Month: September 2023

• The journal’s part in a retraction

  This is another Ranga Dias and superconductivity post, so please avert your gaze if you’re tired of it already.

  According to a September 27 report in Science, the journal Nature plans to retract the latest Dias et al. paper, published in March 2023, claiming to have found evidence of near-room-temperature superconductivity in an unusual material, nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (N-LuH). The heart of the matter seems to be, per Science, a plot showing a drop in N-LuH’s electric resistance below a particular temperature – a famous sign of superconductivity.

  Dias (University of Rochester) and Ashkan Salamat (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), the other lead investigator in the study, measured the resistance in a noisy setting and then subtracted the noise – or what they claimed to be the noise. The problem is apparently that the subtracted plot in the published paper and the plot put together using raw data submitted by Dias and Salamat to Nature are different; the latter doesn’t show the resistance dropping to zero. Meaning that together with the noise, the paper’s authors subtracted some other information as well, and whatever was left behind suggested N-LuH had become superconducting.

  A little more than a month ago, Physical Review Letters officially retracted another paper of a study led by Dias and Salamat after publishing it last year – and notably after a similar dispute (and on both occasions Dias was opposed to having the papers retracted). But the narrative was more dramatic then, with Physical Review Letters accusing Salamat of obstructing its investigation by supplying some other data as the raw data for its independent probe.

  Then again, even before Science‘s report, other scientists in the same field had said that they weren’t bothering with replicating the data in the N-LuH paper because they had already wasted time trying to replicate Dias’s previous work, in vain.

  Now, in the last year alone, three of Dias’s superconductivity-related papers have been retracted. But as on previous occasions, the new report also raises questions about Nature‘s pre-publication peer-review process. To quote Science:

  In response to [James Hamlin and Brad Ramshaw’s critique of the subtracted plot], Nature initiated a post-publication review process, soliciting feedback from four independent experts. In documents obtained by Science, all four referees expressed strong concerns about the credibility of the data. ‘I fail to understand why the authors … are not willing or able to provide clear and timely responses,’ wrote one of the anonymous referees. ‘Without such responses the credibility of the published results are in question.’ A second referee went further, writing: ‘I strongly recommend that the article by R. Dias and A. Salamat be retracted.’

  What was the difference between this review process and the one that happened before the paper was published, in which Nature‘s editors would have written to independent experts asking them for their opinions on the submitted manuscript? Why didn’t they catch the problem with the electrical resistance plot?

  One possible explanation is the sampling problem: when writing an article as a science journalist, the views expressed in the article will be a function of the scientists that I have sampled from within the scientific community. In order to obtain the consensus view, I need to sample a sufficiently large number of scientists (or a small number of representative scientists, such as those who I know are in touch with the pulse of the community). Otherwise, there’s a nontrivial risk of some view in my article being over- or under-represented.

  Similarly, during its pre-publication peer-review process, did Nature not sample the right set of reviewers? I’m unable to think of other explanations because the sampling problem accounts for many alternatives. Hamlin and Ramshaw also didn’t necessarily have access to more data than Dias et al. submitted to Nature because their criticism emerged in May 2023 itself, and was based on the published paper. Nature also hasn’t disclosed the pre-publication reviewers’ reports nor explained if there were any differences between its sampling process in the pre- and post-publication phases.

  So short of there being a good explanation, as much as we have a scientist who’s seemingly been crying wolf about room-temperature superconductivity, we also have a journal whose peer-review process produced, on two separate occasions, two different results. Unless it can clarify why this isn’t so, Nature is also to blame for the paper’s fate.

  2023.09.28

• On Agnihotri’s Covaxin film, defamation, and false bravery

  Vivek Agnihotri’s next film, The Vaccine War, is set to be released on September 28. It is purportedly about the making of Covaxin, the COVID-19 vaccine made by Bharat Biotech, and claims to be based on real events. Based on watching the film’s trailer and snippets shared on Twitter, I can confidently state that while the basis of the film’s narrative may or may not be true, the narrative itself is not. The film’s principal antagonist appears to be a character named Rohini Singh Dhulia, played by Raima Sen, who is the science editor of a news organisation called The Daily Wire. Agnihotri has said that this character is based on his ‘research’ on the journalism of The Wire during, and about, the pandemic, presumably at the time of and immediately following the DCGI’s approval for Covaxin. Agnihotri and his followers on Twitter have also gone after science journalist Priyanka Pulla, who wrote many articles in this period for The Wire. At the time, I was the science editor of The Wire. Dhulia appears to have lovely lines in the film like “India can’t do this” and “the government will fail”, the latter uttered with visible glee.

