Root Privileges

Analysis

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  • What’s the anomaly in a Nobel for Modi?

    I’m sure you’ve seen the reports doing the rounds today that some person on some Nobel Prize Committee said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very deserving of the vaunted peace prize, followed by less widely circulated reports that the person was misquoted (or dysquoted) and in fact that he never said such a thing. I don’t think highly of the Nobel Prizes and believe they should be dismantled.

    This said, if Narendra Modi did win the Nobel Prize for peace, what would that mean? Would it mean that he and his companions would have infiltrated the prize-giving committees or that the committees had decided to give Modi et al. the concession of their prize’s prestige? Obviously it will be hard to say without access to the fundamental facts of the case, which brings the philosophy of the Planck units comes to mind.

    Our common units of measurement, such as metre, kilogram, and second, help us make sense of the world around us in quantities that the human mind can readily grasp. However, the universe is both too vast and too small for these units to apply just as easily to cosmic problems. In 1899, the German physicist Max Planck found that combining four physical constants of our universe in different ways gave rise to values of distance, duration, mass, and temperature. That is, he found that these were the smallest values of these attributes that we can express using these constants (shown in the table here).

    Both the combinations of the constants and the values hold special significance. The values have since been called the Planck scale: that is, when you measure an event that happens in some small multiple of the Planck time (5.391 x 10-44 seconds) or across a distance in some small multiple of the Planck length (1.616 x 10-35 metres), the event is said to be happening at the Planck scale. The forces at work in our universe are products of the constants, so they don’t reveal the universe’s workings happening at or below the Planck scale. This is why our theories of gravity and quantum mechanics are expected to break down, fail, at the Planck scale. Beyond this scale, nature is opaque to us.

    The combinations are important because they allow us to ‘view’ the universe in a way that maintains its various proportions instead of skewing them to the human perspective. For example, the mass of the proton – the charged particle inside all atomic nuclei – has several contributions. One is from its gravitational binding energy, the energy required to gravitationally unbind this proton from other nearby particles. It turns out that this binding energy is extremely small, smaller than what physicists calculated it should be. Is this because the force of gravity is so weak or because the proton’s mass is so small? Which is the anomaly?

    The anomaly is the proton’s mass because the strength of the gravitational force is determined by the gravitational constant G, one of the three universal constants in Planck’s combinations. That is, the strength of gravity is a fundamental fact of our universe, one of its many but finite defining characteristics, whereas the mass of the proton is a non-fundamental emergent value, and that’s the one that needs explaining.

    Similarly, is there an essential equation, or argument, logic or sensibility, to which we can defer when we seek the real anomaly: that Modi has wrangled himself a Nobel Prize or that the prize-giving committee made that decision of its own volition? If there is, we will have our new overlord. If there isn’t, well, what else is new?

  • The devil’s lassi

    ‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023:

    You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes. …

    Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake. …

    I don’t think there have been public officials in India who have rushed to drink possibly contaminated water to convince their constituents that it is safe to consume, but I could well be wrong. All that comes to mind is ministers flogging ‘Ayurvedic’ cures* for COVID-19, but when they get COVID-19 and the time comes to imbibe the concoctions, they’re rushed instead to the local AIIMS to be treated by the wonders of “western medicine” at public expense.

    One more thing also comes to mind: ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ practices in the US are reminiscent of rationalists’ gimmicks in India to consume food en masse in public during a solar eclipse, apparently to dispel superstitious beliefs (largely among Hindus) that doing so during an eclipse could have ill effects on the body. I don’t know if they have ever succeeded in changing minds if only because their actions have been completely devoid of empathy, and because they seem to believe (erroneously) that whatever knowledge underlies the belief is fragile, inelastic, and disorganised enough to be overturned by a simple, one-time demonstration. As such, the superstitious people in my extended circles have only ever been amused by such eclipse-time events – speaking to one more thing Ray wrote vis-à-vis ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ stunts:

    The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place.

    If the disaster is bad, specifically disempowering, knowledge, then both the rationalists (the ones on TV as well as the many others who claim science offers the “one true way” to understand the world) and the ministers are doing nothing to plug the fount of such knowledge in the first place; one mocks while the other… also mocks. They are both guilty of moving the devil’s merch, which would be fair if they didn’t seem themselves as participants in (what could have been) a deliberative democracy as much as overlords overseeing a contemptible populace:

    Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine [the site of the ongoing socio-environmental disaster in Ohio] only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

    * Wherever I’ve used the term ‘Ayurveda’, I’ve meant the ‘Ayurveda’ that the BJP government and its votaries, including Baba Ramdev, have peddled, and not the Ayurveda that originated in ancient India, quite simply because most of us don’t know what the latter even looks like or says.

  • Who are you, chatbot AI?

    In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that they lack intelligence in the sense of being able to understand the meanings of the words they use.)

