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Strike4BlackLives

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Post compiled by Ankita Anirban.

10 June 2020 is #Strike4BlackLives and we urge you to participate in this strike. Organised by a group of physicists, led by Brian Nord and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, this is a day to #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM in solidarity with Black colleagues, Black students and Black people who are excluded from academia. Learn more about the strike here.

“As researchers, teachers, students, and staff we devote an immense amount of our time and mental energy to learning more about the world and ourselves within the framework of our own discipline. The strike day gives us the space and time to center Black lives, show solidarity with academics with marginalized ascribed identities, to educate ourselves about the ways in which we and our institutions are complicit in anti-Black racism, and to take concrete action for change.” –  Particles for Justice call to action.

Thousands have pledged to join the strike, including the arXiv and the American Physical Society. Today, take time to pause your academic work and reflect on your role within the academic institution. Talk to your colleagues, organise within your department and work to become anti-racist.

In the UK, just 1.7% of first year physics undergraduates in 2016 were Black and an IOP report from 2012 shows that for PhD- holding researchers, the number is even lower at 0.1%. If you are not Black, take a moment to count how many Black physicists you have come across in your academic career.

Source: https://cx.report/2020/06/02/equity/

It is clear that academic institutions are in need of radical structural change. Yet with so few Black voices within the system, there is an urgent need for non-Black allies to take an active role in campaigning for change.

Here we provide some starting points we have found useful for learning more about racism in academia, how racism and science are inextricably linked and the case for a more inclusive and pluralist science.

Being Black in physics

For non-Black academics, the first step to understanding the extent to which racism pervades academic life is to hear the stories of Black academics. One place to start is the  #BlackintheIvory hashtag on Twitter which has been used to share experiences of Black academics.

Op-ed: The ‘Benefits’ of Black physics students by Jedidah Isler, New York Times, 2015

News: Why are there so few Black physicists? by Ryan Mandelbaum, Gizmodo, 2020 

Perspective: Curiosity and the end of discimination by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Nature Astronomy, 2017

Blog: Ain’t I a woman? At the intersection of gender, race and sexuality by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Women in Astronomy blog, 2014

Addressing the inequalities and discrimination within academia requires structural change. As an individual, you can campaign within your department to recognise the need for this change and enact it in policies regarding hiring, mentoring and support for Black students. When organising a conference or a new collaboration, reflect on your choice of participants and strive to include more Black voices in the conversation.

500 Women Scientists – Black History Month

Fellows of the National Society of Black Physicists

Who are the Black Physicists? A historical list

Science and colonialism

Modern science as we practise it today has inextricable links to empire, colonialism and the slave trade. Here are some accessible resources which introduce how colonialism has shaped science:

Podcast: BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – on astronomy and the British empire

Blog: Black Women Physicists In the Wake by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2017

Reading list: Decolonising science reading list compiled by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Building a more inclusive science

In addition to recognising the historical impact of colonialism on science, it is also important to acknowledge the influence it continues to wield within scientific practice today.  Here are some resources that re-centre Indigenous science:

Australian Indigenous Astronomy 

Blog: The fight for Mauna Kea and the future of science by Sara Segura Kahanamoku, Massive Science, 2019

Comment: Towards inclusive practices with indigenous knowledge by Aparna Venkatesan et al., Nature Astronomy, 2019

Article: Challenging epistemologies: Exploring knowledge practices in Palikur astronomy by Lesley Green, Futures, 2009

Article: ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity by Lesley Green, Archaeologies, 2008

Long Reads:

Superior by Angela Saini.

Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician by Katherine Johnson

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence by Erica N. Walker 

A different kind of dark energy: placing race and gender in physics, BSc thesis by Lauren Chambers, Department of African American Studies, Yale University

Behind the paper: CP violation in neutrino oscillations

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In 1967, Andrei Sakharov proposed conditions required in the early universe for generating
matter and anti-matter at different rates, to explain the abundance of matter in our universe
today. Charge-Parity (CP) violating processes are essential under these conditions.
Measurements of the CP violation in quarks, first performed in 1964, are too small to explain
the difference, and finding other sources of CP violation is an ongoing quest in the physics
community. In April 2020, the T2K collaboration published a paper in Nature suggesting
large CP violation in the leptonic sector, namely in neutrino oscillations. Some of the
researchers involved in the project tell us their story.

