Supping With The Devil

March 14, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

A short note on my latest reading – ‘The Jasons’ by Ann Finkbeiner.

jasons

The book tells the true story of a group of US scientists, ‘The Jasons,’ who still to this day get together for six weeks or so every summer to analyse defence and security issues, make reports, and propose technical solutions and further work to the US government.

The Jasons were, and are, real ‘A -List’ intellectuals from the worlds of physics, chemistry and biology. They choose the problems they are able and inclined to work on, and are self-selecting of new members – apparently without government interference.

The first Jasons were drawn from the Manhattan project pool, in the age of Dr Atomic; names like Edward Teller and Hans Bethe.

I’m not going to repeat the background: here is a NY Times review of the book and the Jason’s Wikipedia entry. But a few points stuck with me:

Ideas – the shear out-of-the-box / lateral thinking, call it what you will; these guys were having serious fun with serious issues. It’s not something the Jasons are most famous for, but Nick Christofilos’s idea in the 1960s to build one long continuous runway across the USA, so the Russians couldn’t pin down SAC aircraft, tickled me. He also pushed for beam weapons and ‘electron cloud’ defensive umbrella shields; the seeds of Regan’s SDI – however impractical and misguided. He proposed an Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) communication system for submarines, to deliver six words a minute at 25Hz; that’s a 7,400-mile wavelength requiring an antenna 8,500 miles long. One of the interviewees in the book says the system was built – wires were laid !

Motivation – there doesn’t seem to be one factor. The intellectual challenge – sure, but Finkbeiner puts patriotism high on the list too. Several Jasons have described a feeling of practical usefullness, a wish to expand their science into applied technology, to become engineers – multi-disciplinary at that. This touches on the differences between scientists and engineers….and other groups, which I find fascinating.

Despite a crying need for co-operation, there is still today much structural (e.g. funding) and cultural resistance to the inter-disciplinary ethos (I speak as an engineer who served time on the commercial dark side and now hangs out with scientists). As a related aside, check out this recent Los Alamos Study.

Of their time? Born of an acute Cold War terror, the founding Jasons’ revulsion to some of the military projects they got involved with, and the price they might pay in academic and popular reputation, was more than countered by their contemplating the result of inaction. Some Jasons felt they’d made ethical trade-offs, the magnitude of which wasn’t clear to them until it was too late. Are we in the same situation today? If you are a scientist, would you commit to work in total secrecy on projects the results of which might never be published?

And while ‘The Jasons’ deals with the great and the good of an academic elite, were not the dilemmas they faced and the decisions they made in many ways similar to those facing thousands of lesser known scientists and engineers who work in the defence industry?

Update 7/7/2011

Also of interest: article in Imperial Magazine on war and innovation (download pdf)

animals, conservation, environment, Podcast

It’s Gibbon Time!

March 8, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

(This piece originally appeared as an editorial in Conservation Today. You can see/hear it elsewhere on this blog by clicking HERE.

Check out my latest editorial for Conservation Today for a more manageable (=edited) form of the Jones-Mootnick gibbon interview at the Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, California.

astronomy, events, Science Centres, second life, space

Search for Life in Second Life

March 7, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

A little bleary-eyed this morning, having stayed up to watch the Kepler launch on NASA TV.

Kepler’s mission is to locate rocky earth-sized planets around other stars. The satellite carries an instrument called a photometer, or light meter, that measures the very small changes in a star’s brightness that occur when an orbiting planet passes in front of it.

The real interest is in worlds that orbit in a ‘habitable zone,’ not too near and not too far from their star, where liquid water, and possibly life, could exist.

The build-up to Kepler has prompted much discussion around the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. A couple of weeks back I joined ‘The Search for Life Beyond Earth‘ at the Royal Institution. Last night, via a live feed into Second Life from Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, I joined Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University on a ‘Quest for our Origins – The Search for Other Worlds and Life in The Universe,’ including a review of the latest techniques for remotely identifying earth-like planets.

The technical quality of this event was excellent, with live streaming video, multi-screen slides, and sound.

There is another event tonight at 10 a.m Pacific Time (6 pm UK), about the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. Just time for you to sign up; see you there (SL name Erasmus Magic).

Here are some photos from last night:

Scott Gaudi speaking from the Adler Planetarium into Second Life

Microlensing (slide from Scott Gaudi's presentation)

astronomy, Biography, History, space, Visits

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George?

February 28, 2009 Tim Jones 1 Comment

The sun is shining, the outside doors are open, and from the window of the Royal Society library I can see the tops of trees along the Mall.

Michael Lemonick is introduced by the RS's Felicity Henderson — Michael Lemonick is introduced by the Royal Society's Felicity Henderson (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)

Today, at this first in a season of lunchtime talks at the RS, I’m learning from Michael Lemonick some things I never knew about William and Caroline Herschel.

