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New binary black-hole mergers
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about how quickly the discovery of black-hole mergers through gravitational waves was becoming run o’ the mill.
All of the gravitational wave detection announcements before this were accompanied by an embargo, lots of hype building up, press releases from various groups associated with the data analysis, and of course reporters scrambling under the radar to get their stories ready. There was none of that this time. This time, the LIGO scientific collaboration published their press release with links to the raw data and the preprint paper (submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters) on November 15. I found out about it when I stumbled upon a tweet from Sean Carroll.
This week, the LIGO team may just have one-upped itself. On December 1, Shane Larson, a physicist at Northwestern University, Chicago, and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, wrote on his blog that the LIGO and Virgo teams were releasing a joint catalogue of their gravitational-wave detections till date. And in that catalog, Larson drew readers’ attention to the presence of not one, not two, but four new black-hole merger events.
He continued:
What stands out the most in the new LIGO catalog? We are still letting the implications settle in, but the most important thing the new events do is it makes our estimate of the population of black holes in the Universe more accurate, and we’ve started to examine those implications in a new study that is being released in tandem with this announcement.
This study is available here.
To (shamelessly) quote myself once more:
In the near future, the detectors – LIGO, Virgo, etc. – are going to be gathering data in the background of our lives, like just another telescope doing its job. The detections are going to stop being a big deal: we know LIGO works the way it should. Fortunately for it, some of its more spectacular detections … were also made early in its life. What we can all look forward to now is reports of first-order derivatives from LIGO data.
On the New Yorker's 'EDS doctor' story
A fascinating tale in the New Yorker: Michael Holick, a medical researcher and doctor at the Boston University, Massachusetts, has been finding that many American families that have had their babies taken away from them because State Services suspected abuse are in fact up against a little-known disease, called hypermobile Ehler-Danlos syndrome (EDS). The story typically goes like: family finds bruises on baby, rushes to doctor, doctor finds other bruises all together consistent with abuse, notifies state, State Services separates family and baby with emergency order, baby given to custody of guardian, case goes to trial.
Enter Holick, who, with his hypermobile EDS diagnosis, gives stranded families a new way to deal with an already difficult problem. But it’s not so straightforward. For one, Holick’s ideas are not supported by the scientific literature (nor by people known to have EDS, although this is not directly written in the story). For another, he diagnoses the babies at a rate inconsistent with the affliction’s known prevalence. For a third, he diagnoses babies of hypermobile EDS without seeing them first. In fact, as with most New Yorker stories, a summary is only going to diminish the journey of discovery necessary to understand the story in its fullness, so please go ahead and read it.
In the meantime – some of my notes after reading:
1. The New Yorker story seems to be missing details of whether the babies continued to bruise after they are returned to their parents’ custody. The story begins and ends with fractures that occur before Holick enters the families’ lives. It would be interesting to know if physical injuries, although not necessarily at the level of fracture, continued after as well.
2. It sounds to me like Holick’s research into hypermobile EDS is funded by families he has freed from the blame of child abuse using the explanation of hypermobile EDS. This is a severe conflict of interest. If this cycle was broken, and the donations from families redirected to a fund administered by scientists acting on the basis of empirical evidence, it would be interesting to see if Holick can convert some of his insights into usable data. He could also be disabused of his belief that the burden of proof is on others, not on him, when he has little proof himself (“He said that those who find fault with his views should … do studies of their own”).
2. Holick says that, before him, the conviction rate in child abuse cases used to be 100%, and after him, the rate dropped to about 90%. So in 10% of those cases, did the prosecution win the case despite Holick’s expert testimony? It would be interesting to find out more about these cases – especially if Holick was convinced that the babies had hypermobile EDS while the prosecution was able to prove that they didn’t, and that the babies had actually been abused. It could also highlight whether Holick holds an EDS conclusion before he has proof.
