The golden age of scientific popularization

Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:

• High-level scientific popularization, represented by magazines aimed at readers with a good scientific base, who want to stay up to date on the advances made in disciplines other than their own:

o   Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.

The paradox of unsourced information

Ted Chiang

In a previous post in this blog I discussed the paradoxes that would take place if time travel were possible. One of them was this:

• The existence of objects without a cause, illustrated by the science fiction story Find the sculptor by Sam Mimes, which can be summarized thus: on his first trip, the inventor of the time machine jumps 100 years into the future, where he finds a statue that has been erected in his honor. He takes the statue, travels with it 100 years into the past (i.e., to the starting point of his journey), and places it in the same place where he found it, where it will remain for 100 years without anyone touching it. But who made the statue? Nobody. It is an object without a cause, that only exists during those hundred years.

Do black holes have hair?

Black holes are strange objects. They are accumulations of extremely compact matter, which exerts such huge gravity that at less than a certain distance (the event horizon) nothing can escape their attraction, not even light. Hence their name.

The existence of black holes had been predicted in the 18th century by the English geologist John Michell and the French astronomer Laplace. At that time nobody paid attention, but from 1915, when Einstein formulated the theory of General Relativity, the interest in these mysterious objects grew. It was soon concluded that when a massive star exhausted its ability to produce nuclear fusion reactions, no force of nature would be able to overcome the gravitational pull of the remaining matter, resulting in a black hole. But for a long time there were doubts about their real existence, for the theory seemed to predict that the matter located inside a black hole would occupy a zero volume and therefore would have an infinite density. As physicists usually suspect that infinity is a mathematical concept that cannot happen in real life, there were two possibilities: either black holes do not exist, or Einstein's theory would have to be modified so that they wouldn’t have an infinite density.

What is a good scientific popularization?

Isaac Asimov

This news was published on November 20, 2007 in the Spanish major newspaper ABC:

Jugene, the most powerful and ecological civilian computer in the world, is German. [In the] Rhinelandic town of Jülich [was installed] Jugene (Jülicher Blue Gene), whose 167,000 million basic operations (teraflops) per second make it the world's first computer for civilian use...

Actually, the most powerful computers at the time could run at a few hundred teraflops. This news exaggerated the speed of the computer by nine orders of magnitude. This error has not been corrected. It’s still in the web.

Heard on a Radio broadcast on May 30, 2008: Fishermen complain about the rising price of diesel. Five years ago it cost them 320% less. In other words, five years ago they were paid to fill the tank.

Let's look at another example of a wrong headline published on 2/18/2020. The headline says: New green technology generates electricity "out of thin air." The text clarifies that it is generated from the humidity of the air acting on a protein.

These errors, so frequent in the media (I could contribute many more), have led me to formulate the following golden rule of scientific popularization:

Any statement you assert must be correct and contrastable.

Everything one says must be carefully checked to ensure that it is not a mistake, hasty or misrepresented news, or in the worst case, fake news.

Another typical error of scientific popularization in the media is showing as already done news that are really nothing but predictions about the future. This usually happens in headlines, which are usually reduced to the minimum, while keeping maximum impact. For instance, in a recent news published on 2/12/2020, the headline is: Mars was also beaten and for a long time. The text, however, is much less conclusive. What the headline gives as certain, becomes just possible: The red planet could have formed in a longer time scale than previously thought.

Statistics are prone to many manipulations, sometimes with unexpected consequences:

In 1995, one study showed that the contraceptive pill increases the risk of thrombus embolism by 100%. The press published it with great headlines. Thousands of women stopped taking the pill. It is estimated that, as a result, 10,000 more abortions took place, only in Great Britain.

What had really happened? What did that study discover?

Risk of thrombo-embolism in women who do not take the pill: 1 in 14,000. Risk of thrombus embolism in women taking the pill: 2 in 14,000.

In this case, the news was not incorrect. What was wrong was the way of making it public. It’s true, the risk increased by 100% (from 0.00007 to 0.00014). But expressed in that way, it could cause a panic, and it did.

I have given more examples in two old posts in this blog: this one and this one.

This is a list of 24 famous popularizers:

Michael Faraday

Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Jean Martin Charcot, Camille Flammarion, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Josep Comas and Solà, Gregorio Marañón, George Gamow, Willy Ley, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Konrad Lorenz, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, Douglas Hofstadter, Ian Stewart, Raymond Smullyan, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Paul Davies.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Most of them were scientists, distributed among the following fields: 3 mathematicians; 12 physicists, chemists and astronomers; 3 biologists; 4 doctors in medicine; and an engineer. The exception is Martin Gardner, who graduated in philosophy, although he later specialized in philosophy of mathematics. Some of them worked on several disciplines, or kept up to date with them, at least from the informative point of view.

