Root Privileges

Month: June 2021

  • Looking for ghost particles in a frustrated world

    In some of the many types of objects and events involving electrons, it is helpful to think that these particles are made up of three smaller particles, called spinons, holons and orbitons. Physicists call these supposedly imaginary particles quasiparticles. By assuming that they exist, we get to simplify our calculations of the electrons’ behaviour in these environments. Another example of a quasiparticle is the phonon – carriers of sound energy in solid materials.

    One such object, and en exotic one at that, is a spin liquid. These are actually solid materials that are magnets, but are incapable of aligning the spins of their constituent electrons in one consistent way. In conventional ferromagnets, the electrons’ spins are aligned all in the same direction in the presence of a magnetic field. In antiferromagnets, the spins are aligned in an alternating pattern. But in spin liquids, in the presence of a magnetic field, the alignment of electron spins constantly changes in a dynamic pattern. Such materials are said to be frustrated – in that even when they have a reason to be aligned, some other forces intervene to keep them changing.

    Think of ripples in a closed tank of water bouncing between the walls: the height of the waves would be analogous to the extent to which the electrons’ spins are aligned. See this short 2017 video by the CENN Nanocenter, Slovenia, for a visual description.

    When studying spin liquids, scientists have found that it is useful to assume that each electron is made of a spinon and a holon. The spinon carries the electron’s spin and the holon carries the charge. (The orbiton is there but not involved.) Physicists have elucidated the need for such quasiparticles through experiments in which electrons were subjected to extreme physical conditions. In 2009, researchers set up an experiment in which electrons would jump from the surface of a metal to a very narrow wire, in a chamber held only a few fractions above absolute zero. When they jumped, the particles suddenly found themselves with much less room to move around, especially to not get too close to the other electrons (since like charges repel). As a result, the electrons became more distended, in a manner of speaking, as their spinons and holons moved apart to adapt to their surroundings. Such spin-charge separation is rare but has been documented. (See also a similar results reported in 2006.)

    Now, in a new study (preprint here), physicists have reported yet more evidence, of a different kind, that the spinon-holon model is both legitimate and useful.

    Physicists from Princeton University, New Jersey, created a spin liquid in a crystal of ruthenium chloride. This is not simple: the crystal, first made ultra-pure, had to be maintained at 0.5 K (-272.65º C) inside a magnetic field of 7.3-11 tesla (at least 1.2-million-times as strong as Earth’s magnetic field) – the environment in which a stable spin liquid arises in this material. Next, they applied a small amount of heat along “one edge” of the crystal, and began recording its thermal conductivity – its ability to conduct heat.

    When a magnetic field is applied to certain materials in one direction, a temperature gradient, i.e. heat flow, emerges in the perpendicular direction. This is called the thermal Hall effect, and the material’s ability to conduct this heat is its thermal Hall conductivity (symbol κ, lowercase kappa).

    According to a previously published theory, the presence of spinons in the material should show up as an oscillating pattern on a graph showing κ versus the magnetic field.

    Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11410

    This pattern is an analogue of the Shubnikov-de Haas effect: the electrons of a metal, a semimetal or certain semiconductors oscillate if the material is at a very low temperature and in the presence of an intense magnetic field. (However, the mechanism of action between these materials and spin liquids is different.)

    The physicists observed that in the ruthenium chloride crystal, the value of κ oscillated along one direction as long as the magnetic field stayed between 7.3 and 11 tesla, confirming the presence of spinons and their relation to the spin liquid state. They also observed the period of oscillation – the time taken to complete one oscillation – varied in proportion to the inverse of the applied magnetic field. That is, if the magnetic field was weakened by some amount, the period would increase by a proportionate amount. This was an anomalous pattern; the researchers called it a “paradox” in their paper.

    Does this mean spinons are real?

    There’s a two-part answer to this question, and neither arises from the new paper but from what we already know about quasiparticles, and particles in general. But in the end, yes, they could be real.