3. At one point in the story, a judge seems really impressed by Holick’s “172-page résumé”. I don’t know if the “résumé” here refers to Holick’s alternative explanation, in document form, of how a baby in question could have been injured or to his professional record. If it’s the latter, then it’s weird that it is 172 pages long: a résumé by definition is brief. The longer version is the curriculum vitae; although most people regularly use the two labels interchangeably, the New Yorker is also famous for its pedantry. So it’s reasonable to assume the judge was impressed by his alternative explanation – but I think the magazine should still clarify. Otherwise, it sounds like the judge is impressed by his CV and that’s never a good thing.
4. The aftermath of the 2014 interaction between Holick and Robert Sege is remarkable. To me, Holick’s reaction (that the hospital he works at expects him to “cease and desist”) gives away his insecurity about his position and his beliefs. I don’t think he’d have reacted this way if he’d had empirical evidence to back him up. The interaction also exemplifies the basis of his opponents’ vehemence: by not submitting to the traditional methods of medical enquiry, Holick is keeping the door open for potential medical malpractice, though it may not be deliberate. More importantly, if he gets just one diagnosis wrong in a trial that ends up compromised for it, things can get really bad really fastfor the baby.
A culture of communication
Srinavasa Chakravarthy, presumably a mathematician going by a reference in his post, penned an open letter for TH Read about how Indian scientists
… rarely follow the scientific work of [our] Indian colleagues, perhaps because such attention has no practical and material consequence. Thus, we constantly face what is popularly called a double whammy. As it is, the Western academics care two hoots about our work and, what’s more, we are also written off by our beloved compatriots.
In all, Chakravarthy’s is an impassioned plea to his peers to fumble in the dark the way they were told scientists generally do, and forge their own paths instead of kowtowing after their Western counterparts. There are many dimensions to this entreaty. For example, @polybiotique, @Vasishtasetty and @leslee_lazar – all students of science – engaged in a discussion on Twitterabout whether Chakravarthy was disingenuous in not citing the many examples of scientists and science journalists who are, in fact, being Indianand original in their work.
As a science writer and editor myself, I found this part of his plea to be a bit annoying:
The somewhat dogmatic mindset has crept beyond the walls of our academic campuses also. How often do we see the local media covering the scientific work of an Indian colleague? I once saw a piece of work on computational neuroscience from a United States university reported in a local Chennai paper. It is a standard piece of work. Many of us in India have more interesting things to say. Why isn’t it talked about as much? I asked. I was told that the media doesn’t like to cover Indian science, as much as it does science from abroad, simply because the readers don’t like to read about it.
It is odd that Chakravarthy chose to lead with the example of a “local Chennai paper” when he could have chosen the national Chennai paper, The Hindu, and its famous science section. Indeed, analogous to the Twitter discussion, science journalists I have spoken to often feel a twinge of pain when their work isn’t being read or acknowledged. Part of the problem is that consumers of science journalism – just as with the scientists in Chakravarthy’s piece – stick to their usual sources and passively, though not inexcusably, miss instances of it that are good, Indian and original. So on this count, I would say Chakravarthy comes off as disingenuous for not expanding his science-writing menu.
At the same time, his choice of a “local Chennai paper” is instructive. While change must begin somewhere, it is at the level of the local paper that it will be most impactful. (Let’s think in terms of voltage: the potential difference between those writing about science and those reading about it is higher the more local you take it.) However, to expect local papers to change first would be silly. In the realm of incremental changes, a large problem is solved first where it is easiest to solve, so national newsrooms are leading the way.
At this point, in order for me to not seem disingenuous to my peers, I should mention that half the reason any Indian newsroom with a science section struggles to cover science is the Indian scientist. Just as much as you need an earnest science journalist to reach out to a scientist, you need an earnest scientist to respond meaningfully and in time. Many of my writers regularly receive the following response from scientists they’ve reached out to: “All the information is there in the paper” – betraying a severe lack of understanding of what science communication is for and/or about. My personal favourite is a researcher who responded (on a story about amorphous superconductors) after two months and then complained that his quote wasn’t used.
On the other hand, it is easy to write about Western science because scientists in the West are so damned prompt. The cost of writing a science story is much lower if, on average, I have to work with Western scientists. And if we’re wondering whether this problem reflects or contributes to a hierarchy, the answer is ‘yes’ both ways.