You can hear the audio and video (slides) yourself on the RS podcast page. Lemonick’s book ‘The Georgian Star’ is published by W.W.Norton.Co. In the meantime, this short commentary.

Michael Lemonick at the Royal Society (photo Sven Klinge) — Michael Lemonick at the Royal Society (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)

Sir William Herschel is best known as the discoverer of Uranus, a planet that did indeed in the days of William’s sponsor George III go by the popular name of George or ‘Georgium Sidus’ to be precise. But discovering light blue planets that spin at a funny angle is only part of William’s and his sister Caroline’s story.

Having moved to London from Germany, William Herschel the music teacher was enthralled by the stars he saw overhead whilst travelling between clients. Disappointed with the telescopes of the day, he started to build a whole series of his own that would culminate in a 4ft mirrored, 40 ft long giant sponsored by the King himself.

Joined by his sister in Bath, both Herschel’s were professional astronomers in the pay of the King, making Caroline the first ever professional female astronomer (he on £200pa, she as ‘assistant’ on £50pa).

Between them they discovered 3000 galaxies, and Caroline alone identified 8 comets. Uranus was mistakenly declared a comet on its discovery in 1781. Impressively, the Herschel star charts were still in practical use into the 1950s and 60s.

The Herschel’s were amongst the first astronomers to take an interest in the structure and evolution of the universe, rather than following the more practical motivations of the time – like enabling better navigation at sea. William tried to measure stellar distance by the parallax method, but failed due to equipment sensitivity. He was more successful at plotting out the shape of our galaxy – the Milky Way.

Herschel's plot of our galaxy (image WikiCommons)

William Herschel is in some ways the father of infra-red astronomy, having discovered the infra-red region of the spectrum from its warming effect on bottles of liquid; he called them ‘calorific rays’. As Lemonick pointed out, there seems some injustice in the naming of the James Webb space telescope due to launch in 2013, which will work predominantly in the IR spectral range (there is a William Herschel telescope already on the Canary Islands) .

And lastly – I never knew this. It was the common belief of the time, shared by Herschel, that all the planets were inhabited, with the sun just another planet – albeit a particularly bright golden one.

The logic extended to a belief that the luminescent surface of the sun was the visible top side of clouds and, charmingly, that sunspots were holes in the cloud through which – presumably with a powerful enough telescope – one could view ‘sun people’. Those were the days…..

Fun

Faces

February 26, 2009 Tim Jones 1 Comment

Richard Wiseman has just blogged on how some people see faces in inanimate objects. Check out the blog here, but first, what about this.

Richard would explain this in terms of psychology and interpretation. But it’s clear this gate guardian of my (then) fiances’s flat in San Francisco is keen-eyed, shod, armed – and DANGEROUS.

biology, events, Politics, science communication, space, Visits

Life, Talk To Me About Life

February 26, 2009 Tim Jones 2 Comments

Search for Life at the Royal Institution (Photo Tim Jones)

I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess.

So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening: a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars. A piece of Mars !!! That got a reaction from the audience – along with an intelligent question – “how do you know it’s from Mars?” As it happens, matching isotopes between the 1911 meteorite sample and material tested in-situ by the Viking lander on Mars leave little doubt about its origins. Whether it contains signs of former Martian life, as some claim, is another matter.

Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench. Photo: Tim Jones — Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench. (Photo Tim Jones)

The evening’s bottom line was that no extra-terrestrial life has yet been found; but there is particular hope for Mars and/or Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Dartnell structured his lecture from the Earth outwards: Earth, solar system, galaxy, etc. With ‘Earth’ came a definition of life, and what an excuse that was to show some clips from this amazing Harvard Biovisions simulation of how a cell works; fast forward to 4:00mins for the best bit with vesicles being dragged along by ‘motor proteins’.

Moving out from the Earth, we find that the combination of salinity, pH, and temperature on which earth’s more ‘extremophile’ lifeforms thrive: thermophiles, acidophiles, psycrophiles in the lingo, are the exact same as those prevailing on Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons. Further out in the galaxy, there are candidate stars with Jupiter-sized planets at the right sort of solar distance for Earth-like temperature conditions to exist at their supposed moons (HD28185 and Gliese581 were the examples given). So there’s hope. Information, metabolism, blueprint = Life.

Dartnell could see Martian material being brought back to earth for analysis at some point, but not for another ten years or so. In the meantime, the European ExoMars probe, due for launch in 2011, will drive around the surface, drilling holes and taking samples. It will also illuminate the landscape with ultraviolet light, organic molecules betraying themselves with their fluorescence.

