Inspirational women

All my Finding Ada blogposts in one place:

Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, sister of Robert Boyle. She conducted chemistry experiments.

Wendy Hall, computer scientist

Anita Borg, computer scientist

Caroline Arms, metadata pioneer

Hedy Lamarr, inventor

Lisa Barone, SEO expert

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.

Yay!

I've finished my dissertation, "Do Pagans see their beliefs as compatible with science?" (short answer: yes). Thanks to all those who took part in the survey.

hidden talents

The BBC has just discovered an archive of recordings made by Delia Derbyshire, the woman who composed the classic Doctor Who theme music (but the credit was taken by someone else).

They are amazing, and well ahead of their time.

Paul Hartnoll, formerly of the dance group Orbital and a great admirer of Ms Derbyshire's work, said the track was, "quite amazing".

"That could be coming out next week on [left-field dance label] Warp Records," he noted.

This story seems reminiscent of numerous instances where someone discovered or created something that was then credited to someone else.

• Artemisia Gentileschi - many of whose paintings are (or were) attributed to male relatives
  
• Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - discoverer of pulsars (for which her male PhD supervisor got the Nobel prize)
  
• Rosalind Franklin - co-discoverer of DNA (she died before the Nobel Prize was awarded to her three collaborators, and it is not given posthumously)
  
• James R Heath - co-discoverer of C60, better-known as Fullerene
• Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, who contributed to Rutherford's theory of the atom
  

a science not an ideology

Three articles about Darwin by Olivia Judson in the New Yorker:

• June 17: Darwinmania! Darwin got all the glory, but did he deserve it?
• July 8: An Original Confession Many scientists admit that they’ve never read Darwin’s Origin of Species. What are they missing?
• July 15: Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism Darwin lives on, and should, but for the sake of evolutionary studies the term “Darwinism” should be retired.

In the last article, Olivia Judson says that evolutionary biology should not be referred to as Darwinism because it makes it sound as if the science began and ended with Darwin, and as if it has not developed since Darwin. One commenter on the article also pointed out that it ignores the contribution of Alfred Russell Wallace. GeneXs at Witches and Scientists observed that the term 'Darwinism' is also "used nearly as a curse by Creationists, Young-earth Fundamentalists, and Dominionists". To my mind, calling a science an "-ism" makes it sound like a political ideology instead of a science. We don't call the physics of gravity "Newtonism" (though people do refer to Newtonian physics, I suppose). Of course Dawkins' new atheism is an ideology, and social Darwinism was an ideology (and a particularly unpleasant one at that), but evolutionary biology is a science, not an ideology, and therefore shouldn't be labelled as an -ism.

arts graduates

Dawkins is wrong, wrong, wrong. The enemy of science is not religion, it's arts graduates. (Well actually it's probably corporate greed, but today it's arts graduates.)

On the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, there was an item about the acquisition of an important meteorite by the Natural History Museum. One of the presenters said they didn't know the difference between a comet and a meteor, and everyone else in the studio said that they didn't either. If they had said they didn't know the difference between a meteor and a meteorite, that would have been fair enough. Or even if they had been embarrassed about not knowing - but no, they were quite pleased with themselves!

I expect they would laugh at people who didn't know the difference between, say, Cézanne and Monet; but they seem to think it's fine not to understand a fairly basic piece of science. Nor is this a one-off incident; similar things have happened several times on the Today programme (like the time someone felt the need to point out that the Earth orbits the Sun).

It's simple really - a comet is a big ball of dirt and ice which has an elliptical orbit around the sun, which acquires a tail and a coma due to the ice melting as it gets closer to the sun; and a meteor is a shooting star (a small piece of space debris, often a fragment of asteroid) that has a decaying orbit and gets caught in the Earth's gravitational field and burns up on entry to the atmosphere.