    The first part is that instead of pondering the existence of quasiparticles, it may be more useful for us to discard the importance we accord to fundamental particles. We were taught in school that fundamental particles are indivisible. But what we know to be fundamental depends on the energy scale at which we probe these particles. Consider a closed tank of water that you keep heating. First, the liquid will vaporise, and at some point the compounds in the vapour will break apart. Next, the atoms themselves will disintegrate into their constituent particles. If you kept heating the tank (while preserving its structural integrity) for a long time, at some point, with sophisticated instruments, you may be able to observe the protons and neutrons come apart into quarks and gluons.

    For many decades, we thought protons and neutrons were fundamental particles – until we developed methods to observe their behaviour at higher and higher energies. And at one point, using ultra-sophisticated machines like the Large Hadron Collider, we discovered the state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. As physicist Vijay Shenoy of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, told me in 2017:

    Something may look fundamental to us at scales of energies that are accessible to us – but if we probe at higher energy scales, we may see that it is also made up of other even more fundamental things (neutrons/protons are really quarks held together by gluons). We will then say that the original ‘fundamental particle’ is a quasiparticle excitation of the system of ‘even more fundamental things’! You could actually ask where this will end, at what energy scales… We really do not know the answer to this question. This is why the concept of a ‘fundamental particle’ is not a very useful concept in physics.

    Second: Physicists studying particles use quantum field theory (QFT) to make sense of the particles’ properties and behaviour. And in QFT, what we know to be ‘particles’ are really excitations – clumps of energy – of an underlying energy field. For example, electrons are excitations of an electric field; photons are excitations of an electromagnetic field; the hypothetical gravitons are excitations of a gravity field; and so on. In Shenoy’s words (emphasis in the original):

    An excitation is called a particle if, for a given momentum of the excitation, there is a well-defined energy. Quite remarkably, this definition of a particle embodies what we conventionally think of as a particle: small hard things that move about. … A ‘quasiparticle’ excitation is one that is very nearly a particle-like excitation: for the given momentum, it is a small spread of energy about some average value. The manifestation is such that, for practical purposes, if you watch this excitation over longer durations, it will behave like a particle in an experiment.

    Taking both parts together, it seems that instead of asking which parts are ‘fundamental’ and which are ‘imaginary’, it has been more fruitful for physicists to focus on the energy fields that give rise to all excitations in the first place.

  • Homo medicatis

    With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India’s COVID-19 response, soaring across the length of India and plunging into my veins, somewhere in Bangalore. And with every tug away from the compulsions of public healthcare and towards petty politics, the needle tugs at me in turn, its point dragging through my flesh, the blunt cylinder of its form cutting through my skin. I feel a bloodless injury on my body inflicted by an apathetic actor hundreds of leagues distant, and utterly powerless for it. Can you imagine the assault of such a foe? There’s the simple brutality of its strength and then there’s the ignominy of being told that your wounds are accidental, that you deserved neither the attention of your alleged assailant nor the consideration that everyone else has reserved for designated survivors. There is even pain but I cannot hear its wail clearly; it seems to originate from somewhere deep within me, so deep I can only hear its fading screams for help. I am doused in a sourceless, timeless numbness – the site of a revolution that is both ongoing and dead. I am the foregone conclusion of the state’s subjection, the fixed destination – one of many millions, of course – of whatever vaccines, drugs, therapies and philosophies it is determined to wreak; I am simultaneously the constant source of its strength. Imagine a god sustained by the faith of the dying-but-never-dead; does it take not their submission or prayers but their persistence in the face of diseases it will unleash for granted? When it increased the dose gap for Covishield from four to fix, then eight, then twelve and finally to sixteen weeks, the needle tore and tore and tore. Every change was a humiliating reminder of the control the state has grown to exert on me, on the fundamental biochemical defences millennia of evolution has instilled in my body, your body, our bodies. It is unacceptable at this point to insist that one dose of Covishield later, we are X% protected against mild disease and Y% against disease-requiring-hospitalisation by the delta variant. The variant has little to do with why I am reluctant to catch a flight to Delhi, where I long to be, or why the first thought when I wake in the morning is to wonder which member of my extended family has become the latest to succumb this year. Why, even before the vaccine, I was rendered mad ahead of choosing between Covaxin and Covishield. There was, and still is, no data in support of one and the other was, and still is, triggering terrifying – yet rare – blood-related consequences in some people, and both sat poorly with my knowledge of my own illnesses. And this was just me, a person aware of and able to navigate this swamp of nefarious possibilities; what of those who knew less, or knew but could do little to ensure the best outcomes for themselves? Would they be the triply ignominious, the triply neglected? Such foul and abject degradation. I have friends and family who expect to hear from me answers to their questions about how the vaccines work, what the new variants of concern are, and what they themselves ought and ought not to do. But even as I prepare, I become keenly aware of being conscripted to the state’s myth-machine – with the first utterance of “don’t worry” to fall in line with the other GI Joes. But only one misstep and the state waits, on the other side of the road, with irons at the ready to accuse us of lying, or of course seceding. And so the path ahead, the path of a free and unfettered citizen, becomes narrower and narrower, until we are all just needles in veins.