Let’s call it the cost tree: the lowest branches are populated by Western scientists, and the point is to bring Indians higher up to lower ground. Those Indian scientists already there include those educated in the West, those exposed to – and who endorse – the culture of communication, or both. For example, it is very ease to draw a quote from a scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru but very difficult to get one from a researcher at BITS Pilani. It also matters what the scientist thinks of the journalist. A researcher will sooner speak to someone from The Hindu than to someone writing for The Wire (although this is a strictly personal opinion). More broadly, a scientist is likelier to speak to a more engaged journalist than to a less engaged one, and the former cost more to commission and are typically approached for longer stories. TL;DR: There needs to be empathy on both sides for this to work.
One quick-fix for this problem is to eliminate a simple barrier: that of the unknown-unknowns. For scientists who are unaware of good, Indian and original science writing, a common reference list can be curated by scientists and media-persons alike, and added to with time. For science journalists, a similar list of Indian scientists who are available to speak to, and who have been known to respond meaningfully and in time can be curated.
Recently, an effort was made over Twitter to curate a list of scientists for science journalists. Thanks to my poor record-keeping, I’m not able to find the resulting spreadsheet right now – although here’s a Twitter list compiled by Pranesh Prakash that you can sign up to. Now, establishments like the Times of India, which regularly present bad science, and Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle, etc., which do so less frequently, have one less excuse to publish unverified/unqualified reports.
IMO, this is the easier part: English-speaking science journalists can be expected to congregate on Twitter; those who aren’t on the platform still have colleagues or peers who are. If you work for a digital newsroom, you’re expected to have a functional Twitter handle. However, how many scientists – who aren’t required to be on Twitter – are? More importantly, is there one forum where Indian scientists congregate? I’m all ears.
Featured image credit: Pavan Trikutam/Unsplash.
NatGeo clickbait
A National Geographic article published on November 6 carried a surprising headline:
Earth has two extra, hidden ‘moons’
The lede followed through:
Earth’s moon may not be alone. After more than half a century of speculation and controversy, Hungarian astronomers and physicists say they have finally confirmed the existence of two Earth-orbiting “moons” entirely made of dust.
This sounds strange because there has been little else in the news about dust-moons in the last few years. No major discoveries are made in one instant, and can often be anticipated many years in advance through discussions among scientists. However, the rest of the article put paid to the doubt.
The ‘dusty moons’ National Geographic alludes to are in fact the Kordylewski dust clouds. Late last month, a group of Hungarian astronomers confirmed the presence of these clouds, located in two different directions at about the same distance Moon is from Earth.
Astronomers have been debating the existence of these clouds since the 1950s. In that decade, an astronomer named Kazimierz Kordylewski climbed a mountain and photographed parts of the night sky where these clouds had been predicted by other astronomers before him to exist. The dust clouds have since been called Kordylewski clouds in his honour.
However, confirming their presence has taken so long even though they’re so close to Earth because of their brightness – or lack of it. They are too faint to spot because the stars in their background far outshine them, even at this distance. But they aren’t completely obscured either: they reflect sunlight in feeble amounts, giving themselves away to the persistent observer.
Although Kazimierz Kordylewski found the dust clouds this way, the Hungarian group was more sophisticated. According to their two published papers (here and here), they took advantage of dust’s ability to polarise light. Waves of light are in fact waves of electric and magnetic fields undulating through space at right angles to each other.
The electric fields of different waves point in different directions. But when they hit a dust particle, they get polarised: the electric fields all line up. This is how sunglasses work: the lenses are filters that don’t let light of certain polarisations pass through, cutting glare.
Like all astronomical discoveries, their finding will have to be validated by independent observers before the community reaches a consensus. But in the meantime, the claimed discovery is a matter of concern because of where the Kordylewski clouds are located: at two Lagrange points.
The Lagrange – or libration – points are places in space where the gravitational fields of the Sun, Moon and Earth tug at each other such that an object at that point will be in an Earth-synchronous orbit around the Sun.