  It has been terribly disappointing to see senior ICMR scientists promoting the film as well as the film (according to the trailer, at least) confidently retaining the name of Balram Bhargava for the character as well; for the uninitiated, Bhargava was the ICMR director-general during the pandemic. (One of his aides also has make-up strongly resembling Raman Gangakhedkar.) In Pulla’s words, “the political capture of this institution is complete”. The film has also been endorsed by Sudha Murthy and received a tone-deaf assessment by film critic Baradwaj Rangan, among other similar displays of support. One thing that caught my eye is that the film also retains the ICMR logo, logotype, and tagline as is (see screenshot below from the trailer).

  

  The logo appears on the right of the screen as well as at the top-left, together with the name of NIV, the government facility that provided the viral material for and helped developed Covaxin. This is notable: AltBalaji, the producer of the TV show M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, was prevented from showing ISRO’s rockets as is because the show’s narrative was a fictionalised version of real events. A statement from AltBalaji to The Wire Science at the time, in 2019, when I asked why the show’s posters showed the Russian Soyuz rocket and the NASA Space Shuttle instead of the PSLV and the GSLV, said it was “legally bound not to use actual names or images of the people, objects or agencies involved”. I don’t know if the 2019 film Mission Mangal was bound by similar terms: its trailer shows a rocket very much resembling the GSLV Mk III (now called LVM-3) sporting the letters “S R O”, instead of “I S R O” ; the corresponding Hindi letters “स” and “रो”; and a different logo below the letters “G S L V” instead of the first “I” (screenshot below). GSLV is still the official designation of the launch vehicle, and a step further from what the TV show was allowed. And while the film also claims to be based on real events, its narrative is also fictionalised (read my review and fact-check).

  

  Yet ICMR’s representation in The Vaccine War pulls no punches: its director-general at the time is represented by name and all its trademark assets are on display. It would seem the audience is to believe that they’re receiving a documentarian’s view of real events at ICMR. The film has destroyed the differences between being based on a true story and building on that to fictionalise for dramatic purposes. Perhaps more importantly: while AltBalaji was “legally bound” to not use official ISRO imagery, including those of the rockets, because it presented a fiction, The Vaccine War has been freed of the same legal obligation even though it seems to be operating on the same terms. This to me is my chief symptom of ICMR’s political capture.

  Of course, that Agnihotri is making a film based on a ‘story’ that might include a matter that is sub judice is also problematic. As you may know, Bharat Biotech filed a defamation case against the Foundation for Independent Journalism in early 2022; this foundation publishes The Wire and The Wire Science. I’m a defendant in the case, as are fellow journalists and science communicators Priyanka Pulla, Neeta Sanghi, Jammi Nagaraj Rao, and Banjot Kaur, among others. But while The Wire is fighting the case, it will be hard to say before watching The Vaccine War as to whether the film actually treads on forbidden ground. I’m also not familiar with the freedoms that filmmakers do and don’t have in Indian law (and the extent to which the law maps to common sense and intuition). That said, while we’re on the topic of the film, the vaccine, defamation, and the law, I’d like to highlight something important.

  In 2022, Bharat Biotech sought and received an ex parte injunction from a Telangana court against the allegedly offending articles published by The Wire and The Wire Science, and had them forcibly taken down. The court also prevented the co-defendants from publishing articles on Covaxin going forward and filed a civil defamation case, seeking Rs 100 crore in damages. As the legal proceedings got underway, I started to speak to lawyers and other journalists about implications of the orders, whether specific actions are disallowed on my part, and the way courts deal with such matters – and discovered something akin to a labyrinth that’s also a minefield. There’s a lot to learn. While the law may be clear about something, how a contention winds its way through the judicial system is both barely organised and uncodified. Rahul Gandhi’s own defamation case threw informative light on the role of judges’ discretion and the possibility of a jail term upon conviction, albeit for the criminal variety of the case.

  The thing I resented the most, on the part of sympathetic lawyers, legal scholars, and journalists alike, is the view that it’s the mark of a good journalist to face down a defamation case in their career. Whatever its origins, this belief’s time is up in a period when defamation cases are being filed at the drop of a hat. It’s no longer a specific mark of good journalism. Like The Wire, I and my co-defendants stand by the articles we wrote and published, but it remains good journalism irrespective of whether it has also been accused of defamation.

