A new feathered dinosaur suggests that most dinosaurs had feathers

 

Jul 28, 2014

Original link:  https://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/a-new-feathered-dinosaur-suggests-that-most-dinosaurs-had-feathers/              

 

By Why Evolution Is True

What better evidence that birds arose from dinosaurian reptiles than the discovery of a fossil with both scales and feathers? Further, the fossil comes from the right time period: after reptiles had already evolved but before we see modern flying birds with fully-developed feathers.

 

Of course, we already knew that birds are the only living descendants of dinosaurs—some biologists classify them as dinosaurs—but as we go earlier and earlier back into the evolution of dinos, we’re beginning to find that many, perhaps most, had feather-like structures. That is what we call a “preadaptation”—a feature that could be co-opted later for a different useful function: in the case of birds, gliding and then flight. (“Preadaptations,” of course, didn’t evolve because they’d be useful in the future, for natural selection doesn’t anticipate future needs; it produces features that enhance reproduction in the here and now. But those features can be hijacked for other things later, like penguins’ vestigial wings that became modified for swimming.)

 

The earliest feathers, as we’ll see on the specimen I’ll show shortly, are small, filamentous structures that occur along with scales. They were of no possible use for flying or gliding, but they wouldn’t evolve unless they enhanced the animal’s reproduction (or its proxy, survival). What were they for? The authors of the paper we’re discussing today suggest this (my emphasis):

Here we report a new ornithischian dinosaur, Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus, with diverse epidermal appendages, including grouped filaments that we interpret as avianlike feathers. This suggests that all Dinosauria could have had feathers and that feathers arose for purposes of insulation and signaling and were only later co-opted for flight.

So what is the finding? The researchers found a 150 million-year-old fossil of an ornithischian dinosaur in Siberia. The beast was about 1.5 meters long (4.5 feet), so it wasn’t large. The important thing is that it was an ornithischian dinosaur rather than a theropod dinosaur, and (I’m going from memory here) all of the decently-preserved feathered dinosaurs that were found previously were theropods. Although there were earlier suggestions that some ornithischians had feather-like structures, the preservation was not nearly as good as that in the new fossil.

 

The finding is important because ornithischians are in a completely different evolutionary group from theropods, which were saurischians. The former were herbivores and had hips like birds. “Ornithischian” means “bird-hipped,” even though, confusingly, modern birds descended from the othergroup, the theropods, a carnivorous subgroup of the saurischians. (“Saurishian” means “lizard-hipped.”)

 

Here’s the dinosaur family tree showing the two different groups and their difference in skeletal morphology. Note that birds (“Aves”) are descended from theropods:

Now if both sauriscians and ornithschians were feathered, that means either that both groups evolved feathers independently, or that they inherited feathers (probably rudimentary filaments that later evolved into full plumage) from their common ancestor. The latter possibility is more likely given the probable developmental complexity of feathers. But even if feather evolution was independent in the two groups, it still suggests thatmost dinosaurs, not just the theropods whose descendants became birds, had feathers. T. rex (a theropod) could have been covered in down!

But let’s back up and see the details. The new report in Science by Pascal Godefroit et al. (reference and link below, no free download) reports the finding of feather and scale impressions on an ornithischian dinosaur they named Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus (there were actually six skulls and many bones).  The source of the name and conditions of preservation are given by the lead author in a “news and views”-type piece in National Geographic:

The dinosaur’s name essentially means “Kulinda River running dinosaur.” Zabaikalsky Krai is the region of Siberia where it was discovered (which explains its species name,zabaikalicus).

“There were lakes and there were volcanoes there, lots of volcanoes,” Godefroit says. The plant-eating dinosaurs likely died and fell to the lake bottom, where eruptions soon after covered them with a fine ash. That is what preserved the feather imprints with the fossil bones.

“We don’t know how big this fossil bed is, and it is likely we will find more when we go back,” Godefroit says.

The authors of the paper were working in four countries—Russia, Ireland, Belgium, and the UK—showing once again the international character of science. Since I’d like the readers to be able to read at least parts of scientific papers, I’ll put the paper’s abstract below, which is not too technical:

Abstract:

Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous [JAC: the Cretaceous went from 145 million years ago to 66 million years ago] deposits from northeastern China have yielded varied theropod dinosaurs bearing feathers. Filamentous integumentary structures have also been described in ornithischian dinosaurs, but whether these filaments can be regarded as part of the evolutionary lineage toward feathers remains controversial. Here we describe a new basal neornithischian dinosaur from the Jurassic of Siberia [JAC: the Jurassic was earlier, from about 201 to 145 million years ago] with small scales around the distal hindlimb, larger imbricated scales around the tail, monofilaments around the head and the thorax, and more complex featherlike structures around the humerus, the femur, and the tibia.The discovery of these branched integumentary structures outside theropods suggests that featherlike structures coexisted with scales and were potentially widespread among the entire dinosaur clade; feathers may thus have been present in the earliest dinosaurs.

Green Groups Go To War On Scientific Reform In Europe

By Trevor Butterworth

Original Link:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2014/07/30/green-groups-go-to-war-on-scientific-reform-in-europe/

 

It is, perhaps, not the best of times for Greenpeace. Many of its supporters are angered at the revelation that a senior executive has been commuting some 500 miles roundtrip to work by plane, which makes a mockery of the group’s campaign to reduce our collective carbon footprint; and there is now revolt inside the organization with over 40 staff signing a letter calling on Pascal Husting, the executive in question, to resign. “If you keep your position… we cannot repair our loss of credibility,” said the letter, published in the Dutch paper Volkskrant. “If Greenpeace does not walk the talk, why should others do so?”