A guest post by Ciro Riccio (Scientist, Stony Brook University), Patrick Dunne (Scientist,
Imperial College London), Pruthvi Mehta (Ph.D. student, University of Liverpool), Sam
Jenkins (Ph.D. student, University of Sheffield), Tomoyo Yoshida (Graduated Ph.D. student,
Tokyo Institute of Technology), Clarence Wret (Scientist, University of Rochester)

The oscillation analysis, whose results were recently published in Nature, is the last link in a
long chain of work. It amalgamates the effort of the entire collaboration, from those designing
and constructing the experiment 20 years ago, to the countless hours of detector operations
taken by people all over the world, to the development of the analyses.

The project
There are over 400 people working on T2K, in 12 countries, at 69 institutes. Many of us have
spent years building our bit of the experiment, from physical objects like detector or beamline
instrumentation, to abstract items like data analysis frameworks. Looking at the author list,
you’ll see that T2K consists of collaborators from all over the world. Our daily
communications happen online; in video meetings, emails, and chats. It’s sometimes a
challenge to find good time-slots for connecting people over 16 time zones, and it’s not
uncommon to sign-off from a meeting with a good-night, only to be met with a good-morning,
and vice versa.

Our international collaborators frequently fly to Japan to spend a week or two monitoring the
experiment in Tokai—on the east coast—where the neutrino beamline and Near Detectors
are, or Kamioka—just west of the Japanese alps—where the Far Detector is. In addition to
the flashing computer screens and sounding alarms, we get to witness a very different side
of Japan from the bright lights of Tokyo, from the beautiful mountains and rivers of rural
Japan, to the delicious local specialities. Avoiding the risk of data loss often occurs at the
cost of sleep for the operations experts (as the contributors to this blog post can attest)—but
all is forgotten after a morning visit to the local onsen (hot-spring).

It’s impossible to overemphasise the fantastic experience of Japanese culture as an added
bonus of partaking in T2K. Many of the restaurants in the Tokai and Kamioka areas are
familiar with members of the collaboration, and are very accommodating to international
collaborators. The owner of one particular restaurant in Tokai often recognises Sam and
remembers that he can speak a small amount of the language (chotto), and indulges him to
order in broken Japanese (we like to think it’s good for practice, and not solely their
entertainment). A favourite annual event is the sweet potato festival (imo matsuri), a
community event in Tokai held in November to celebrate the root vegetable that the Ibaraki
prefecture is renowned for.

T2K collaboration meeting, Paris 2019, Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

The measurement
The Super-Kamiokande Far Detector started construction in 1991 in Kamioka, and operates
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so as not to miss rare astrophysical events, such as
supernova bursts. The neutrino beam and the Near Detectors started construction 2001
(beam) and 2007 (Near Detectors) in Tokai, and are continuously operating when we have
pre-allocated beam time, sometimes up to seven months per year.
To make our measurement we not only need the neutrino beam and the detectors, but also a
computer-simulated model of the entire experiment, painstakingly quantifying how we think
each component behaves and how certain we are of that description. This includes
everything from the neutrino beam (and the proton beam collisions that creates it), to the
neutrino interactions in our detectors, to the density of the Earth between Tokai and
Kamioka, to how good our detectors are at measuring the neutrinos.

To characterise the neutrino beam, we have two detectors (“ND280” and “INGRID”) 280m
from the neutrino source, which have a staggering amount of neutrinos passing through
them. Occasionally these neutrinos interact at the Near Detectors, occasionally they interact
300km later in Super-Kamiokande, but most of the time they continue out through Earth’s
atmosphere, propagating deep into space. To put things into perspective, this analysis used
about 3×1021 (3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) proton interactions to create the neutrino
beam. Roughly one neutrino is created per proton interaction, but due to their rare interaction rate with matter, we observe a mere 120,000 neutrino events at ND280 (60,000
of which were used in our analysis) and about 500 at Super-Kamiokande over the course of
nine years. In the early neutrino beam experiments of the 1970s, the data are often on less
than 500 neutrino events, with the experiments sitting right next to the neutrino source for
tens of years. Today we have about the same number of neutrino events in a similar amount
of time, but sitting 300km away from the source at Super-Kamiokande. It’s only recently that
we have the technology, international funding support from governments, and scientific
community in place to produce such powerful neutrino beams, which are the backbone of
these precise measurements.