  Second, the process is the punishment, as the adage goes, yet by valorising the presence of a defamation case in a journalist’s record, it seeks to downplay the effects of the process itself. These effects include the inherent uncertainty; the unfamiliar procedures, documentation, and their contents and purposes; the travelling, especially to small towns, and planning ahead (taking time off work, availability of food, access to clean bathrooms, local transport, etc.); the obscure rules of conduct within courtrooms and the varying zeal with which they’re implemented; the variety and thus intractability of options for legal succour; and the stress, expenses, and the anxiety. So please, thanks for your help, but spare me the BS of how I’m officially a good journalist.

  2023.09.25

• On India’s new ‘Vigyan Puraskar’ awards

  The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of four awards with 56 laureates, The Hindu has reported. Unlike in the previous paradigm, and like the Padma awards to recognise the accomplishments of civilians, the RVP will comprise a medal and a certificate, and no cash. The changes are the result of the recommendations of a committee put together last year by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

  The new paradigm presents four important opportunities to improve the way the Indian government recognises good scientific work.

  1. Push for women

  A note forwarded by the Department of Science and Technology, which has so far overseen more than 200 awards every year, to the MHA said, “Adequate representation of women may … be ensured” – an uncharacteristically direct statement (worded in the characteristic style of the Indian bureaucracy) that probably alludes to the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Awards, which were only announced last week for the year 2022.

  The SSB Awards are the most high-profile State-sponsored awards for scientists in the old paradigm, and they have become infamous for their opaque decision-making and gross under-representation of women scientists. Their arbitrary 45-year age limit further restricted opportunities for women to be nominated, given breaks in their career due to pregnancies, childcare, etc. As a result, even fewer women have won an SSB Award than the level of their participation in various fields of the scientific workforce.

  According to The Hindu, to determine the winners of each year’s RVP awards, “A committee will be constituted every year, comprising the Secretaries of six science Ministries, up to four presidents of science and engineering academies, and six distinguished scientists and technologists from various fields”.

  The SSB Awards’ opacity was rooted in the fact that candidates had to be nominated by their respective institutes, without any process to guarantee proper representation, and that the award-giving committee was shrouded in secrecy, with no indication as to their deliberations. To break from this regrettable tradition, the Indian government should publicise the composition of the RVP committee every year and explain its process. Such transparency, and public accountability, is by itself likely to ensure more women will be nominated for and receive the awards than through any other mechanism.

  2. No cash component

  The RVP awards score by eliminating the cash component for laureates. Scientific talent and productivity are unevenly distributed throughout India, and are typically localised in well-funded national institutes or in a few private universities, so members of the scientific workforce in these locales are also more likely to win awards. Giving these individuals large sums of money, that too after they have produced notable work and not before, will be redundant and only subtract from the fortunes of a less privileged scientist.

  A sum of Rs 5 lakh may not be significant from a science department’s point of view, but it is the principle that matters.

  To enlarge the pool of potential candidates, the government must also ensure that research scholars receive their promised scholarships on time. At present, delayed scholarships and fellowships have become a tragic hallmark of doing science in India, together with officials’ promises and scramble every year to hasten disbursals.

  3. Admitting PIOs

  In the new paradigm, up to one of the three Vigyan Ratna awards every year may go to a person of Indian origin (PIO), and up to three PIOs may receive the Vigyan Shri and Yuva-SSB awards, of the 25 in each group. (PIOs aren’t eligible for the three Vigyan Team awards.)

  Including PIOs in the national science awards framework is a slippery slope. An award for scientific work is implicitly an award to an individual for exercising their duties as a scientist as well as for navigating a particular milieu, by securing the resources required for their work or – as is often the case in India – conducting frugal yet clever experiments to overcome resource barriers.

  Rewarding a PIO who has made excellent contributions to science while working abroad, and probably after having been educated abroad, would delink the “made in India” quality of the scientific work from the work itself, whereas we need more awards to celebrate this relationship.

  This said, the MHA may have opened the door to PIOs in order to bring the awards to international attention, by fêting Indian-origin scientists well-known in their countries of residence.

  4. Science awards for science

  The reputation of an award is determined by the persons who win it, illustrated as much by, say, Norway’s Abel Prize as by the Indian Science Congress’s little-known ‘Millennium Plaques of Honour’. To whom will the RVP prizes be awarded? As stated earlier, the award-giving committee will comprise Secretaries of the six science Ministries, “up to” four presidents of the science and engineering academies, and six “distinguished” scientists and technologists.