It’s a fair point. “Do as I say, but not as I do” is the most visceral of all hypocrisies, while commuting to work by plane is such an unambiguous excess it can jolt even those weary of climate change and its discontents. Nor did it matter that one might be able to forgive Husting his predicament: a new job but no easy way to get there until he could move his family; once the detail emerged in a story about financial mismanagement in the Guardian newspaper (millions lost in currency trading), Greenpeace’s critics had a symbol and a cudgel.

But all of this is a distraction from a much more unpleasant and significant hypocrisy, which Greenpeace has signed onto, along with eight other environmental groups: a campaign to abolish the position of Chief Scientific Advisor to the President of the European Commission.

The position was created in 2011, and filled by Anne Glover, Chair in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Aberdeen, and former chief scientific advisor to Scotland. Glover told a recent meeting in Europe (as reported by the news site EurActive) that she only agreed to accept the position if she was given complete independence from political concerns in order to focus on the evidence, which was agreed.

But in assessing how scientific evidence drives European policy making in general, she found that it was often subordinated to the political imperative—find me the evidence to support my great policy idea!—and, as a consequence, became prey to confirmation bias. You found or commissioned the science to support your position, not the other way around. As Glover saw it, there was little incentive to report back to a politician that the best available scientific evidence does not support your idea, your reasoning, your policy.

Left – Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser to President Barroso; Giles Merritt, SDA Director. (Photo credit: Security & Defence Agenda)

 

So Glover proposed a reform plan that would have the Commission create a new system that would disconnect scientific research on questions of policy from the political imperative, while making the process completely transparent for everyone involved. The position of chief scientific advisor would evolve into an agency with the resources and protection to give evidence without fear or favor. If politicians still wanted to reject the advice, so be it; but they won’t be able to blame it on partial evidence—in both senses of the word. In a “painstaking” demonstration of walking the talk, Glover established a pan-European network of science advisors, which met for the first time in June.

What could be so wrong with this that environmental groups want to trash Glover and have her office abolished? She is “intransparent” (sic) in her advice to the President, their letter says. Well, that’s the way the job was set up, but now that she’s figured out how the whole system of scientific advice isn’t working in Europe, she appears to have a solution that places transparency at the center of evidence-based policy advice. Why not support that?

Glover’s position “concentrates too much influence in one person, and undermines in-depth scientific research and assessments carried out by or for the Commission directorates in the course of policy elaboration,” the petition continues. But she has identified a signal weakness in this process, while laying out a process that will expand the role of science. Glover is, in effect, arguing for the devolution of whatever power she has into an independent institution that can give much greater voice to the scientific consensus.

 

In short, this attack makes no sense—why would Greenpeace and the other environmental groups want to destroy someone who is proposing one of the most significant reform agendas in Europe, one that could liberate policy decisions from imperfect evidence and bias? Don’t they want science to be protected from political meddling and behind-the-scenes lobbying? In a rambling, appearance on BBC radio’s flagship news show, Today, Greenpeace UK’s Chief Scientist hedged, arguing for more transparency through a return to a pre-Scientific Advisor era, when there was less. We should, in other words, promote scientific transparency by destroying an office that has provided Europe with the best chance of getting it.

After such arguments, it is hard not to conclude that political self-interest is really at work here, given that the NGO petition ends with an attack on Glover for arguing that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are no more of a threat than conventionally bred plants. In that she is simply reflecting the position of numerous scientific academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the World Health Organization, one can only assume that Greenpeace assumes an independent scientific agency would do the same, and so make  environmental organizations’ lobbying on the issue that much more difficult. One can only wonder what would have happened had a coalition of pro-business groups demanded Glover’s head on the grounds that she believed climate change to be threat. Would Greenpeace concur on the same principles it now advances?

All of this underscores why, to the politician and lobbyist, science is often no more than an ally when convenient, and disposable when not. Evidence is simply a figure of speech rather than something that emerges from the scientific method. And this is why there has an impassioned response to Greenpeace’s letter from scientific organizations, scientists, teachers and students across Europe. As the counter petition from the British charity Sense About Science puts it “Policy makers or lobbyists who seek to remove scientists because they don’t like their findings or advice do so at the peril of their citizens.”

This is not just a European issue simply because policy decisions taken there have ramifications here and elsewhere; the complex problems we all face demand more evidence based policy analysis, not less. We all need more independent scientific advisors, not fewer—and certainly not zero. We all need more transparency—we need to know how the research was done, how it should be understood, and why it should command our reasoned consideration. Professor Glover is speaking to politicians and citizens everywhere; her voice needs to defended and amplified; her role expanded, not strangled.

Trevor Butterworth is in the process of launching Sense About Science USA

Is the Universe Unnatural?

July 19, 2014 Astrophysics
Original Link:  http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/is-the-universe-unnatural/
      

There is a question that is beginning to haunt the world of science; it’s been rearing its ugly head for the last several decades. The question is simply, “is the universe unnatural?”

As most of you are aware, particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced in July of 2012 that they had finally discovered the elusive Higgs boson – that discovery has since been confirmed. The confirmation of the Higgs’ existence was one of the greatest triumphs of science in 2012, confirming the nearly 50-year-old theory that aims to explain how elementary particles have mass. Arkani-Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study explained, “the fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for the experiment, it’s a triumph for the theory, and it’s an indication that physics works.”

This discovery, however, was a double edged sword.

The Higgs has gotten all of the media attention; however, quantum theories also suggest that scientists should have found a host of other particles along with the Higgs in order to really show that the whole theory makes sense. Thus far, these particles haven’t been found. That might not sound like a big deal, but without these accompanying particles, using our current understandings of quantum theory, the Higgs’ mass in reality is exponentially different than what is predicted by the modified theories.