    What is more, his entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land.

    Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Giorgio Agamben

  • Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet

    If I had been Bharat Biotech’s teacher and “Where is your data?” had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks.

    The correct answer to where is your data can take one of two forms: either an update in the form of where the data is in the data-processing pipeline or to actually produce the data. The latter in fact would have deserved a bonus point, if only because the question wasn’t precise enough. The question should really have been a demand – “Submit your data” – instead of allowing the answerer, in its current form, to get away with simply stating where the data currently rests. Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 because it does neither; the 1 is for correct spelling.

    In fact, the company’s chest-thumping based on publishing nine papers in 12 months is symptomatic of a larger problem with the student. He fails to understand that only data is data, and that the demand for data is a demand for data per se. It ought not to be confused with a demand for authority. Data accords authority in an object-oriented and democratic sense. With data, everyone else can see for themselves – whether by themselves or through the mouths and minds of independent experts they trust – if the student’s claims hold up. And if they do, they confer the object of the data, the COVID-19 vaccine named Covaxin, with attributes like reliability.

    (Why ‘he’? The patriarchal conditions in and with which science has operated around the world, but especially in Europe and the US, in the last century or so have diffused into scientific practice itself, in terms of how the people at large have constituted – as well as have been expected to constitute, by the scientific community – scientific authority, expertise’s immunity to criticism and ownership of knowledge production and dissemination apparatuses, typically through “discrimination, socialisation and the gender division of labour”. Irrespective of the means – although both from the company’s and the government’s sides, very few women have fielded and responded to questions about drug/vaccine approvals – we already see these features in the manner in which ‘conventional’ scientific journals have sought to retain their place in the international knowledge production economy, and their tendency to resort to arguments that they serve an important role in it even as they push for anti-transparent practices, from the scientific papers’ contents to details about why they charge so much money.)

    However, the student has confused authority of this kind with authority of a kind we more commonly associate with the conventional scientific publishing paradigm: in which journals are gatekeepers of scientific knowledge – both in terms of what topics they ‘accept’ manuscripts on and what they consider to be ‘good’ results; and in which a paper, once published, is placed behind a steeply priced paywall that keeps both knowledge of the paper’s contents and the terms of its ‘acceptance’ by the journal beyond public scrutiny – even when public money funded the research described therein. As such, his insistence that we be okay with his having published nine papers in 12 months is really his insistence that we vest our faith in scientific journals, and by extension their vaunted decision to ‘approve of’ his work. This confusion on his part is also reflected in what he offers as his explanation for the absence of data in the public domain, but which are really his excuses.

    Our scientific commitment as a company stands firm with data generation, data transparency and peer-reviewed publications.