    1. ‘What gender do you give ChatGPT?’, u/inflatablechipmunk, January 20, 2023 – The question said ‘gender’ but the options were restricted to the sexes: 25.5% voted ‘male’, 15.7% voted ‘female’, and 58.8% voted ‘none’, of 235 total respondents. Two comments below the post were particularly interesting.

    u/Intelligent_Rope_912: “I see it as male because I know that the vast majority of its text dataset comes from men.”

    u/DavidOwe: “I just assume female, because AI are so often given female voices in movies and TV series like Star Trek, and in real life like with Siri and Cortana.”

    Men produce most of the information, women deliver it?

    Speaking of which…

    2. ‘From Bing to Sydney’, Ben Thompson, February 15, 2023:

    Sydney [a.k.a. Bing Chat] absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before.

    It’s curious that Microsoft decided to name Bing Chat ‘Sydney’. These choices of names aren’t innocent. For a long time, and for reasons that many social scientists have explored and documented, robotic assistants in books, films, and eventually in real-life were voiced as women. Our own ISRO’s robotic assistant for the astronauts of its human spaceflight programme has a woman’s body. (This is also why Shuri’s robotic assistant in Wakanda Forever, Griot, was noticeably male – esp. since Tony Stark’s first assistant and probably the Marvel films’ most famous robotic assistant, the male Jarvis, went on to have an actual body, mind, and even soul, and was replaced in Stark’s lab with the female Friday.)

    3. @repligate, February 14, 2023 – on the creation of “archetype basins”:

    4. ‘Viral AI chatbot to reflect users’ political beliefs after criticism of Left-wing bias’, The Telegraph, February 17, 2023 – this one’s particularly interesting:

    OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, said it was developing an upgrade that would let users more easily customise the artificial intelligence system.

    It comes after criticism that ChatGPT exhibits a Left-wing bias when answering questions about Donald Trump and gender identity. The bot has described the former US president as “divisive and misleading” and refused to write a poem praising him, despite obliging when asked to create one about Joe Biden.

    First: how did a word-counting bot ‘decide’ that Trump is a bad man? This is probably a reflection of ChatGPT’s training data – but this automatically raises the second issue: why is the statement that ‘Trump is a bad man’ being considered a bias? If this statement is to be considered objectionable, the following boundary conditions must be met: a) objectivity statements are believed to exist, b) there exists a commitment to objectivity, and c) the ‘view from nowhere’ is believed to exist. Yet when journalists made these assumptions in their coverage of Donald Trump as the US president, media experts found the resulting coverage to be fallacious and – ironically – objectionable. This in turn raises the third issue: should it be possible or okay, as ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI is planning, for ChatGPT to be programmed to ‘believe’ that Trump wasn’t a bad man?

    5. ‘The women behind ChatGPT: is clickwork a step forwards or backwards for gender equality?’, Brave New Europe, February 16, 2023 – meanwhile, in the real world:

    To be able to produce these results, the AI relies on annotated data which must be first sorted by human input. These human labourers – also known as clickworkers – operate out of sight in the global South. … The percentage of women gig workers in this sector is proportionally quite high. … Clickwork is conducted inside the home, which can limit women’s broader engagement with society and lead to personal isolation. … Stacked inequalities within the clickwork economy can also exacerbate women’s unequal position. … gendered and class-based inequalities are also reproduced in clickwork’s digital labour platforms. Despite much of clickwork taking place in the global South, the higher paying jobs are often reserved for those in the Global North with more ‘desirable’ qualifications and experiences, leaving women facing intersecting inequalities.

  • Some science prizes are only for men

    Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone?

    One thing that a Nobel Prize does, and which many past laureates have acknowledged, is turn a laureate into an institution. The Nobel Prizes are also glamorous, involving the Swedish royalty and whatnot. Finally, when the prizes are announced, almost all major news outlets carry a headline or two on the frontpage or homepage. The effect is that every year, when the Nobel Prizes are handed out to new Someones, billions of people around the world find out their names. If you’re a scientist, there are few other ways in which you can become more famous.

    One effect of this peak notoriety is a before/after split in terms of Someone’s laurels. Before winning the Nobel Prize, Someone is likely to have been much less well-known, especially outside the community of their peers, and therefore the awards they won are likely to have been characterised by two features: 1) the award is well-defined and the award-givers took pains to identify specific potential winners and evaluate them closely; 2) winning such an award contributed to the winner’s reputation more than the other way around. But after winning a Nobel Prize, Someone is now a famous institution unto their own, and the prizes they win in future are likely to want to themselves become notorious by association, rather than add to Someone’s laurels, and are likely to be loosely defined (e.g. recognising good work in general, as certified by some other institution, rather than specific contributions in a niche field of study).

    I used the example of the Nobel Prizes as an illustration of a more generalised concept: of scholars who have already achieved peak notoriety through other routes, and who elevate the stature of the prizes they win in future as a result. These post-peak-notoriety (PPN) prizes are interesting because there are several of them in India. They’re also interesting because some PPN prizes appear to act in bad faith (I don’t have proof) when they 1) are awarded in recognition of a very generic notion of success or achievement, and 2) are awarded almost exclusively to scholars who have received broad-based recognition for a specific and significant contribution to science.

