Tag Archives: press

Whatever Happened to the Nonsense Merchants?

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I was recently reminded that Michio Kaku exists.

In the past, Michio Kaku made important contributions to string theory, but he’s best known for what could charitably be called science popularization. He’s an excited promoter of physics and technology, but that excitement often strays into inaccuracy. Pretty much every time I’ve heard him mentioned, it’s for some wildly overenthusiastic statement about physics that, rather than just being simplified for a general audience, is generally flat-out wrong, conflating a bunch of different developments in a way that makes zero actual sense.

Michio Kaku isn’t unique in this. There’s a whole industry in making nonsense statements about science, overenthusiastic books and videos hinting at science fiction or mysticism. Deepak Chopra is a famous figure from deeper on this spectrum, known for peddling loosely quantum-flavored spirituality.

There was a time I was worried about this kind of thing. Super-popular misinformation is the bogeyman of the science popularizer, the worry that for every nice, careful explanation we give, someone else will give a hundred explanations that are way more exciting and total baloney. Somehow, though, I hear less and less from these people over time, and thus worry less and less about them.

Should I be worried more? I’m not sure.

Are these people less popular than they used to be? Is that why I’m hearing less about them? Possibly, but I’d guess not. Michio Kaku has eight hundred thousand twitter followers. Deepak Chopra has three million. On the other hand, the usually-careful Brian Greene has a million followers, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, where the worst I’ve heard is that he can be superficial, has fourteen million.

(But then in practice, I’m more likely to reflect on content with even smaller audiences.)

If misinformation is this popular, shouldn’t I be doing more to combat it?

Popular misinformation is also going to be popular among critics. For every big-time nonsense merchant, there are dozens of people breaking down and debunking every false statement they say, every piece of hype they release. Often, these people will end up saying the same kinds of things over and over again.

If I can be useful, I don’t think it will be by saying the same thing over and over again. I come up with new metaphors, new descriptions, new explanations. I clarify things others haven’t clarified, I clear up misinformation others haven’t addressed. That feels more useful to me, especially in a world where others are already countering the big problems. I write, and writing lasts, and can be used again and again when needed. I don’t need to keep up with the Kakus and Chopras of the world to do that.

(Which doesn’t imply I’ll never address anything one of those people says…but if I do, it will be because I have something new to say back!)

Simulated Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Simulated Friends

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Maybe you’ve recently seen a headline like this:

Actually, I’m more worried that you saw that headline before it was edited, when it looked like this:

If you’ve seen either headline, and haven’t read anything else about it, then please at least read this:

Physicists have not created an actual wormhole. They have simulated a wormhole on a quantum computer.

If you’re willing to read more, then read the rest of this post. There’s a more subtle story going on here, both about physics and about how we communicate it. And for the experts, hold on, because when I say the wormhole was a simulation I’m not making the same argument everyone else is.

[And for the mega-experts, there’s an edit later in the post where I soften that claim a bit.]

The headlines at the top of this post come from an article in Quanta Magazine. Quanta is a web-based magazine covering many fields of science. They’re read by the general public, but they aim for a higher standard than many science journalists, with stricter fact-checking and a goal of covering more challenging and obscure topics. Scientists in turn have tended to be quite happy with them: often, they cover things we feel are important but that the ordinary media isn’t able to cover. (I even wrote something for them recently.)

Last week, Quanta published an article about an experiment with Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. By arranging the quantum bits (qubits) in a particular way, they were able to observe behaviors one would expect out of a wormhole, a kind of tunnel linking different points in space and time. They published it with the second headline above, claiming that physicists had created a wormhole with a quantum computer and explaining how, using a theoretical picture called holography.

This pissed off a lot of physicists. After push-back, Quanta’s twitter account published this statement, and they added the word “Holographic” to the title.

Why were physicists pissed off?

It wasn’t because the Quanta article was wrong, per se. As far as I’m aware, all the technical claims they made are correct. Instead, it was about two things. One was the title, and the implication that physicists “really made a wormhole”. The other was the tone, the excited “breaking news” framing complete with a video comparing the experiment with the discovery of the Higgs boson. I’ll discuss each in turn:

The Title

Did physicists really create a wormhole, or did they simulate one? And why would that be at all confusing?