Presentation of final results of the oscillation analysis. Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

Once the neutrinos are characterised at the Near Detector, the oscillation analysis takes all
the models of the neutrino beam, the detectors, the neutrino interaction, and neutrino
oscillations, combines them with their constraints, and blends them together to describe our
observations. The analysis and all of its inputs turns PhD students’, scientists’ and
professors’ daily work into many cycles of communication-implementation-validation, over
the course of more than a year. When validations and tests are satisfied, we finally get to
look at the data and make our measurement of the neutrinos’ oscillations. That last link in
the long chain has the privilege to see the final result first in the collaboration. The moment
when the plot pops onto your screen and you’re the only person who knows what it shows is
pretty special. For this result, published in April 2020, we first saw the results internally in
Autumn 2018, and spent the time between then and now extensively validating and testing
alternate explanations.

Looking ahead
T2K is currently in the process of updating the analysis using more data taken during
2019/2020, and using better models of the experiment, all thanks to the continuing dedicated
work of all our collaborators. Many of us are also working on upgrades of the neutrino
beamline, the Near Detectors and the Far Detector, to squeeze out more science from the
neutrino beam. Our results published in Nature are the strongest constraint on the CP
violating phase in neutrinos to date, but we have only taken about half of our allocated data.
There is much more to come and the prospects are truly exciting for all of us. As we
continue, we’re including the work of even more people than the analyses that came before;
new students, scientists and professors. We hope they, like us, get their share of the
pleasant, stressful, lovely, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding experience of being on an
international science collaboration such as ours.

Party at Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay. Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

What’s the difference between a supernova and a fork?

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Francesca Chadha-Day is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying particle astrophysics and axion phenomenology. She is also a comedian. Here, Fran writes for us about her experience of stand-up comedy. 

My first stand-up comedy performance was an unfortunate side effect of a promise I made to myself. I used to be an atrocious public speaker and, at the start of my PhD, vowed to do something about it. I promised myself I would say yes to every public speaking opportunity that came my way for the next few months. I deeply regretted this promise when I opened an e-mail from Bright Club – a comedy night where academics do stand-up about their research. According to my self-imposed rules, I had to do it.

{credit}Steve Cross{/credit}

For the next month, most of my free time was devoted to writing and meticulously memorising my set. I was terrified. When my time on stage finally arrived, it was 20 seconds of blinding fear, followed by eight minutes of pure joy (and relief). Making a room full of people laugh is absolutely brilliant.

My first set asked and answered the question “what do theoretical particle physicists do all day?” My answer is that we spend our time figuring out what the universe would look like if the laws of physics were just a little bit different than what we currently think. For example, what if there were new particles, new interactions between particles, or even new dimensions? Comparing these calculations to data helps us discover what the laws of physics really are. In other words, we write fan fiction for the universe. This first short set formed the basis of my first solo show, Physics Fan Fiction, which I took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.

I believe that science comedy is a great addition to the landscape of public engagement with science. It appeals to people who might not want to come to a more traditional science talk, and it’s a perfect medium for communicating how science works. Rather than focusing only on the facts and figures of physics, my comedy explores the scientific method, the challenges of making progress in particle physics, and day to day life as a theoretical physicist. I even have a set on quantum field theory.

This kind of science communication really appeals to me because I have never been that excited by how large space is, or how fast the protons can go at the Large Hadron Collider. I am excited by the fact that the laws of physics which make a star explode into a supernova are the same laws of physics that make celery. The immense variety of phenomena that arise from the interactions of 18 or so fundamental particles is what physics is all about. This is the subject of my recent show “10 key differences between a supernova explosion and a fork”.

Writing a stand-up comedy show is a highly creative endeavour – and theoretical physics is just as creative. My creative process is more or less the same, whether I am writing a set, thinking up a new method to discover dark matter, or even debugging some code. For me, it’s all about asking stupid questions, and then doing my best to answer them. “What are the main differences between a supernova and a fork?” is a pretty stupid question. Einstein’s question, “how come the speed of light is a constant in Maxwell’s equations” might well have seemed stupid initially, but it led to one of the most beautiful and revolutionary theories in physics.

So, what are the key differences between a supernova and a fork? The first difference is that a supernova lasts for a few weeks, whereas forks are stable more or less indefinitely. The last is that no-one knows what happens if you put a supernova in a microwave.

 

Interactions: Nell Freudenberger

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Ankita Anirban interviews Nell Freudenberger about her book `Lost and Wanted’ whose protagonist is a theoretical physicist.

