The Week magazine distinguished itself last year by picking Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balram Bhargava as its ‘person of the year’ for 2021. And now, ahead of National Science Day tomorrow, The Week has conducted an “exclusive” interview with science minister Jitendra Singh. Long Small story short, it’s rubbish.
I discovered the term ‘Gish gallop’ in a 2013 blog post by David Gorsky, in which he wrote about the danger of acquiescing to cranks’ request for experts to debate them on a public stage. While such invitations may appear to legitimate experts to be an opportunity to settle the matter once and for all, it never works that way: the stage and the debate become platforms on which the cranks can spew their bullshit, in the name of having the right in the limited context of the event to do so, and use the inevitably imperfect rebuttal – limited by time and other resources – as a way to legitimise some or all of their claims. (Also read in this context: ‘No, I Will Not Debate You’.)
One particular tactic to which cranks resort in these circumstances is, Gorsky wrote, “to Gish gallop”: to flood their rhetoric with new terms, claims, arguments, etc. with little regard for their relevance or accuracy, in an effort to inundate their opponents with too many points on which to push back.
In their ‘interview’, with the help of kowtowing questions and zero push-back, The Week has allowed Jitendra Singh to Gish gallop. In this case, however, instead of Singh drawing credibility from his ‘opponent’ being an expert who couldn’t effectively refute his contentions, he derives his upper-hand from his interlocutor being a well-known, once-reputed magazine, and secretly from its (possibly enforced) supinity.
The penultimate question is the best, to me: “Yet, India’s good work gets shadowed by pseudoscience utterances. Somehow, your government has not been able to quieten the mumbo jumbo.” Dear interviewer, the government itself is the origin of a lot of the mumbo jumbo. Any question that isn’t founded on that truth will always ignore the problem, and will not elicit a solution.
Overall, the interview is a press release worded in the form of a Q&A, with a healthy chance that the opportunity to publish it was dangled in front of The Week in exchange for soft questions. Yet its headline may be accurate in a way the magazine didn’t intend: this government is going to achieve its mythical goal of perfect ‘Aatmanirbharta’ only by boring a hole through science, and reason and common sense.
Happy national science day!
Featured image: Jitendra Singh, May 2014. Photo edited (see original here). Credit: Press Information Bureau/GoI, GODL – India.
It’s not exactly that simple, but it’s still a relatively simple way to produce a lovely palette of colours. Researchers from Norway and Germany have reported that when a synthetic clay called Na-fluorohectorite is suspended in water, the material separates out in thin nanosheets – i.e. nanometre-thick layers of Na-fluorohectorite separated by water. And these sheets produce structural colours.
Colour is the frequency of light that we see, after other objects have absorbed all the other frequencies of light. For example, if you have a green-coloured bottle in front of you in a well-lit room, you see that it’s green because the bottle has absorbed all other frequencies in the visible light, leaving only the green frequency to reach your eyes. On the other hand, structural colours are produced when the structure of an object manipulates the incoming light to pronounce some frequencies and screen others.
When light enters between the Na-fluorohectorite layers in water, it bounces between the layers even as some beams of light interfere with other beams. The layer’s final colours are the colours that survive these interactions.
The amazing thing here is that class 10 physics allows you to glean some useful insights. As the researchers wrote in their paper, “The constructive interference of white light from individual nanosheets is described by the Bragg-Snell’s law”. The equation for this law:
2d(n2 − sin2θ)1/2 = mλ
d is the distance between the nanosheet layers. θ is the angle of observation of the layers. m is a constant. λ is the wavelength of the light “enhanced by constructive interference”, according to the paper.
When the colour visible changes according to the angle of observation, θ, the phenomenon is called iridescence. However, the researchers found that Na-fluorohectorite layers were non-iridescent, i.e. the colour of each layer looked the same from different angles of observation. They attributed this to bends and wrinkles in the nanosheets, and to turbostratic organisation: the layers are slightly rotated relative to each other.
Similarly, the effective refractive index of the light, interacting with two distinct materials, is given by this equation:
n = (n12Φ1 + n22Φ2)1/2
n1 is the refractive index of one material and Φ1 is the amount of that material in the overall setup (by volume). So also for n2 and Φ2.
Taking both equations together, by controlling the values of n and d, they researchers could control the colour of light that survives its interaction with the water-clay composite. In fact, as we’ll see later, the volume of clay suspended in the water is very low (around 1% at a time), so the effective refractive can be approximated to be the refractive index of water – around 1.33. So if n is fixed, the researchers would only have to change d – the distance between the – to change the structural colours that the clay produced!