Many of the popularizers mentioned above also addressed the other way of popularizing science: by means of fiction. Some of the names indicated are also famous as authors of science fiction novels, or just fiction, with some scientific stroke: Asimov, Clarke, Gamow, Sagan, Davies, Ramón y Cajal, and Marañón wrote novels, some of which are considered among the best in the genre.

Are popularizers born or made? Surely both things at once. The best definition of a popularizer was given by Willy Ley, when one of his teachers asked the students to write a composition developing the following question: which profession do I want to practice when I’ll be grown up, and why? Willy Ley replied: I want to be an explorer. The teacher did not like the answer, and said there was nothing left to explore. Obviously, the teacher was wrong.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Popularization of Science: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca
Happy summer holidays. See you by mid-August

George Ellis and the multiverse

George Ellis

George Ellis is a South African cosmologist who rose to fame almost half a century ago when he wrote a book together with Stephen Hawking (The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1973), today considered a classic.

In an earlier post in this blog, published in November 2014, I mentioned that there are six independent theories about the multiverse, almost all of them incompatible with each other. In a recent article titled Theory Confirmation and Multiverses published in the book Why Trust a Theory?, edited by Radin Dardashti, Richard David and Karim Thébault (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Ellis updates the different multiverse theories. He does not mention six, as I did five years ago, but nine, although he has left out one of the six I mentioned in my post (Smolin’s), perhaps because this theory has been abandoned in the meantime. The nine theories are:

Five years in PopulScience

Albert Einstein

This week we celebrate a small anniversary: five years since this blog was created. In this time, 245 posts have been published. The Spanish version of the blog is a little older: it was created 30 weeks before, in January 2014, and has published 257 posts.

To mark the date by some kind of celebration, I have decided to compute the list of people most mentioned in the blog in these five years. The following table shows the names of the ten people most quoted and the number of times their name has been quoted:

Name	Times quoted in PopulScience
Albert Einstein	42
Isaac Newton	33
Stephen Hawking	20
C.S. Lewis	20
Aristotle	17
Charles Darwin	14
Isaac Asimov	14
Richard Dawkins	12
Plato	10
Ptolemy	9

Space as a point of concord for humanity

Start of a V-2 rocket in 1943

The exploration of space began some seventy years ago, as a continuation of the Third Reich’s war effort to develop ballistic missiles (the V-2 rocket) to bombard Britain and other places without the need of airplanes.

At the end of World War II, the two new great powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) recruited the scientists and technicians who had carried out the German advances in that field, took them to their respective countries and started programs of space exploration, whose first objective was, of course, to obtain military advantages in the cold war that had just begun. As a result of Operation Paperclip (the US recruitment program), German scientists as important as Werner von Braun went to work in the United States. An equivalent Soviet program (the Operation Osoaviakhim) did the same with other German scientists, perhaps less known, but equally efficient. With their help, both superpowers began a space race that would last several decades.

The unreasonable effectiveness of science

Paul Davies

Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization. In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the following:

The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a distinct teleological flavor.

And in his most famous book, The Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Davies wrote the following words:

The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

What Davies poses here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the following words:

Irreversible processes

Those physicists who consider the arrow of time as an illusion have a problem: not all physics is compatible with a reversible time, as the equations and theories mentioned in an earlier article of this blog seem to indicate. The second principle of thermodynamics is known since the mid-nineteenth century (1850), when Clausius introduced the concept of entropy and it was proved that the value of this physical magnitude always increases, if it is measured in an isolated system that does not exchange matter or energy with its outside. Since the universe is an isolated system, we have at least one physical quantity that makes it possible to unequivocally signal the direction of time flow.

Aware of this problem, physicists in favor of the reversibility of time have answered in different ways: it has been said that the second principle of thermodynamics is a fictitious, subjective law that does not conform to reality; a mental illusion; an approximation; a consequence of the initial conditions of the universe. It has been hypothesized that, if the universe were cyclic, the arrow of time would be reversed during the contraction stage. (This theory has been abandoned). To escape the problem, Stephen Hawking proposed a universe without initial conditions in his book A Brief History of Time. It is curious, this desire to defend at any price the reversibility of time, when it was precisely Hawking who proposed the existence of an arrow of time in black holes, which rather than being permanent, would disintegrate.

In 1928, a year after inventing the term the arrow of time, Arthur Eddington challenged the physicists who defend the reversibility of time with the following devastating words: If your theory is found to be against the second law of Thermodynamics... there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation (The Nature of the Physcal World, 1928).