Image Credit: ATA Wolerian Walawski

Of course, something somewhere is wrong. It could be that we are missing a piece of the puzzle that allows a Higgs boson with a mass 126 giga-electron-volts to exist (in contrast to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 giga-electron-volt Higgs our math currently says should exist due to its interactions with other particles), or it could be that somewhere our math is fundamentally wrong, or the universe could simply be unnatural.

“Naturalness” is a term coined by Albert Einstein, and it is used to describe the elegantly intricate laws of nature. In a natural universe, absolutely everything can be explained with the aid of mathematics. All of the constants of nature are refined by the physical laws of nature and the entire puzzle makes perfect sense. In a unnatural universe, the horrible idea that some of the fundamental laws of nature are an arbitrary byproducts of the random fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime becomes a reality.

The LHC has been nothing short of a revolutionary force in advancing our understanding of the cosmos. Many times, revolutionary understandings present uncomfortable truths; because the LHC did not find the particular zoo of particles scientists were looking for, it’s forcing a large number of physicists to grapple with the idea of an unnatural universe. Hope is not lost for a natural order though. The LHC will start smashing protons together again in 2015 in a final search for answers and naturalness. If the search turns up empty handed, what will happen then?

Image Credit: XKCD

Firstly, it’s very probable that the multiverse theory will take center stage as one of the most plausible models explaining our universe. If the universe is unnatural, and contains arbitrary constants that allow for conditions in our universe perfect for life to arise, physicists reason that, in order to balance out the improbability of such a universe, there must be other universes with differing laws of physics. One such hypothesis containing a multiverse construct, string theory, theorizes about 10^500 multiverses exist. With so many universes, it is extremely likely that this random chance would eventually produce a life-favoring universe, and the rest is history.

String theory is an extremely polarizing hypothesis. You either love it or hate it. Edward Witten, also a physicist at the Institute of Advanced Study, said, “I would be personally happy if the multiverse interpretation is not correct, in part because it potentially limits our ability to understand the laws of physics.”

All of the weight of what happens next rests with the scientists at the LHC. Whatever they find (or, don’t find) in the next decade will fundamentally shape our understanding of absolutely everything.
Scientists will probe the very heart of physics in an attempt to determine whether we live in an overly complicated standalone universe or if we simply exist in a very friendly bubble in a larger multiverse.
In case the doors of unnaturalness and naturalness both seem unfavorable, some physicists have envisioned a third door for a modified naturalness. The main proponents of this model are Joe Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois and Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa in Italy. The basic premise of this hypothesis suggests that scientists are misjudging the affects of other particles on the mass of the Higgs boson. Their idea is far from airtight, when additional particles are thrown in, such as dark matter, the model falters.

Image source

Strumia has said that he isn’t an advocate of the modified naturalness hypothesis, but he wants to open a discussion for the consequences of such a theory. Even though it has problems now, the same line of thinking could help to resolve some of the problems of seemingly arbitrary constants. Modified naturalness, and naturalness for that matter, has a much larger problem standing in the way.
Neither can adequately explain why the universe didn’t annihilate itself in the big bang.
Is the universe natural, unnatural, or does it have a modified naturalness? The most exciting thing about that question is that we are on the brink of having an answer. Whether the answer is comfortable or uncomfortable, pleasant or unpleasant, desirable or undesirable, we are poised to head into a new era of scientific understanding.

Breakthrough Material Could Cut the Cost of Solar Energy in Half

by Orion D. Jones

July 30, 2014, 2:46 PM

What's the Latest?

Renewable energy startup Glint Photonics has created a new material that, when used to cover photovoltaic cells on solar panels, can capture more energy with less infrastructure, greatly reducing the total cost of harvesting the sun's power. By changing its reflectivity in response to heat from concentrated sunlight, the material can gather in light that comes in from different angles throughout the day. Currently, directing sunlight onto the most absorbent part of solar cells requires lenses or mirrors supported by concrete and steel "which must be moved precisely as the sun advances across the sky to ensure that concentrated sunlight remains focused on the cells." That added infrastructure quickly runs up the costs for renewable energy plants.

What's the Big Idea?

Here's how Glint's device works using two essential parts: "The first is an array of thin, inexpensive lenses that concentrate sunlight. The second is a sheet of glass that serves to concentrate that light more—up to 500 times—as light gathered over its surface is concentrated at its edges." As the day goes on, the angle of the incoming light shifts and the material adapts, allowing light in only at the most direct angle, trapping the light beneath the edges of the material until it can be absorbed. The company says its material could produce electricity at four cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to eight cents for the best conventional solar panels.

Read more at Technology Review

Photo credit: Shutterstock

by Orion D. Jones

Science Is Not About Certainty The separation of science and the humanities is relatively new—and detrimental to both

Science Is Not About Certainty The separation of science and the humanities is relatively new—and detrimental to both

By Carlo Rovelli Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

We teach our students: We say that we have some theories about science. Science is about hypothetico-deductive methods; we have observations, we have data, data require organizing into theories. So then we have theories. These theories are suggested or produced from the data somehow, then checked in terms of the data. Then time passes, we have more data, theories evolve, we throw away a theory, and we find another theory that’s better, a better understanding of the data, and so on and so forth.

This is the standard idea of how science works, which implies that science is about empirical content; the true, interesting, relevant content of science is its empirical content. Since theories change, the empirical content is the solid part of what science is.

Now, there’s something disturbing, for me, as a theoretical scientist, in all this. I feel that something is missing. Something of the story is missing. I’ve been asking myself, “What is this thing missing?” I’m not sure I have the answer, but I want to present some ideas on something else that science is.

This is particularly relevant today in science, and particularly in physics, because—if I’m allowed to be polemical—in my field, fundamental theoretical physics, for thirty years we have failed. There hasn’t been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. But we don’t know, and for the moment Nature has not said yes, in any sense.

There hasn’t been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades.