  These ‘Ministries’ are the Departments of Science and Technology, of Biotechnology, of Space, and of Atomic Energy, and the Ministries of Earth Sciences and of Health and Family Welfare. As such, they exclude representatives from the Ministries of Environment, Animal Husbandry, and Agriculture, which also deal with research, often of the less glamorous variety.

  Just as there are inclusion criteria, there should be exclusion criteria as well, such as requiring eligible candidates to have published papers in credible journals (or preprint repositories) and/or to not work with or be related in any other way to members of the jury. Terms like “distinguished” are also open to interpretation. Earlier this year, for example, Mr. Khader Vali Dudekula was conferred a Padma Shri in the ‘Science and Engineering’ category for popularising the nutritional benefits of millets, but he has also claimed, wrongly, that consuming millets can cure cancer and diabetes.

  The downside of reduction and centralisation is that they heighten the risk of exclusion. Instead of becoming another realm in which civilians are excluded – or included on dubious grounds, for that matter – the new awards should take care to place truly legitimate scientific work above work that meets any arbitrary ideological standard.

  2023.09.21

• The ‘Climate Overshoot’ website

  Earlier this evening, as I was working on my laptop, I noticed that it was rapidly heating up, to the extent that it was burning my skin through two layers of cloth. This is a device that routinely runs a half-dozen apps simultaneously without breaking a sweat, and the browser (Firefox) also seldom struggles to handle the few score tabs I have open at all times. Since I’d only been browsing until then, I checked about:processes to find if any of the tabs could be the culprit, and it was: the Climate Overshoot Commission (COC) website. Which is ironic because the COC was recently in the news for a report in which it detailed its (prominent) members’ deliberations on how the world’s countries could accelerate emission cuts and not overshoot emissions thresholds.

  The COC itself was the product of deliberations among some scientists who wished to test solar geoengineering but couldn’t. And though the report advises against deploying this risky technology without thoroughly studying it first, it also insists that it should remain on the table among other climate mitigation strategies, including good ol’ cutting emissions. Irrespective of what its support for geoengineering implies for scientific and political consensus on the idea, the COC can also help by considerably simplifying its website so it doesn’t guzzle more computing power than all the 56 other tabs combined, and around 3 W just to stay open. The findings aren’t even that sensible.

  2023.09.18

• Hasan Minhaj’s search for the premise

  When Hasan Minhaj spoke on his show about living through some dangerous experiences as a Muslim man from an Indian family growing up in the US of A, he wasn’t speaking the truth. He told Clare Malone of The New Yorker that his stories have “seeds” of truth”, that his comedy is 70% “emotional truth—this happened” and 30% “hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction”. First, we really need to use words other than ‘truth’ to talk about things that aren’t true the way a ‘truth’ is expected to be. Second, I was only queasy as long as it seemed that Minhaj was passing off other similar people’s stories as his own, but then it seemed to be that they weren’t anyone’s stories at all, a problem exacerbated by the ways in which they involved women. Then he said this, which rang closer home in a different way:

  “The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise”

  So he had a punchline and went looking for a premise – the sort of thing that’s sunk scientists and journalists when they tried to do the same thing. It’s also the trope that cryptocurrencies popularised in the heyday of ‘investments’ in bitcoin and NFTs. They were solutions looking for problems, and when solutions look for problems, they tend to ignore the structural factors that create the problems. For example, crypto-bros wanted to democratise the ownership of pieces of art rather than letting them accumulate in the hands of extremely wealthy individuals. But NFTs aren’t concerned with the relationships between creditors and debtors, wealth and social signalling, and art and capitalism. So they failed to make a difference.

  But that shouldn’t diminish the irony that the world today is one big premise looking for a punchline, sometimes desperately. In India itself, the incumbent BJP government has assumed many elements of authoritarian and fascist ideologies in its rule, and the social fabric has suffered. One cause of suffering is that the government has, together with unscrupulous TV news anchors and some supine public institutions, vitiated public dialogue, spread misinformation, deviated in spirit from the implementation of the RTI Act, and suppressed the production and release of data from public surveys and research that are critical of its dogma.