`Lost and Wanted’ is a novel about friendship, grief and parenthood. Helen, the protagonist, is coming to terms with the death of her best friend, Charlie, when she begins to receive mysterious texts from her friend’s phone. Her son later claims to have seen Charlie in their house. The story unfolds as Helen tries to explain these seemingly `supernatural’ phenomena, while reflecting on her friendship with Charlie and continuing her academic work.

What is perhaps unusual about this plot is that Helen is a theoretical physicist. Explanations of physics concepts are threaded throughout the narrative, but the execution is not heavy-handed. Rather, physics is a focus of the book only as it is central to Helen’s life and worldview. I found Helen compelling and convincing and it was refreshing to be able to relate to a character, not necessarily in terms of feelings, but simply in her daily routines and concerns as a researcher.

When I finished the book, I wanted to learn about the author and was surprised to find that she did not have a physics background and her previous work was not about science at all. Curious to find out more about her motivation to write this novel and how she found the process, I reached out to her.

What inspired you to write a novel about a physicist?

I wanted to write a book about women and work; about the commitment of a woman to a career that demanded sacrifices of her.  In my first draft (which I threw away completely) the narrator was a writer.  The problem was that I got bored thinking about something I knew so well, and the writing reflected that.  I have a friend from college who is an astrophysicist, and I wrote to him to ask whether he could recommend an introductory undergraduate cosmology textbook.  He did, and reading it made me wonder if my female narrator could be a physicist.  That idea was terrifying at first because I don’t have a background in science.  Usually though, the idea that scares you is the one that’s worth pursuing.  I wonder if that’s true in science as well.

Image of author

Credit: Elena Seibert

The physics metaphors are `entangled’ with the plot and structure of the book. Which came to you first, the metaphors or the plot?

Characters always come first, followed by plot.  I resisted using the science in the book metaphorically at all, at least at first.  I really wanted readers to see Helen doing science `onstage’ in the novel, rather than simply throwing in technical jargon to make the reader believe she was a scientist.  I thought Helen would be very impatient with scientific metaphors like gravity used to describe romantic attraction, or entanglement for friendship.  In talking to physicists though, I started to change my mind.  One LIGO experimental physicist told me that our 3D brains have a lot of trouble understanding certain phenomena without leaning on analogies (he was talking about describing black holes quantum mechanically as opposed to classically at the time) and that he wasn’t opposed to them.  He said that the trick was to make those metaphors as accurate as possible.  I thought that by really trying to understand the work that Helen was doing myself, I might be able to make the scientific concepts in the book more complex and evocative than they normally are in casual conversation.

How did you go about doing your research – both on the technical aspects of the science and also about the daily rhythms of life as a physicist?

To begin with, I read a lot.  I’m lucky that many physicists consider it worth their time to write for a general audience.  Books by David Kaiser, Lisa Randall, Kip Thorne, Janna Levin, Steven Weinberg, and Louisa Gilder, as well as a sociology of LIGO by Harry Collins and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, were especially helpful.  My reading gave me the confidence to approach some physicists myself and I was fortunate that they were all so generous with their time.  I was struck by how passionate these physicists were about their work, and how willing they were to put it in simple terms for a novice.  I once had an amusing conference call with two LIGO physicists from the interferometer at Livingston, where they helped me brainstorm violent disasters that might occur in a LIGO lab.  (For the record, their ideas were bloodier than mine.)  I also visited labs at Columbia and MIT to see some of the equipment that appears in the novel, as well as small details like the objects that might sit on a physicist’s desk, for example, a cosmic microwave background stuffed toy.  You can’t make this stuff up …

Did you have any preconceived notions about the life of a physicist which you reconsidered after your research?

I kept trying to find some dramatic way in which physicists saw the world differently.  I was thinking about that especially in terms of grief because Charlie’s death is the center of the book.  I asked every scientist I spoke to, “Is there something that makes you different from other people because you’re a physicist?”  Their answers were very boring; one physicist told me that he’s not afraid of flying, because he understands the way the plane operates.  I came to the conclusion that physicists are more like the rest of us than we think, and that Helen should react to loss the same way anyone else would, with some magical thinking—what the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt calls “irrational expectations of recovery.”

As far as preconceived notions go, I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know sexual harassment was as prevalent in the science departments of universities as it is in the humanities.  I think I got that wrong because most of my friends in college were liberal arts majors, and because female students in STEM are so underrepresented in popular culture.

How much do you relate to the way Helen sees the world? Does she have a life you think you would enjoy?