I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we’re doing something wrong—at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences. Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean. The story is an old story about my latest, greatest passion outside theoretical physics—an ancient scientist, or so I say even if often he’s called a philosopher: Anaximander. I’m fascinated by this character, Anaximander. I went into understanding what he did, and to me he’s a scientist. He did something that’s very typical of science and shows some aspect of what science is. What is the story with Anaximander? It’s the following, in brief:

Until Anaximander, all the civilizations of the planet— everybody around the world—thought the structure of the world was the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet. There’s an up and a down, heavy things fall from the up to the down, and that’s reality. Reality is oriented up and down; Heaven’s up and Earth is down. Then comes Anaximander and says, “No, it’s something else. The Earth is a finite body that floats in space, without falling, and the sky is not just over our head, it’s all around.”

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How did he get this? Well, obviously, he looked at the sky. You see things going around—the stars, the heavens, the moon, the planets, everything moves around and keeps turning around us. It’s sort of reasonable to think that below us is nothing, so it seems simple to come to this conclusion. Except that nobody else came to this conclusion. In centuries and centuries of ancient civilizations, nobody got there. The Chinese didn’t get there until the 17th century, when Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits went to China and told them. In spite of centuries of the Imperial Astronomical Institute, which was studying the sky. The Indians learned this only when the Greeks arrived to tell them. In Africa, in America, in Australia—nobody else arrived at this simple realization that the sky is not just over our head, it’s also under our feet. Why?

Because obviously it’s easy to suggest that the Earth floats in nothing, but then you have to answer the question, Why doesn’t it fall? The genius of Anaximander was to answer this question. We know his answer—from Aristotle, from other people. He doesn’t answer this question, in fact: He questions this question. He asks, “Why should it fall?” Things fall toward the Earth. Why should the Earth itself fall? In other words, he realizes that the obvious generalization—from every heavy object falling to the Earth itself falling—might be wrong. He proposes an alternative, which is that objects fall toward the Earth, which means that the direction of falling changes around the Earth.

This means that up and down become notions relative to the Earth. Which is rather simple to figure out for us now: We’ve learned this idea. But if you think of the difficulty when we were children of understanding how people in Sydney could live upside-down, clearly this required changing something structural in our basic language in terms of which we understand the world. In other words, “up” and “down” meant something different before and after Anaximander’s revolution.

He understands something about reality essentially by changing something in the conceptual structure we use to grasp reality. In doing so, he isn’t making a theory; he understands something that, in some precise sense, is forever. It’s an uncovered truth, which to a large extent is a negative truth. He frees us from prejudice, a prejudice that was ingrained in our conceptual structure for thinking about space.

Why do I think this is interesting?  Because I think this is what happens at every major step, at least in physics; in fact, I think this is what happened at every step in physics, not necessarily major. When
I give a thesis to students, most of the time the problem I give for a thesis is not solved. It’s not solved because the solution of the question, most of the time, is not in solving the question, it’s in questioning the question itself. It’s realizing that in the way the problem was formulated there was some implicit prejudice or assumption that should be dropped. 

If this is so, then the idea that we have data and theories and then we have a rational agent who constructs theories from the data using his rationality, his mind, his intelligence, his conceptual structure doesn’t make any sense, because what’s being challenged at every step is not the theory, it’s the conceptual structure used in constructing the theory and interpreting the data. In other words, it’s not by changing theories that we go ahead but by changing the way we think about the world.
The prototype of this way of thinking—the example that makes it clearer—is Einstein’s discovery of special relativity. On the one hand, there was Newtonian mechanics, which was extremely successful with its empirical content. On the other hand, there was Maxwell’s theory, with its empirical content, which was extremely successful, too. But there was a contradiction between the two.

If Einstein had gone to school to learn what science is, if he had read Kuhn, and the philosophers explaining what science is, if he was any one of my colleagues today who are looking for a solution of the big problem of physics today, what would he do? He would say, “OK, the empirical content is the strong part of the theory. The idea in classical mechanics that velocity is relative: forget about it. The Maxwell equations: forget about them. Because this is a volatile part of our knowledge. The theories themselves have to be changed, OK? What we keep solid is the data, and we modify the theory so that it makes sense coherently, and coherently with the data.”

That’s not at all what Einstein does. Einstein does the contrary. He takes the theories very seriously. He believes the theories. He says, “Look, classical mechanics is so successful that when it says that velocity is relative, we should take it seriously, and we should believe it. And the Maxwell equations are so successful that we should believe the Maxwell equations.” He has so much trust in the theory itself, in the qualitative content of the theory—that qualitative content that Kuhn says changes all the time, that we learned not to take too seriously—and he has so much in that that he’s ready to do what? To force coherence between the two theories by challenging something completely different, which is something that’s in our head, which is how we think about time.

He’s changing something in common sense—something about the elementary structure in terms of which we think of the world—on the basis of trust of the past results in physics. This is exactly the opposite of what’s done today in physics. If you read Physical Review today, it’s all about theories that challenge completely and deeply the content of previous theories, so that theories in which there’s no Lorentz invariance, which are not relativistic, which are not general covariant, quantum mechanics, might be wrong.…

Every physicist today is immediately ready to say, “OK, all of our past knowledge about the world is wrong. Let’s randomly pick some new idea.” I suspect that this is not a small component of the long-term lack of success of theoretical physics. You understand something new about the world either from new data or from thinking deeply on what we’ve already learned about the world. But thinking means also accepting what we’ve learned, challenging what we think, and knowing that in some of the things we think, there may be something to modify.

What, then, are the aspects of doing science that I think are undervalued and should come up front? First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging, the a priori that we have. It has nothing to do with the assembling of data and the ways of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do with the way we think, and with our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking and keep changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new visions that work a little bit better.