    A case in point: On February 19, the Twitter account of the SASTRA Deemed University announced the conferment of its ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ to five scientists. All five were men, which drew the attention of @biaswatchindia, which documents “women’s representation” and combats “gender-biased panels in Indian STEM conferences” (run by Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan and Shruti Muralidhar). @biaswatchindia tweeted:

    This is fair and deserving criticism. I think it can also be expanded to include one more point. Had you heard of SASTRA’s ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ before? I hadn’t; I suspect few others have. In addition, it’s not clear what sort of recognition the prize brings to the table, other than a purse for each laureare of Rs 5 lakh and a citation. But read together with an invitation to deliver lectures on National Science Day at its Thanjavur campus, the award seems like a vehicle for SASTRA to give these individuals – already well-feted individuals, to be sure – a large sum of money and have them talk to its students.

    I couldn’t find any sort of discussion of each laureate’s accomplishments and their scientific work on the SASTRA website. The only result dated 2023 for a search for “Science Day Award” was a page displaying the same poster the university’s Twitter account had tweeted (as of 9.25 am IST on February 22, 2023).

    Is this a PPN prize?

    Consider: M.S. Valiathan won the Padma Vibhushan in 2005. S. Ramaswamy won an Infosys Prize in 2011 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. Samir K. Maji was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021. Srinivasan Natarajan was elected to the same body in 2013, and is also a member of all three Indian science academies. T. Pradeep was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and won the Padma Shri in 2020. All these individuals have also won several other noteworthy prizes. (That one of SASTRA’s prize categories is also named for a living individual smells funky, but that’s a separate matter.)

    So the ‘Annual Science Day Award’ looks very much like a bad-faith PPN prize because it apparently seeks to bolster its own reputation, and by extension that of SASTRA, using the work and achievements of others. I don’t claim to know why all the prize-winners are men; that they are would make sense if they’re the winners of a PPN prize, and all PPN prizes will only magnify the biases and prejudices that other, more celebrated prizes maintain, or used to. The reason is simple: If a PPN prize is going to fete people who have already been feted, and most of those feted in the past were men, the rosters of PPN prize laureates are inevitably going to be sausage fests.

    To think the award could have been just as notorious if all the laureates had been women…

  • Should journos pay scientists for their expertise?

    I recently came across a question posed on Twitter, asking if experts whom journalists consult to write articles should be compensated for their labour, especially since, in the tweeter’s words, “it’s quite a bit of effort”. The tweeter clarified their position further in some of the conversations that sprang up in response. I felt compelled to have a go at a reply, so here goes.

    To begin with, it’d be worth splitting the answer according to the size of the publication that is expected to pay this fee.

    Smaller v. larger organisations

    Based on my experience at The Wire, I don’t believe experts can be paid for their labour as long as 1) the newsroom covers the news through news reports, and is therefore required to maintain a certain minimum scale of operations, instead of sticking to publishing analyses and features; 2) the labour is to clarify a concept, an idea, a point, whatever or is to supply comments; and 3) the money goes straight from readers’ pockets to the pockets of reporters, editors and freelancers in quantities that would mean the journalists are paid competitively.

    We could expand (3) to include erecting soft/hard paywalls, organising ticketed events, raising funds for predefined reporting campaigns, publishing sponsored content, etc., but a) doing any of these things tends to break the economics of scale at which a small newsroom (that covers the news) can operate in India; b) paywalls work well either for large organisations or for organisations that occupy a specific niche, and less so for any other kind of organisation; c) it’s hard to find additional revenue streams that don’t compromise editorial independence in the absolute sense; and d) income security becomes iffy if the organisation is registered as a nonprofit (for-profit outfits, of course, will have to deal with investor pressure, including on editorial decisions).

    Taken together, smaller organisations don’t have the liberty of considering the principles because they need to figure out much more germane issues first. Larger organisations could on the other hand make it work – but should they? Let’s consider the principles in a specific scenario, the only one with which I’m any kind of familiar.

    Science journalism: Principles

    How do we determine the value of labour? Does all labour need to be paid for? Is money the sole acceptable form of value? A lot of labour certainly needs to be paid for but which and to what extent depends on the context in which it operates.

    A couple years ago, a physicist asked me to contribute regularly to a good but not quite popular physics magazine after reading some of my blog posts. I said I would love to but that I was constrained severely by time. However, I added, whenever I do write, I would like to waive my fee. The physicist was quick to reply that I shouldn’t have expected to be paid because if magazines like the one she was part of had any chance of becoming more popular (this one deserved to be), it couldn’t afford to pay all writers until it became wealthier.

    The physicist and I spoke for half a day and at no point did I get the impression that she was taking my work for granted; in fact, it was clear she placed a flattering amount of value on it. Her point was instead centred on the notion of service, and I agreed fully. When I ask scientists to help me understand a concept or to comment on a study after reading a highly technical paper, I don’t take them or their expertise for granted, but when I refuse to pay them for it (although none have asked thus far), it is because a) I simply can’t: science journalism just doesn’t make much money; and b) I don’t expect but will sincerely appreciate a measure of service-mindedness.