  One consequence of all this for journalists has been that proof that might seal a causal relationship between a hypothesis and a set of facts is often out of reach, and too often just so. During the pandemic, for example, almost every instance of health journalism was also an instance of investigative journalism. In the last decade, using various forms of retaliation and sanction, the government has silenced some critics and forced others to think twice before responding to reporters. In this milieu, journalism can build only a more incomplete picture of reality as we experience or even observe it (more than subjective experiences that it couldn’t fully capture anyway). Individuals are free to piece together the rest in their imagination, and they do. But for journalists at least, it’s a cardinal sin to present this extrapolation as fact. It’s important, but it’s not fact. This was for example one of the issues with Ronan Farrow’s work during the #MeToo movement.

  Minhaj isn’t a journalist and punchlines aren’t reports put together through journalistic work – yet his quote is insightful to the practice of journalism. After substituting “conclusion” for “punch line”, for instance, we have a faithful reflection of what might have gone wrong with The Wire‘s TekFog and Meta reports last year, and after which The Wire sued Devesh Kumar, the person at the centre of both investigative efforts, for deceiving The Wire‘s journalists. Kumar had allegedly invented the raison d’être of both series to match what many of us have come to accept as an incontestable reality.

  (Note: I worked with The Wire at the time these reports were published but wasn’t involved in reporting or publishing them. I have, however, since unpublished one post on this blog in which I considered TekFog’s implications for science journalism.)

  The alleged premise in both cases was broadly that people affiliated with the BJP were using sophisticated IT tools to manipulate the spread of hateful messages (‘TekFog’) and removal of anti-party sentiment (‘Meta’) on social media platforms. The conclusions in both sets of reports – before The Wire repudiated them – were in line with the fact that BJP leaders have regularly resorted to communalising rhetoric to win votes and BJP governments have jailed people for social-media posts criticising the party’s views and actions. But it soon became clear that the conclusions weren’t worth the premise even in circumstances as difficult as those created by the foot-soldiers of Hindutva. This to me is what makes Minhaj’s rationale so disagreeable.

  Of course, journalism is different from a talk-show, but Malone’s reply to Minhaj as he tries repeatedly to justify the fictionalising should resonate with anyone who claims to relate the truth but doesn’t: “But it didn’t happen to you.” (Who is experiencing the event matters as well, so the last two words may be redundant.) It’s the simplest argument against confirmation bias, and it also speaks to an important part of the identity of comedians like Minhaj, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, etc.: they’re a source of new information about the world insofar as they expect to be perceived to be credible when they tell us how to think about that information, and that so happens to be in the form of jokes.

  While Minhaj is influential, the outing of his more striking anecdotes as untrue leaves him the story, as it did Farrow and Kumar, rather than the actual people and ideas that he apparently wished to highlight. And that’s harmful to those people and ideas. In the words of legal scholars Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, writing in 1997 in the aftermath of the Tawana Brawley case:

  Indifference to the distinction between fact and fiction minimizes real suffering by implying that it is no worse than imagined or self-inflicted suffering.

  2023.09.17

• The AI trust deficit predates AI

  There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

  But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

  If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it?

  Trust plays an important role in the public understanding of science. The excerpt above – from an article by Mark Bailey, chair of Cyber Intelligence and Data Science at the National Intelligence University, Maryland, in The Conversation about whether we can trust AI – showcases that.

  Bailey treats AI systems as “alien minds” because of their, rather their makers’, inscrutable purposes. They are inscrutable not just because they are obscured but because, even under scrutiny, it is difficult to determine how an advanced machine-based logic makes decisions.

  Setting aside questions about the extent to which such a claim is true, Bailey’s argument as to the trustworthiness of such systems can be stratified based on the people to whom it is addressed: AI experts and non-AI-experts, and I have a limited issue with the latter vis-à-vis Bailey’s contention. That is, to non-AI-experts – which I take to be the set of all people ranging from those not trained as scientists (in any field) to those trained as such but who aren’t familiar with AI – the question of trust is more wide-ranging. They already place a lot of their trust in (non-AI) technologies that they don’t understand, and probably never will. Should they rethink their trust in these systems? Or should we taken their trust in these systems to be ill-founded and requiring ‘improvement’?

  Part of Bailey’s argument is that there are questions about whether we can or should trust AI when we don’t understand it. Aside from AI in a generic sense, he uses the example of self-driving cars and a variation of the trolley problem. While these technologies illustrate his point, they also give the impression that AI systems not making decisions aligned with human expectations and their struggle to incorporate ethics is a problem restricted to high technologies. It isn’t. The trust deficit vis-à-vis predates AI. Many of the technologies that non-experts trust but which don’t uphold that (so to speak) are not high-tech; examples from India alone include biometric scanners (for Aadhaar), public transport infrastructure, and mechanisation in agriculture. This is because people’s use of any technology beyond their ability to understand is mediated by social relationships, economic agency, and cultural preferences, and not technical know-how.

