The body of science, as it’s collected in the ever-growing volume of dry, formulaic journal articles, has little space for context. It certainly has no room for sentiment. Yet, as science writers know well, it’s the human backdrop to scientific progress that brings science to life and gives it its inspirational power. Astronomer Mike Brown‘s book on his search for large solar system bodies that ultimately led to the now infamous demotion of Pluto, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, is a beautiful example of this.

In the book, Brown describes how, as a young Assistant Professor at Caltech, he started looking for large solar system objects beyond Pluto – searching, ultimately, for a distant 10th planet he just had a hunch was out there. The story of his search covers several years of hard work, hope, disappointment, self-doubt, and eventually, as we know, success. His discoveries called into question our understanding of the word “planet”, and led to the controversial 2006 IAU vote that removed Pluto from the solar system elite of planets. He tells us about his life, as it unfolded in parallel with his exploration of the solar system – in particular the birth of his daughter Lilah.

There aren’t many first-hand accounts of scientific discovery accessible to a non-expert audience. One of my favourites is Alan Guth‘s book on his work on the theory of inflation, The Inflationary Universe, which is an excellent read about an exciting time in cosmology. Even when described at a general public-level, inflation remains an esoteric concept. The issue of Pluto’s identity crisis, however, has infiltrated the public mind to an unprecedented degree.

I’d been looking forward to reading the book since spending a very enjoyable evening chatting to Mike at the tweetup I organised at the 2009 IAU meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Mike is an avid tweeter and writes a great blog. I finally got round to How I Killed Pluto… last week, and it brightened up my daily commute. Brown describes the ups and downs of research and life as an academic, and the long road that led him to discovering Quaoar, Sedna, Haumea, Makemake and “10th planet” Eris. Beyond the chronology of events, there’s plenty of food for thought on the process of discovery, scientific fraud, data sharing, and a good deal of astro-politics surrounding the Pluto vote in Prague.

The episode of a transatlantic struggle over credit of the discovery of one object, where Brown becomes the target of internet chatroom hatred for allegedly “hiding discoveries” is particularly relevant, and his clear and balanced refutation of these accusations is a must-read for anyone interested in data sharing issues.

What sets the book apart from others in its category for me is the ample space devoted to the very honest account of his personal life, and particularly the early life of Lilah, whose story is tightly intertwined with, and for a while even becomes the subject of, Brown’s research. As a kid in the late 80s-early 90s I used to love watching the TV series The Wonder Years, which had this wonderful grainy intro of typical family home videos, with Joe Cocker’s version of With a Little Help from my Friends. The parts in How I Killed Pluto… about Lilah reminded me of that. They’re lovely, touching and steeped in nostalgia, yet stay on the right side of cheesy.

There are many good reasons for picking up this book – an interest in the Pluto saga, curiosity about the life of modern day scientists, or simply the story of a man who falls in love (twice). Whatever your angle, it’ll make you smile.

[... big thanks to Steph Holler for the birthday gift!]

SPIE, the somewhat bizarrely acronymed International Society for Optical Engineering, is a household name for astronomy instrumentalists. Organiser of the biggest global conference on telescopes and instruments, SPIE publish a number of decent journals and some very useful books. I’m a particular fan of their Field Guide series, which are small spiral-bound quick-reference booklets on topics like adaptive optics,  spectroscopy or optical testing. I recently saw that SPIE have now released a free iPhone app for their Field Guide to Geometrical Optics, by John Greivenkamp.

SPIE have released a number of iPhone apps. I tried their conference planner earlier this summer, at the San Diego Astronomical Telescopes conference. That was not a success due to the unfortunate timing of the iOS4 release just before the conference and the updated iOS4-compatible app being held up by the app store. That was bad luck, so I was keen to give them another go, and I’m glad I did.

The Field Guide goes through all the standard formulae for reflection, refraction, optical path length, magnification, etc, as well as aberrations and optical systems, and the information is presented very legibly in the app. There are some great added-value features too: some of the key equations are tappable, which allows you to perform the calculation described in the equation with values of choice, like so:

Key graphs can be viewed bigger, without surrounding text. There is a separate listing just for the equations, and you can also record notes.

I’m really impressed with  this application, it looks nice and has some excellent features, and I think the Field Guides lend themselves really well to viewing a mobile device. Best of all, it’s also free! Get it in the app store here.