Scientists like stationing satellites at these points because they can stay in orbit with much less fuel spent than if they were stationed elsewhere. However, now we (may) know the Kordylewski clouds are located at the points labelled L4 and L5. This means satellites stationed there will have to carry protective shielding. Otherwise, dust particles could damage sensitive instruments and end the mission before its time.
However, the Kordylewski clouds can’t be classified as moons, although they can be as natural satellites. Judit Slíz-Balogh, a coauthor of the current study and an astronomer at the Eötvös Loránd University, calls them “pseudo-satellites”. The distinction is important because, even when bracketed between single- or double-quotes, the label of moon can’t be applied to a dust cloud.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which decides the meaning of astronomical terms like planet, star, etc., defines a moon only as a planet’s natural satellite. However, that isn’t license to call every natural satellite a moon. (In fact, one of the definitions of a planet would make our Moon a planet, too.)
But a size-based organisational paradigm would imply that an object much smaller than the moon would have to be called a moonlet. For example: Saturn’s moon Pan, which is 35 km at its widest. Something even smaller will have to make do with the catch-all label ‘particles’. Then again, the paradigm falters with the overall form of the satellite. For another example: the dust, ice and rocks that make up Saturn’s rings are called ‘ring particles’ even though some of them weigh a few quintals.
Carolyn Collins Petersen, a former member of the Hubble Space Telescope instrument team, wrote for ThoughtCo. earlier this year, “There is no official definition of ‘moonlet’ and ‘ring particle’ by the … IAU. Planetary scientists have to use common sense to distinguish between these objects.”
Importantly, it would be counterproductive to argue that anything goes because there is no technical definition. To the contrary, especially with science communication, it is important to use words whose meanings are generally agreed upon. ‘Natural satellites of dust’ would have helped that cause better than ‘”Moons” made of dust’.
The Wire
November 9, 2018
Featured image credit: Lucas Ludwig/Unsplash.
Twitter ≠ reality
Behold:
Vijaya Gadde is the “Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Lead at Twitter”. Her replies are to Indian right-wingers on Twitter demanding to know why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey saw fit to be photographed holding a poster with the words “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy” on it.
Her copy-pasted apology, while clarifying that the picture wasn’t “relective” of Twitter’s views, certainly seems to reflect the all-important difference between reality and social media platforms: everyone’s participation is better for business, Mark and Jack believe, including that of the the idiots and the barbarians. Otherwise, there’s no need @vijaya would have to apologise to a bunch of trolls engaging in whataboutery and intent on misunderstanding the phrase on the poster.
From the positions of reason, civility and constitutionality, nobody should have to apologise for standing by the message “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”. Or even have to clarify that “smash” isn’t a call to violence, that “Brahmanical” is very specific to the Indian context, that “patriarchy” is not a synonym for “man-hater”. Shouldn’t have to respond to idiots.
We saw exactly the same thing happen with Facebook in September, when its sole right-wing fact-checker – The Weekly Standard – objected to a partially wrong story by a liberal outlet – Think Progress – and had it blocked from being viewed on the platform. Think Progress got mad, wrote an angry oped and its supporters slathered the left media space with more. The Weekly Standard held its ground (reasonably so, the Think Progress article’s headline was evidently wrong). But Facebook just sat there, smug in its belief that it was doing good.
Dead animal pics
I think the media needs to adopt a rule about not displaying raw footage of dead animals, especially if they’re in a poor state. It’s gross, undignified and triggering – but most of all, it’s used to convey a very narrow-minded view of a complex problem.
The gross factor ties into the question of dignity: animals need to be shown the way they might be had they been alive. Using their dead, deformed bodies to inspire action on the part of some humans is not fair. The use of such images also triggers guilt, which is not useful when you want the outcome to be positive change.
But the biggest issue is that by using the image of an animal devoid of all agency, apparently at the mercy of human justice, you’re driving home a point more specifically defined than it should actually be: that it’s about saving the animals. It’s not.
Sure, we need to save the animals – but in the process we need to be solving an actual problem as well. Instead, ‘saving the animals’ has been too frequently used as a rallying cry for having done some kind of good when really it’s just been a distraction from doing the more difficult thing.