In doing that, what we’ve learned in the past is our main ingredient—especially the negative things we’ve learned. If we’ve learned that the Earth is not flat, there will be no theory in the future in which the Earth is flat. If we have learned that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, that’s forever.
We’re not going to go back on this. If you’ve learned that simultaneity is relative, with Einstein, we’re not going back to absolute simultaneity, like many people think. Thus when an experiment measures neutrinos going faster than light, we should be suspicious and, of course, check to see whether there’s something very deep that’s happening. But it’s absurd when everybody jumps and says, “OK, Einstein was wrong,” just because a little anomaly indicates this. It never works like that in science.

The past knowledge is always with us, and it’s our main ingredient for understanding. The theoretical ideas that are based on “Let’s imagine that this may happen, because why not?” are not taking us anywhere.

I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust our past knowledge, and on the other hand, we are always ready to modify, in depth, part of our conceptual structure of the world. There’s no contradiction between the two; the idea of the contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science, which is the idea that science is about certainty.

Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking at the present level of knowledge.

Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it’s not certain. In fact, not only is it not certain, but it’s the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure but because they’re the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they’re the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody’s criticism.

The very expression “scientifically proven” is a contradiction in terms. There’s nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality, there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment we have a vision of reality that is effective, it’s good, it’s the best we have found so far. It’s the most credible we have found so far; it’s mostly correct.

But, at the same time, it’s not taken as certain, and any element of it is a priori open for revision.
Why do we have this continuous …? On the one hand, we have this brain, and it has evolved for millions of years. It has evolved for us, basically, for running across the savannah, for running after and eating deer and trying not to be eaten by lions. We have a brain tuned to meters and hours, which is not particularly well-tuned to think about atoms and galaxies. So we have to overcome that. 

At the same time, I think we have been selected for going out of the forest, perhaps going out of Africa, for being as smart as possible, as animals that escape lions. This continuing effort on our part to change our way of thinking, to readapt, is our nature. We’re not changing our mind outside of nature; it’s our natural history that continues to change us.

If I can make a final comment about this way of thinking about science, or two final comments: One is that science is not about the data. The empirical content of scientific theory is not what’s relevant.
The data serve to suggest the theory, to confirm the theory, to disconfirm the theory, to prove the theory wrong. But these are the tools we use. What interests us is the content of the theory. What interests us is what the theory says about the world. General relativity says spacetime is curved. The data of general relativity are that the Mercury perihelion moves 43 degrees per century with respect to that computed with Newtonian mechanics.   

Who cares? Who cares about these details? If that were the content of general relativity, general relativity would be boring. General relativity is interesting not because of its data but because it tells us that as far as we know today, the best way of conceptualizing spacetime is as a curved object. It gives us a better way of grasping reality than Newtonian mechanics, because it tells us that there can be black holes, because it tells us there’s a Big Bang. This is the content of the scientific theory. All living beings on Earth have common ancestors. This is a content of the scientific theory, not the specific data used to check the theory.

So the focus of scientific thinking, I believe, should be on the content of the theory—the past theory, the previous theories—to try to see what they hold concretely and what they suggest to us for changing in our conceptual frame.     

The final consideration regards just one comment about this understanding of science, and the long conflict across the centuries between scientific thinking and religious thinking. It is often misunderstood. The question is, Why can't we live happily together and why can’t people pray to their gods and study the universe without this continual clash? This continual clash is a little unavoidable, for the opposite reason from the one often presented. It’s unavoidable not because science pretends to know the answers. It’s the other way around, because scientific thinking is a constant reminder to us that we don’t know the answers. In religious thinking, this is often unacceptable. What’s unacceptable is not a scientist who says, “I know…” but a scientist who says, “I don’t know, and how could you know?” Many religions, or some religions, or some ways of being religious, are based on the idea that there should be a truth that one can hold onto and not question.
This way of thinking is naturally disturbed by a way of thinking based on continual revision, not just of theories but of the core ground of the way in which we think.     
       
So, to sum up, science is not about data; it’s not about the empirical content, about our vision of the world. It’s about overcoming our own ideas and continually going beyond common sense. Science is a continual challenging of common sense, and the core of science is not certainty, it’s continual uncertainty—I would even say, the joy of being aware that in everything we think, there are probably still an enormous amount of prejudices and mistakes, and trying to learn to look a little bit beyond, knowing that there’s always a larger point of view to be expected in the future.   

We’re very far from the final theory of the world, in my field, in physics—extremely far. Every hope of saying, “Well we’re almost there, we've solved all the problems” is nonsense. And we’re wrong when we discard the value of theories like quantum mechanics, general relativity—or special relativity, for that matter—and try something else randomly. On the basis of what we know, we should learn something more, and at the same time we should somehow take our vision for what it is—a vision that’s the best vision we have, but one we should continually evolve.

If science works, or in part works, in the way I’ve described, this is strongly tied to the kind of physics I do. The way I view the present situation in fundamental physics is that there are different problems: One is the problem of unification, of providing a theory of everything. The more specific problem, which is the problem in which I work, is quantum gravity. It’s a remarkable problem because of general relativity. Gravity is spacetime; that’s what we learned from Einstein. Doing quantum gravity means understanding what quantum spacetime is. And quantum spacetime requires some key change in the way we think about space and time.

Now, with respect to quantum gravity, there are two major research directions today, which are loops, the one in which I work, and strings. These are not just two different sets of equations; they are based on different philosophies of science, in a sense. The one in which I work is very much based on the philosophy I have just described, and that’s what has forced me to think about the philosophy of science.