Here’s a short video of the team’s efforts:
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl8147
The researchers found that some white light still survives and dulls the colours on display, which is why they’ve used a dark substrate (in the background). It absorbs the white light, accentuating the other colours.
This is a simple workaround – but it’s also inefficient and limits the applications of their discovery. So they found another way. The researchers dunked Na-fluorohectorite in water along with atoms of caesium. Within “seconds to minutes”, the Na-fluorohectorite formed double sheets – two layers of Na-fluorohectorite sandwiched together by a thin layer of caesium atoms. And these double layers produced bright colours.
Difference in colour brightness between the single- and the double-layer nanosheets. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl8147
The double layers form so rapidly because of a phenomenon called osmotic swelling. The surfaces of the Na-fluorohectorite single-layers are negatively charged. The caesium ion is positively charged, and gets attracted to these surfaces. If two layers, called L1 and L2, are closer to each other than to other layers, then the concentration of caesium ions between these two layers will be significantly higher than in the rest of the water. This prevents the water from entering the gap between L1 and L2, and allows them to practically stick to each other.
The percentages denote the amount of Na-fluorohectorite by volume. Ignore the orders. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl8147
There’s more: the researchers also found that they could change the colours by adding or removing water. This is wonderfully simple, but also to be expected. The separation between two nanosheets – i.e. between L1 and L2 – is affected by the concentration of caesium ions in the water. So if you add more water, the concentration of ions drops, the separation increases and the colour changes.
An edited excerpt from the paper’s discussion section, on the findings’ implications:
Because of the sustainability and abundance of clay minerals, the present system carries considerable potential for upscaled applications in various areas ranging from pigments in cosmetics and health applications to windows and tiles. The results and understanding obtained here on synthetic clays should be transferred to natural clays, where vermiculite … presents itself as the most suitable candidate for upscaling the concept presented here. … our results could break new ground when embedding appropriate amounts of these clay nanolayers into transparent but otherwise mechanically weak matrices, providing structural coloration, mechanical strength, and tunable stability at the same time.
SpaceX announced a day or two ago that the crew of its upcoming Polaris Dawn mission will include a space operations engineer at the company named Anna Menon. As if on cue, PTI published a report on February 15 under the headline: “SpaceX engineer Anna Menon to be among crew of new space mission”. I’ve been a science journalist for almost a decade now and I’ve always seen PTI publish reports pegged on the fact that a scientist in the news for some reason has an Indian last name.
In my view, it’s always tricky to celebrate scientists for whatever they’ve done by starting from their nationality. Consider the case of Har Gobind Khorana, whose birth centenary we marked recently. Khorana was born in Multan in pre-independence India in 1922, and studied up to his master’s degree in the country until 1945. Around 1950, he returned to India for a brief period in search of a job. He didn’t succeed, but fortunately received a scholarship to return to the UK, where he had completed his PhD. After that Khorana was never based in India, and continued his work in the UK, Canada and the US.
He won a Nobel Prize in 1968, and India conferred him with the Padma Vibhushan in 1969, and India’s Department of Biotechnology floated a scholarship in his name in 2007 (together with the University of Wisconsin and the India-US S&T Forum). I’m glad to celebrate Khorana for his scientific work, or his reputation as a teacher, but how do I celebrate Khorana because he was born in India? Where is the celebration-worthy thing in that?
To compare, it’s easy for me to celebrate Satyendra Nath Bose for his science as well as his nationality because Bose studied and worked in India throughout his life (including at the University of Dhaka in the early 1920s), so his work is a reflection of his education in India and his struggles to succeed, such as they were, in India. An even better example here would be that of Meghnad Saha, who struggled professionally and financially to make his mark on stellar astrophysics. But Khorana completed a part of his studies in India and a part abroad and worked entirely abroad. When I celebrate his work because he was Indian, I’m participating in an exercise that has no meaning – or does in the limited, pernicious sense of one’s privileges.
The same goes for Anna Menon, and her partner Anil Menon, a flight surgeon whom NASA selected to be a part of its astronaut crew earlier this year. According to Anil’s Wikipedia page, he was in India for a year in 2000; other than that, he studied and worked in the US from start to today. I couldn’t find much about Anna’s background online, except that her last name before she got married to Anil in 2016 was Wilhelm, that she studied her fourth grade and completed her bachelor’s and master’s studies in the US, and that there is nothing other than her partner’s part Indian heritage (the other part is Ukrainian) to suggest she has a significant India connection.