Balador checked that the above was correct by going to a helpful NASA FAQ page, which has a neat little table:

Asteroid	A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun.
Comet	A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of dust and/or gas.
Meteoroid	A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun.
Meteor	The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth's atmosphere and vaporizes; a shooting star.
Meteorite	A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth's atmosphere and lands upon the Earth's surface.

Questionnaire

Are you a Pagan with views about science and religion? Would you be interested in completing my research questionnaire, "Pagans and science"? Thanks!

rendezvous with Yama

It's the end of an era, the death of Arthur C Clarke. He was one of two authors who introduced me to science fiction (the other being Ursula K Le Guin).

My favourite one of his books has to be The Fountains of Paradise, but I also found Childhood's End deliciously creepy. One of his short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God, is one of my favourite short stories (even though Buddhists don't believe in "God" in quite the way that the story implies).

He also invented the space elevator and the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays.

Quite a few people have remembered him on their blogs:

Here is to Arthur C. Clarke. Here is to Sri Lanka. by Iva Skoch
Gadling - http://www.gadling.com

Arthur C. Clarke: An Appreciation of a Life Well-Lived by Jeff VanderMeer OMNIVORACIOUS - http://www.omnivoracious.com/

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008 by The Bad Astronomer
Bad Astronomy Blog - http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog

Arthur C. Clarke Appreciation by Jeff VanderMeer
Ecstatic Days - http://www.jeffvandermeer.com

An appreciation of Arthur C. Clarke
Official Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
skepticalobservor - http://skepticalobservor.blogspot.com/

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke by Dave Itzkoff
Paper Cuts - http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 - 2008 by Dan Sandler
Control Freak - Video Games - http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_videogames/

Arthur C. Clarke RIP by Stuart Woods
Quillblog - http://www.quillandquire.com/blog

RIP Sir Arthur - Liz Williams

Arthur C Clarke is dead by Al Billings at In Pursuit of Mysteries

the darkness at the end of the paradigm

The other day we went to a very thought-provoking talk by Jocelyn Bell Burnell (the discoverer of pulsars) at the Bath Science Café at The Raven.

There was talk of dark matter and dark energy, which are basically 'dark' in the sense that no-one knows what they are. We do know that dark matter is probably non-baryonic, unlike most matter in the universe. (Baryonic matter is matter with protons and neutrons in the nucleus.)

So, she said, there will be a paradigm shift when the nature of dark matter and dark energy is discovered.

There was a similar paradigm shift when it was finally realised that phlogiston didn't exist. Natural philosophers studying burning materials assumed that, since they gained weight after burning, they must be emitting a substance that had negative mass; they called this substance phlogiston. Joseph Priestley almost had it right when he produced "phlogisticated air" (air that, he believed, was rich in phlogiston), but it was Antoine Lavoisier who realised that phlogiston didn't exist, and that rather than losing a substance with negative mass, the burning material was actually fixing oxygen out of the air. The theory of phlogiston may seem daft now, but it made sense at a time when it was assumed that air was all one substance, not several different gases mixed together. (I remember watching a video about this in O-level Chemistry.)

Another paradigm shift that Professor Bell Burnell told us about occurred in astronomy when looking at planetary orbits; it was assumed they were circular, but then people observed anomalies in them and called them epicycles, and it all got very untidy until Johannes Kepler pointed out that the orbits were elliptical.

And of course the most famous paradigm shift of all was the one when Copernicus pointed out that we live in a heliocentric solar system, not a geocentric one.

At least nowadays you are not likely to get burnt at the stake or kept under house arrest for suggesting a radical new scientific idea. The worst thing that could happen to you is loss of tenure.