Why? Because the idea is the following: The best of what we know about spacetime is what we know from general relativity. The best of what we know about mechanics is what we know from quantum mechanics. There seems to be a difficulty in attaching the two pieces of the puzzle together: They don’t fit well. But the difficulty might be in the way we face the problem. The best information we have about the world is still contained in these two theories, so let’s take quantum mechanics as seriously as possible, believe it as much as possible. Maybe enlarge it a little bit to make it general relativistic, or whatever. And let’s take general relativity as seriously as possible. General relativity has peculiar features, specific symmetries, specific characteristics. Let’s try to understand them deeply and see whether as they are, or maybe just a little bit enlarged, a little bit adapted, they can fit with quantum mechanics to give us a theory—even if the theory that comes out contradicts something in the way we think. 

That’s the way quantum gravity—the way of the loops, the way I work, and the way other people work—is being developed. This takes us in one specific direction of research, a set of equations, a way of putting up the theory. String theory has gone in the opposite direction. In a sense, it says, “Well, let’s not take general relativity too seriously as an indication of how the universe works.”
Even quantum mechanics has been questioned, to some extent. “Let’s imagine that quantum mechanics has to be replaced by something different. Let’s try to guess something completely new” —some big theory out of which, somehow, the same empirical content of general relativity and quantum mechanics comes out in some limit. 

I’m distrustful of this huge ambition, because we don’t have the tools to guess this immense theory. String theory is a beautiful theory. It might work, but I suspect it’s not going to work. I suspect it’s not going to work because it’s not sufficiently grounded in everything we know so far about the world, and especially in what I perceive as the main physical content of general relativity. 
String theory’s big guesswork. Physics has never been guesswork; it’s been a way of unlearning how to think about something and learning about how to think a little bit differently by reading the novelty into the details of what we already know. Copernicus didn’t have any new data, any major new idea; he just took Ptolemy, the details of Ptolemy, and he read in the details of Ptolemy the fact that the equants, the epicycles, the deferents, were in certain proportions.  It was a way to look at the same construction from a slightly different perspective and discover that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

Einstein, as I said, took seriously both Maxwell’s theory and classical mechanics in order to get special relativity. Loop quantum gravity is an attempt to do the same thing: take general relativity seriously, take quantum mechanics seriously, and out of that, bring them together, even if this means a theory where there’s no time, no fundamental time, so that we have to rethink the world without basic time. The theory, on the one hand, is conservative because it’s based on what we know. But it’s totally radical, because it forces us to change something big in our way of thinking.

String theorists think differently. They say, “Well, let’s go out to infinity, where somehow the full covariance of general relativity is not there. There we know what time is, we know what space is, because we’re at asymptotic distances, at large distances. The theory is wilder, more different, newer, but in my opinion it’s more based on the old conceptual structure. It’s attached to the old conceptual structure and not attached to the novel content of the theories that have proven empirically successful. That’s how my way of reading science coincides with the specifics of the research work that I do—specifically, loop quantum gravity.

Of course, we don’t know. I want to be very clear. I think string theory is a great attempt to go ahead, by great people. My only polemical objection to string theory is when I hear—but I hear it less and less now—“Oh, we know the solution already; it’s string theory.” That’s certainly wrong, and false.
What’s true is that it is  a good set of ideas; loop quantum gravity is another good set of ideas. We have to wait and see which one of these theories turns out to work and, ultimately, be empirically confirmed.   

This takes me to another point, which is, Should a scientist think about philosophy or not? It’s the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now that we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude naïve, for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back. Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy. Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and having a head full of philosophy. Galileo would never have done what he did without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher and started by discussing this with Descartes and had strong philosophical ideas.

Newton thought of himself as a philosopher and started by discussing this with Descartes and had strong philosophical ideas.

Even Maxwell, Boltzmann—all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical frame of mind. He says that in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading that allows him to construct that fantastically new physical theory, quantum mechanics. 

The divorce between this strict dialogue between philosophers and scientists is very recent, in the second half of the 20th century. It has worked because in the first half of the 20th century people were so smart. Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac and company put together relativity and quantum theory and did all the conceptual work. The physics of the second half of the century has been, in a sense, a physics of application of the great ideas of the people of the ’30s—of the Einsteins and the Heisenbergs.

When you want to apply these ideas, when you do atomic physics, you need less conceptual thinking. But now we’re back to basics, in a sense. When we do quantum gravity, it's not just application. The scientists who say “I don't care about philosophy” —it’s not true that they don’t care about philosophy, because they have a philosophy. They’re using a philosophy of science. They’re applying a methodology. They have a head full of ideas about what philosophy they’re using; they’re just not aware of them and they take them for granted, as if this were obvious and clear, when it’s far from obvious and clear. They’re taking a position without knowing that there are many other possibilities around that might work much better and might be more interesting for them.

There is narrow-mindedness, if I may say so, in many of my colleagues who don’t want to learn what’s being said in the philosophy of science. There is also a narrow-mindedness in a lot of areas of philosophy and the humanities, whose proponents don’t want to learn about science—which is even more narrow-minded. Restricting our vision of reality today to just the core content of science or the core content of the humanities is being blind to the complexity of reality, which we can grasp from a number of points of view. The two points of view can teach each other and, I believe, enlarge each other.

This piece has been excerpted from The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos.  Copyright © 2014 by Edge Foundation, Inc. Published by Harper Perennial.

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist; a professor at Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille; and author of The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy and the textbook, Quantum Gravity, the main introduction to the field since its publication in 2004.

Underwater self-healing polymer mimics mussels

30 July 2014 James Urquhart

 

 

A common acrylic polymer used in biomedical applications and as a substitute for glass has been given the ability to completely self-heal underwater by US researchers. The method, which takes inspiration from the self-healing abilities of adhesive proteins secreted by mussels, could allow for longer lasting biomedical implants.
'Polymer self-healing research is about 10 years old now and many different strategies have been developed,' says Herbert Waite, who conducted the work with colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 'None, however, address the need for healing in a wet medium – a critical omission as all biomaterials function, and fail, in wet environments.'