So celebrating Anna Menon by sticking her name in a headline makes little sense. It’s not like PTI has been reporting on her work over time for it to single her out in the headline now. The agency should just have said “SpaceX announces astronaut crew for pioneering Polaris Dawn mission” or “With SpaceX draft, Anna Menon could beat her partner Anil to space”. There’s so much worth celebrating here, but gravitating towards the ‘Menon’ will lead you astray.
This in turn gives rise to a question about one’s means, and in turn one’s class/caste (historically as well as today, both the chance to leave the country to study, work and live abroad and the chance to conduct good work and have it noticed has typically accrued and accrues to upper-caste, upper-class peoples – Saha’s example again comes to mind; such chances have also been stacked against people of genders other than cis-male).
When we talk about a scientist who did good work in India, we automatically talk about the outcomes of privileges that they enjoy. Similarly, when we talk of a scientist doing good work in a different country, we also talk about implicit caste/class advantage in India, the country of origin, that allowed them to depart and advantages they subsequently came into at their destination.
But when we place people who are doing something noteworthy in the spotlight for no reason other than because they have Indian last names, we are celebrating nothing except this lopsided availability of paths to success (broadly defined) – without critiquing the implied barriers to finding similar success within India itself.
We need to think more critically about who we are celebrating and why: if there is no greater reason than that they have had a parent or a family rooted in India, the story must be dropped. If there is a greater reason, that should define the headline, the peg, etc. And if possible the author should also accommodate a comment or two about specific privileges not available to most scientists and which might have made the difference in this case.
This post benefited from valuable feedback from Jahnavi Sen.
This is a step in the right direction, and the government needs to do more.
You often read articles that have this sentence, typically authored by experts who are writing about some new initiative of the Indian government. These articles are very easy to find after the government has made a slew of announcements – such as during the Union budget presentation.
These articles have the following structure, on average: introducing the announcement, a brief description of what the announcement is about, comments about its desirability, and finally what the government should do to improve (often the bottom 50% of the article).
There was a time when such articles could have been understood to be suggestions to the government. Some news publications like The Hindu and Indian Express have traditionally prided themselves on counting influential lawmakers among the readers of their op-ed pages and editorials. But almost no one could think this is still the case, at least vis-à-vis the national government.
The one in power since 2014, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has always done only what it wants, frequently (and perhaps deliberately, if its actions during the COVID-19 pandemic are anything to go by) to the exclusion of expert advice. And this government has launched many schemes, programmes, missions, etc. that are steps in the right direction, and that’s it. They have almost never become better with time, and certainly not because bona fide experts demanded it.
Some examples: Ayushman Bharat, KISAN, Swachh Bharat, Mudra Yojana and ‘Smart Cities’ (too many instances to cite). Most of these initiatives have been defined by lofty, even utopian, goals but lack the rigorous, accountable and integral implementation that these goals warrant. As such, the government’s PR and troll machineries simply spin the ministers’ announcements at the time they are made for media fodder, and move on.
To be sure, the government has some other initiatives it has worked hard to implement properly, such as ‘Make in India’ and the GST – a courtesy it has reserved for activities that contribute directly to industrialisation and economic growth, reflected in the fact that such growth has come in fits and starts, and has been limited to the richer.
So at this time, to laud “steps in the right direction” followed by suggestions to improve such initiatives is worse than a mistake: it is to flout an intentional ignorance of the government’s track record.
Instead, an article would be better if it didn’t give the government the benefit of the doubt, and criticised it for starting off on a weak note or for celebrating too soon.
Apart from making suggestions to the government, such articles have served another purpose: to alert their readers, the people, to what needs to happen for the initiatives in question to be deemed successful. So the experts writing them could also consider pegging their statements on this purpose – that is, communicating to their readers as to what components an initiative lacks and why, therefore, it would be premature to hope it will do good.
In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated with more mentions in the news.
Gold OA refers to scientists publishing their paper in an OA journal, and green is when scientists publish their paper in a journal and then self-archives a copy on an openly accessible website or in a repository. A hybrid OA journal is one that allows for some papers to be published OA (or gold) and for the others to stay behind a paywall.
Schultz didn’t check if there was a causative relationship between a paper’s OA status and the likelihood of it being covered in the press, but found a significant correlation. It’s a heartening result – but I think it might be useful to qualify this finding with a perspective from India, a country whose scientific-publishing literacy is likely to be lower than the global average, and certainly lower than that in the richest nations, which also have some of the world’s more mature science-journalism enterprises. (To be sure, and lest we forget, science journalism is more than just coverage of the pandemic.)