Route of the Sea of Cortez expedition

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, and though his popularity had waned in the latter stages of his career, he’s been a much-read and well-loved author for many decades. The Nobel committee cited his “sympathetic humour and keen social perception” as the hallmarks of his writing. Steinbeck’s books and stories often deal with war, class, adversity and destitution, and in his lifetime he wrote both fiction and non-fiction; the former frequently based on his real-life experiences as a journalist. But did you know Steinbeck also wrote about science?

On my recent holiday to the central coast of California, I read Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account of the research trip around the entire Baja California peninsula Steinbeck undertook with his good friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Monterey-based Ricketts, who served as inspiration for several of Steinbeck’s fictional characters, was a leading expert on the fauna of the Pacific intertides. In 1940, the pair set off on a 6-week specimen-gathering trip on board a chartered sardine vessel, the Western Flyer, together with the ship’s captain Tony Berry, engineer Tex, seamen Tiny and Sparky, and a cantakerous outboard motor pseudonymously referred to as the Hansen Sea-Cow.[Interestingly, Steinbeck's wife Carol also accompanied them on the trip in a bid to save their faltering marriage. They separated soon after their return, and no word is mentioned of her in the book, which wasn't published in its current form until 1951].

The book contains a fair bit of barnacle-talk but is mainly a platform for Steinbeck’s views on life, the world, politics, and science. It’s really excellent and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into any or all of those topics. Importantly, he actually manages to interweave all these subjects that cast a new light on old questions: what is science, why do science. He talks about relativity, causality and destiny.

The start of the book contains a lot of discussion on the reason for undertaking the trip, and the reason people do science in the first place.

“The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea-cucumber, and, finding a new arrangement and number, feel an exaltation and give the new species a name, and write about it possessively? It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the “services to science” platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds [...]“

In his initial discussion on the preparations for the trip, he comments on the subjectivity of science research:

“There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind.”

“We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality [...] We knew that what seemed to us true could be only relatively true anyway. There is no other kind of observation.”

The conflict between science and religion is one of the most divisive in the philosophy of science, and indeed in the political arena, today. Steinbeck, 60 years ago, posits that both are driven by the same search for one-ness with and understanding of the world.

“[...] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

The “elastic string of time” is a recurring theme, both in scientific and general existential context. Steinbeck comments frequently that the Indians the group encounter in the Mexican coastal towns seem to live by an entirely different clock than the rest of the world (or at least the US); and on the boat time runs differently still. He uses this as a starting point for discussing aspects of relativity, both as a concept, and as a physical process in the Universe.

“It is strange how the time sense changes with different peoples. The Indians [...] had a different time sense -”time-world” would be the better term- from ours. And we think we can never get into them unless we can invade that time-world, for this expanding time seems to trail an expanding universe, or perhaps to lead it. One considers the durations indicated in geology, in paleontology, and, thinking out of our time-world with its duration between time-stone and time-stone, says, “What an incredible interval!”. Then, when one struggles to build some picture of astro-physical time, he is faced with a light-year, a thought-deranging duration unless the relativity of all things intervenes and time expands and contracts, matching itself relatively to the pulsings of a relative universe.”

Interesting how he makes the mistake of equating a light-year with time rather than distance, I wonder why? Maybe a PhD thesis resides in a library somewhere in the world providing an explanation. He talks at length about “the strictures of the old teleologies” – the idea that processes have an intrinsic goal – “that infect our observation, causal thinking warped by hope”, that result in our abhorrence of the statement that “a thing is because it is”.

The political backdrop of the time also features in Steinbeck’s writing. As the group embarked on their trip, Europe was descending into the anarchy of World War II. Yet, he writes,

“Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost—we didn’t know it, but we knew the daily [sardine] catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. And so it was with the chartering of a boat. The owners were not distrustful of us; they didn’t even listen to us because they couldn’t quite believe we existed. We were obviously ridiculous.”

The war features heavily in many of Steinbeck’s books, inluding in Cortez, albeit in a more subtly unsettling way as the expedition was unaware of the events that occurred during their trip (and the US was at that point not yet involved in WWII). In addition, the quote to me emphasises something that is often forgotten or misunderstood when we talk about educationng “the public” about science. There’s a lot more to it than telling them about new discoveries, or showing them role models. There’s a lot of people who don’t quite believe that we exist – fiddling with pixels, containing information from outer space, for months on end, and claiming that somehow it should matter to them? That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to engage with these people, we just need a very different approach to those we use to entice the typical Guardian reader.