    Sharing your data in a secluded channel with government bodies is not data transparency. That’s what the student needs for regulatory approval. Transparency applies when the data is available for everyone else to independently access, understand and check.

    Phase 3 final analysis data will be available soon. Final analysis requires efficacy and 2 months safety follow-up data on all subjects. This is mandated by CDSCO and USFDA. Final analysis will first be submitted to CDSCO, followed by submissions to peer reviewed journals and media dissemination.

    What is required by CDSCO does not matter to those allowing Bharat Biotech’s vaccines into the bloodstreams, and in fact every Indian on whom the student has inflicted this pseudo-choice. And at this point to invoke what the USFDA requires can only lead to a joke: studies of the vaccines involved in the formal vaccination drive have already been published in the US; even studies of new vaccines as well as follow-ups of existing formulations are being placed in the public domain through preprint papers that describe the data from soup to nuts. All we got from the student vis-à-vis Covaxin this year was interim phase 3 trial data in early March, announced through a press release, and devoid even of error bars for its most salient claims.

    So even for an imprecisely worded question, it has done well to elicit a telling answer from the student: that the data does not exist, and the student believes he is too good for us all.

    Thanks to Jahnavi Sen for reading the article before it was published.

  • ‘Science people’

    Two of the most annoying kinds of ‘science people’ I’ve come across on social media of late:

    • Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and the rest on faith, and claim to know that “science can explain everything” without being able to explain it themselves. Champions of science’s right to explanation, typically to the exclusion of social and cultural influences and to the rejection of faith/religion. Often woke-types found explaining “science” they read in some paper and more often than not (and inadvertently) advancing scientistic positions.
    • Vocational practitioners of science – These people seem to know a small subset of things well but are unable to apply the fundamentals of what they’ve learnt to other topics, typically to the effect that we have well-educated people openly suspecting if vaccines cause disease or that China created the virus. Often engineers of some sort, probably because of the environments of entitlement in which they’re trained and subsequently employed, and frequently centrists.

    Of course, a trait that partly defines these two groups is also a strong confounding factor: these are often the loudest people on the social media – so they get noticed more, while the quieter but likely more sensible people are noticed less, leading to inchoate observations like this one. However, these two groups of people remain the most annoying.

  • Notes on mindful email use

    Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is versatile, but most people seem to use it in annoying ways (based on the email traffic in my professional inbox). I’ve been using only my email for work for five years or so now, and even before used it over phone to the extent possible. I hate speaking on the phone with people who aren’t at least close friends or family.

    However, this seems to be a ridiculous proposition in journalism circles: I’m not sure of the history here but if you have a phone and you’re starting off as a journalist, you’re expected to be reachable – by every Tom, Dick and Harry – by phone. People will call you repeatedly even if you’re not picking, they’ll WhatsApp you next; sometimes, they’ll send you an email and then call you to let you know they’ve emailed you. Sometimes they’ll follow up both with a WhatsApp message saying, “Please don’t forget.” (I’m not a forgetful person – but there’s a first time for everything).

    Worst of all, they will share your number with others without asking you; most of them won’t even check whom they’re sharing your number with. They were asked, so they will answer.

    Another group that will react to your insistence on using email as if it was a joke is PR people. In 2016, I did a story about TeamIndus with help from their PR team, and to this day, I haven’t been able to get my phone number out of some database PR people share among themselves of numbers of journalists they know. No amount of promises to “do the needful” seems to have the desirable outcome.

    At the same time, most of those who do use email use it in ways that suggest they think it’s the opposite of a phone call. Here are some tips (read: desperate pleas) to use email sensibly, especially if the recipient receives scores of emails a day.