An Indian perspective might also help to understand that a paper’s coverage in the news media is as much about whether it’s OA as about whether journalists know what OA is.
Schultz has found that the contents of a green/gold/hybrid OA paper are more likely to be covered in the news than those of a non-OA paper – but didn’t check for a causative relationship. One way to interpret the latter is that she didn’t check if a journalist determined to report on a paper because it was OA. Now, a journalist making this decision requires automatically that she be aware of what OA publishing is, its merits (and demerits if possible) and the ins/outs of displaying a preference – as a journalist – for OA versus non-OA papers.
Such awareness exists among Indian media-persons but it is sharply confined to some small pockets. And when awareness of OA, at least in opposition to non-OA, is so limited, the question of whether to cover a paper based on whether it has been published in an OA journal is relegated to the bottom of the priority list – if it finds mention at all.
In India, it is likelier for the average journalist who has been tasked with covering a scientific finding – rather than a science journalist per se, because the former are at least one order of magnitude more common – to consider whether the paper was published in a journal at all; whether, in keeping with the dominant view in the Indian scientific community, that paper was peer-reviewed; and whether it was published in a prestigious journal. Otherwise, the journalist may not even discover that paper.
When I was at The Hindu, I received a lot of emails from scientists requesting coverage of their paper, and 90% of the time, they would add with pride that the papers had been published in the peer-reviewed [insert name of legacy journal here] journal; I receive fewer such emails at The Wire Science but still around half-dozen a day.
This is just to say that the way the average journalist in India discovers papers is skewed in favour of non-OA, paywalled journals, typically one of Nature, Science, The Lancet, etc. (In a roundabout way, the popular support for Sci-Hub in India might attest to this reality: we need Sci-Hub because we need to access papers behind paywalls.)
Another factor in India that skews the discoverability of papers, albeit to a lesser extent, is journal outreach. The Nature Publishing Group, PLOS and Science are all prolific outreachers (the last through the EurekAlert! service) and the papers that are covered most often by Indian mainstream media outlets have likelier than not been published in one of these journals. In fact, this together with scientists flagging their own papers to journalists would cover almost all papers published in the mainstream Indian press.
So as such, a shift in favour of OA papers isn’t likely to arise from the quarter of journalists covering science in India – at least not without significant efforts to improve their awareness of the principles of OA. Note that this post is based on my personal experiences in the Indian news media space since 2012; if you have evidence to the contrary, please share. I’d be happy to be wrong on this front.
Some facts are just boring, like 1 + 1 = 2. You already knew them before they were presented as such, and now that you do, it’s hard to know what to do with them. Some facts are clearly important, even if you don’t know how you can use them, like the spark plug fires after there’s fuel in the chamber. These two kinds of facts may seem far apart but you also know on some level that by repeatedly applying the first kind of fact in different combinations, to different materials in different circumstances, you get the second (and it’s fun to make this journey).
Then there are some other facts that, while seemingly simple, provoke in your mind profound realisations – not something new as much as a way to understand something deeply, so well, that it’s easy for you to believe that that single neural pathway among the multitude in your head has forever changed. It’s an epiphany.
I came across such a fact this morning when reading an article about a star that may have gone supernova. The author packs the fact into one throwaway sentence.
Roughly every second, one of the observable Universe’s stars dies in a fiery explosion.
The observable universe is 90-something billion lightyears wide. The universe was born only 13.8 billion years ago but it has been expanding since, pushed faster and faster apart by dark energy. This is a vast, vast space – too vast for the human mind to comprehend. I’m not just saying that. Scientists must regularly come up against numbers like 8E50 (8 followed by 50 zeroes), but they don’t have to be concerned about comprehending the full magnitude of those numbers. They don’t need to know how big it is in some dimension. They have the tools – formulae, laws, equations, etc. – to tame those numbers into submission, to beat them into discoveries and predictions that can be put to human use. (Then again, they do need to deal with monstrous moonshine.)
But for the rest of us, the untameability can be terrifying. How big is a number like 8E50? In kilograms, it’s about a 100-times lower than the mass of the observable universe. It’s the estimated volume of the galaxy NGC 1705 in cubic metres. It’s approximately the lifespan of a black hole with the mass of the Sun. You know these facts, yet you don’t know them. They’re true but they’re also very, very big, so big that they’re well past the point of true comprehension, into the realm of the I’d-rather-not-know. Yet the sentence above affords a way to bring these numbers back.