No discussion on extra-terrestrial life is complete without some sort of Saganish ‘Billions’ illustration of how many stars – and presumably planets – there are in the universe: the implication being that we have a large sample size even if the odds are thin (which they aren’t necessarily). Lewis Dartnell showed it last night. Astronomer Stephen Warren showed it at his inaugural lecture at Imperial College tonight. This is the now iconic Hubble deep field image showing a section of sky equivalent to only 1/30th the moon’s diameter (Warren reckoned a 1mm square at the end of your arm – sounds about right). And most of the objects here are galaxies.

The insufficiently humbled can check out higher resolution versions at Hubblesite.org.

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

“Life, don’t talk to me about life….”

🙂

Postscript

As a quick aside. Before Lewis Dartnell kicked off, the organisers called for a show of hands of any first time visitors to the Royal Institution, and that turned out to be a fair chunk of audience; less than 50% I reckon, but a good number. With my SciCom hat on, that’s really encouraging – folk taking an interest in science and technology (and they didn’t look like the UFO squad either).

events, History of Science, News, science communication

Buon Compleanno Galileo – “Eppur si muove”

February 16, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

“And yet it moves” – supposedly the rider Galileo Galilei added to his confession to the Inquisition when questioned about the earth’s movement around the sun.

And clock hands move too – across timezones. That makes it comfortably still 15th February in my equal most favouritistical country, the USA – so, HAPPY BIRTHDAY GALILEO!

To tell you all about him: heeeeeeeere’s Carl…..

Biography, biology, events, evolution

Darwin’s Sacred Cause

February 13, 2009 Tim Jones 2 Comments

As any Darwin aficionado will tell you, as this celebratory week draws to a close, there is one biography of Charles Darwin that stands out from the crowd.

James Moore, Olivia Judson, and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Olivia Judson and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones) — Olivia Judson and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

James Moore & Olivia Judson at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones) — James Moore & Olivia Judson at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Not only is Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s 1991 ‘Darwin‘ comprehensive at 677 pages before the notes, it’s brick-like iconicity somehow speaks of closure, the last word, to any further debate about Darwin.

On a personal note, not withstanding Janet Browne’s Voyaging and Power of Place, which are both excellent reads, and show that Darwin was not in fact the last word, I have a particular affection for the Desmond and Moore biography. It’s simply one of the few books of length that I’ve ever found the right combination of time and inclination to read right through non-stop; it took about a week one Christmas holiday. And as with all good biographies of departed figures, that level of immersion leaves one genuinely saddened when the subject dies.

Adrian Desmond talks about Darwin's Sacred Cause (photo Tim Jones) — Adrian Desmond talks about Darwin's Sacred Cause (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

So it was with some interest last Monday, that I walked the whole 100 feet or so from my department at Imperial College to the Great Hall, to join a public conversation with Olivia Judson interviewing Adrian Desmond and James Moore. The theme – the authors’ NEW book, ‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause‘.

James Moore (photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

This post isn’t a book review. As much as I’d like to drop everything else and read it – I haven’t found the time yet! Thankfully, it looks nothing in length like (as Desmond reminded us at this session) ‘the brick’.

Olivia Judson (photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Rather – before it becomes completely old news, I’ll point you to this online lecture podcast from Imperial College that helpfully captures the whole session.

That said, as a brief preview, the focus of the conversation is around Darwin and race, and the argument that man (as opposed to finches and other animals) was the core motivation behind developments in the theory of natural selection and the writing of the Origin of Species. The Origin itself, we are told, was originally conceived to include extensive discussion on man and race. The authors further link Darwin’s feelings about race back to a family upbringing and tradition steeped in benevolence and an active opposition to slavery.

Enough said for now – maybe more when I’ve read the book!

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climate, environment, events, media, Politics, science communication

“Very Little Can Stop The Train” Sir David King On Media Reporting and MMR

February 11, 2009 Tim Jones 1 Comment

I’ve just returned from the annual British Humanist Association Darwin Day Lecture, this year delivered by Sir David King at a session chaired by Richard Dawkins.

Sir David King and Professor Richard Dawkins at the BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2009 (photo Tim Jones)

King is a former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, and now heads up a multi-disciplinary organisation tackling climate change – The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment- at Oxford University.

His talk entitled ‘Can British Science Rise to the New Challenges of the Twenty First Century?’ was very similar in content to one I watched him give at a PAWS event in November, and dealt less with British Science, and more with the complexities of tackling global climate change. There were some new angles, but I’d refer you to my previous blog HERE – inspired by Sir David’s earlier talk – rather than repeat myself. I believe a podcast of tonight’s event will appear on the BHA site in due course.