The book is packed with fascinating insights, and just overall great Steinbeckiness. It’s also a very funny book.

Next to marriage settlement or sentence of death, a ship’s charter is as portentous a document as has ever been written. Penalties are set down against both parties, and if on some morning the rising sun should find your ship in the middle of the Mojave Desert you have only to look again at the charter to find the blame assigned and the penalty indicated.

The outboard motor, the Hansen Sea-Cow, in particular is a comic thread throughout the book.

Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing. [...] When and where these ghoulish little motors learn to reproduce themselves the human species is doomed. For their hatred of us is so great that they will wait and plan and organize and one night, in a roar of little exhausts, they will wipe us out.[...] It is more than a species. It is a whole redefinition of life.[...] It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends.

The Sea-Cow did not run that day but it seemed to enjoy having its flywheel spun.

Anyway, there’s far too much to talk about for me to sum up in this post. Just go read it.

Some asides….

In 2006, during my first trip to central California, I took a little pilgrimage to the Steinbeck Center in his birthplace, Salinas. It’s an odd appearance in a rather uninspiring town (sorry, Salinas) that you probably would never stop off in for any other reason, unless you needed a tractor, or some lettuce. I was the only visitor there for the whole duration of my visit, but the staff were lovely and the exhibits were actually very interesting. So if you enjoy reading Steinbeck or are interested in the socio-political and economic history of the US in the mid-20th century, it’s worth a visit.

The Steinbeck Center is currently holding an essay writing competition inspired by Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, where he talks about his trip around the United States, late in his life, with his poodle Charley. A wonderful book. So if you’ve recently travelled with your dog, and feel inspired, write about it. Details here.

In 2004, scientists from the Hopkins Marine station in Monterey and the Instituto Nacional de Ecologia in Mexico recreated Steinbeck and Ricketts’ expedition to the Sea of Cortez as an educational project. Read about it here.

A few days ago, I posted this poll about the show The Big Bang Theory, asking the question if it was bad for science (and women). I closed the poll last night, the votes are in, you people have spoken.  Here’s the final results from 58 votes – and thanks for voting, polls are fun!

Most of you don’t seem to take sitcoms all that seriously, and that’s probably a sensible attitude. Also, quite a few of you think I should get a life. That’s probably also a fair statement. Beyond that, there’s about twice the number of BBT-lovers as there are BBT-haters, with a smattering of on-the-fencers. Well, you already know where I stand, but before I return back to the life that I do in fact have, let me elaborate.

Like I said in the previous post, I really love BBT. One of the reasons I don’t have a problem with the way the characters are presented is that they have really evolved as the show’s progressed – particularly the central trio of Leonard, Penny and Sheldon. They are very human and loveable. The message to me is that every Sheldon needs a Penny in their life, and vice versa, which is lovely.The boys may mock Penny, but she often comes out on top. And even though Penny looks down on the scientists’ geekiness, she ends up joining in and having fun.

I suspect that many people who have a problem with the stereotyping haven’t watched beyond the first few episodes, in which the characters are very one-dimensional. And I guess the reason these folks didn’t continue watching is that they just didn’t like it, which would further contribute to their negative feeling about it.

I don’t actually think the show is perfect, there are some things that maybe I’d like to see changed. The two supporting characters of Howard and Raj are a little one-sided compared with Leonard, Penny and Sheldon, and I really hope something happens on that front. And what happened to Leslie Winkle, the resident girl physicist? It would be great if her part became more substantial again. I read somewhere that the writers just couldn’t get quality material for her on a regular basis – but I found her much more fun and interesting than, say, creepy Kripke, who seems to have become more of a fixture in the show. Try harder, writers, please?

One voter who went for the “trainwreck” option impressively demonstrated an evidence base to their concerns about BBT: a study from 2008 published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, looking at how sexist humour affects male attitudes towards women (also described here). In a couple experiments, the authors show how exposure to sexist humour makes men who already have sexist attitudes towards women act out more on their feelings, e.g. by being less likely to donate money to a women’s rights organisation, than if exposed to gender-neutral jokes or to just sexist statements (rather than jokes). The message is that joking about women makes sexist behaviour more acceptable. In the authors’ own words, “sexist humor acts as a releaser of prejudice”.