The author writes that every second or so, a star goes supernova. According to one estimate, 0.1% of stars have enough mass to eventually become a black hole. The observable universe has 200 billion trillion stars. This means there are 2E20 stars in the universe that could become a black hole, if they’re not already. Considering the universe has lived around 38% of its life and assuming a uniform rate of black hole formation (a big assumption but should suffice to illustrate my point), the universe should be visibly darkening by now, considering photons of light shouldn’t have to travel much before encountering a black hole.
But it isn’t. The simple reason is that that’s how big the universe is. We learn about stars, other plants, black holes, nebulae, galaxies and so forth. There are lots and lots of them, sure, but you know what there is the most of? The things we often discuss the least: the interstellar medium, the space between stars, and the intergalactic medium, the space between galaxies. Places where there isn’t anything big enough, ironically, to be able to catch the popular imagination. One calculation, based on three assumptions, suggests matter occupies an incomprehensibly low fraction of the observable universe (1. 85% of this is supposed to be dark matter; 2. please don’t assume atoms are also mostly empty).
In numbers, the bigness of all this transcends comprehension – but knowing that billions upon billions of black holes still only trap a tiny amount of the light going around can be… sobering. And enlivening. Why, in the time you’ve taken to read this article, 300 more black holes will have formed. Pfft.
Plagiarism is a tricky issue. If it’s straightforward to you, ask yourself if you’re assuming that the plagiariser (plagiarist?) is fluent in reading and writing, but especially writing, English. The answer’s probably ‘yes’. This is because for someone entering into an English-using universe for the first time, certain turns of phrase and certain ways to articulate complicated concepts stick with you the first time you read them, and when the time comes for you to spell out the same ideas and concepts, you passively, inadvertently recall them and reuse them. You don’t think – at least at first – that they’re someone else’s words, more so if you haven’t been taught, for no fault of yours, what academic plagiarism is and/or that it’s bad.
This is also why there’s a hierarchy of plagiarism. For example, if you’re writing a scientific paper and you copy another paper’s results, that’s worse than if you copy verbatim the explanation of a certain well-known idea. This is why former University Grants Commission chairman Praveen Chaddah wrote in 2014:
There are worse offences than text plagiarism — such as taking credit for someone else’s research ideas and lifting their results. These are harder to detect than copy-and-pasted text, so receive less attention. This should change. To help, academic journals could, for instance, change the ways in which they police and deal with such cases.
But if you’re fluent with writing English, if you know what plagiarism and plagiarise anyway (without seeking resources to help you beat its temptation), and/or if you’re stealing someone else’s idea and calling it your own, you deserve the flak and (proportionate) sanctions coming your way. In this context, a new Retraction Watch article by David Sanders makes for interesting reading. According to Sanders, in 2018, he wrote to the editors of a journal that had published a paper in 2011 with lots of plagiarised text. After a back-and-forth, the editors told Sanders they’d look into it. He asked them again in 2019 and May 2021 and received the same reply on both occasions. Then on July 26 the journal published a correction to the 2011 article. Sanders wasn’t happy and wrote back to the editors, one of whom replied thus:
Thank you for your email. We went through this case again, and discussed whether we may have made the wrong decision. We did follow the COPE guidelines step by step and used several case studies for further information. This process confirmed that an article should be retracted when it is misleading for the reader, either because the information within is incorrect, or when an author induces the reader to think that the data presented is his own. As this is a Review, copied from other Reviews, the information within does not per se mislead the reader, as the primary literature is still properly cited. We agree that this Review was not written in a desirable way, and that the authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but according to the guidelines the literature must be considered from the point of view of the reader, and retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors. We therefore concluded that a corrigendum was the best way forward. Hence, we confirm our decision on this case.
Thank you again for flagging this case in the first place, which allowed us to correct the record and gain deeper insights into publishing ethics, even though this led to a solution we do not necessarily like.
Sanders wasn’t happy: he wrote on Retraction Watch that “the logic of [the editor’s] message is troubling. The authors engaged in what is defined by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) as ‘Major Plagiarism’ for which the prescribed action is retraction of the published article and contacting the institution of the authors. And yet the journal did not retract.” The COPE guidelines summarise the differences between minor and major plagiarism this way:
Not being fluent in English could render the decisions made using this table less than fair, for example because an author could plagiarise several paragraphs but honestly have no intention to deceive – simply because they didn’t think they needed to be that careful. I know this might sound laughable to a scientist operating in the US or Europe, out of a better-run, better-organised and better-funded institute, and who has been properly in the ins and outs of academic ethics. But it’s true: the bulk of India’s scientists work outside the IITs, IISERs, DAE/DBT/DST-funded institutes and the more progressive private universities (although only one – Ashoka – comes to mind). Their teachers before them worked in the same resource-constrained environments, and for most of whom the purpose of scientific work wasn’t science as much as an income. Most of them probably never used plagiarism-checking tools either, at least not until they got into trouble one time and then found out about such things.