So perhaps, given the greater relevance to current debate over poor media reporting of science, and particularly that related to MMR (and the Goldacre/LBC radio encounter), you’d like to hear what Sir David volunteered tonight on that subject. It came up in response to a question from the floor about the Daily Mail. Sir David’s transposed response:

“We’ve now got a measles epidemic growing in this country, and the measles epidemic is the result directly of a very poor piece of science from John Wakefield, somehow being published in the Lancet – should never have been published – the database was far too small. And then gaining momentum in the media, and it’s not only the Daily Mail, John Humphreys was one of those pushing that… that the connection between MMR and autism raised real questions, and the take-up of the MMR vaccine began to fall very dramatically. And my prediction a few years ago was that we would approach something like a hundred deaths a year from, amongst children, from measles as a measles outbreak occured, inevitably.

If you do models and you drop below 80% uptake of the vaccine, the measles must come back. Of course the Daily Mail’s campaign was one of the instruments that got people very worried about that particular issue. So I think that was an example where the science was so clear. Let me tell you. There was a Danish study of all the children born in Denmark over ten years of whom 15% had not had the MMR vaccine, and 85% had. The statistical incidence of autism in the two groups was the same. Now just to be on the…on the…..when I say the same within statistical error. The nice thing was, from the point of view of those who were sceptics, that amongst the group who didn’t have the vaccine, there was a slight larger number- larger percentage – with autism. Now any parent worrying about the situation, just needs surely to be given that set of statistics, and yet the Daily Mail wouldn’t publish it when I went to them. What am I saying, [finding his words]well, it rarely gets their story right. There is…there is a sort of disbelief, but I’m afraid when a newspaper is running a campaign, there’s very little can stop the train”

To which Richard Dawkins, with a look of amazement and with apparent reference to the Daily Mail not printing the Denmark evidence, said – “I’m shocked”

events, evolution, News, religion

Secularist Of The Year

February 8, 2009 Tim Jones 1 Comment

The National Secular Society’s annual award for Secularist of the Year has been awarded jointly to Dr Evan Harris MP and Lord Avebury, for their success in getting blasphemy laws abolished. I joined the event this afternoon, which was also a celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th anniversary, at the Imperial Hotel in central London.

Dr Evan Harris MP and Lord Avebury, with Executive Director NSS Keith Porteous Wood and Richard Dawkins. (Photo Tim Jones)

The awards were made by Professor Richard Dawkins, and comprised a golden ammonite trophy and a cheque for £5000. Both winners declined to keep the money and donated it instead for next year’s prize.

Richard Dawkins inspects a 'golden ammonite' trophy before presenting it — Richard Dawkins inspects a 'golden ammonite' trophy as Keith Porteous-Wood looks on. (Photo Tim Jones)

A range of politicians, scientists, celebrities, and commentators of various types were in the audience: including from the scientific community Prof.Peter Atkins. Prof.Steve Jones, a previous year’s winner of the prize, sent best wishes. Science journalists included Simon Singh (Fermat’s Last Theorem), and Ben Goldacre (Bad Science). I also spotted former news presenter Anna Ford, and comedian Robin Ince.

Face in the crowd - Professor Peter Atkins. (Photo Tim Jones)

The abolition of the blasphemy law in 2008 was something of a coup for the NSS. Secularists have been fighting for years what has seemed like an unwinnable battle, and I sense the movement still can’t quite believe its success. While not used since the 1970s, Christian evangelicals had been pushing for a revival in the application of the law.

Lord Averbury with trophy (Photo Tim Jones)

A statement on the NSS website after the event said: ‘The ancient law was called the common law offence of blasphemous libel, and was widely thought to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Despite this, the Government had not been keen to abolish it, we believe because of fear of discomforting the Established Church. They see abolition as an attack on their privileged position and a possible first step towards disestablishment.’

It was a lively afternoon, where the company, food, and entertainment were all excellent. The formal entertainment took the form of a re-enactment of a debate held in Oxford in 1860 between Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog) and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (Soapy Sam). In ultimate irony, Wilberforce was (a little too convincingly) played by Terry Sanderson, the President of the NSS. Given the audience, the winner of the debate was never at issue.

NSS President, Terry Sanderson - convincing portrayal of Bishop Wilberforce (Photo Tim Jones)

wilberforcevanityfair1 — Bishop 'Soapy' Samuel Wilberforce

Joint winner Lord Avebury’s story is equally ironic. His grandfather, one of Darwin’s great supporters and a member of the ‘X Club‘ with Huxley, was not actually an atheist: he was too ‘conventional’, Avebury said. Indeed, incongruous with his grandson’s award today, his grandfather had been instrumental in having Darwin buried in Westminster Abbey.

Evan Harris, who one critic has described as humourless, was everything but, quipping in surprise as he received his golden ammonite trophy: “I was always taught at Hebrew School that the Ammonites were slain by the Israelites”.

Communicate Science