Quantum Rocketry

Ten years ago, a seventh-grade class did an intriguing project. The students drew pictures and wrote descriptions of what they thought scientists were like. Then the entire class visited Fermilab, a US accelerator physics lab. After the visit, the students created a new set of drawings and descriptions of scientists.

The results are here, on a Fermilab outreach page.

Almost all of the “before” pictures drawn by these students show a man in a white lab coat holding a test tube. Many of the scientists depicted are balding, wearing glasses, and have a shirt pocket stuffed full of pens. The accompanying written descriptions talk about people who are “kind of crazy, talking always quickly,” “a very simple person . . . simple clothes, simple house, simple personality;” someone who “never got into sports as a child; he was always trying to get his straight A grades even higher,” is “brainy and very weird,” and “has pockets full of pens and pencils.” The descriptions from female students are particularly fixated on the stereotyped image of a geeky guy in a lab coat. Many of the students described someone who does try to do good things, who tries to make the world a better place, but they are still a person who is ultra-smart in some obscure way that does not relate to the students.

The “after” drawings and descriptions were quite different. Gone were the lab coats, test tubes, and glasses. Some of the background items like desks or computers remained, but the students drew men in jeans and tee shirts and women in ordinary blouses. Suddenly, “scientists” are people who “are interested in dancing, pottery, jogging and even racquetball” and “are just like a normal person who has kids and life.” The scientist “doesn’t wear a lab coat” and “got normal grades in school.” Scientists “come in all shapes and forms,” “aren’t very different from everyone else,” “played sports, still play some sports or still watch and go to games,” “are really nice and funny people.” One of these seventh graders “even saw a person with a Bulls shirt on.”

In the new descriptions, I saw that many of the students realized that scientists were not driven to science by their intelligence, by social rejection, or by an innate need to best everyone around them in intellectual gamesmanship; but by a passion to discover, to create, to invent, to explain, and to improve our everyday lives. Scientists chose their careers because they love science and are dedicated to answering the questions they pose. And that love remains with them. They are pursuing a dream, doing what they want to do and have wanted to do for much of their lives. In the words of one student, “if you want to be a scientist, be like these wonderful people and live up to your dreams.”

Many of these students also came away with a new sense that with this passion and dedication, they could be scientists, too. While few of them put the idea in those words, a number of descriptions echoed the phrase “they are just like you and me.” Some thought that “a scientist’s job looks like a lot of fun” because “they can do whatever they want and they still get paid for it.” One girl in the class even went so far as to say “Who knows? Maybe I can be a scientist!” I was particularly glad to see the work of the  girls like Amy, who started with a fairly stereotyped image of the balding, nearsighted man in a white coat, but ended up with a woman in ordinary street clothes who has a full set of hobbies along with her love of science. Even if Amy didn’t write “I could be a scientist, too,” her after-visit picture probably looks a lot more like she thought of herself in seventh grade.

The “Who’s a Scientist?” page was last updated in May 2000. Now that those students are old enough to have graduated from college, I’d love to see someone get back in touch with them to see how many pursued science in college and how many of them have gone on to advanced studies or to scientific careers!

I love the idea of this project, and I wish more schools in this country would do similar things. It would be incredibly valuable for our students to see that it’s not just brains that make a scientist, and the required brains don’t crowd out all the other qualities that make people interesting or friendly or outdoorsy or social or anything else these students might want to be. We physicists and chemists and astronomers and biologists and geologists are not merely adult versions of the stereotypical middle-school nerds!

(Those are the computer scientists.)

I’ve been getting a lot of my subject matter from Ryan lately, it seems…

Well, in any case, he put a link on Twitter to Sam Harris’ TED talk about science and morality, and how science could feed into morality. It’s well worth looking at and thinking about a little.

Morality has to do with distinguishing “right” from “wrong,” and Harris has a very good point that scientific methodology could be applied to help make that distinction. However, while I listened to his talk, a very important point came to mind. Let me set this up with the statement that many concepts or measures in this universe don’t come out to binary extremes. (Quantum states of spin-1/2 particles, for instance, are an exception.) In most cases, it’s not a question of just being on one side or the other; it’s a question of how far towards one side or the other your measurement comes out. I think the same is true of morality: how right is one thing compared to another? How wrong are the alternatives?

In answering such questions with scientific processes – not an idea I disagree with, in principle – we would likely end up at some kind of optimization problem. Given all the scientific data about the possible reactions and effects of a particular decision, how can we make the most “right” decision? That’s a pretty straightforward problem to approach scientifically. However, we must be careful about how we define “most!”