    1. “Phone calls cost money, emails are free.” – Emails cost more than money; they cost peace of mind. You shouldn’t hit the ‘compose’ button just because it’s there. Ask yourself if you really need to send the email you’re thinking about. If the answer is ‘yes’, ask yourself if you really need to send a whole new email or if you could tack your message onto an existing email thread. Following three threads with inputs for the same story exacerbates the cognitive demand, and leads to inbox hell.
    2. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – This is exactly why email is awesome: so you don’t run around making decisions for the both of us that help only you. I’m not in a hurry to respond because I’ve got my own priorities. If I’m free and it’s still my working hours, I’ll reply as soon as possible (which is often something like 10 minutes); if I’m not but the email seems important, I’ll acknowledge it. If you need a quick reply, the decision has to be a joint one: say so, say by when and – most importantly – say why.
    3. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – It’s because you get to make phone calls willy-nilly that you start to assume you’re justified every time you think you’re in a hurry, without waiting to evaluate if the matter is actually urgent or you’re just an impatient time-brat. But often this extends to email, too: unless you’re my boss, simply insisting you’re in a hurry isn’t going to get you anywhere if I’m in a hurry, too.
    4. “I’m just following-up to make sure…” – Dude, email works. If you’ve sent me an email, I’ve got it (unless you’ve spelt my name and/or the organisation ID wrong; in that case the email server will send you a heads-up). Follow-ups are okay if the recipient hasn’t replied for at least 24 hours, or in particularly extenuating circumstances like being promised a reply by a certain deadline and for that deadline to have been missed.
    5. This is an organisation-specific thing, although I suspect it’d apply to many small newsrooms: Don’t cc a bunch of editors if your email only needs the attention of one of them, or you’ll bloat their inboxes with emails they may never need to read, destroy their peace of mind and incur their ire. You can also avoid the bystander effect. If you email three editors, each one will think one of the other two will respond while focusing their attention on the billion other emails that only they can answer.

    It doesn’t matter to me that someone else’s inbox has 12,353 unread emails and that that doesn’t affect them. Having more than a couple dozen unread emails at a time stresses me out. And I think it might be better if we all assumed this is the case with all email recipients. The less mindful you become about using email, the more you encourage the recipient to impose an extremely high bar of acceptance on the email’s contents, maybe even reject whatever you’re writing about on the first available excuse.

    (The less said about spammy websites the better, although Indian government websites have been particularly awful. One ID shared to IRCTC while booking a train ticket will suddenly mean updates about ‘Mann Ki Baat’, job openings at ISRO and posters from the Indian Army telling me about the perks of signing up.)

    How we communicate with each other at work also has a mental-health side that too many people overlook too often. There is no device vibrating furiously on my table, a name wrought bright on the screen, with a green icon insisting I drag it up. There are no single ticks waiting to turn double or grey ticks waiting to turn blue. Many people are able to organise their work lives around phone calls and WhatsApp messages; I find them too intrusive.

    However, the act of intruding isn’t the technology’s doing, even if it facilitates the intrusion. Users can often make a decision to be less intrusive, and they need to do so more often.1 They need to remember that there’s a way to use email wrong and that that could have the same effect as phone calls. Inculcating email discipline could also help others use email more peacefully, without having to contemplate paid-for solutions they may not be able to afford just to get away from your habits.

    Finally, this is a two-way street: you can’t be an email user in bad faith – never responding to any emails and/or using it in infuriating ways yourself – and expect others to be different. My own pleas are suffixed by what I aspire to offer in return, and in fact what all emails should elicit: broadly, an honest, sound, considered reply.

    1. Of course, I write here in the extremely limited context of a well-to-do urban email-user corresponding mostly with others who fit the same description. Smartphones in general are intrusive but we can’t just use them differently and incur the attendant benefits if other people don’t join you and continue using smartphones as usual.

  • On the lab-leak hypothesis

    One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are, and go on about why they are right.

    Shortly after I read Nicholas Wade’s 10,000-word article on Medium, I pitched a summary to a medical researcher, whose first, and for a long time only, response was one word: “rubbish”. Much later, he told me about how the virus could have evolved and spread naturally. Even if I couldn’t be sure if he was right, having no way to verify the information except to bounce it off a bunch of other experts, I was sure he thought he was right. But how was Wade wrong? I suspect for many people the communication failures surrounding this (or a similar) question may be a sticking point.