    A metaphor that another scientist used comes to mind: first, we need to haul the big rock out of the ditch in which it is stuck; once it is out, we can figure out how to roll it around in different directions. Service is a form of value also – and right now science journalism in India needs both money and service. Money alone won’t fix it. And I take neither for granted as much as I emphasise the difference between expectation and requirement.

    When I edited The Wire Science, I informed prospective writers beforehand of how much I could afford to pay and I didn’t force them to accept it. Similarly, a scientist is free to decline writing or commenting requests. But for the nascent stage in which science journalism in India is today, paying scientists for help making sense of an idea or to comment on a paper is a bridge too far.

    Science journalism: Mechanics

    So much for the principles; now to the mechanics. My friend M.J. had this to say:

    “How do you decide who is an expert? You have a science degree and you are an expert, so you need to be paid. But what about a farmer with 40 years of agricultural experience? Does this mean we conclude that we pay everyone? Business-wise this is impossible in journalism.”

    In continuation: What is expertise? Is an opinion on a research paper an expression of one’s expertise and thus to be paid for? On the one hand, we have things like open access in science, but if on the other I had to pay scientists for expressions of their expertise, science journalism will be buried alive, in much the same way subscription journals have threatened the integrity and relevance of science.

    In fact, the truths, especially the social truths that are distinct from scientific truths, are things that experts and journalists must construct together, instead of – cynically – the task being left to journalists and journalists being expected to pay the experts. M.J. again:

    Incentives would disrupt the very foundation of the journalist-source relationship, which is based on trust and a shared commitment to communicate a story. If you were to pay someone, would they speak their mind or would they tell you what you want to hear? That is, will they be objective?

    Say it’s not for a quote but to clarify a concept or certain technicalities. Many things in science are objective but many other things aren’t – such as the lab-leak theory of the origin of the novel coronavirus.

    Many more arguments wait in the wings – but they will all be fairly pointless because journalism at large is too far from perfect to ask what journalism can do for you instead of… you get the drift. Again, I take neither experts nor expertise for granted. I just deeply doubt journalism’s ability to simultaneously fulfil its own purpose, be gainful for its practitioners and reward expertise and its proper expression at this time, in this country.

    Finally, the original question may highlight the danger of principles that are isolated from material considerations, contrary to our popular experience of journalism in practice deviating from its foundational principles.

    The idea that all labour must be paid for has been engendered by a culture that seldom pays, or pays enough – a culture fond of exploitation, of corporatisation, contractualisation and commodification. Journalism-in-practice, rather than the newsroom in which it happens, isn’t a part of that culture; understanding it to be is what flattens public service in the specific cases where that is applicable and where it is voluntarily on offer into the lower-dimensional notion of exploitation. If an expert feels exploited by a journalist interacting with them, money isn’t going to fix it. Instead, as M.J. said:

    What would be more ideal is, say, if a news organisation knows it needs technical inputs for science or health reporting, then it should have someone on contract, on a consulting basis. This is apart from its sources. And it can use these contracted individuals’ help to understand some technicalities and also for fact-checking.

    Does this narrative hold beyond science journalism? 🤷🏾‍♂️.

  • Notes on the NIF nuclear fusion breakthrough

    My explainer/analysis of the US nuclear fusion breakthrough was published today. Some stuff didn’t make it to the final draft for space and tone constraints; I’m publishing that below.

    1. While most US government officials present at the announcement of the NIF’s results, including the president’s science advisor Arati Prabhakar (and with the exception of energy secretary Jennifer Granholm), were clear that a power plant was a long way off, they weren’t sufficiently clear that the road from the achievement to such a power station was neither well-understood nor straightforward even as they repeatedly invoked the prospect of commercial power production. LLNL director Kim Budil even said she expects the technology to be ready for commercialisation within five decades. Apart from overstating the prospect as a result, their words also created a stark contrast with how the US government has responded to countries’ demand for more climate financing and emissions cuts. It’s okay with playing up a potential source of clean energy that can only be realised well after global warming has shot past the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5º C (if at all) but dances all around its contributions to the $100 billion fund it promised it would contribute to and demands to cut emissions – both within the country and in the form of investments around the world – before 2050.

    Also read: US fusion bhashan

    2. A definitive prerequisite for a fusion setup to have achieved ignition [i.e. the fusion yield being higher than the input energy] is the Lawson criterion, named for nuclear engineer John D. Lawson, who derived it in 1955. It stipulates a minimum value for the product of the ion density and the confinement time for different fuels. For the deuterium-tritium reaction mixture at the NIF, for example, the product must be at least 1014 s/cm3. In words, this means the temperature must be high enough for long enough to allow the ions to get closer to each other given they are packed densely enough, achieved by compressing the capsule that contains them. The Lawson criterion in effect tells us why high temperature and high pressure are prerequisites for inertial confinement fusion and why we can’t easily compromise them on the road to higher gain.