The story rests on a concept from the study of quantum gravity, called holography. Holography is the idea that in quantum gravity, certain gravitational systems like black holes are fully determined by what happens on a “boundary” of the system, like the event horizon of a black hole. It’s supposed to be a hologram in analogy to 3d images encoded in 2d surfaces, rather than like the hard-light constructions of science fiction.

The best-studied version of holography is something called AdS/CFT duality. AdS/CFT duality is a relationship between two different theories. One of them is a CFT, or “conformal field theory”, a type of particle physics theory with no gravity and no mass. (The first example of the duality used my favorite toy theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills.) The other one is a version of string theory in an AdS, or anti-de Sitter space, a version of space-time curved so that objects shrink as they move outward, approaching a boundary. (In the first example, this space-time had five dimensions curled up in a sphere and the rest in the anti-de Sitter shape.)

These two theories are conjectured to be “dual”. That means that, for anything that happens in one theory, you can give an alternate description using the other theory. We say the two theories “capture the same physics”, even though they appear very different: they have different numbers of dimensions of space, and only one has gravity in it.

Many physicists would claim that if two theories are dual, then they are both “equally real”. Even if one description is more familiar to us, both descriptions are equally valid. Many philosophers are skeptical, but honestly I think the physicists are right about this one. Philosophers try to figure out which things are real or not real, to make a list of real things and explain everything else as made up of those in some way. I think that whole project is misguided, that it’s clarifying how we happen to talk rather than the nature of reality. In my mind, dualities are some of the clearest evidence that this project doesn’t make any sense: two descriptions can look very different, but in a quite meaningful sense be totally indistinguishable.

That’s the sense in which Quanta and Google and the string theorists they’re collaborating with claim that physicists have created a wormhole. They haven’t created a wormhole in our own space-time, one that, were it bigger and more stable, we could travel through. It isn’t progress towards some future where we actually travel the galaxy with wormholes. Rather, they created some quantum system, and that system’s dual description is a wormhole. That’s a crucial point to remember: even if they created a wormhole, it isn’t a wormhole for you.

If that were the end of the story, this post would still be full of warnings, but the title would be a bit different. It was going to be “Dual Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Dual Friends”. But there’s a list of caveats. Most of them arguably don’t matter, but the last was what got me to change the word “dual” to “simulated”.

  1. The real world is not described by N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. N=4 super Yang-Mills theory was never intended to describe the real world. And while the real world may well be described by string theory, those strings are not curled up around a five-dimensional sphere with the remaining dimensions in anti-de Sitter space. We can’t create either theory in a lab either.
  2. The Standard Model probably has a quantum gravity dual too, see this cute post by Matt Strassler. But they still wouldn’t have been able to use that to make a holographic wormhole in a lab.
  3. Instead, they used a version of AdS/CFT with fewer dimensions. It relates a weird form of gravity in one space and one time dimension (called JT gravity), to a weird quantum mechanics theory called SYK, with an infinite number of quantum particles or qubits. This duality is a bit more conjectural than the original one, but still reasonably well-established.
  4. Quantum computers don’t have an infinite number of qubits, so they had to use a version with a finite number: seven, to be specific. They trimmed the model down so that it would still show the wormhole-dual behavior they wanted. At this point, you might say that they’re definitely just simulating the SYK theory, using a small number of qubits to simulate the infinite number. But I think they could argue that this system, too, has a quantum gravity dual. The dual would have to be even weirder than JT gravity, and even more conjectural, but the signs of wormhole-like behavior they observed (mostly through simulations on an ordinary computer, which is still better at this kind of thing than a quantum computer) could be seen as evidence that this limited theory has its own gravity partner, with its own “real dual” wormhole.
  5. But those seven qubits don’t just have the interactions they were programmed to have, the ones with the dual. They are physical objects in the real world, so they interact with all of the forces of the real world. That includes, though very weakly, the force of gravity.

And that’s where I think things break, and you have to call the experiment a simulation. You can argue, if you really want to, that the seven-qubit SYK theory has its own gravity dual, with its own wormhole. There are people who expect duality to be broad enough to include things like that.

But you can’t argue that the seven-qubit SYK theory, plus gravity, has its own gravity dual. Theories that already have gravity are not supposed to have gravity duals. If you pushed hard enough on any of the string theorists on that team, I’m pretty sure they’d admit that.