    (‘Wade’, after the first mention, is shorthand for an author of a detailed, non-trivial article that considers the lab-leak hypothesis, irrespective of what conclusion it reaches. I’m cursorily aware of Wade’s support for ‘scientific racism’, and by using his name, I don’t condone any of his views on these and other matters. Other articles to read on the lab-leak topic include Nicholson Baker’s in Intelligencer and Katherine Eban’s in Vanity Fair.)

    We don’t know how the novel coronavirus originated, nor are we able to find out easily. There are apparently two possibilities: zoonotic spillover and lab-leak (both hypotheses even though the qualification has been more prominently attached to the latter).

    Quoting two researchers writing in The Conversation:

    In March 2020, another article published in Nature Medicine provided a series of scientific arguments in favour of a natural origin. The authors argued: The natural hypothesis is plausible, as it is the usual mechanism of emergence of coronaviruses; the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is too distantly related from other known coronaviruses to envisage the manufacture of a new virus from available sequences; and its sequence does not show evidence of genetic manipulation in the laboratory.

    Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis (minus the outright-conspiratorial) – rather more broadly the opponents of the ‘zoonotic-spillover’-evangelism – have argued that lab leaks are more common than we think, the novel coronavirus has some features that suggest the presence of a human hand, and a glut of extra-scientific events that point towards suspicious research and communication by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    However, too many counterarguments to Wade’s and others’ articles along similar lines have been to brush the allegations aside, as if they were so easily dismissed – like my interlocutor’s “rubbish”. And it’s an infuriating response. To me at least (as someone who’s been at the receiving end of many such replies), it smacks of an attitude that seems to say (a) “you’re foolish to take this stuff seriously,” (b) “you’re being a bad journalist,” (c) “I doubt you’ll understand the answer,” and (d) “I think you should just trust me”.

    I try not to generalise (c) and (d) to maintain my editorial equipoise, so to speak – but it’s been hard. There’s too much of too many scientists going around insisting we should simply listen to them, while making no efforts to ensure non-experts can understand what they’re saying, much less admitting the possibility that they’re kidding themselves (although I do think “science is self-correcting” is a false adage). In fact, proponents of the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis and others like to claim that their idea is more likely, but this is often a crude display of scientism: “it’s more scientific, therefore it must be true”. The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are also being increasingly underrepresented outside the scientific literature, which isn’t a trivial consideration because the disparity could exacerbate the patronising tone of (c) and (d), and render scientists less trustworthy.

    Science communication and/or journalism are conspicuous by absence here, but I also think the problem with the scientists’ attitude is broader than that. Short of engaging directly in the activities of groups like DRASTIC, journalists take a hit when scientists behave like pedagogic communication is a waste of time. More scientists should make more of an effort to articulate themselves better. It isn’t wise to dismiss something that so many take seriously – although this is also a slippery slope: apply it as a general rule, and soon you may find yourself having to debunk in great detail a dozen ridiculous claims a day. Perhaps we can make an exception for the zoonotic-spillover v. lab-leak hypotheses contest? Or is there a better heuristic? I certainly think there should be one instead of having none at all.

    Proving the absence is harder than proving the presence of something, and that’s why everyone might be talking about why they’re right. However, in the process, many of these people seem to forget that what they haven’t denied is still firmly in the realm of the possible. Actually, they don’t just forget it but entirely shut down the idea. This is why I agree with Dr Vinay Prasad’s words in MedPage Today:

    If it escaped due to a wet market, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL laboratories because a future virus could come from either. And, if it was a lab leak, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL 3 and 4 … you get the idea. Both vulnerabilities must be fixed, no matter which was the culprit in this case, because either could be the culprit next time.