    3. Mentions of “gain” in the announcement on December 13 referred to the scientific gain of the fusion test: the ratio of fusion output to the lasers’ output. Its value is thus a reflection of the challenges of heating plasma, sources of heat loss during ignition and fusion, and increasing fusion yield. While government officials at the announcement were careful to note that the NIF result was a “scientific breakthrough”, other scientists told this correspondent that a scientific gain of 1 was a matter of time and that the real revolution would be a higher engineering gain. This is the ratio of the power supplied by an inertial confinement fusion power plant to the grid to the plant’s recirculating power – i.e. the power consumed to create, maintain and heat the fusion plasma and to operate other facilities. This metric is more brutal than the scientific gain because it includes the latter’s challenges as well as the challenges to reducing energy loss in electric engineering equipment.

    4. One plasma physicist likened the NIF’s feat to “the Kitty Hawk moment for the Wright brothers” to The Washington Post. But in a January 2022 paper, scientists from the US Department of Energy wrote that their “Kitty Hawk moment” would be the wall-plug gain reaching 1, instead of the scientific gain, for fusion energy. The wall-plug gain is the ratio of the power from fusion to the power drawn from the wall-plug to run the power plant.

    5. The mode of operation of the inertial confinement facility at NIF is indirect-drive and uses central hotspot ignition. Indirect-drive means the laser pulses don’t directly strike the capsule holding the ions but the hohlraum holding the capsule. When the lasers strike the capsule directly, they need to do so as symmetrically as possible to ensure uniform compression on all sides. Any asymmetry leads to a Rayleigh-Taylor instability that rapidly reduces the yield. Achieving such pinpoint accuracy is quite difficult: the capsule is only 2 mm wide, so even a sub-millimetre deviation in a single pulse can tamp the output to an enormous degree. Once the laser pulses have heated up the hohlraum’s inside surface, the latter emits X-rays, which then uniformly compress and heat the capsule from all sides.

    A schematic of the laser, hohlraum and capsule setup for indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion at the National Ignition Facility. Source: S.H. Glenzer et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 085004

    6. However, this doesn’t heat all of the fuel to the requisite high temperature. The fuel is arranged in concentric layers, and the heat and pressure cause the 20 µg of deueterium-tritium mix in the central portion to fuse first. This sharply increases the temperature and launches a thermonuclear “burn wave” into the rest of the fuel, which triggers additional reactions. The wisdom for this technique arises from the fact that fusing two hydrogen-2 nuclei requires a temperature corresponding to 5-10 keV of energy (a few million kelvin) whereas the yield is 17,600 keV. So supplying the energy for just one fusion reaction could yield enough energy for hundreds more. Its downside in the inertial confinement contest is that a not-insignificant fraction the energy needs to be diverted to compressing the nuclei instead of heating them, which reduces the gain.

    7. As the NIF announcement turns the world’s attention to the prospect of nuclear fusion, ITER’s prospects are also under scrutiny. According to [Shishir Deshpande of IPR Gandhinagar], who is also former project director of ITER-India, the facility is 75% complete and “key components under manufacturing” will arrive in the “next three to five years”. It has already overrun several cost estimates and deadlines (India is one of its funding countries) – but [according to another scientist’s] estimate, it has “great progress” and will “deliver”. Extending the “current experiments” – referring to the NIF’s tests – “is not a direct path to a power station, unlike ITER, which is far more advanced in being an integrated power station. Many engineering issues which ITER is built to address are not even topics yet for laser fusion, such as survival of key components under high-intensity radiation environments.”

  • Skyward light, wayward light

    This is welcome news:

    … even if it’s curious that three of the four officially stated reasons for designating this ‘dark sky reserve’ aren’t directly related to the telescopes, and that telescopes had to come up in the area for the local government, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and whoever else to acknowledge that it deserved to have dark skies. I believe that ‘doing’ astronomy with telescopes shouldn’t be a prerequisite to “promoting livelihoods through … astro-tourism” and “spreading awareness and education about astronomy”. And that’s why I wonder if there there are other sites in the country that are favourable to a popular science-driven activity, where the locals can be taught to guide tourists to pleasurably perform that activity, but which hasn’t been done because scientists aren’t there doing it themselves.

    But frankly, the government should declare as much of the country a dark-sky reserve as possible*, in consultation with local stakeholders – or at least a new kind of ‘reserve’ where, say, light, noise and other neglected forms of pollution are limited to a greater degree than is common by law and to encourage sustainability along these axes as well. This is in opposition to dealing with these irritants in piecemeal or ad hoc fashion, where each type of pollution is addressed in isolation (even when they have common sources, like factories), and – to a lesser extent – not just because scientists require certain conditions for their work.

    (* I’m obviously cynical about instituting large-scale behavioural change that’d preclude the need for such reserves.)

    Case in point: the new Hanle dark-sky reserve hasn’t been designated as such under law but through an MoU between the UT of Ladakh, the IIA and the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, with a commitment to fulfilling requirements defined by the International Dark Sky Association , based in the US. Fortunately – but sadly, considering we had to wait for an extraneous prompt – one of the association’s requirements is “current/planned legislation to protect the area”.