Recently, when that whale was found dead near a beach in Indonesia with 115 plastic cups in its belly, the gory image was used in the press as if to remind the people that they’re not supposed to be dumping plastic in the sea. I think that’s a problem.
Yes, our world is a consumerist nightmare that’s driving climate change and widespread resource inequalities. However, saving the animals is not the point here. Some whales are dying but if we’re to save all of them, the conversation we need to have is about how we’re going to stop manufacturing plastics and start recycling all of the rest. If we do that, the animals will be automatically saved.
Instead, we’ve got news reports almost entirely fixated on marine plastics and not talking about the way we make, transport, consume and trash plastics at all. This is what fixating on dead or dying animals does: refashions a problem to be far more downstream than and different from what it actually is.
Absolute hot
There’s only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute ‘hots’, depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an interesting conception because, while absolute zero is very well-defined and perfectly understood, absolute hot simply stands for the exact opposite not in a physical sense but in an epistemological one: it is the temperature at which the object of study resembles something not understood at all. According to the short Wikipedia article on it, there are two well-known absolute hots:
- Planck temperature – when the force of gravity becomes as strong as the other fundamental forces, leading to a system describable only by theories of quantum gravity, which don’t exist yet
- Hagedorn temperature – when the system’s energy becomes so large that instead of heating up further, it begins to produce hadrons (particles made up of quarks and gluons, like protons and neutrons) or turns into a quark-gluon plasma
Over drinks yesterday with the physicist known as The Soufflé, he provided the example of a black hole. Thermodynamics stipulates that there is an upper limit to the amount of energy that can be packed into a given volume of space-time. So if you keep heating this volume even after it has breached its energy threshold, then it will transform into a black hole (by the rules of general relativity). For this system, its absolute hot will have been reached, and from the epistemological point of view, we don’t know the microscopic structure of black holes. So there.
However, it seems not all physical systems behave this way, i.e. become something unrecognisable beyond their absolute hot temperature. Quantum thermodynamics describes such systems as having negative temperatures on the kelvin scale. You are probably thinking it is simply colder than absolute zero – a forbidden state in classical thermodynamics – but this is not it. There seems to be a paradox here but it is more a cognitive illusion. That is, the paradox comes undone when you acknowledge the difference between energy and entropy.
The energy of a system is the theoretically maximum capacity it has to perform work. The entropy of the system is the amount of energy that cannot be used to do work, also interpreted as a degree of disorderliness. When a ‘conventional’ system is heated, its energy and entropy both increase. In a system with negative temperature, heating increases its energy while bringing its entropy down. In other words, a system with negative temperature becomes more energetic as well as is able to dedicate a larger fraction of that energy towards work at highertemperatures.
Such a system is believed to exist only when it can access quantum phenomena. More fundamentally, such a system is possible only if the number of high energy states it has are limited. In classical systems, which is anything that you can observe in your daily life, such as a pot of tea, objects can be heated as high a temperature as needed. But in the quantum realm, akin to what classical thermodynamics says about the birth of black holes – that its energy density became so high that space-time wrapped around the system – systems of elementary particles are often allowed to have possess only certain energies. As a result, even if the system is heated beyond its absolute hot, its energy can’t change, or at least there will be nothing to show for it.
While it was a monumentally drab subject in college, thermodynamics – as I have learnt since – can be endlessly fascinating the same way, say, the study of financial instruments can illuminate the pulse of capitalism. This is because thermodynamics – as in the study of heat, energy and entropy – encapsulates the physical pulse of the natural universe. You simply need to go where its laws take you to piece together many things about reality.
Of course, a thermodynamic view of the world may not always be the most useful way to study it. At the same time, there will almost always be a way to translate some theory of the world into thermodynamic equivalents. In that sense, the laws and rules of thermodynamics allow its practitioners to speak a kind of universal language the way Douglas Adams’s Babel fish does.