As an example, if you drive you have probably had the experience of getting stuck at a stoplight somewhere, getting frustrated, and saying to your passenger or yourself, “Wow, these lights are stupid. I’d love to meet the guy who designed them, they could be a lot better than they are.”

The operative word there is “better,” and the question is, how do you tell which stoplight timings are better than others? Probably, the guy who designed them actually chose the best timings. But what he considered “the best” is maybe not what you consider “the best.” Maybe he maximized the traffic flow on the main street instead of the cross street. Maybe he minimized the average number of red lights cars encounter along a certain route. Maybe he found the timing that gave the least amount of wait time at certain intersections, while also giving the highest possible rate of cars through the intersection, during rush hour on average Thursday mornings. Which one of these definitions of “best” is best? And why is it so? There is an assumption underlying the process here, and it can have a dramatic effect on the results.

I think we have to keep that point in mind while considering Harris’ points. We have a lot of data on actions and consequences. We can use scientific processes such as optimization to try and synthesize that data into a decision about what is right and what is wrong. But we have to bear in mind the assumptions that underlie that process, be up front about them, and be willing to entertain other possibilities.

I am reluctant to bump “Conference” down on my front page with this can of worms, especially now that my readership has been on the up-and-up, but hey, it’s my blog….

Yesterday I made the mistake of trolling around the New York Times web site for a few minutes between a lunch meeting and getting back to work. It was a mistake because I discovered this magazine article on the influence of religion in textbook revisions. It caught my attention with its headline, but it’s not really about how Christian the American Founding Fathers were. It’s about how Christian the Texas state school board thinks they were.

It’s a long article, and it covers a lot of ground. And I find a lot of it, honestly, terrifying.

I’m not just talking about the despicable attempts to get Christian creationism into science classrooms. (Side notes on semantics: “intelligent design” is a form of creationism, so I will not distinguish between the two; also, I will generally use the word “creationism” as a shorthand for “Christian creationism” – a necessary distinction, as there are hundreds of religions, each with their own creation story, to choose from.) Nor am I talking about the insidious efforts to insert the beliefs and practices of specific Christian sects into our government. I am talking about the repeated references to concepts like manifest destiny – the idea that American history has been guided by divine providence, that westward expansion was an effort to bring the One True Religion to the inferior heathen natives, that God has chosen America for divine purpose. It’s the divine right of kings all over again. And it’s the very reason why we have the First Amendment. A lot of that article made me so angry that I couldn’t do any useful work for about half an hour. Read the rest of this entry »

A judge has sentenced Dale and Leilani Neumann, Christian fundamentalists who were convicted of negligence in the death of their diabetic daughter when they prayed for her healing rather than contact any medical professional. They get six months in jail, to be served one month out of every year for the next six years. I think they got off easy. They are guilty in my mind of criminal insanity and hubris, and at the very least, their two remaining children should now be wards of the state.

One purported definition of “insanity” is to repeat the same action or set of actions, over and over again, seeing the same result each time but somehow expecting a different one. When their daughter felt faint, the Neumanns prayed. When she could no longer walk, the Neumanns prayed. When she could not eat, the Neumanns prayed. When she could no longer even speak, the Neumanns prayed. And when her breathing came in ragged, shallow gasps, the Neumanns prayed. Only after her breath and pulse stilled did they think to contact EMS; by then, of course, it was far too late. These parents have demonstrated that their convictions are more important to them than the safety and health of their children. They have also demonstrated an inability to form a workable understanding of the world from observable phenomena. Insanity that endangers lives: these people should be put away for psychiatric evaluation.

I’m reminded of that pseudo-joke – or, more appropriately, the modern parable – of a man with devout beliefs who hears on the evening news one day that his city is in the path of a terrible hurricane. “I’m not worried about that,” he says to himself, “because I know that God will save me.” The hurricane hits, and as trees and power lines crash the ground around his house, a policeman comes to his door. Yelling over the wind and rain, the officer offers the man a ride out of town. “No, thank you,” says the man, “I trust in God to save me.” Hours later, the city floods and the man flees to the roof of his house as the water level rapidly rises. He sees a family paddling down the whitewater of their street, and they backpaddle for a moment to draw closer to the man. “Come quickly!” they cry, “we have room for one more! We can save you!” But the man refuses again, telling them that he knows God will save him from this predicament. The water continues to rise, and the man eventually drowns in the ruins of his home. His soul finally comes in contact with the God he always believed in, but, his faith shaken by the hurricane, the man cannot help but shout, “God, I believed in you all my life! How could you leave me on that house to die?” God retorts, “What are you talking about? I sent a TV newsman, a police officer, and your neighbors, all to help you!”