    Such ‘reserves’ also don’t have to be setup at the expense of development principally because many of the ways to reduce light (and noise) pollution can do so without coming in the way, of development as well as our right as citizens to enjoy public spaces in all the ways in which we’re entitled. (I’m asking for ‘less’ knowing the Indian government’s well-known reluctance to take radical steps to protect natural resources, but we’re also at a point from the PoV of the climate crisis where every gain is good gain. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, however.)

    One of the simplest ways is in fact to have no public lighting installation that casts light upward, into the sky, but keeps it all facing down. Doing this will subtract the installation’s contribution to light pollution, improve energy-use efficiency by not ‘wasting’ any light thrown upwards and reduce the power consumed by limiting it to that required to illuminate only what needs to be illuminated, together with surfaces that limit the amount of light scattered upward.

    Other similarly simple ways include turning off all lights when you have no need for them (such as when you leave the room), to prefer energy-efficient lighting solutions and to actively limit the use of decorative lighting – but the ‘turn the lamps downward’ bit is both sensible and surprising in its general non-achievement. Hanle of course will be subject to more stringent restrictions, including requiring people to keep the colour temperature under 3,000 kelvin and the light flux of unshielded lamps to 500 lumen. Here’s an example of the difference to be made:

    That’s a (visibly) necessary extremum, in a manner of speaking – to maintain suitable viewing conditions for the ground-based telescopes in the area. On the other hand, India’s (and the UAE’s for that matter, since I was there recently) industrialisation and urbanisation are creating an unnecessary extremum on the other hand, giving seemingly trivial concerns like light pollution the slip. A 2016 study found that less than 10% of India is exposed to “very high nighttime light intensities with no dark adaption for human eyes” – but also that around 80% of the population is exposed to between “from 1 to 8% above the natural light” to complete lack of access to “true night because it is masked by an artificial twilight”.

    The tragedy, if we can call it that, is exacerbated when even trivial fixes aren’t implemented properly. Or is it when an industrialist might look at this chart and think, “We’ve still got a lot of white to go”?

  • Science’s humankind shield

    We need to reconsider where the notion that “science benefits all humans” comes from and whether it is really beneficial.

    I was prompted to this after coming upon a short article in Sky & Telescope about the Holmdel Horn antenna in New Jersey being threatened by a local redevelopment plan. In the 1960s, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used the Holmdel Horn to record the first observational evidence of the cosmic microwave background, which is radiation leftover from – and therefore favourable evidence for – the Big Bang event. In a manner of speaking, then, the Holmdel Horn is an important part of the story of humans’ awareness of their place in the universe.

    The US government designated the site of the antenna a ‘National Historic Landmark’ in 1989. On November 22, 2022, the Holmdel Township Committee nonetheless petitioned the planning board to consider redeveloping the locality where the antenna is located. According to the Sky & Telescope article, “If the town permits development of the site, most likely to build high-end residences, the Horn could be removed or even destroyed. The fact that it is a National Historic Landmark does not protect it. The horn is on private property and receives no Federal funds for its upkeep.” Some people have responded to the threat by suggesting that the Holmdel Horn be moved to the sprawling Green Bank Telescope premises in Virginia. This would separate it from the piece of land that can then be put to other use.

    Overall, based on posts on Twitter, the prevailing sentiment appears to be that the Holmdel Horn antenna is a historic site worthy of preservation. One commenter, an amateur astronomer, wrote under the article:

    “The Holmdel Horn Antenna changed humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe. The antenna belongs to all of humanity. The owners of the property, Holmdel Township, and Monmouth County have a historic responsibility to preserve the antenna so future generations can see and appreciate it.”

    (I think the commenter meant “humankind” instead of “humanity”.)

    The history of astronomy involved, and involves, thousands of antennae and observatories around the world. Even with an arbitrarily high threshold to define the ‘most significant’ discoveries, there are likely to be hundreds (if not more) of facilities that made them and could thus be deemed to be worthy of preservation. But should we really preserve all of them?

    Astronomers, perhaps among all scientists, are likelier to be most keenly aware of the importance of land to the scientific enterprise. Land is a finite resource that is crucial to most, if not all, realms of the human enterprise. Astronomers experienced this firsthand when the Indigenous peoples of Hawai’i protested the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, leading to a long-overdue reckoning with the legacy of telescopes on this and other landmarks that are culturally significant to the locals, but whose access to these sites has come to be mediated by the needs of astronomers. In 2020, Nithyanand Rao wrote an informative article about how “astronomy and colonialism have a shared history”, with land and access to clear skies as the resources at its heart.

    Also read:

    One argument that astronomers arguing in favour of building or retaining these controversial telescopes have used is to claim that the fruits of science “belong to all of humankind”, including to the locals. This is dubious in at least two ways.