    His words provide an important counterweight of sorts to a tendency from the zoonotic-spillover quarter to treat articles about the lab-leak possibility as a monolithic allegation instead of as a collection of independent allegations that aren’t equally unlikely. For example, the Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Wade’s articles have all also called into question safety levels at BSL 3 and 4 labs, whether their pathogen-handling protocols sufficiently justify the sort of research we think is okay to conduct, and allegations that various parties have sought to suppress information about the activities at such facilities housed in the Wuhan Institute.

    I don’t buy the lab-leak hypothesis and I don’t buy the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis; in fact, I don’t personally care for the answer because I have other things to worry about, but I do buy that the “scientific illiberalism” that Dr Prasad talks about is real. And it’s tied to other issues doing the rounds now as well. For example, Newsweek‘s profile of DRASTIC’s work has been a hit in India thanks to the work of ‘The Seeker’, the pseudonym for a person in their 20s living in “Eastern India”, who uncovered some key documents that cast suspicion on Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli’s claims vis-à-vis SARS-CoV-2. And two common responses to the profile (on Twitter) have been:

    1. “In 2020, when people told me about the lab-leak hypothesis, I dismissed them and argued that they shouldn’t take WhatsApp forwards seriously.”
    2. “Journalism is redundant.”

    (1) is said as if it’s no longer true – but it is. The difference between the WhatsApp forwards of February-April 2020 and the articles and papers of 2021 is the body of evidence each set of claims was based on. Luc Montagnier was wrong when he spoke against the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis last year simply because his reasoning was wrong. The reasons and the evidence matter; otherwise, you’re no better than a broken clock. Facile WhatsApp forwards and right-wingers’ ramblings continue to deserve to be treated with extreme scepticism.

    Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesn’t make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers.

    Columbia Journalism Review, April 15, 2020

    The second point is obviously harder to fight back, considering it doesn’t stake a new position as much as reinforces one that certain groups of people have harboured for many years now. It’s one star aligning out of many, so its falling out of place won’t change believers’ minds, and because the believers’ minds will be unchanged, it will promptly fall back in place. This said, apart from the numerous other considerations, I’ll say investigations aren’t the preserve of journalists, and one story that was investigated to a greater extent by non-journalists – especially towards a conclusion that you probably wish to be true – has little necessarily to do with journalism.

    In addition, the picture is complicated by the fact that when people find that they’re wrong, they almost never admit it – especially if other valuable things, like their academic or political careers, are tied up with their reputation. On occasion, some turn to increasingly more technical arguments, or close ranks and advertise a false ‘scientific consensus’ (insofar as such consensus can exist as the result of any exercise less laborious than the one vis-à-vis anthropogenic global warming), or both. ‘Isolating the legitimate questions’ here apart – from both sides, mind you – needs painstaking work that only journalists can and will do.

    Featured image credit: Ethan Medrano/Pexels.

  • Broken clocks during the pandemic

    Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two of the most read articles published by The Wire Science in the last 15 months have been the fact-checks of Luc Montagnier’s comments on the two occasions he spoke up in the French press. On the first, he said the novel coronavirus couldn’t have evolved naturally; the second, he insisted mass vaccination was a big mistake. The context in which Montagnier published his remarks evolved considerably between the two events, and it tells an important story.

    When Montagnier said in April 2020 that the virus was lab-made, the virus’s spread was just beginning to accelerate in India, Europe and the US, and the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the virus’s origins had few listeners and were consigned firmly to the margins of popular discourse on the subject. In this environment, Montagnier’s comments stuck out like a sore thumb, and were easily dismissed.

    But when Montagnier said in May 2021 that mass vaccination is a mistake, the context was quite different: in the intervening period, Nicholas Wade had published his article on why we couldn’t dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis so quickly; the WHO’s missteps were more widely known; China’s COVID-19 outbreak had come completely under control (actually or for all appearances); many vaccine-manufacturers’ immoral and/or unethical business practices had come to light; more people were familiar with the concept and properties of viral strains; the WHO had filed its controversial report on the possible circumstances of the virus’s origins in China; etc. As a result, speaking now, Montagnier wasn’t so quickly dismissed. Instead, he was, to many observers, the man who had got it right the first time, was brave enough to stick his neck out in support of an unpopular idea, and was speaking up yet again.