I think behavioural research of this kind is not hard science in the way that physics is, and I don’t know enough about the background and methodology of the study to analyse it critically. I’m sure there are some provisos, no research is perfect, but I can accept their conclusion that sexist jokes, like racist or homophobic jokes, can make it seem ok to discriminate, which is bad. I just don’t think BBT is as one-sided as that.

An interesting side avenue to the discussion was raised by another friend: perhaps our personal feelings about BBT say more about ourselves than about the show? Go think about that, voters.

Ford, T., Boxer, C., Armstrong, J., & Edel, J. (2007). More Than “Just a Joke”: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (2), 159-170 DOI: 10.1177/0146167207310022

My edition of the book contained the chapter missing from the first edition, which could only be included after a nasty legal dispute had been settled. This chapter, arguably the most angrifying of the lot, is also freely available online and gives an excellent taster of the nastiness Goldacre brings to light in the book. Read it here.

The book also reminded me of the tragic case I wrote about earlier this year, in which a Dutch nurse was convicted of multiple murders on the basis of botched statistics and very little else – and as the case has progressed I thought I’d give a brief update. On 16 March, the public prosecution officially requested that Lucia’s conviction is overturned by the court. They did however not give an official apology to Ms. De Berk, which her attorney was upset about (link in Dutch).  The court will give its final verdict next week, 16 14 April. All agree this is the one of the worst ever miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. I’ll keep you posted.

Staying on top of the literature, even in a narrow field, is one of the biggest challenges we face in research today. Do you have an ever-growing pile of astro-ph papers on your desk you’ve meaning to read? Yeah, we all have that. In recent years a number of software packages and web applications have come on the market to help researchers organise their literature: Papers, Reference Manager, Jabref, and Zotero. Past AstroBetter posts have introduced Papers and discussed Papers vs. BibDesk. A recent addition that’s been getting good press lately is London-based Mendeley.[...]

I wrote a guest post on literature-management-slash-science.fm-software Mendeley for the Astrobetter blog.  Go read it here!

More screenshots are in my public Astrobetter notebook, alongside those I did for the Evernote post.

I just finished reading a book called Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, by a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker, Randy Olson. Olson quit his research career to go to film school, and is now an established science film director in Hollywood. One of his earliest efforts was this music video about the sex lives of barnacles. In this book, he talks about his experience of being a man of substance in a world of style, and gives advice to scientists on how to communicate research to a wide audience without boring, annoying or patronising them.

For all his good advice, I have to say Olson picked a rather unfortunate title. It’s impossible to buy this book as a gift for someone without seeming, well, rude. Being a scientist, obviously, I did just that for the scientist I share my life with. He wasn’t too impressed (but did finish the book, then placed it on my side of the bed).

It’s a short and snappy read, filled with anecdotes rather than facts and figures, and that reflects exactly the point Olson tries to make. His advice is broken down into five simple statements:

• Don’t be so cerebral
• Don’t be so literal-minded
• Don’t be such a poor story-teller
• Don’t be so unlikeable
• Be the voice of science

It’s all quite common sense stuff but it gives some good food for thought. Anyone who’s ever worked in outreach or with media knows it’s really tough to find a balance between absolute factual accuracy and good storytelling and Olson goes into this problem in some detail.

One interesting point he makes is that science is essentially a negating profession:

The entire profession of science has at its core a single word, and that word is “no”. Science is a process not of affirming ideas but of attempting to falsify ideas in the search for truth. This is what a hypothesis is – an idea that can be tested and possibly falsified and rejected.

It’s true that in science we’re taught to be hyper-critical, to pick others’ work apart and try to find the holes. That pervading negativity can be hard to stomach for people – I think (hope?) that every scientist probably goes through phases of self-doubt and insecurity. This is actually one of the big reasons I started writing this blog: I wanted to say “yes” to something. I wanted to read a paper and have a space where I could say “how neat is this?” rather than have to focus on tearing it to pieces. And I’m sure many scientists enjoy outreach for that very reason.