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca in a Spanish Newspaper

On February 23, 2018, a Spanish Newspaper (La Opinión, El Correo de Zamora) published this interview with me, performed by Ana Arias, which I am now translating into English. The interview was re-published a few days later (March 10) in the website ReligionEnLibertad (ReligionInFreedom). This is the translation of the interview:

He took an interest in science since he was quite small, as he says. At age 16 he wrote a book of zoology in two volumes that was never published. Anyway, whenever he has to consult information about some little known animal, he consults his book. "And I can find almost everything there," he adds. Now, at 71, he is an honorary professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

He believes in science. And also in God. Under the sponsorship of the Caja Rural Foundation and the Science-Religion University Forum held yesterday at the University College, Manuel Alfonseca gave a lecture about The Faith of Contemporary Atheist Scientists.

What is the faith of those scientists?

That God does not exist.

Cyclic Time and Linear Time

Stephen Hawking

In an article published in 1999, in volume 879 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Pier Luigi Luisi speaks about the two traditional models of time that have been considered by traditional philosophy and the mythologies of various historical civilizations. They must not be confused with the two philosophical models originated in the twentieth century, the time A and time B of which I spoke in another post of this blog.

• Cyclical time, predominant in Asian civilizations and the Greco-Roman world until the Christian world view took root there. The origin of this model is evident, for many natural phenomena are cyclical: sunrise and sunset; the phases of the moon; the annual movements of the stars, synchronized with the seasons and with many biological phenomena...
• Linear time, prevailing in the three religions who consider themselves descendants of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Linear time can be compared with the course of the life of a living being, which begins at birth, goes on with changes during a certain period, and ends with death.

Mistakes in popular science in the media: Stephen Hawking didn’t discover everything

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking has been in the last decades a scientific icon for the media. His painful personal situation turned him into a celebrity who inevitably attracts attention. Therefore, the media have a tendency to exaggerate his scientific work, attributing to him achievements that weren’t his, which he would be the first to repudiate, if he were still among us.

For example, on the occasion of his death, the following headlines appeared in several media:

•         AlDiaNews.com: Stephen Hawking, author of the Big Bang theory dies at 76

•         ElTiempoHoy: Creador de la teoría del Big Bang y los agujeros negros: fallece Stephen Hawking a los 76 años. (Creator of Big Bang’s theory and black hole theory: Stephen Hawking dies at 76).

•         Gizmodo Univisión: Del Big Bang a la Teoría del Todo: el increíble legado científico de Stephen Hawking (From the Big Bang to the Theory of Everything: Stephen Hawking’s incredible legacy).

What’s a scientific theory

Karl Popper

Although it is fashionable to assert that Karl Popper’s theories about the evolution of science are outdated, his definition of what is a scientific theory is unassailable:

A theory is scientific if and only if it is possible to design an experiment that proves that this theory is false.

A paradigmatic case is the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen designed an experiment that could prove this theory false. A few months later, Niels Bohr published another article in the same magazine, in answer to the previous article. Almost 30 years later, as I explained in another post in this blog, the EPR experiment, which up to that point had been mental, could be carried out and confirmed Bohr’s predictions, rather than Einstein’s. As this theory was able to resist an attempt to prove it false, it must be considered a scientific theory.

Of course, this success of the theory does not imply that it should automatically be considered correct or true. Scientific theories (always according to Popper) never become so. This theory has successfully withstood an attempt to prove it false, but the next attempt could do it.

Virtual particles

Werner Heisenberg

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, one of the consequences of quantum mechanics, makes possible the birth of virtual particles in the void, apparently transgressing the principle of energy conservation, the most holy in physics. The reason is that Heisenberg’s principle can be expressed in several ways, one of which relates the uncertainty about the energy to the uncertainty about time:

DE.Dt≥ħ/2

This expression can be interpreted in the sense that a pair of objects, each with energy E, can appear spontaneously in the vacuum, provided that they lasts at most a time Dt<ħ/(2E). These pairs of objects are called virtual particles. One of these particles is always matter, the other antimatter, and their duration, according to this principle, is ridiculously small. A virtual electron, for instance, would last 1.3×10^-21 seconds (just above one sextillionth of a second). The higher the mass (energy) of the virtual particle, the less time it will last. After that time, the two particles will annihilate each other and disappear. Due to their short duration, the existence of virtual particles has not been experimentally verified.

Is it possible for these virtual particles to become real under certain circumstances? Yes it is, and it is believed that there are at least two situations (somewhat drastic, it is true) where this could happen.