That is what decisively makes the experiment a simulation. It approximately behaves like a system with a dual wormhole, because you can approximately ignore gravity. But if you’re making some kind of philosophical claim, that you “really made a wormhole”, then “approximately” doesn’t cut it: if you don’t exactly have a system with a dual, then you don’t “really” have a dual wormhole: you’ve just simulated one.

Edit: mitchellporter in the comments points out something I didn’t know: that there are in fact proposals for gravity theories with gravity duals. They are in some sense even more conjectural than the series of caveats above, but at minimum my claim above, that any of the string theorists on the team would agree that the system’s gravity means it can’t have a dual, is probably false.

I think at this point, I’d soften my objection to the following:

Describing the system of qubits in the experiment as a limited version of the SYK theory is in one way or another an approximation. It approximates them as not having any interactions beyond those they programmed, it approximates them as not affected by gravity, and because it’s a quantum mechanical description it even approximates the speed of light as small. Those approximations don’t guarantee that the system doesn’t have a gravity dual. But in order for them to, then our reality, overall, would have to have a gravity dual. There would have to be a dual gravity interpretation of everything, not just the inside of Google’s quantum computer, and it would have to be exact, not just an approximation. Then the approximate SYK would be dual to an approximate wormhole, but that approximate wormhole would be an approximation of some “real” wormhole in the dual space-time.

That’s not impossible, as far as I can tell. But it piles conjecture upon conjecture upon conjecture, to the point that I don’t think anyone has explicitly committed to the whole tower of claims. If you want to believe that this experiment literally created a wormhole, you thus can, but keep in mind the largest asterisk known to mankind.

End edit.

If it weren’t for that caveat, then I would be happy to say that the physicists really created a wormhole. It would annoy some philosophers, but that’s a bonus.

But even if that were true, I wouldn’t say that in the title of the article.

The Title, Again

These days, people get news in two main ways.

Sometimes, people read full news articles. Reading that Quanta article is a good way to understand the background of the experiment, what was done and why people care about it. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think anything said there was wrong, and they cover essentially all of the caveats you’d care about (except for that last one 😉 ).

Sometimes, though, people just see headlines. They get forwarded on social media, observed at a glance passed between friends. If you’re popular enough, then many more people will see your headline than will actually read the article. For many people, their whole understanding of certain scientific fields is formed by these glancing impressions.

Because of that, if you’re popular and news-y enough, you have to be especially careful with what you put in your headlines, especially when it implies a cool science fiction story. People will almost inevitably see them out of context, and it will impact their view of where science is headed. In this case, the headline may have given many people the impression that we’re actually making progress towards travel via wormholes.

Some of my readers might think this is ridiculous, that no-one would believe something like that. But as a kid, I did. I remember reading popular articles about wormholes, describing how you’d need energy moving in a circle, and other articles about optical physicists finding ways to bend light and make it stand still. Putting two and two together, I assumed these ideas would one day merge, allowing us to travel to distant galaxies faster than light.

If I had seen Quanta’s headline at that age, I would have taken it as confirmation. I would have believed we were well on the way to making wormholes, step by step. Even the New York Times headline, “the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine”, wouldn’t have fazed me.

(I’m not sure even the extra word “holographic” would have. People don’t know what “holographic” means in this context, and while some of them would assume it meant “fake”, others would think about the many works of science fiction, like Star Trek, where holograms can interact physically with human beings.)

Quanta has a high-brow audience, many of whom wouldn’t make this mistake. Nevertheless, I think Quanta is popular enough, and respectable enough, that they should have done better here.

At minimum, they could have used the word “simulated”. Even if they go on to argue in the article that the wormhole is real, and not just a simulation, the word in the title does no real harm. It would be a lie, but a beneficial “lie to children”, the basic stock-in-trade of science communication. I think they could have defended it to the string theorists they interviewed on those grounds.

The Tone

Honestly, I don’t think people would have been nearly so pissed off were it not for the tone of the article. There are a lot of physics bloggers who view themselves as serious-minded people, opposed to hype and publicity stunts. They view the research program aimed at simulating quantum gravity on a quantum computer as just an attempt to link a dying and un-rigorous research topic to an over-hyped and over-funded one, pompous storytelling aimed at promoting the careers of people who are already extremely successful.

These people tend to view Quanta favorably, because it covers serious-minded topics in a thorough way. And so many of them likely felt betrayed, seeing this Quanta article as a massive failure of that serious-minded-ness, falling for or even endorsing the hypiest of hype.