  For the layperson, trust in a technology is really trust in some institution, individuals or even some organisational principle (traditions, religion, etc.), and this is as it should be – perhaps even for more-sophisticated AI systems of the future. Many of us will never fully understand how a deep-learning neural network works, nor should we be expected to, but that doesn’t implicitly make AI systems untrustworthy. I expect to be able to trust scientists in government and in respectable scientific institutions to discharge their duties in a public-spirited fashion and with integrity, so that I can trust their verdict on AI, or anything else in similar vein.

  Bailey also writes later in the article that some day, AI systems’ inner workings could become so opaque that scientists may no longer be able to connect their inputs with their outputs in a scientifically complete way. According to Bailey: “It is important to resolve the explainability and alignment issues before the critical point is reached where human intervention becomes impossible.” This is fair but it also misses the point a little bit by limiting the entities that can intervene to individuals and built-in technical safeguards, like working an ethical ‘component’ into the system’s decision-making framework, instead of taking a broader view that keeps the public institutions, including policies, that will be responsible for translating the AI systems’ output into public welfare in the picture. Even today in India, that’s what’s failing us – not the technologies themselves – and therein lies the trust deficit.

  Featured image credit: Cash Macanaya/Unsplash.

  2023.09.14

• Scientists’ conduct affects science

  Nature News has published an excellent feature by Edwin Cartlidge on the “wall of scepticism” that arose in response to the latest superconductivity claim from Ranga Dias et al., purportedly in a compound called nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. It seems the new paper has earned a note of concern as well, after various independent research groups failed to replicate the results. Dias & co. had had another paper, claiming superconductivity in a different material, retracted in October 2022, two years after its publication. All these facts together raise a few implications about the popular imagination of science.

  First, the new paper was published by Nature, a peer-reviewed journal. And Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego, told Nature News “that editors should have first resolved the question about the provenance of the raw data in the retracted 2020 Nature article before even considering the 2023 paper”. So the note reaffirms the role of peer-review being limited to checking whether the information presented in a paper is consistent with the paper’s conclusions, and not checking whether it is well-founded and has integrity in and of itself.

  Second, from Nature News:

  “Researchers from four other groups, meanwhile, told Nature’s news team that they had abandoned their own attempts to replicate the work or hadn’t even tried. Eremets said that he wasted time on the CSH work, so didn’t bother with LuNH. ‘I just ignored it,’ he says.”

  An amusing illustration, I think, that speaks against science’s claims to being impartial, etc. In a perfectly objective world, Dias et al.’s previous work shouldn’t have mattered to other scientists, who should have endeavoured to verify the claims in the new paper anew, given that it’s a fairly sensational claim and because it was published in a ‘prestigious’ peer-reviewed journal. But, as Eremets said, “the synthesis protocol wasn’t clear in the paper and Dias didn’t help to clarify it”.

  The reciprocal is also true: Dias chose to share samples of nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride that his team had prepared only with Russell Hemley, who studies material chemistry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, (and some other groups that he refused to name) – and that Hemley is one of the researchers who hasn’t criticised Dias’s findings. Hemley is also not an independent researcher; he and Dias worked together on the work in the 2020 paper that was later retracted. Dias should ideally have shared the samples with everyone. But scientists’ social conduct does matter, influencing decisions about how other scientists believe they should respond.

  Speaking of which: Nature (the journal) on the other hand doesn’t look at past work and attendant misgivings when judging each paper. From Nature News (emphasis added):

  The editor’s note added to the 2023 paper on 1 September, saying that the reliability of data are in question, adds that “appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.” Karl Ziemelis, Nature’s chief applied- and physical-sciences editor, based in London, says that he and his colleagues are “assessing concerns” about the paper, and adds: “Owing to the confidentiality of the peer-review process we cannot discuss specific details of what transpired.” As for the 2020 paper, Ziemelis explains that they decided not to look into the origin of the data once they had established problems with the data processing and then retracted the research. “Our broader investigation of that work ceased at that point,” he says. Ziemelis adds that “all submitted manuscripts are considered independently on the basis of the quality and timeliness of their science”.