A mathematical model for time travel

Welcome for time travellers

On May 2 2017, Newsweek published an article with this title:

Time travel is mathematically possible with mind-boggling model

You may well imagine that, with that title, the article will rather fall into the category of sensationalist papers on seemingly scientific issues. Indeed, in a quick reading of this article I have detected the following inaccuracies:

1. The title does not make clear the difference between a theoretical possibility of traveling in time and building a time machine. That is, the different between theory and practice. What Ben Tippett has developed is a purely theoretical mathematical model.
2. It presents the idea as something new which puts an end to a string of failures and disappointing calculations. Space-time loops, however, are known to be compatible with the general theory of relativity since quite a long time ago. In 1992, for instance, Stephen Hawking came to the conclusion that it would not be possible to use them without negative energy, something that is not known to exist. In 2005, the Israeli Amos Ori proposed a procedure that would not require it, consisting of spinning around an empty toroid region surrounded by a sphere containing enormous amounts of matter (e.g. a black hole). This is not so different from what is being proposed now.

Brain transplant

On February 13, 2017, the Spanish newspaper La Razón Digital published an interview with Rafael Matesanz, expert in transplants, with the following headline:

Brain transplant would be the panacea

As usual, the media prefer the most spectacular headlines, regardless of whether they misrepresent the meaning of the article. In this case, for example, the headline was taken from a rather secondary part of the interview. The following:

Is there an organ, today irreplaceable, but that will be [transplanted] in the future?

The brain.

Will it be viable?

To make it replaceable, we should know how to connect with the bone marrow the fibers leaving the central nervous system, otherwise... We are still far away, although we would like to be able to do it, for that would mean being able to cure quadriplegia and paraplegia.

...

Can you give me an example?

Consider what it would mean to people like Stephen Hawking, with a privileged brain, which you could transplant into a healthy body. Or many vegetative diseases that spoil the motor part of a body, with a healthy brain. It could be an unbeatable form of treatment, but we are far from it. Conceptually it would be the panacea.

Alternatives to the Big Bang

The Big Bang theory has a problem, which can be explained by the following set of questions:

• The farthest we can see is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which originated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We cannot see directly what happened before, because it is hidden behind that radiation.
• It is true that we cannot see, but we can deduce what happened in those first 380,000 years by applying the standard physical theory, i.e. general relativity. It is also possible to check those deductions, for they offer predictions, such as the average composition of the cosmos, which fit well with the experimental data.
• The problem is, general relativity does not take us to time zero, the Big Bang itself. This theory can be applied only from 5×10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang (the Planck time), as quantum effects were predominant before that time, and we do not have a physical theory that unifies quantum mechanics with general relativity.

Did the universe have a beginning?

Georges Lemaître

This question has fascinated scientists since 1931, when the Belgian astronomer, physicist and priest Georges Lemaître formulated the theory of the primordial atom, which since 1950 was known as the Big Bang theory. According to this cosmological theory, as the universe is expanding, if we move back in time we must come to a point (13,800 million years ago, the cosmologists tell us) when it would have gone through a singularity, with a volume tending to zero, while pressure and density would tend to infinity. Could this have been the beginning of the universe?

In 1951 Pope Pius XII, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the following words:

A mind illuminated and enriched by modern scientific knowledge, calmly evaluating this problem, is led to break the circle of a matter entirely independent and autochthonous, either uncreated, or because it has arisen by itself, and to rise to a creative Spirit... It seems really that present science, by jumping back over millions of centuries, has succeeded in being witness to that primordial “Fiat lux”, when out of nowhere burst forth, together with matter, a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and were reunited into millions of galaxies

Logical fallacies

Stephen Hawking

In the previous article I mentioned that advocates of materialistic scientism often fall in logical fallacies, but usually do not notice, probably because their knowledge of philosophy is not deep enough. Moreover, they often despise philosophy, not realizing that logic (which is a part of philosophy) aims to analyze the way we think, and that, without logic, science loses its supporting base. So, Stephen Hawking wrote at the beginning of his book, The Grand Design:

Philosophy is dead ... Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

And starting there, he proceeds to make philosophy in a popular science book.

In my discussions with supporters of materialistic scientism, I’ve often had to tell my opponents that they are committing a logical fallacy. Generally they are reluctant to admit it, but when I explain it in detail, they finally do (I guess, because usually the discussion ends there). By this I do not mean to imply that I never fall in logical fallacies, because we are all human, but at least so far, no one has shown me any. Of course, it is possible that I have fallen in them and the person who was debating with me did not notice.

Questions for materialist atheists

Steven Weinberg

There is a website (10 questions Christians must answer) that offers 10 questions to believers in Christianity. If they consider and meditate these questions deeply, they are supposed to convince themselves that their religious beliefs are absurd, that the best they can do is convert to atheism. This website (and others like it) gave us the idea that these contributions are double-edged, as the same procedure can be used for the opposite purpose: one can also be skeptical towards materialism. Therefore we are proposing here a few questions and offer a link to the atheistic page to give the reader the chance to compare both approaches impartially and draw their own conclusions.

1.      Consider this assertion: Nothing exists but those things with which science can experiment. Do you believe this because of scientific reasons, or it is a dogma for you?