Another part I found myself agreeing with was Olson’s discussion of what he calls “the bane and the joy of science blogs.” It’s good that more and more scientists are writing blogs to talk about their work to a wide audience, but unfortunately the basic premise of many science blogs is “anger” – an easily accessible emotion for most of us. Now, I certainly have nothing against a well-timed rant, but bile and scorn are not a very constructive way to have a dialogue. It can make scientists seem very arrogant and patronising towards those not working in academia, and this precisely works in favour of those who undermine science – anti-vaccination, anti-evolution folks etc. A good example of this is the mudslinging that’s gone on over the subject of science and religion – but let’s not wade into that debate.

It’s a fun book to read that has some inetresting insights. I’ve definitely made some mental notes to myself for things to keep in mind next time I talk to non-scientists about my work, or even prepare a science talk.

Some time ago Kelle Cruz, one of the writers of the Astrobetter blog, invited me to write a guest post on how I use Evernote for work. It’s just appeared on the blog today, so go check it out.

I created a public notebook in Evernote with some screenshots to illustrate some of the ways I use the programme I’ve described in the post. At the same time this can give Evernote newbies a flavour of the application’s  look and feel.

Once upon a time in a country far away I was a young girl who loved looking at the stars. I didn’t know any other keen stargazers and the internet was still in its infancy, so I relied on books to help me work out what I was looking at.

These days, sadly, stargazing doesn’t feature very heavily in my life anymore given my light polluted dwellings but my earliest experiences of looking through telescopes did inspire me to get into helping design them myself, as a profession. So I was keen to have a read of one of O’Reilly‘s publications, The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, by Robert and Barbara Thompson, a copy of which found its way to my desk (h/t to Alasdair).

In their preface to the book, the Thompsons explain that every beginning amateur astronomer faces the same problem: “which objects to observe and how to find them”. Their book has a couple of short chapters on deep space objects in general (i.e. all the stuff up there that’s not in our solar system), and on the materials the beginning observer can use to explore the night sky. The rest of the book gives an alphabetical overview of 50 northern constellations, and the objects that can be found in them for the observer.

Skygazing books for beginners always seem to suffer from an identity crisis: are they supposed to be read indoors for information, or taken out into the night? The authors of Illustrated Guide suggest their book is primarily a field observing guide, but I would argue that it’s quite hefty to carry around. Perhaps the observer who has enough nous to have invested in a tripod, a good torch and a table (or a companion) could take this book outside with them; as a beginner I certainly would have lacked the dexterity and equipment to handle this textbook-sized tome as well as binoculars. But if you’re a little more organised than I was this shouldn’t be a problem.

Personally I always found ring-bound books by far the most practical for taking outside with me, although this does seem to be bound so that it will stay open where you left it.

The Thompsons are quite clearly experienced observers who know their technical stuff. The chapter on observing equipment – telescopes, binoculars, eyepieces and star charts – is excellent, with lots of personal anecdotes and tips.

The science introduction however, I felt was lacking in accuracy in places. The authors for example write that

A planetary nebula is the ruins of an old, red giant star that has exploded into short-lived prominence as a nova and then subsided into a small, hot white dwarf surrounded by a shell of expanding gas.

This is plainly wrong. A planetary nebula is created when a regular star runs out of fuel and becomes unstable, undergoing repeated cycles of expansion and contraction, until the inert core is no longer able to hold on to the outer envelope, which is ejected. The ejected material forms the nebula around the hot exposed core, a white dwarf. There is no explosion involved in this process, and certainly no nova explosion. A nova only occurs in the particular case where an existing white dwarf accretes material from its companion, resulting in a cataclysmic explosion that throws the acrreted material out into the interstellar medium. This does not result in the creation of a planetary nebula.

Another complaint I had is that the Thompsons don’t talk at all about geography. They list the dates on which each constellation reaches its highest point in the sky but fail to mention that this depends of course very strongly on the observer’s location. All the links to observing organisations are entirely US- (& Canada-) based. It is of course more practical to focus on the night sky from a given hemisphere or continent, but this warrants a bit of explanation.

The presentation of the individual constellations is nicely done, with useful and clear finding charts and good overview tables of the interesting objects in the region. There’s plenty there to keep a beginning amateur observer occupied for a couple of years – depending on how clear your skies are! If you decide to invest in some equipment, there is lots of good advice.

If you’re based in the US and want to get into stargazing, this book can help you on your way very nicely.

Buy it here:
Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders: From Novice to Master Observer (DIY Science)