To those people, I’d like to politely suggest you get over yourselves.

Quanta’s goal is to cover things accurately, to represent all the facts in a way people can understand. But “how exciting something is” is not a fact.

Excitement is subjective. Just because most of the things Quanta finds exciting you also find exciting, does not mean that Quanta will find the things you find unexciting unexciting. Quanta is not on “your side” in some war against your personal notion of unexciting science, and you should never have expected it to be.

In fact, Quanta tends to find things exciting, in general. They were more excited than I was about the amplituhedron, and I’m an amplitudeologist. Part of what makes them consistently excited about the serious-minded things you appreciate them for is that they listen to scientists and get excited about the things they’re excited about. That is going to include, inevitably, things those scientists are excited about for what you think are dumb groupthinky hype reasons.

I think the way Quanta titled the piece was unfortunate, and probably did real damage. I think the philosophical claim behind the title is wrong, though for subtle and weird enough reasons that I don’t really fault anybody for ignoring them. But I don’t think the tone they took was a failure of journalistic integrity or research or anything like that. It was a matter of taste. It’s not my taste, it’s probably not yours, but we shouldn’t have expected Quanta to share our tastes in absolutely everything. That’s just not how taste works.

This Week at Quanta Magazine

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I’ve got an article in Quanta Magazine this week, about a program called FORM.

Quanta has come up a number of times on this blog, they’re a science news outlet set up by the Simons Foundation. Their goal is to enhance the public understanding of science and mathematics. They cover topics other outlets might find too challenging, and they cover the topics others cover with more depth. Most people I know who’ve worked with them have been impressed by their thoroughness: they take fact-checking to a level I haven’t seen with other science journalists. If you’re doing a certain kind of mathematical work, then you hope that Quanta decides to cover it.

A while back, as I was chatting with one of their journalists, I had a startling realization: if I want Quanta to cover something, I can send them a tip, and if they’re interested they’ll write about it. That realization resulted in the article I talked about here. Chatting with the journalist interviewing me for that article, though, I learned something if anything even more startling: if I want Quanta to cover something, and I want to write about it, I can pitch the article to Quanta, and if they’re interested they’ll pay me to write about it.

Around the same time, I happened to talk to a few people in my field, who had a problem they thought Quanta should cover. A software, called FORM, was used in all the most serious collider physics calculations. Despite that, the software wasn’t being supported: its future was unclear. You can read the article to learn more.

One thing I didn’t mention in that article: I hadn’t used FORM before I started writing it. I don’t do those “most serious collider physics calculations”, so I’d never bothered to learn FORM. I mostly use Mathematica, a common choice among physicists who want something easy to learn, even if it’s not the strongest option for many things.

(By the way, it was surprisingly hard to find quotes about FORM that didn’t compare it specifically to Mathematica. In the end I think I included one, but believe me, there could have been a lot more.)

Now, I wonder if I should have been using FORM all along. Many times I’ve pushed to the limits of what Mathematica could comfortable handle, the limits of what my computer’s memory could hold, equations long enough that just expanding them out took complicated work-arounds. If I had learned FORM, maybe I would have breezed through those calculations, and pushed even further.

I’d love it if this article gets FORM more attention, and more support. But also, I’d love it if it gives a window on the nuts and bolts of hard-core particle physics: the things people have to do to turn those T-shirt equations into predictions for actual colliders. It’s a world in between physics and computer science and mathematics, a big part of the infrastructure of how we know what we know that, precisely because it’s infrastructure, often ends up falling through the cracks.

Edit: For researchers interested in learning more about FORM, the workshop I mentioned at the end of the article is now online, with registrations open.

Fields and Scale

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I am a theoretical particle physicist, and every morning I check the arXiv.

arXiv.org is a type of website called a preprint server. It’s where we post papers before they are submitted to (and printed by) a journal. In practice, everything in our field shows up on arXiv, publicly accessible, before it appears anywhere else. There’s no peer review process on arXiv, the journals still handle that, but in our field peer review doesn’t often notice substantive errors. So in practice, we almost never read the journals: we just check arXiv.

And so every day, I check the arXiv. I go to the section on my sub-field, and I click on a link that lists all of the papers that were new that day. I skim the titles, and if I see an interesting paper I’ll read the abstract, and maybe download the full thing. Checking as I’m writing this, there were ten papers posted in my field, and another twenty “cross-lists” were posted in other fields but additionally classified in mine.