    The problem here is that Luc Montagnier is a broken clock – in the way even broken clocks are right twice a day: not because they actually tell the time but because the time is coincidentally what the clock face is stuck at. On both occasions, the conclusions of Montagnier’s comments coincided with what conspiracists have been going on about since the pandemic’s start, but on both occasions, his reasoning was wrong. The same has been true of many other claims made during the pandemic. People have said things that have turned out to be true but they themselves have always been wrong, whenever they have been wrong, because their particular reasons for something to be true were wrong.

    That is, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. Unless you can explain why the time is what it is, you’re not a clock!

    Montagnier’s case also illuminates a problem with soothsaying: if you wish to be a prophet, it is in your best interests to make as many predictions as possible – to increase the odds of reality coinciding with at least one prediction in time. And when such a coincidence does happen, it doesn’t mean the prophet was right; it means they weren’t wrong. There is a big difference between these positions, and which becomes pronounced when the conspiratorially-minded start incorporating every article published anywhere, from The Wire Science to The Daily Guardian, into their narratives of choice.

    As the lab-leak hypothesis moved from the fringes of society to the centre and came mistakenly to conflate possibility with likelihood (i.e. zoonotic spillover and lab-leak are two valid hypotheses for the virus’s origins but they aren’t equally likely to be true), the conspiratorial proponents of the lab-leak hypotheses (the ones given to claiming Chinese scientists engineered the pathogen as a weapon, etc.) have steadily woven imaginary threads between the hypothesis and Indian scientists who opposed Covaxin’s approval, the Congress leaders who “mooted” vaccine hesitancy in their constituencies, scientists who made predictions that came to be wrong, even vaccines that were later found to have rare side-effects restricted to certain demographic groups.

    The passage of time is notable here. I think adherents of lab-leak conspiracies are motivated by an overarching theory born entirely of speculation, not evidence, and who then pick and choose from events to build the case that the theory is true. I say ‘overarching’ because, to the adherents, the theory is already fully formed and true, and that pieces of it become visible to observers as and when the corresponding events play out. This could explain why time is immaterial to them. You and I know that Shahid Jameel and Gagandeep Kang cast doubt on Covaxin’s approval (and not Covaxin itself) after the time we were aware that Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials were only just getting started in December, and before Covishield’s side-effects in Europe and the US came to light (with the attendant misreporting). We know that at the time Luc Montagnier said the novel coronavirus was made in a lab, last year, we didn’t know nearly enough about the structural biology underlying the virus’s behaviour; we do now.

    The order of events matters: we went from ignorance to knowledge, from knowing to knowing more, from thinking one thing to – in the face of new information – thinking another. But the conspiracy-theorists and their ideas lie outside of time: the order of events doesn’t matter; instead, to these people, 2021, 2022, 2023, etc. are preordained. They seem to be simply waiting for the coincidences to roll around.

    An awareness of the time dimension (so to speak), or more accurately of the arrow of time, leads straightforwardly to the proper practice of science in our day-to-day affairs as well. As I said, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. This is why effects lie in the future of causes, and why theories lie in the causal future of evidence. What we can say to be true at this moment depends entirely on what we know at this moment. If we presume what we can say at this moment to be true will always be true, we become guilty of dragging our theory into the causal history of the evidence – simply because we are saying that the theory will come true given enough time in which evidence can accrue.

    This protocol (of sorts) to verify the truth of claims isn’t restricted to the philosophy of science, even if it finds powerful articulation there: a scientific theory isn’t true if it isn’t falsifiable outside its domain of application. It is equally legitimate and necessary in the daily practice of science and its methods, on Twitter and Facebook, in WhatsApp groups, every time your father, your cousin or your grand-uncle begins a question with “If the lab-leak hypothesis isn’t true…”.