I loved learning about Helen’s work.  I don’t like the idea that science and the humanities require different types of brains, and the wonderful physicist-writers I read while researching the novel disprove that theory anyway.  That said, it seems unlikely that I would’ve made it as a physicist.  But if you could build me a theoretical model in which I could have done physics at Helen’s level (or even a less elevated one) I think I would have loved her life.  Some readers have said that Helen is cold, or that she sees the world in a strange way; if that’s true, those are qualities I share.  I do often feel sort of removed from other people, more of an observer than a participant.  I won’t speak for scientists, but I think this is probably true of most writers.

Book cover of Lost and Wanter

Courtesy of Knopf

What’s in our browser tabs? October 2019

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As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break science-related browsing. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in October:

Nature and physics. In Physics Today, Melinda Baldwin recounts the highs and lows of physics research published in Nature over the past 150 years.

 

At APS News, Preprints make inroads outside of physics. “Recently, however, the tide has begun to shift. Since 2013, dozens of preprint servers in fields such as biology, chemistry, and sociology have popped up and garnered tens of thousands of submissions.”

 

Football’s concussion crisis is awash with pseduoscience, reports Christie Aschwanden in Wired. “Products that offer a “seatbelt” or “bubble wrap” for the brain claim to reduce head trauma. If only the laws of physics worked that way.”

 

Check out the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 36th annual Gallery of Fluid Motion and an accompanying editorial explaining how winners were picked and giving some stats on which fluid dynamics phenomena get awarded the most.

 

Review with care. Writing in Science, Adriana L. Romero-Olivares gives good advice for when, and how, to comment as a referee on the level of written English of a scientific paper.


Athene Donald asks, What do we know about the research ecosystem? “There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study.”

Peer Review Week 2019: Improving peer review quality through transparent, reproducible research

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This guest blog comes from Sowmya Swaminathan, Head of Editorial Policy and Research Integrity for Nature Research

By the time a research study reaches the peer review process, many crucial decisions that affect the rigor of the study design, methodology, data collection, analysis and reporting have already been made. Nevertheless, by developing and implementing editorial policies and by providing a publishing infrastructure that supports publication of transparent reproducible research, editors, journals and publishers can help improve the published paper, adding value and quality to the peer review and publication process.

Broadly speaking, four pillars – policy, publishing infrastructure, advocacy and awareness, and collective action – have driven editorial and publishing innovation and furthered our mission to work in partnership with the research community to advance quality and integrity.  In this blog post I provide an overview and examples of the many initiatives undertaken at Nature Research to support publication of reproducible research.

Policy

Transparency is at the heart of our policies designed to improve the reproducibility of published research. We ask authors to report information about their experimental design, as well as to clearly identify and make their datasets, code and materials available, also making it easier for reviewers to access the information they need to assess the study appropriately. We strongly support open research practices such as sharing the underlying building blocks of the research article – data, code and protocols – through repositories.

We have found that policies centred on transparency have had an impact.  For example, independent studies have found that the Nature Research Life Science Reporting Summary, an instrument to support transparent reporting in life science articles, which we introduced in 2013, has improved reporting of statistics and other aspects of experimental design and analysis [1,2].

We recognize that what works for reporting in life sciences is often not applicable to many of the other disciplines. While we advocate for a minimum threshold for transparency across core aspects of data, code, and materials, we have also worked with experts to tailor approaches that are designed to meet field-specific needs, for example in areas of photovoltaics and photonics research.

Data availability is another area where implementing a policy focused on transparency has had clear benefits. Since 2016, when we introduced a mandatory data availability statement on all research articles published in Nature-branded journals, we have seen a rise in data sharing through public repositories across our journals, especially in the life sciences, and increased appreciation of the value of data sharing to underscore the integrity and credibility of published work in many disciplines.

Publishing Infrastructure

Designing an innovative peer review and publishing infrastructure that supports all aspects of publishing reproducible research is central to our overall vision for an open and transparent ecosystem. A robust technology infrastructure is also essential to drive large-scale adoption of best practice approaches by authors, reviewers and editors. Over the years, we have introduced a number of publishing innovations that have furthered our commitment to reproducibility. These include avenues for publishing data and protocols such as Scientific Data and Protocol Exchange, and new article formats like Data Descriptors and Registered Reports that focus on data and methodological rigour respectively, rather than the specific results.