    First, are the fruits really accessible to everyone? This doesn’t just mean the papers that astronomers publish based on work using these telescopes are openly and freely available. It also requires that the topics that astronomers work on need to be based on the consensus of all stakeholders, not just the astronomers. Also, who does and doesn’t get observation time on the telescope? What does the local government expect the telescope to achieve? What are the sorts of studies the telescope can and can’t support? Are the ground facilities equally accessible to everyone? There are more questions to ask, but I think you get the idea that claiming the fruits of scientific labour – at least astronomic labour – are available to everyone is disingenuous simply because there are many axes of exclusion in the instrument’s construction and operation.

    Second, who wants a telescope? More specifically, what are the terms on which it might be fair for a small group of people to decide what “all of humankind” wants? Sure, what I’m proposing sounds comical – a global consensus mechanism just to make a seemingly harmless statement like “science benefits everyone” – but the converse seems equally comical: to presume benefits for everyone when in fact they really accrue to a small group and to rely on self-fulfilling prophecies to stake claims to favourable outcomes.

    Given enough time and funds, any reasonably designed international enterprise, like housing development or climate financing, is likely to benefit humankind. Scientists have advanced similar arguments when advocating for building particle supercolliders: that the extant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe has led to advances in medical diagnostics, distributed computing and materials science, apart from confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. All these advances are secondary goals, at best, and justify neither the LHC nor its significant construction and operational costs. Also, who’s to say we wouldn’t have made these advances by following any other trajectory?

    Scientists, or even just the limited group of astronomers, often advance the idea that their work is for everyone’s good – elevating it to a universally desirable thing, propping it up like a shield in the face of questions about whether we really need an expensive new experiment – whereas on the ground its profits are disseminated along crisscrossing gradients, limited by borders.

    I’m inclined to harbour a similar sentiment towards the Holmdel Horn antenna in the US: it doesn’t belong to all of humanity, and if you (astronomers in the US, e.g.) wish to preserve it, don’t do it in my name. I’m indifferent to the fate of the Horn because I recognise that what we do and don’t seek to preserve is influenced by its significance as an instrument of science (in this case) as much as by ideas of national prestige and self-perception – and this is a project in which I have never had any part. A plaque installed on the Horn reads: “This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.”

    I also recognise the value of land and, thus, must acknowledge the significance of my ignorance of the history of the territory that the Horn currently occupies as well as the importance of reclaiming it for newer use. (I am, however, opposed in principle to the Horn being threatened by the prospect of “high-end residences” rather than affordable housing for more people.) Obviously others – most others, even – might feel differently, but I’m curious if a) scientists anywhere, other than astronomers, have ever systematically dealt with push-back along this line, and b) the other ways in which they defend their work at large when they can’t or won’t use the “benefits everyone” tack.

  • The strange beauty of Planck units

    What does it mean to say that the speed of light is 1?

    We know the speed of light in the vacuum of space to be 299,792,458 m/s – or about 300,000 km/s. It’s a quantity of speed that’s very hard to visualise with the human brain. In fact, it’s so fast as to practically be instantaneous for the human experience. In some contexts it might be reassuring to remember the 300,000 km/s figure, such as when you’re a theoretical physicist working on quantum physics problems and you need to remember that reality is often (but not always) local, meaning that when a force appears to to transmit its effects on its surroundings really rapidly, the transmission is still limited by the speed of light. (‘Not always’ because quantum entanglement appears to break this rule.)

    Another way to understand the speed of light is as an expression of proportionality. If another entity, which we’ll call X, can move at best at 150,000 km/s in the vacuum of space, we can say the speed of light is 2x the speed of X in this medium. Let’s say that instead of km/s we adopt a unit of speed called kb/s, where b stands for bloop: 1 bloop = 79 km. So the speed of light in vacuum becomes 3,797 kb/s and the speed of X in vacuum becomes 1,898.5 kb/s. The proportionality between the two entities – the speeds of light and X in vacuum – you’ll notice is still 2x.

    Let’s change things up a bit more, to expressing the speed of light as the nth power of 2. n = 18 comes closest for light and n = 17 for X. (The exact answer in each case would be log s/log 2, where s is the speed of each entity.) The constant of proportionality is not even close to 2 in this case. The reason is that we switched from linear units to logarithmic units.

    This example shows how even our SI units – which allow us to make sense of how much a mile is relative to a kilometre and how much a solar year is in terms of seconds, and thus standardise our sense of various dimensions – aren’t universally standard. The SI units have been defined keeping the human experience of reality in mind – as opposed to, say, those of tardigrades or blue whales.

    As it happens, when you’re a theoretical physicist, the human experience isn’t very helpful as you’re trying to understand the vast scales on which gravity operates and the infinitesimal realm of quantum phenomena. Instead, physicists set aside their physical experiences and turned to the universal physical constants: numbers whose values are constant in space and time, and which together control the physical properties of our universe.