The point of all this is to say that, although there is speculation as to what dark matter and dark energy might be, it may be that something else is wrong, such as the basic assumptions which led to the need to theorise their existence, in which case whatever is causing the need to insert them into the theoretical models turns out to be something completely different. In a hundred years' time, people could be laughing at those early 21st century scientists who believed in 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', in the same way that we find phlogiston, flat earth theory and geocentric cosmology amusing nowadays. Such is the weirdness when we're sitting on the brink of a paradigm shift. Maybe a bit like sitting at the event horizon of a black hole - nothing will ever be the same again once you have passed the threshold.

why birds sing

I just finished watching the documentary Why Birds Sing on BBC4. David Rothenberg says they sing because they enjoy it (and a neurologist has contributed significant evidence to this theory by showing an increase in dopamine - a pleasure hormone - levels in birds' brains when they sing). Conventional bird-song science says that they sing to attract females to mate with, and that the females are attracted by the complexity of the song, and that there's no aesthetic sense in birds. But if that is the case, why are the female birds attracted to the song? If they find complex songs more attractive, then they're making an aesthetic judgment. QED. I don't understand why rationalists are so antipathetic to the idea that animals feel emotion. If there are gay animals (clearly having sex for a reason other than procreation, like emotional bonding) and animals that love to interact with other animals - like dogs and cats that like to hang out together - then clearly animals experience emotions. In The Science of Discworld, Jack Cohen mentions that he once had a praying mantis (an insect, for goodness' sake) that liked to do tricks to impress an audience, and would not perform if you gave him a trick that he considered too simple. So I can't see what is so irrational about saying that birds have an aesthetic sense, and sing for the sheer pleasure of singing. I don't think this is anthropomorphising birds. It is quite probable that early humans were inspired to make music by listening to birds, and this is why our musical scales are similar to theirs. It seems that rationalists want to take away any notion of love or spirituality, and explain everything mechanistically. I don't think it is irrational to say that birds and animals can experience pleasure (why else do cats enjoy stroking and food, bonobos enjoy sex, or humans enjoy all the things that we enjoy - after all, we are animals too).

There's also a longer article by David Rothenberg on why this is important.

"As human music grows to encompass ever more kinds of sounds and listens more sensitively to what is around us, there will be more interspecies music than ever before. It works best when the human musician welcomes the encounter with openness and respect, ready to take in the unfamiliar and genuinely learn something new, to change one's musical sense in the presence of new and exciting sounds. Approach the situation without too many expectations, and let us make music together that neither species could make apart. It is one more way for us to learn about and to appreciate the animal world."

And here's another article, featuring marvellous musical mice (who sing in octaves and shifts in the ultrasonic range).

Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo of Washington University in St. Louis show that male mice “sing” to females in ultrasonic ranges.

“Individual males produce songs with characteristic syllabic and temporal structure,” the authors write.

In this study of captive animals, the mice sing primarily in octaves and shifts. In a study of wild California wild mice, other researchers found that the mice sang in thirds. Patricia Gray says, “This is phenomenal to me as a musician that intervals do matter. They matter to us and to other species as well.”

creationism research

Recent research on creationism in the USA shows that almost half of Americans do not believe in evolution.

It seems, though, that the question was not framed in such a way as to allow for people who
believe that one of the seven "days" of creation was millions of years, and that evolution and the big bang are true, but God, a god, or the gods started the whole process - where do these people fit in the scheme of things?

• 24% of Americans believe that both the theory of evolution and the theory of creationism are probably or definitely true
• 41% believe that creationism is true, and that evolution is false
• 28% believe that evolution is true, but that creationism is false
• 3% either believe that both are false or have no opinion about at least one of the theories

Without further research, it's not possible to determine the exact thinking process of those who agreed that both the theory of evolution and creationism are true. It may be, however, that some respondents were seeking a way to express their views that evolution may have been initiated by or guided by God, and told the interviewer that they agreed with both evolution and creationism in an effort to express this more complex attitude.

Personally I believe in a multiverse in which universes appear and disappear due to the effects of black and white holes (many physicists have adopted this view), and where the processes of evolution, emergence and collapse are the physical correlates of the thought processes of the mind of the Universe.