More recently, three Nature Research journals have tested executable platforms for peer review and publication of code. Although the policy and practice of peer reviewing code has been in place at these journals for many years, powering the process through an executable platform sets the stage for a more seamless and scalable experience for authors, reviewers and editors.

Advocacy and awareness

Advocacy and awareness-raising in the broader research and publishing community are other important areas of engagement for us in advancing our commitment to integrity in research. In the pages of Nature and the Nature-branded journals, we have often highlighted and debated the many different, complex issues, challenges and solutions on the path to transparent, reproducible research including discipline-specific needs and barriers to reproducible research (for example, see recent discussions about reproducibility in nano-medicine and data and code sharing in physics).

Collective action

Shifting entrenched patterns of how research is conducted and published requires stakeholders across the research and publishing community to work collectively in the push for better practice. Nature Research journals are proud to have participated in and supported many such efforts to accelerate data sharing, advance best practice toward open and transparent research and align on minimum reporting standards.

We believe that our editors and journals have an important role to play in tackling the many issues that affect the quality and integrity of published research. Indeed, we feel privileged to be able to engage with a global and multidisciplinary research community and are committed to furthering the cause of transparent, reliable research with all the tools at our disposal.

Join the discussions during Peer Review Week: #QualityinPeerReview, #PeerRevWk2019 #PeerReviewWeek

References:

  1. The NPQIP Collaborative group, Did a change in Nature journals’ editorial policy for life sciences research improve reporting? BMJ Open Science 2019;3:e000035. doi: 10.1136/bmjos-2017-000035
  2. Han S, et al. (2017) A checklist is associated with increased quality of reporting preclinical biomedical research: A systematic review. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0183591. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183591

What’s in our browser tabs? August 2019

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Welcome to our new monthly link round-up! As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break popular science reading. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in August:

  • Ready, set, bake — Physics World. Rahul Mandal, 2018 Great British Bake Off winner — and metrologist  — writes about the science of baking. (PS: if you like cake, check out Rahul’s instagram)
  • Nathalie Walchover’s account in Quanta magazine of the latest developments in the Hubble constant saga. This summer the tension between different measurements of H0 got more dramatic with new papers coming out and a dedicated meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
  • There are some stunning images in the shortlist for the RPS 2019 science photographer of the year award.
  • How Ancillary Technology Shapes What We Do In Physics.Why is the definition of the second based on cesium atoms? Why do MRI scanners use such large magnets? Partly because of physics, but largely because of technology and history, as Chad Orzel explains.
  • We can’t believe we only just discovered this gem from 2017: Twelve LaTeX packages to get your paper accepted by Andreas Zeller. Examples include “The significance package.  Alters your experiment settings until results become statistically significant, repurposing LaTeX’s built-in formatting algorithm for advanced p-hacking.  Use as usepackage[p=0.05]{significance}.” and “The award package.  Makes your paper win an award, as in usepackage[bestpaper]{award}.”
  • The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk. Over at The Guardian, Julia Carrie Wong talks to Neil Johnson about his work analyzing online extremism and hate in terms of gelation.

Alive in the universe

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This is a guest post by Sarah Hiddleston 

Nature Middle East has an exciting contribution to the grande dame of art events –The Venice Biennale. For more than 120 years the Biennale has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to the floating city, whose sweeping squares, crumbling palazzos and beautiful churches play host to the world’s foremost cutting-edge creative minds. Now in its 58th iteration, it takes as its theme May you live in interesting times and promises to be a showcase of what its artistic director Ralph Rugoff describes as “art’s potential for looking into things that we do not already know”.

Nature Middle East’s film-short charts the contribution of Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj as he examines the nature of reality, life, death, migration and the passage of time. Together with the British poet Ruth Padel, Kourbaj will open a 28-day exhibition entitled Alive in the Universe with a three-piece performance installation at the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava on May 8. The film, shot last year in Kourbaj’s studio in Cambridge, will be shown alongside the installation.

Alive in the Universe is a creative take on the wonder and anguish of existence including some of the most perplexing questions in science. Masterminded by co-curators Caroline Wiseman and David Baldry, it was inspired by Albert Einstein’s dictum that “art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way”. The exhibition seeks to challenge and deepen our understanding of life and death, gender and procreation, the cosmos, water, dark matter, technology and time among others.