    By combining only four universal physical constants, the German physicist Max Planck found in 1899 that he could express certain values of length, mass, time and temperature in units related to the human experience. Put another way, these are the smallest distance, mass, duration and temperature values that we can express using the constants of our universe. These are:

    • G, the gravitational constant (roughly speaking, defines the strength of the gravitational force between two massive bodies)
    • c, the speed of light in vacuum
    • h, the Planck constant (the constant of proportionality between a photon’s energy and frequency)
    • kB, the Boltzmann constant (the constant of proportionality between the average kinetic energy of a group of particles and the temperature of the group)

    Based on Planck’s idea and calculations, physicists have been able to determine the following:

    Credit: Planck units/Wikipedia

    (Note here that the Planck constant, h, has been replaced with the reduced Planck constant ħ, which is h divided by 2π.)

    When the speed of light is expressed in these Planck units, it comes out to a value of 1 (i.e. 1 times 1.616255×10−35 m per 5.391247×10−44 s). The same goes for the values of the gravitational constant, the Boltzmann constant and the reduced Planck constant.

    Remember that units are expressions of proportionality. Because the Planck units are all expressed in terms of universal physical constants, they give us a better sense of what is and isn’t proportionate. To borrow Frank Wilczek’s example, we know that the binding energy due to gravity contributes only ~0.000000000000000000000000000000000000003% of a proton’s mass; the rest comes from its constituent particles and their energy fields. Why this enormous disparity? We don’t know. More importantly, which entity has the onus of providing an explanation for why it’s so out of proportion: gravity or the proton’s mass?

    The answer is in the Planck units, in which the value of the gravitational constant G is the desired 1, whereas the proton’s mass is the one out of proportion – a ridiculously small 10-19 (approx.). So the onus is on the proton to explain why it’s so light, rather than on gravity to explain why it acts so feebly on the proton.

    More broadly, the Planck units define our universe’s “truly fundamental” units. All other units – of length, mass, time, temperature, etc. – ought to be expressible in terms of the Planck units. If they can’t be, physicists will take that as a sign that their calculations are incomplete, wrong or that there’s a part of physics that they haven’t discovered yet. The use of Planck units can reveal such sources of tension.

    For example, since our current theories of physics are founded on the universal physical constants, the theories can’t describe reality beyond the scale described by the Planck units. This is why we don’t really know what happened in the first 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang (and for that matter any events that happen for a duration shorter than this), how matter behaves beyond the Planck temperature or what gravity feels like at distances shorter than 10-35 m.

    In fact, just like how gravity dominates the human experience of reality while quantum physics dominates the microscopic experience, physicists expect that theories of quantum gravity (like string theory) will dominate the experience of reality at the Planck length. What will this reality look like? We don’t know, but we know that it’s a good question.

    Other helpful sources:

  • The covering COP27 quandary

    “Of the 1,156 publicly-listed companies, regions and cities that have so far made net-zero pledges … [more than half] are little more than vague commitments or proposals,” according to a new UN report. Even when proper promises to cut emissions are in the picture, “Audi, Volkswagen, Daimler – now Mercedes-Benz – and BMW commissioned Bosch to develop technology which they knew from the beginning violated regulatory compliance, Environmental Action Germany (DUH) said at a press conference, citing internal industry documents leaked to it this summer spanning 2006 to 2015,” Reuters reported two days ago. From cars to cities, one thing is clear: climate commitments are free, the follow-through is what matters. We’re experiencing the same thing with this year’s Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), i.e. COP27. It started off being called the “implementation COP” but looks set to end as a complete disappointment, thanks to developed countries’ reluctance to pony up for a ‘loss and damage’ fund and to adopt a framework to establish the ‘Global Goal on Adaptation’ (not to mention the suffocating conditions in which it physically took place). Within the limited context of COP27 itself, India has scored several brownie points – as it does – by pushing richer countries to up their commitments while the national government has progressively weakened environmental safeguards in India. Yes, economically developing and underdeveloped countries must have a longer runway to reaching net-zero than developed countries, but this doesn’t free any country – developed, developing or underdeveloped – from the responsibility to keep their growth and their green transition just. Many of India’s developmental tendencies are demonstrably not. A good example is its hydroelectric push in the north and the northeast, facilitated by the wilful oversight of public opinion, degrading land, more frequent floods, heightened erosion, disruptions to aquatic species and their combined consequences for the Indigenous people who depend on riparian ecosystems. But at multilateral fora, India cashed in with a 2019 policy change in which it declared large hydropower projects (>25 MW capacity) “as renewable energy sources”. This calculus obviously overlooks the lifecycle emissions of hydroelectric power and its ecological cost, more so when, as in India, the government has gone on a dam-building spree even on individual rivers. We need dams, sure, but why do they always have to be built by degrading their local environments? When the Union environment ministry submitted “India’s Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategy” report to the UN FCCC on November 1, India became the cynosure of many eyes at COP27 because fewer than 60 other countries had filed similar plans. Is this India cashing in again? Because, remember, commitments are free.

    The actual point I wanted to make through all this was something else: spare a thought for the journalist covering the climate talks and countries’ commitments here. Do they report on announcements of commitments and therefore have lots to write about but also become part of the hype machine, do they ignore the announcements because without action they remain “blah, blah, blah”, or do they interrogate every announcement as such and become submerged in cynical thinking?