  The refusal to share samples echoes an unusual decision by the journal Physical Review B to publish a paper authored by researchers at Microsoft, in which they reported discovery a Majorana zero mode – an elusive particle (in a manner of speaking) that could lead the way to building quantum ‘supercomputers’. However, it seems the team withheld some information that independent researchers could have used to validate the findings, presumably because it’s intellectual property. Rice University physics professor Douglas Natelson wrote on his blog:

  The rationale is that the community is better served by getting this result into the peer-reviewed literature now even if all of the details aren’t going to be made available publicly until the end of 2024. I don’t get why the researchers didn’t just wait to publish, if they are so worried about those details being available.

  ---

  Take all of these facts and opinions together and ask yourself: what then is the scientific literature? It probably contains many papers that have cleared peer-review but whose results won’t replicate. Some papers may or may not replicate but we’ll never know for a couple years. It also doesn’t contain replication studies that might have been there if the replicators and the original research group were on amicable terms. What also do these facts and view imply for the popular conception of science?

  Every day, I encounter two broad kinds of critical imaginations of science. One has emerged from the practitioners of science, and those studying its philosophy, history, sociology, etc. These individuals have debated the notions presented above to varying degrees. But there is also a class of people in India that wields science as an antidote to what it claims is the state’s collusion with pseudoscience, and such collusion as displacing what is apparently science’s rightful place in the Indian society-state: as the best and sole arbiter of facts and knowledge. This science is apparently a unified whole, objective, self-correcting, evidence-based, and anti-faith. I imagine this science needs to have these characteristics in order to effectively challenge, in the courts of public opinion, the government’s oft-mistaken claims.

  At the same time, the ongoing Dias et al. saga reminds us that any ‘science’ imprisoned by these assumptions would dismiss the events and forces that would actually help it grow – such as incentivising good-faith actions, acknowledging the labour required to keep science honest and reflexive, discussing issues resulting from the cultural preferences of its exponents, paying attention to social relationships, heeding concerns about the effects of one’s work and conduct on the field, etc. In the words of Paul Feyerabend (Against Method, third ed., 1993): “Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages.”

  2023.09.07

• The UAE’s hacks for international prominence

  The UAE seems to be making a sincere attempt to whitewash itself, according to a New York Times report on September 1, by hosting the COP28 climate talks. This is both unsurprising and fascinating – both because we’ve seen this in the local cosmopolitan self-image the country has sought to build. This is perhaps most overt with Dubai, but Abu Dhabi and Sharjah as well: while the former, with its surfeit of tourist attractions, seems keen to appear to be from the future, as they say, all three cities have been erected on a migrant labour force, especially from the Indian subcontinent, that is otherwise kept hidden from sight. The country is also the personal fiefdom of the emirs of each emirate and has no interest or room for critical dialogues on most matters of any import – a point that the newspaper’s report also makes:

  “That’s the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the U.A.E. acting as host of the annual global climate conference,” said Devin Kenney, who researches the United Arab Emirates for Amnesty International. “How are you supposed to have a serious discussion about a critical problem for all humanity in a country where critical discussion is illegal?”

  As far as taking responsibility for major events to launder one’s international reputation goes, the UAE’s previous attempt was its Mars mission. In July 2020, the country ‘launched’ a probe named ‘Hope’ to the red planet, which successfully achieved orbital capture in February 2021. Emaratis celebrated the occasion in much the same way Indians had with the Mars Orbiter Mission, and such celebration was probably the mission’s primary objective. The UAE’s spaceflight organisation was actually founded in 2014; the probe was assembled in the University of Colorado, by engineers from the UAE as well as from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley; its ground-segment requirements are being met by NASA and a private entity in Arizona; and it was tested in and launched by Japan, onboard its H-IIA rocket.

  ‘Hope’ was not a product of the UAE’s space programme because the UAE doesn’t have a space programme the way India, China, Russia, Japan or the US have a space programme. Yet the UAE reaped a reputational windfall out of the exercise, thrusting itself into the ranks of countries that have successfully conducted interplanetary missions, and giving its citizens and ‘permanent residents’ something to cheer about.

  Recently, in an opinion article in The Hindu, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy associate professor Rahul Menon used the ‘Hope’ mission as an example of a country with a lower population (and thus relatively lower availability of highly skilled persons in diverse fields) achieving what India, China, etc. had because of state intervention, towards his larger point that such intervention is also capable of yielding desirable outcomes. But the UAE is a red herring in this arena whose state did nothing more than fork out a considerable sum of (what is essentially family) money, fly out some of its best engineers to the US, contract a rocket in Japan, and wait. Seldom having seen the country do better, I bet it’s trying to pull a similar trick with COP28.