Watch: the video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpUOx-wTUz4

The story behind the story: A billion dots of light

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This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Matt Thompson with his story A billion dots of light. A London-based experimental musician, Matt brought us the intriguing story Ded-Mek last year. You can catch up on his other work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, Matt reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing A billion dots of light

Generation starships, one of the mainstays of SF, never seemed entirely plausible to me. Who would volunteer to live out their entire lives in a tin can (or even a hollowed-out hunk of space rock) just so that their descendants could form a colony? No one, most likely. But while the solution proposed in this story has a certain elegance to it (leaving aside the thorny question of who the original crew might have been), it does raise some delicate ethical questions.

Being a non-meat eater, I’ve occasionally found myself involved in conversations where considerations on the farming and slaughter of animals are countered with statements along the lines of “But they’re just dumb beasts”. It’s a debatable point, true, but seems like a hangover from a waning Judeo-Christian viewpoint concerning the existence of the soul. But can a human being whose higher thought processes were cauterized at birth be said to even have a soul (should such a thing exist)? And, if not, has anyone really been hurt? Do the means always justify the ends? Perhaps our accelerating technological landscape requires a new set of standards.

That’s the conclusion the viewpoint character in the story, an AI that has achieved some level of sentience over the course of its vast journey, comes to when faced with the conflict between the ‘accepted’ humanitarian perspective it was programmed with and the grotesque reality of the charnel-house it’s presiding over. In its decision to set the future colonists free from the moral burden of the past, this tension is resolved only at the cost of forcing those unborn pioneers to start over from scratch.

The human race right now doesn’t have that luxury. The ‘one set of ethics for the rich, one for the poor’ attitude has brought us to the brink of self-annihilation. The free market has, in the end, proved a failure. If the onward march of science is to be undertaken as a process of prising open Pandora’s box we’d better make sure we know what’s inside.

Rivalry, crystal structure prediction and discovery of new materials

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Post by Artem Oganov.

The review in Nature Reviews Materials can be read here.

The story of our review started in 2006 when my group and the duo of Chris Pickard and Richard Needs published papers that changed the view of the scientific community in an important way. Prior to this, it was widely believed that crystal structures are, in general, not predictable: the number of possible structures is just way too large, and going through all of them is impossible. Our works showed that this problem can be handled, and this opens a way for computational materials discovery. I developed an evolutionary approach, while Pickard and Needs used random sampling. Within a few years we found ourselves in an increasingly intense competition which drove us to develop our methods and explore new applications for them, which, of course, is good for science.

At some point it became clear that if the intensity of this competition was allowed to develop further it could slip into bitterness, and potentially outright hostility. Did I need to win such a fight, if it brought me nothing positive in the end? The question was how to change this. I knew two things: first, that every problem has a solution. Second, I knew that with the right approach every problem can be turned into an advantage. At some point Qiang Zhu, my former PhD student and now Assistant Professor, found a brilliant solution: to write together a review. First, we felt that the community really needed such a review of many years of hard work, now not just of two groups, but also of many others who joined this field later. Second, writing a review with your rivals makes the review actually better: reviews have to be balanced, and rivals are the best people for ensuring this balance! Third, working on something together helps to build bridges. So, with this in mind, after a thorough discussion with Qiang Zhu, Chris Pickard and Richard Needs, I talked to Giulia Pacchioni, an editor at Nature Reviews Materials, and convinced her that we could write something important for the community.

We began working on the review from a position of low trust. We had countless debates, and the writing initially went very slowly. This delay risked us losing the invitation. However, the editors were very patient and encouraging. However, the editors were very patient and encouraging. The first skeleton, basically, a set of bullet points, was sketched by Richard Needs, and then each of us expanded these points, transforming them into a more or less coherent text (I think I took the most bullet points, Chris Pickard took many as well). We tried different ways of co-writing, experimenting with Google-docs and Overleaf, but there was not one technical solution that everyone liked, so eventually we just created our own versions of the review and let Qiang Zhu merge and edit them all. Much later he told me that he quietly cut a lot of text which had a potential for igniting arguments; funny that at the time no one noticed this, which I guess shows that our differences of opinion are actually of little importance. Once we had a complete draft, everyone started editing the text written by everyone else. By the end of this process we were all on the same wavelength. After submission we had one round of peer review and quite a bit of proofreading, mostly handled by me. The end result is one we can be proud of: a nice review of a field that we were fortunate to catalyze. But also a human victory. Rivals becoming friends and gaining a shared understanding is so much more important than winning a competition.

Artem Oganov
Center for Energy Science and Technology
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia.