Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:
- A math-favoring article and math-disparaging letters in the Washington Post
- Data from Fermilab that could change the standard model, as reported in the New York Times
- A writer's disappointed rejection of his former anti-nuke colleagues
- Support for science from a conservative New York Times columnist
Washington Post both boosts and bashes math
Have the letters editors at the Washington Post been listening to the Jimmy Buffett adolescent-cynic song "Math Sucks"?
Their news-editor colleagues recently ran on the front page an article headlined "Algebra II Movement Multiplies: More States Require Course, Citing It as Link to Students' Success." It's just a news report, not a National Academy study. But it tries hard to bear out that headline while respecting the fact that correlation isn't causation.
Yet the opinion editors chose to run three letters in reply: two mocking the article, and one asserting what it called a better idea.
The article reports that "Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates," and that in recent years, "20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students." The article describes the organizations pushing the movement, tells of worries that the new requirements are causing some kids to quit school, and offers a special focus on efforts in Arkansas.
As to the correlation-causation problem, the article stipulates that "whether learning Algebra II causes students to fare better in life, or whether it is merely correlated ... isn't clear." In reporting on an Educational Testing Service study, it carefully notes the authors' "warning that many factors come into play."
Yet one of the three negative letters—the one suggesting courses in statistics instead—scolds both the article and the movement for blindness to the nonequivalence of correlation and causation. Another letter simply ridicules math education. The writer smirkingly describes his plans to teach his toddler granddaughter quantum electrodynamics and string theory. The third letter writer boasts that while he can't do algebra, he is "financially solvent, [has] a healthy savings account and [has] no credit debt at a time when so many of [his] algebraically superior peers are unable to understand the basics of balancing a checkbook or maintaining a household budget."
Maybe it's just me, with my lifelong bias—common intuition, really—but I believe the study of foreign languages and math, besides supplying useful skills, generally trains the intellect. I agreed with the news editors who placed the article on the front page. And I was surprised at the disdainful responses that the letters editors selected, almost in the spirit of "Math Sucks."
"Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths"
As of the morning of 7 April, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the Washington Post had reported the news from Dennis Overbye's 6 April New York Times article "At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths." Overbye's opening paragraphs require quoting:
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.
The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab's Tevatron, once the world's most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.
"Nobody knows what this is," said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. "If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century."
One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature—in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by—that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.
Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.
Overbye goes on to quote and paraphrase from the "mixture of awe and skepticism" he has encountered among physicists worldwide. He emphasizes that the "key phrase, everyone agrees, is 'if it holds up.' " A paper is being posted online, Overbye says, and is also being submitted to Physical Review Letters. He closes with the ironic observation that this is all happening "just as the Tevatron—and perhaps Fermilab itself—is being shut down for budget savings."
Best-selling author criticizes anti-nuke former colleagues
Here's another report about the nuclear ideology wars. In a recent issue of the Guardian in the UK, the best-selling author George Monbiot offers a commentary headlined "The Unpalatable Truth Is That the Anti-nuclear Lobby Has Misled Us All," with a stand-first summary saying, "I've discovered that when the facts don't suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce."
He calls his discovery "deeply troubling," and charges that the "anti-nuclear movement to which [he] once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health." He takes some responsibility: "The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice."
Monbiot reports that an epiphany—not his word, but probably apt—took place in the aftermath of a public debate involving Dr. Helen Caldicott, whom he calls "the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner." She made claims that seemed to need supporting. Her response to his request for sources, he says, left him "profoundly shaken." Here's a key passage:
First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so—all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.
I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink—in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.
Monbiot continues by analyzing, at some length, reports that have grossly overstated the health effects of Chernobyl. He condemns a pattern: "Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar."
He suggests a connection: "These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced."
And he offers this conclusion:
We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.
Conservative David Brooks advocates science even during austerity
Literally, this is a report about only one statement in one New York Times column on the US financial crisis. But that one statement might have implications for science in a time of fiscal austerity.
David Brooks likes science and often engages it. Besides his twice-weekly column, he writes blog postings at the Times. A recent one, headlined "More Tools for Thinking," explored which "scientific concepts everyone's cognitive toolbox should hold."
It must be stipulated that Brooks can sometimes provoke certain conservatives to skepticism about his conservative bona fides in what is, after all, the New York Times. Just to cite one example from a Google-able wealth of them, Rush Limbaugh once called him "the quasi-, the supposed conservative columnist" at the Times.
But consider these paragraphs from the opening of Brooks's 8 April column, his second in a row promoting what he promotes here:
The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing.
The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.
Raising taxes on the rich will not do it. There aren't enough rich people to generate the tens of trillions of dollars required to pay for Medicare, let alone all the other programs. Democrats, thus, face a fundamental choice. They can either reverse President Obama's no-new-middle-class-taxes pledge, or they can learn to live with Paul Ryan's version of government.
As these paragraphs show, among serious people, David Brooks must be taken as a conservative—must be taken as one who sees a need to curtail federal spending quite drastically. That's why I want to quote a single statement from his second Paul Ryan–endorsing column in a row: "[T]he economic challenge from China and India demands that we spend more on Pell grants, scientific research, early childhood education and other investments in human capital than Ryan proposes."
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