Other fields use arXiv: mathematicians and computer scientists and even economists use it in roughly the same way physicists do. For biology and medicine, though, there are different, newer sites: bioRxiv and medRxiv.

One thing you may notice is the different capitalization. When physicists write arXiv, the “X” is capitalized. In the logo, it looks like a Greek letter chi, thus saying “archive”. The biologists and medical researchers capitalize the R instead. The logo still has an X that looks like a chi, but positioned with the R it looks like the Rx of medical prescriptions.

Something I noticed, but you might not, was the lack of a handy link to see new papers. You can search medRxiv and bioRxiv, and filter by date. But there’s no link that directly takes you to the newest papers. That suggests that biologists aren’t using bioRxiv like we use arXiv, and checking the new papers every day.

I was curious if this had to do with the scale of the field. I have the impression that physics and mathematics are smaller fields than biology, and that much less physics and mathematics research goes on than medical research. Certainly, theoretical particle physics is a small field. So I might have expected arXiv to be smaller than bioRxiv and medRxiv, and I certainly would expect fewer papers in my sub-field than papers in a medium-sized subfield of biology.

On the other hand, arXiv in my field is universal. In biology, bioRxiv and medRxiv are still quite controversial. More and more people are using them, but not every journal accepts papers posted to a preprint server. Many people still don’t use these services. So I might have expected bioRxiv and medRxiv to be smaller.

Checking now, neither answer is quite right. I looked between November 1 and November 2, and asked each site how many papers were uploaded between those dates. arXiv had the most, 604 papers. bioRxiv had roughly half that many, 348. medRxiv had 97.

arXiv represents multiple fields, bioRxiv is “just” biology. Specializing, on that day arXiv had 235 physics papers, 135 mathematics papers, and 250 computer science papers. So each individual field has fewer papers than biology in this period.

Specializing even further, I can look at a subfield. My subfield, which is fairly small, had 20 papers between those dates. Cell biology, which I would expect to be quite a big subfield, had 33.

Overall, the numbers were weirdly comparable, with medRxiv unexpectedly small compared to both arXiv and bioRxiv. I’m not sure whether there are more biologists than physicists, but I’m pretty sure there should be more cell biologists than theoretical particle physicists. This suggests that many still aren’t using bioRxiv. It makes me wonder: will bioRxiv grow dramatically in future? Are the people running it ready for if it does?

Is Outreach for Everyone?

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Betteridge’s law applies here: the answer is “no”. It’s a subtle “no”, though.

As a scientist, you will always need to be able to communicate your work. Most of the time you can get away with papers and talks aimed at your peers. But the longer you mean to stick around, the more often you will have to justify yourself to others: to departments, to universities, and to grant agencies. A scientist cannot survive on scientific ability alone: to get jobs, to get funding, to survive, you need to be able to promote yourself, at least a little.

Self-promotion isn’t outreach, though. Talking to the public, or to journalists, is a different skill from talking to other academics or writing grants. And it’s entirely possible to go through an entire scientific career without exercising that skill.

That’s a reassuring message for some. I’ve met people for whom science is a refuge from the mess of human interaction, people horrified by the thought of fame or even being mentioned in a newspaper. When I meet these people, they sometimes seem to worry that I’m silently judging them, thinking that they’re ignoring their responsibilities by avoiding outreach. They think this in part because the field seems to be going in that direction. Grants that used to focus just on science have added outreach as a requirement, demanding that each application come with a plan for some outreach project.

I can’t guarantee that more grants won’t add outreach requirements. But I can say at least that I’m on your side here: I don’t think you should have to do outreach if you don’t want to. I don’t think you have to, just yet. And I think if grant agencies are sensible, they’ll find a way to encourage outreach without making it mandatory.

I think that overall, collectively, we have a responsibility to do outreach. Beyond the old arguments about justifying ourselves to taxpayers, we also just ought to be open about what we do. In a world where people are actively curious about us, we ought to encourage and nurture that curiosity. I don’t think this is unique to science, I think it’s something every industry, every hobby, and every community should foster. But in each case, I think that communication should be done by people who want to do it, not forced on every member.

I also think that, potentially, anyone can do outreach. Outreach can take different forms for different people, anything from speaking to high school students to talking to journalists to writing answers for Stack Exchange. I don’t think anyone should feel afraid of outreach because they think they won’t be good enough. Chances are, you know something other people don’t: I guarantee if you want to, you will have something worth saying.

Truth Doesn’t Have to Break the (Word) Budget

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Imagine you saw this headline:

Scientists Say They’ve Found the Missing 40 Percent of the Universe’s Matter

It probably sounds like they’re talking about dark matter, right? And if scientists found dark matter, that could be a huge discovery: figuring out what dark matter is made of is one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in physics. Still, maybe that 40% number makes you a bit suspicious…

Now, read this headline instead:

Astronomers Have Finally Found Most of The Universe’s Missing Visible Matter

Visible matter! Ah, what a difference a single word makes!

These are two articles, the first from this year and the second from 2017, talking about the same thing. Leave out dark matter and dark energy, and the rest of the universe is made of ordinary protons, neutrons, and electrons. We sometimes call that “visible matter”, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to spot. Much of it lingers in threads of gas and dust between galaxies, making it difficult to detect. These two articles are about astronomers who managed to detect this matter in different ways. But while the articles cover the same sort of matter, one headline is a lot more misleading.

Now, I know science writing is hard work. You can’t avoid misleading your readers, if only a little, because you can never include every detail. Introduce too many new words and you’ll use up your “vocabulary budget” and lose your audience. I also know that headlines get tweaked by editors at the last minute to maximize “clicks”, and that news that doesn’t get enough “clicks” dies out, replaced by news that does.

But that second headline? It’s shorter than the first. They were able to fit that crucial word “visible” in, without breaking the budget. And while I don’t have the data, I doubt the first headline was that much more viral. They could have afforded to get this right, if they wanted to.

Read each article further, and you see the same pattern. The 2020 article does mention visible matter in the first sentence at least, so they don’t screw that one up completely. But another important detail never gets mentioned.

See, you might be wondering, if one of these articles is from 2017 and the other is from 2020, how are they talking about the same thing? If astronomers found this matter already in 2017, how did they find it again in 2020?

There’s a key detail that the 2017 article mentions and the 2020 article leaves out. Here’s a quote from the 2017 article, emphasis mine:

We now have our first solid piece of evidence that this matter has been hiding in the delicate threads of cosmic webbing bridging neighbouring galaxies, right where the models predicted.

This “missing” matter was expected to exist, was predicted by models to exist. It just hadn’t been observed yet. In 2017, astronomers detected some of this matter indirectly, through its effect on the Cosmic Microwave Background. In 2020, they found it more directly, through X-rays shot out from the gases themselves.

Once again, the difference is just a short phrase. By saying “right where the models predicted”, the 2017 article clears up an important point, that this matter wasn’t a surprise. And all it took was five words.

These little words and phrases make a big difference. If you’re writing about science, you will always face misunderstandings. But if you’re careful and clever, you can clear up the most obvious ones. With just a few well-chosen words, you can have a much better piece.

Pseudonymity Matters. I Stand With Slate Star Codex.

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Slate Star Codex is one of the best blogs on the net. Written under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, the blog covers a wide variety of topics with a level of curiosity and humility that the rest of us bloggers can only aspire to.

Recently, this has all been jeopardized. A reporter at the New York Times, writing an otherwise positive article, told Scott he was going to reveal his real name publicly. In a last-ditch effort to stop this, Scott deleted his blog.

I trust Scott. When he says that revealing his identity would endanger his psychiatric practice, not to mention the safety of friends and loved ones, I believe him. What’s more, I think working under a pseudonym makes him a better blogger: some of his best insights have come from talking to people who don’t think of him as “the Slate Star Codex guy”.

I don’t know why the Times thinks revealing Scott’s name is a good idea. I do know that there are people out there who view anyone under a pseudonym with suspicion. Compared to Scott, my pseudonym is paper-thin: it’s very easy to find who I am. Still, I have met people who are irked just by that, by the bare fact that I don’t print my real name on this blog.

I think this might be a generational thing. My generation grew up alongside the internet. We’re used to the idea that very little is truly private, that anything made public somewhere risks becoming public everywhere. In that world, writing under a pseudonym is like putting curtains on a house. It doesn’t make us unaccountable: if you break the law behind your curtains the police can get a warrant, similarly Scott’s pseudonym wouldn’t stop a lawyer from tracking him down. All it is, is a filter: a way to have a life of our own, shielded just a little from the whirlwind of the web.