This brings me to my second point: for the Neumanns to refuse to contact medical professionals is arrogance, pure and simple. They were, in essence, refusing to admit that their fellow human beings could help their daughter. Not only were they refusing their fellow men and women, but the were refusing their daughter – putting their own beliefs, even in the face of dwindling supporting evidence, as more important than her life. If there is a God who created people in the image of God, then people and their capabilities are at least representatives of divine power. Even if you take issue with that statement, then you must admit that people do have the capability to treat type 1 diabetes, which caused the Neumanns’ daughter’s death. So, unlike in the parable I reproduced above, there was no uncertainty to the outcome in her case – without insulin, she would die; in the hands of medical professionals, diabetes would be easily identified and treated. She would still be alive. Her parents refused a course of action that would have kept their daughter alive in favor of a course of action that they could plainly see was allowing her condition to deteriorate. This level of pride, to “stay the course” when a quick, easy, and known solution exists but would require some ideological capitulation, is staggering.

I have type 1 diabetes myself. I know that my treatment regimen revolves around human ingenuity and technical proficiency. God did not create the insulin pump that keeps me alive. God did not hand down to humans the techniques for cajoling pig pancreatic cells to produce human insulin. And God certainly hasn’t waved a mighty hand to miraculously cure me. No, for those first two items and hopefully for the third, human intelligence is responsible. Human training. Human learning. Human teaching. Human experimentation. Human courage. If a God is in any way responsible, it is solely in allowing human brains to evolve such that we could produce the advances in science, medicine, and technology that would lead to insulin production, glucose monitoring techniques, subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps, and the education of those who must treat themselves. For me to rely on wishful thinking to hope my diabetes away would be negligence. If someone else was responsible for treating me, for them to rely on wishful thinking to hope my diabetes away would be criminal negligence.

[EDIT: added some links and fixed a couple typos.]

Since Ryan did this a while ago, the Humans Space Flight Plans Committee is in hearings, and I’m finishing a summer stint at NASA Johnson Space Center, I feel like I have to do this. Five broad reasons for the world – specifically America – to have a robust human spaceflight program:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have two things to write down some thoughts about.

First, while I do some of the more mechanical computer modeling work during the day, I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR streamed over the Tubes. Today, I learned some factoids that basically break down as follows:

1. If you figure out how many people in America get health care and the quality of care they recieve, you find that we actually have the most “rationed” healthcare system of industrialized nations. That is, in a country with omg-we-can’t-have-that single-payer healthcare, or even anything not as vile and disgusting as that, more people get the care they need when they need it than in the USA.
2. If you figure out how much health care costs in this country, and compare it to the cost of health care in other countries – not just premiums, mind you, but tax money that goes into health care as well – you find that Americans have the most expensive health care system in the world.

If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, it’s that the GOP is neither morally nor fiscally responsible; and that they are not really “conservative” in any actual definition of the word. If you’re not thinking that, you’re probably a Republican and have just pegged me as a pinko commie godless bleeding-heart Massachusetts liberal. (I will give you three of the words in that phrase, contend that there’s nothing wrong with at least those three, and the rest I contest.) In fact, I am merely a scientist and engineer, and I know how to read numbers and am willing to make policy decisions based on data. I’m also insulin-dependent diabetic, and would seriously appreciate a much lower cost and more assurance of the efficacy of the treatments just keeping myself alive.

Second, I have been hoping to come up with some good theoretical results to present in a conference paper on my research later this summer, and it just hasn’t happened. I’ve been too busy with other work-related things, and now I’m in a summer internship at NASA and don’t have the time to spare, so results are not going to be forthcoming before the paper deadline. This leads me to conclude that I much prefer being an experimentalist to being a theoretician. The reason is that labs sometimes go the experimenter’s way, and sometimes they don’t – but part of that is uncontrollable. The experimenter can, though, usually sift through data to find some useful results. Even negative results are useful. Any results at all will at least shed light on the techniques employed. If theoretical work doesn’t go the theoretician’s way, however…you are just left with a theoretician staring blankly at a piece of paper with a lot of scratchwork. And a lack of results just means that the theoretician hasn’t done the right thing or worked hard enough yet.

In other words, I have no results and it’s my own damn fault. I can’t even blame fault apparatus, numerical noise, or experimental error. I just didn’t do enough, or the right kind of, work. And that just makes me less motivated to continue this line of inquiry.