The most famous example of this in the popular conception of scientific research is the work of Stephen Hawking. Together with Jacob Bekenstein and others, Hawking used thermodynamic calculations to show (on paper) that black holes were mortal and in fact emitted radiation out into the universe, instead of sucking everything in. He also found that the total entropy contained inside a black hole – its overall disorderliness – was closely related to its surface area. This was in the 1970s, but the idea that there are opportunities to understand the insides of a black hole by studying its outsides is as profound today as it was then.
On the banner on the ISRO homepage
The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers’ comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked by this and wanted to know if it could be discussed in an article.
This is annoying for sure. The ‘Click here’ link opens another tab and loads a mygov.in webpage exhorting the reader to “let [their] ideas flow to the ramparts of the Red Fort”. The friend said that the least that could’ve been done was to ask for comments on India’s space programme that could be included in Modi’s speech.
However, I’m glad in a way that this banner is what it is. All front-facing websites of the Government of India are maintained by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY). ISRO’s is perhaps among the most visited homepages of them all but popularity shouldn’t have to determine how important they are to DEITY, or in fact to those tasked with updating those pages.
In this context, it is simply ludicrous that a majority of government websites – including those of centrally funded universities and research institutions – do not carry an SSL certificate (i.e. the domain loads on an http connection instead of on an https connection). This is the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology website, for example:
Second: ISRO’s homepage itself is often outdated. The organisation is notorious for its lack of outreach. Its press releases section does not discuss anything but successful launches for the most part. The latest item on the homepage carousel at 4.37 pm on August 11 was the launch of the IRNSS 1I satellite, which happened on April 18. On top of all this, the CSS is non-uniform. This is what one of the slides looked like:
… and the next slide looked like this:
What the hell is a reader supposed to expect?
In light of these issues, seeing the banner about Modi’s Independence Day speech doesn’t seem out of the ordinary at all: I click ‘close’ and get more nonsense from the website itself. I’m glad that the DEITY or the PMO or whoever decided to deface the ISRO homepage the way they have because one hopes that, at least this way, the readers and anyone else using the website – including ISRO itself – will take their corresponding digital residence more seriously, treating it and securing it the way it should be.
Failing Sarabhai
We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.
Normally this kind of comment would be a platitude. In fact, it still is except for the fact that there’s quite a bit here that can be interpreted differently according to the changing times. This comment, rather quote, was tweeted by ISRO on August 10 and attributed to its founding scientist, Vikram Sarabhai. (The text looks like it was copied and pasted from a PDF – or maybe it was intended as a poem.)
The following terms are subjective: “meaningful role”, “advanced technologies” and “real problems”. From ISRO’s POV, they likely stand for the commitment of space technologies towards resolving day-to-day issues faced by terrestrial enterprises. More specifically, to use space-borne assets to assist safety and rescue, mapping resources, tracking animals as well as land-use, forecasting the weather, etc. Moreover, the terms are also somewhat dangerous because Sarabhai doesn’t specify who decides what they mean. 😉
For example, the BJP government at the Centre believes “real problems” are technological problems, not scientific ones, and has in fact discouraged small-scale exploratory efforts. M.S. Santhanam penned an article in The Hindu when this year’s Economic Survey was released discussing this issue. I do not think the article received as much attention as it deserved, and is worth bookmarking.
Given that Sarabhai’s words seem to lend themselves to various other, and broader, contexts, it would seem disingenuous of ISRO to expect to be judged on its existing efforts and not for ones that it is failing at. For one, I choose to interpret the tweet as an admission of failure on ISRO’s part to play a “meaningful role” in communicating its research and dispelling the attendant fake news, a “real problem” by any yardstick, using “advanced technologies” like Twitter and Facebook, which allow scientists to take charge of the narrative from their desks, lab benches or wherever.
To this end, Sarabhai’s quote well illustrates a battle – joined in the realms of language and memory – that few pay attention to. For a government bent on normalising majoritarian authority, we need to fight and reclaim what “real problems” and “meaningful roles” mean, or can mean, wrenching them away from the justification of “what most people think” and towards “what is justified by reason”, and not abandon the latter just because it is harder to do.
Metastable 