The idea of mimicking the biological self-healing ability of mussel adhesive proteins is not new, and previous attempts have involved polymer networks functionalised with catechols – synthetic water-soluble organic molecules that mimic mussel adhesive proteins – and metal-ion mediated bonding.
However, how mussel adhesive proteins self-heal remains poorly understood, which has limited attempts to synthesise catechols that accurately mimic biological self-healing underwater.

Now, Waite and colleagues have discovered a new aspect of catechols after they were simply 'goofing around' in the lab and found a new way to modify the surface of poly(methyl methacrylate), or PMMA, with catechols. This led them to explore the material's properties and discover that hydrogen bonding enables the polymer to self-heal underwater after being damaged. 'Usually, catechols in wet adhesives are associated with covalent or coordination mediated cross-linking. Our results argue that hydrogen bonding can also be critical, especially as an initiator of healing,' he says.

The healing process begins because catechols provide multidentate hydrogen-bonding faces that trigger a network of hydrogen bonds to fix any damage – the interaction is strong enough to resist interference by water but reversible. Acting a bit like dissolvable stitches, hydrogen bonding between the catechols appears to stitch the damaged area, which allows the underlying polymer to fuse back together. After about 20 minutes, the hydrogen bonded catechols mysteriously disappear leaving the original site of damage completely healed. 'We don't know where the hydrogen bonded catechols go,’ Waite says. ‘Possibly back to the surface, dispersed within the bulk polymer, or some other possibility.'

Phillip Messersmith, a biomaterials expert at the University of California, Berkeley, US, says that this is ‘really creative work’. '[This] reveals a new dimension of catechols, which in this case mediate interfacial self-healing through the formation of hydrogen bonds between surfaces, and which are ultimately augmented or replaced by other types of adhesive interactions.'

References

B Kollbe Ahn et al, 2014, Nat. Mater., DOI: 10.1038/nmat4037

Origins Of Mysterious World Trade Center Ship Determined

Origins Of Mysterious World Trade Center Ship Determined

July 30, 2014 | by Stephen Luntz

   

Photo credit: Lower Manhatten Development Corporation.The partial hull of a ship found in excavating the World Trade Center site.

  

A remarkable piece of scientific detective work has revealed the wooden ship found beneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center was built just before, or during, the American War of Independence. Even the location where the wood was grown appears to have been settled.

In 2010, when digging the foundations for the buildings that will replace the twin towers, workers found a 9.75m long oaken partial hull 7m below what is now street level. Hickory in the keel indicated the ship was almost certainly of North American origin, but its age and specific place of construction were initially a mystery.

Isotopic dating isn’t precise enough to tell us the age of the wood from which the ship is made, so instead researchers from Columbia University used the tree rings. As they report in probably the most attention grabbing story ever published in Tree-Ring Research the rings in timber from different parts of the ship were found to be highly similar.


^{Lower Manhatten Development Corporation Via Columbia University. The rings in the white oak of the ship's hull reveal the seasons in which the timber grew.} 

Since the width of tree rings depends on the weather that season, trees growing nearby tend to have  ring patterns that match each other fairly closely.  When compared to 21 trees of the same species (white oak, Quercus Leucobalanus) from the eastern American seaboard team, led by Dr Dario Martin-Benito, found exceptionally good matches to those from the Keystone State.

“Our results showed the highest agreement between the WTC ship chronology and two chronologies from Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania,” the paper reports. The last rings indicate the ship was built from trees felled in 1773, confirming previous theories.

While the ship has potential to provide insight into construction of the day, the authors note “idiosyncratic aspects of the vessel's construction [indicate] that the ship was the product of a small shipyard.”

"Philadelphia was one of the most — if not the most — important shipbuilding cities in the U.S. at the time. And they had plenty of wood so it made lots of sense that the wood could come from there,” Martin-Benito told Livescience 

The wood has previously been found to have been infested with Lyrodus pedicellatus, indicating a trip to the Caribbean at some point. This infestation with shipworm may have led to its  premature demise, possibly being used as a sort of reclamation process to bolster Manhattan's defenses against the sea.

Although considered part of the World Trade Center site, the location of the ship was not excavated when the original towers were built.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/origins-mysterious-world-trade-center-ship-determined#CkJ2ptwsTZ2YjqSC.99

Depleted Uranium Could Turn Carbon Dioxide into Valuable Chemicals

Depleted Uranium Could Turn Carbon Dioxide into Valuable Chemicals

New reactions could convert excessive CO2 into building blocks for materials like nylon

Jul 28, 2014 |By Polly Wilson and ChemistryWorld

A model of carbon dioxide levels in Earth's lower atmosphere.
Credit: NOAA

European scientists have synthesised uranium complexes that take them a step closer to producing commodity chemicals from carbon dioxide.

Widespread fossil fuel depletion and concerns over levels of climatic carbon dioxide are motivating research to convert this small molecule into value-added chemicals. Organometallic uranium complexes have successfully activated various small molecules before. However, there were no reports of an actinide metal complex that could reductively couple with carbon dioxide to give a segment made from two carbon dioxide molecules – an oxalate dianion.

Not only has this now been achieved, but simply changing the alkyl group on the cyclopentadienyl ring of the uranium(iii) sandwich complex has a remarkable effect on carbon dioxide activation, enabling selective tuning of the resulting reduction products.

Geoff Cloke’s group at the University of Sussex, UK, and computational collaborators at the University of Toulouse, France, found that a small methyl group gives both bridging oxo and oxalate complexes; intermediate ethyl and isopropyl substituents give bridging carbonate and oxalate species; while bulkier tertiary butyl gives only the bridging carbonate complex. The oxalate formation is particularly important as it involves making a C–C bond directly from carbon dioxide. This is a fundamentally important but seldom reported transformation.