I know there are journalists who follow this blog. If you have contacts in the Times tech section, or know someone who does, please reach out. I want to hope that someone there is misunderstanding the situation, that when things are fully explained they will back down. We have to try.

This Week, at Scientific American

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I’ve written an article for Scientific American! It went up online this week, the print versions go out on the 25th. The online version is titled “Loopy Particle Math”, the print one is “The Particle Code”, but they’re the same article.

For those who don’t subscribe to Scientific American, sorry about the paywall!

“The Particle Code” covers what will be familiar material to regulars on this blog. I introduce Feynman diagrams, and talk about the “amplitudeologists” who try to find ways around them. I focus on my corner of the amplitudes field, how the work of Goncharov, Spradlin, Vergu, and Volovich introduced us to “symbology”, a set of tricks for taking apart more complicated integrals (or “periods”) into simple logarithmic building blocks. I talk about how my collaborators and I use symbology, using these building blocks to compute amplitudes that would have been impossible with other techniques. Finally, I talk about the frontier of the field, the still-mysterious “elliptic polylogarithms” that are becoming increasingly well-understood.

(I don’t talk about the even more mysterious “Calabi-Yau polylogarithms“…another time for those!)

Working with Scientific American was a fun experience. I got to see how the professionals do things. They got me to clarify and explain, pointing out terms I needed to define and places I should pause to summarize. They took my rough gel-pen drawings and turned them into polished graphics. While I’m still a little miffed about them removing all the contractions, overall I learned a lot, and I think they did a great job of bringing the article to the printed page.

When You Shouldn’t Listen to a Distinguished but Elderly Scientist

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Of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s sayings, the most famous is “Clarke’s third law”, that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Almost as famous, though, is his first law:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Recently Michael Atiyah, an extremely distinguished but also rather elderly mathematician, claimed that something was possible: specifically, he claimed it was possible that he had proved the Riemann hypothesis, one of the longest-standing and most difficult puzzles in mathematics. I won’t go into the details here, but people are, well, skeptical.

This post isn’t really about Atiyah. I’m not close enough to that situation to comment. Instead, it’s about a more general problem.

See, the public seems to mostly agree with Clarke’s law. They trust distinguished, elderly scientists, at least when they’re saying something optimistic. Other scientists know better. We know that scientists are human, that humans age…and that sometimes scientific minds don’t age gracefully.

Some of the time, that means Alzheimer’s, or another form of dementia. Other times, it’s nothing so extreme, just a mind slowing down with age, opinions calcifying and logic getting just a bit more fuzzy.

And the thing is, watching from the sidelines, you aren’t going to know the details. Other scientists in the field will, but this kind of thing is almost never discussed with the wider public. Even here, though specific physicists come to mind as I write this, I’m not going to name them. It feels rude, to point out that kind of all-too-human weakness in someone who accomplished so much. But I think it’s important for the public to keep in mind that these people exist. When an elderly Nobelist claims to have solved a problem that baffles mainstream science, the news won’t tell you they’re mentally ill. All you can do is keep your eyes open, and watch for warning signs:

Be wary of scientists who isolate themselves. Scientists who still actively collaborate and mentor almost never have this kind of problem. There’s a nasty feedback loop when those contacts start to diminish. Being regularly challenged is crucial to test scientific ideas, but it’s also important for mental health, especially in the elderly. As a scientist thinks less clearly, they won’t be able to keep up with their collaborators as much, worsening the situation.

Similarly, beware those famous enough to surround themselves with yes-men. With Nobel prizewinners in particular, many of the worst cases involve someone treated with so much reverence that they forget to question their own ideas. This is especially risky when commenting on an unfamiliar field: often, the Nobelist’s contacts in the new field have a vested interest in holding on to their big-name support, and ignoring signs of mental illness.

Finally, as always, bigger claims require better evidence. If everything someone works on is supposed to revolutionize science as we know it, then likely none of it will. The signs that indicate crackpots apply here as well: heavily invoking historical scientists, emphasis on notation over content, a lack of engagement with the existing literature. Be especially wary if the argument seems easy, deep problems are rarely so simple to solve.

Keep this in mind, and the next time a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, don’t trust them blindly. Ultimately, we’re still humans beings. We don’t last forever.

Journalists Need to Adapt to Preprints, Not Ignore Them

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Nature has an article making the rounds this week, decrying the dangers of preprints.

