speak out on behalf of, scientifically or otherwise, climate change, the reality of it. If I were to give a list of recommended reading, it would run into twice the intended length of this post; hence I demur. Yet, I am adding to it!

The points go thus: Climate change models predict more severe weather events and Sandy was one. Last year’s Irene, though it spared New York, just adds to the scenario. Ergo, climate change is real.

The flooding of lower Manhattan is the combination of two things: a higher storm surge on top of an increasing sea level – both features of global warming. Ergo, global warming.

Statistics are trotted out to show extreme weather events, like heat waves, flooding, heavier downpours, of once in five hundred year probability occur like clockwork, only with the clocks running haywire, like squeezing five hundred years into half a decade. Points to climate change.

Then, engineers take over. New York needs a sea wall. The cost is a few billion dollars, take a few dozen billions more as such projects invariably get inflated, through conflation. Where there is a seawall, ecologists and environmentalists too would want a share of the pie, you understand.

That is a bonanza for the engineering community. I am not being excessively cynical. It is engineering firms that are recommending seawalls for New York, after all! To add to the natural cynicism, let me mention that, as per a news item, our former president Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam recently said that nuclear power is an effective response to climate change – the not-to-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste position, if you ever heard one. Oh, it has a local relevance too, Kudankulam. This is global leveraging. Even as Kalam addressed a gathering in Peking University, his intended audience was in southern Tamil Nadu!

Much of what you have read thus far may tend to project me as a climate skeptic. I am not. It is not that so many posts of mine, in this blog space as elsewhere over the years, have been from the perspective of a climate change believer. But, of course I could have suddenly changed my stance; maybe I got a million dollars from Koch brothers (How I wish I had!).

No. I am still a strong believer in climate change scenarios. Note the word “scenarios”. There is a message in that. No scientist, no scientific program can tell us as of now which, of the scenarios, if any at all, will be realized. Indeed I am quite certain that what will be realized will be identified only post facto and that will be an as yet unidentified combination. With that belief – yes, belief – I think all the scientists who are referring to Sandy, the single instance, as adding to the proof of climate science are doing science as well as the reality (scenario-based, to be sure) of climate change great disservice.

But this is what civil society seems to demand of science, a level of certainty that science shies away from. Science, unlike astrology, is no predictor of future. It throws up a number of scenarios and asks society to be prepared for whatever scenario it chose. But it boomerangs and science feels cornered. And, irony of ironies, engineering in its current form as a progeny of science, seems to find pleasure in cornering science, damn society.

The sociological scenario that is unfolding is stacked up against science. Climate skeptics ask for proof and science says it has none, at least at the level demanded. Business demands certainty and science offers none. Society is becoming more and more skeptical of science, having been taken that road too many times in the past. Scientists hedge and not very effectively at that.

Science, particularly climate science, feels besieged from all directions. It comes out fighting. But as implied in the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this coming out, with blazing pistol shots, is doomed to be a failure. Science has just not learned how to leverage crises. It knows only one way – come out straight. It has not taken any lessons from Muhammad Ali to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” It has not read Rahm Emanuel’s chapter on Obama’s victory in 2008.

This is the crisis in science. Alas, it does not know how to turn that into an opportunity.

Raghuram Ekambaram