  2023.09.04

• The Kapitza pendulum

  Rarely does a ‘problem’ come along that makes you think more than casually about the question of mathematics’s reality, and problems in mathematical physics are full of them. I came across one such problem for the first time yesterday, and given its simplicity, thought I should make note of it.

  I spotted a paper yesterday with the title ‘The Inverted Pendulum as a Classical Analog of the EFT Paradigm’. I’ve never understood the contents of such papers without assistance from a physicist, but I like to go through them in case a familiar idea or name jumps up that warrants a more thorough follow-up or I do understand something and that helps me understand something else even better.

  In this instance, the latter happened, and I discovered the Kapitza pendulum. In 1908, a British mathematician named Andrew Stephenson described the problem but wasn’t able to explain it. That happened at the hands of the Russian scientist Pyotr Kapitsa, for whom the pendulum is named, who worked it out in the 1950s.

  You are familiar with the conventional pendulum:

  

  Here, the swinging bob is completely stable when it is suspended directly below the pivot, and is unmoving. The Kapitza pendulum is a conventional pendulum whose pivot is rapidly moved up and down. This gives rise to an unusual stable state: when the bob is directly above the pivot! Here’s a demonstration:

  As you can see, the stable state isn’t a perfect one: the bob still vibrates on either side of a point above the pivot, yet it doesn’t move beyond a particular distance, much less drop downward under the force of gravity. If you push the bob just a little, it swings across a greater distance for some time before returning to the narrow range. How does this behaviour arise?

  I’m fascinated by the question of the character of mathematics because of its ability to make predictions about reality – to build a bridge between something that we know to be physically true (like how a conventional pendulum would swing when dropped from a certain height, etc.) and something that we don’t, at least not yet.

  If this sounds wrong, please make sure you’re thinking of the very first instantiation of some system whose behaviour is defying your expectations, like the very first Kapitza pendulum. How do you know what you’re looking at isn’t due to a flaw in the system or some other confounding factor? A Kapitza pendulum is relatively simple to build, so one way out of this question is to build multiple units and check if the same behaviour exists in all of them. If you can be reasonably certain that the same flaw is unlikely to manifest in all of them, you’ll know that you’re observing an implicit, but non-intuitive, property of the system.

  But in some cases, building multiple units isn’t an option – such as a particle-smasher like the Large Hadron Collider or the observation of a gravitational wave from outer space. Instead, researchers use mathematics to check the likelihood of alternate possibilities and to explain something new in terms of something we already know.

  Many theoretical physicists have even articulated that while string theory lacks experimental proof, it has as many exponents as it does because of its mathematical robustness and the deep connections they have found between its precepts and other, distant branches of physics.

  In the case of the Kapitza pendulum, based on Newton’s laws and the principles of simple harmonic motion, it is possible to elucidate the rules, or equations, that govern the motion of the bob under the influence of its mass, the length of the rod connecting the bob to the pivot, the angle between the line straight up from the pivot and the rod (θ), acceleration due to gravity, the length of the pivot’s up-down motion, and how fast this motion happens (i.e. its frequency).

  From this, we can derive an equation that relates θ to the distance of the up-down motion, the frequency, and the length of the rod. Finally, plotting this equation on a graph, with θ on one axis and time on the other, and keeping the values of the other variables fixed, we have our answer:

  

  When the value of θ is 0º, the bob is pointing straight up. When θ = 90º, the bob is pointing sideways and continues to fall down, to become a conventional pendulum, under the influence of gravity. But when the frequency is increased from 10 arbitrary units in this case to 200 units, the setup becomes a Kapitza pendulum as the value of θ keeps shifting but only between 6º on one side and some 3º on the other.

  The thing I’m curious about here is whether mathematics is purely descriptive or if it’s real in the way a book, a chair or a planet is real. Either way, this ‘problem’ should remind us of the place and importance of mathematics in modern life – by virtue of the fact that it opens paths to understanding, and then building on, parts of reality that experiences based on our senses alone can’t access.

  Featured image: A portrait of Pyotr Kapitsa (left) in conversation with the chemist Nikolai Semyonov, by Boris Kustodiev, 1921. Credit: Kapitsa Collection, public domain.

  2023.09.01