On the surface, this is a bit like an article by foxes decrying the dangers of henhouses. There’s a pretty big conflict of interest when a journal like Nature, that makes huge amounts of money out of research scientists would be happy to publish for free, gets snippy about scientists sharing their work elsewhere. I was expecting an article about how “important” the peer review process is, how we can’t just “let anyone” publish, and the like.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. The article is about a real challenge, the weakening of journalistic embargoes. While this is still a problem I think journalists can think their way around, it’s a bit subtler than the usual argument.

For the record, peer review is usually presented as much more important than it actually is. When a scientific article gets submitted to a journal, it gets sent to two or three experts in the field for comment. In the best cases, these experts read the paper carefully and send criticism back. They don’t replicate the experiments, they don’t even (except for a few heroic souls) reproduce the calculations. That kind of careful reading is important, but it’s hardly unique: it’s something scientists do on their own when they want to build off of someone else’s paper, and it’s what good journalists get when they send a paper to experts for comments before writing an article. If peer review in a journal is important, it’s to ensure that this careful reading happens at least once, a sort of minimal evidence that the paper is good enough to appear on a scientist’s CV.

The Nature article points out that peer review serves another purpose, specifically one of delay. While a journal is preparing to publish an article they can send it out to journalists, after making them sign an agreement (an embargo) that they won’t tell the public until the journal publishes. This gives the journalists a bit of lead time, so the more responsible ones can research and fact-check before publishing.

Open-access preprints cut out the lead time. If the paper just appears online with no warning and no embargoes, journalists can write about it immediately. The unethical journalists can skip fact-checking and publish first, and the ethical ones have to follow soon after, or risk publishing “old news”. Nobody gets the time to properly vet, or understand, a new paper.

There’s a simple solution I’ve seen from a few folks on Twitter: “Don’t be an unethical journalist!” That doesn’t actually solve the problem though. The question is, if you’re an ethical journalist, but other people are unethical journalists, what do you do?

Apparently, what some ethical journalists do is to carry on as if preprints didn’t exist. The Nature article describes journalists who, after a preprint has been covered extensively by others, wait until a journal publishes it and then cover it as if nothing had happened. The article frames this as virtuous, but doomed: journalists sticking to their ethics even if it means publishing “old news”.

To be 100% clear here, this is not virtuous. If you present a paper’s publication in a journal as news, when it was already released as a preprint, you are actively misleading the public. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten messages from readers, confused because they saw a scientific result covered again months later and thought it was new. It leads to a sort of mental “double-counting”, where the public assumes that the scientific result was found twice, and therefore that it’s more solid. Unless the publication itself is unexpected (something that wasn’t expected to pass peer review, or something controversial like Mochizuki’s proof of the ABC conjecture) mere publication in a journal of an already-public result is not news.

What science journalists need to do here is to step back, and think about how their colleagues cover stories. Current events these days don’t have embargoes, they aren’t fed through carefully managed press releases. There’s a flurry of initial coverage, and it gets things wrong and misses details and misleads people, because science isn’t the only field that’s complicated, real life is complicated. Journalists have adapted to this schedule, mostly, by specializing. Some journalists and news outlets cover breaking news as it happens, others cover it later with more in-depth analysis. Crucially, the latter journalists don’t present the topic as new. They write explicitly in the light of previous news, as a response to existing discussion. That way, the public isn’t misled, and their existing misunderstandings can be corrected.

The Nature article brings up public health, and other topics where misunderstandings can do lasting damage, as areas where embargoes are useful. While I agree, I would hope many of these areas would figure out embargoes on their own. My field certainly does: the big results of scientific collaborations aren’t just put online as preprints, they’re released only after the collaboration sets up its own journalistic embargoes, and prepares its own press releases. In a world of preprints, this sort of practice needs to happen for important controversial public health and environmental results as well. Unethical scientists might still release too fast, to keep journalists from fact-checking, but they could do that anyway, without preprints. You don’t need a preprint to call a journalist on the phone and claim you cured cancer.

As open-access preprints become the norm, journalists will have to adapt. I’m confident they will be able to, but only if they stop treating science journalism as unique, and start treating it as news. Science journalism isn’t teaching, you’re not just passing down facts someone else has vetted. You’re asking the same questions as any other journalist: who did what? And what really happened? If you can do that, preprints shouldn’t be scary.