Uranium(iii) lends itself to small molecule activation for a number of reasons: it is a strong reducing agent with a U(iii)/U(iv) redox couple electrode potential of around –2.5 V and, unlike transition metals, it is not constrained by the 18 electron rule and overall has pretty unique reactivity. These characteristics do however make handling such extremely air sensitive and reactive compounds challenging. While the chemistry is still far from large-scale production for industrial applications, Fang Dai, a chemical engineer at General Motors, US, points out that it ‘provides a solid basis for further exploration of both chemical activation of carbon dioxide and corresponding organo-actinide chemistry’.

Finding an alternative use for depleted uranium – which has almost negligible radioactivity and is in plentiful supply – to its typical use in military applications is certainly desirable. What’s more, controlling the selectivity and establishing different mechanisms and key intermediates of reductive activations could lead to reductive coupling of more than one type of small molecule. Cloke raises the ‘fantastic’ example of creating a dicarboxylic acid uranium derivative by reductively coupling carbon dioxide and ethene: ‘Dicarboxylic acids such as adipic acid are used in making nylon, so to make them directly from carbon dioxide would be very attractive. Although making a catalytic system would undoubtedly be challenging, demonstrating this idea is the next, very important, step.’

This article is reproduced with permission from Chemistry World. The article was first published on July 25, 2014.

Jacob Bronowski

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

            

Jacob Bronowski
Born	18 January 1908 (1908-01-18) Łódź, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died	22 August 1974 (1974-08-23) (aged 66) East Hampton, New York, United States
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	Polish-English
Fields	Mathematics, operations research, biology, history of science,
Institutions	Salk Institute
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	H. F. Baker
Known for	Geometry, The Ascent of Man
Spouse	Rita Coblentz
Children	Lisa Jardine, Judith Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.

Life and work

Jacob Bronowski was born in Łódź, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, in 1908. His family moved to Germany during the First World War, and then to England in 1920. Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Great Britain,^[1] he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and went on to study at the University of Cambridge and graduated as the senior wrangler.

As a mathematics student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bronowski co-edited—with William Empson—the literary periodical Experiment, which first appeared in 1928. Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life. He was also a strong chess player, earning a half-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for the British Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970.^[2] He received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. For a time in the 1930s he lived near Laura Riding and Robert Graves in Majorca. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. Beginning in this period, the British secret service MI5 kept Bronowski under surveillance believing he was a security risk, which is thought to have restricted his access to senior posts in the UK.^[3]

During the Second World War Bronowski worked in operations research for the UK's Ministry of Home Security, where he developed mathematical approaches to bombing strategy for RAF Bomber Command. At the end of the war, Bronowski was part of a British team that visited Japan to document the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following his experiences of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, he discontinued his work for British military research and turned to biology, as did his friend Leó Szilárd and many other physicists of that time, to better understand the nature of violence. Subsequently, he became Director of Research for the National Coal Board in the UK, and an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.

In 1950, Bronowski was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the biology of humanity's intellectual products.

In 1967 Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge. Transcripts of the lectures were published posthumously in 1978 as The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and remain in print.

He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s. His ability to answer questions on many varied subjects led to an offhand reference in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus where one character states that "He knows everything." Bronowski is best remembered for his thirteen part series The Ascent of Man (1973), a documentary about the history of human beings through scientific endeavour. This project was intended to parallel art historian Kenneth Clark's earlier "personal view" series Civilisation (1969) which had covered cultural history.

During the making of The Ascent of Man, Bronowski was interviewed by the popular British chat show host Michael Parkinson. Parkinson later recounted that Bronowski's description of a visit to Auschwitz—Bronowski had lost many family members during the Nazi era—was one of Parkinson's most memorable interviews.^[4]

Personal life

Jacob Bronowski married Rita Coblentz in 1941.^[5] The couple had four children, all daughters, the eldest being the British academic Lisa Jardine and another being the filmmaker Judith Bronowski. He died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York^[6] a year after The Ascent of Man was completed, and was buried in the western side of London's Highgate Cemetery, near the entrance.

Books

Jacob Bronowski's grave in Highgate Cemetery, London.

• The Poet's Defence (1939)
• William Blake: A Man Without a Mask (1943)
• The Common Sense of Science (1951)
• The Face of Violence (1954)
• Science and Human Values. New York: Julian Messner, Inc. 1956, 1965.  Check date values in: |date= (help)
• William Blake: The Penguin Poets Series (1958)
• The Western Intellectual Tradition, From Leonardo to Hegel (1960) - with Bruce Mazlish
• Biography of an Atom (1963) - with Millicent Selsam
• Insight (1964)
• The Identity of Man. Garden City: The Natural History Press. 1965. 
• Nature and Knowledge: The Philosophy of Contemporary Science (1969)
• William Blake and the Age of Revolution (1972)
• The Ascent of Man (1974)
• A Sense of the Future (1977)
• Magic, Science & Civilization (1978)
• The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
• The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science (1979) - edited by Piero Ariotti and Rita Bronowski.

References

1. Jump up ^ Bronowski, Jacob (1967). The Common Sense of Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 8. ISBN 0-674-14651-4. 
2. Jump up ^ Winter, Edward. "Chess Notes". Retrieved 23 March 2008. 
3. Jump up ^ Berg, Sanchia (4 April 2011). "MI5 'said Bronowski was a risk'". BBC News. 
4. Jump up ^ Bronowski, Jacob (8 February 1974). Dr. Jacob Bronowski. Interview with Michael Parkinson. BBC Television. Parkinson. Retrieved 2014-02-03. 
5. Jump up ^ Lisa Jardine Obituary: Rita Bronowski [Coblentz], The Guardian, 22 September 2010
6. Jump up ^ "Milestones, Sep. 2, 1974", Time website (n.d., reprint of contemporary item)