I myself found out about the latter in an interesting way – when I reported that Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, had plagiarised in some of his papers, around the time students at the university were protesting the university’s response to the death of Rohith Vemula. When I emailed Podile for his response, he told me he would like my help with the tools with which he could spot plagiarism. I thought he was joking, but after a series of unofficial enquiries over the next year or so, I learnt that plagiarism-checking software was not at all the norm, even if solutions like Copyscape were relatively cheap, in state-funded colleges and second-tier universities around the country. I had no reason to leave Podile off the hook – but not because he hadn’t used plagiarism-checking software but because he was a vice-chancellor of a major university and had to have done better than claim ignorance.
(I also highly recommend this November 2019 article in The Point, asking whether plagiarism is wrong.)
According to Sanders, the editor who replied didn’t retract the paper because he thought it wasn’t ‘major plagiarism’, according to COPE – whereas Sanders thought it was. The editor appears to have reasoned his way out of the allegation, in the editor’s view at least, by saying that the material printed in the paper wasn’t misleading because it had been copied from non-misleading original material and that the supposedly lesser issue was that while it had been cited, it hadn’t been syntactically attributed as such (placed between double quotes, for example). The issue for Sanders, with whom I agree here, is that the authors had copied the material and presented it in a way that indicated they were its original creators. The lengths to which journal editors can go to avoid retracting papers, and therefore protect their journal’s reputation, ranking or whatever, is astounding. I also agree with Sanders when he says that by refusing to retract the article, the editors are practically encouraging misconduct.
I’d like to go a step further and ask: when journal editors think like this, where does that leave Indian scientists of the sort I’ve described above – who are likely to do better with the right help and guidance? In 2018, Rashmi Raniwala and Sudhir Raniwala wrote in The Wire Science that the term ‘predatory’, in ‘predatory journals’, was a misnomer:
… it is incorrect to call them ‘predatory’ journals because the term predatory suggests that there is a predator and a victim. The academicians who publish in these journals are not victims; most often, they are self-serving participants. The measure of success is the number of articles received by these journals. The journals provide a space to those who wanted easy credit. And a large number of us wanted this easy credit because we were, to begin with, not suitable for the academic profession and were there for the job. In essence, these journals could not have succeeded without an active participation and the connivance of some of us.
It was a good article at the time, especially in the immediate context of the Raniwalas’ fight to have known defaulters suitably punished. There are many bad-faith actors in the Indian scientific community and what the Raniwalas write about applies to them without reservation (ref. the cases of Chandra Krishnamurthy, R.A. Mashelkar, Deepak Pental, B.S. Rajput, V. Ramakrishnan, C.N.R. Rao, etc.). But I’m also confident enough to say now that predatory journals exist, typified by editors who place the journal before the authors of the articles that constitute it, who won’t make good-faith efforts to catch and correct mistakes at the time they’re pointed out. It’s marginally more disappointing that the editor who replied to Sanders replied at all; most don’t, as Elisabeth Bik has repeatedly reminded us. He bothered enough to engage – but not enough to give a real damn.
In mid-2012, shortly after physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had announced the discovery of a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson, there was some clamour in India over news reports not paying enough attention or homage to the work of Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose and Albert Einstein together developed Bose-Einstein statistics, a framework of rules and principles that describe how fundamental particles called bosons behave. (Paul A.M. Dirac named these particles in Bose’s honour.) The director-general of CERN, the institute that hosts the LHC, had visited India shortly after the announcement and said in a speech in Kolkata that in honour of Bose, he and other physicists had decided to capitalise the ‘b’ in ‘boson’.
It was a petty victory of a petty demand, but few realised that it was also misguided. Bose made the first known (or at least published) attempts to understand the particles that would come to be called bosons – but neither he nor Einstein anticipated the existence of the Higgs boson. There have also been some arguments (justified, I think) that Bose wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize for his ideas because he didn’t make testable predictions; Einstein received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1915 for anticipating the photoelectric effect. The point is that it was unreasonable to expect Bose’s work to be highlighted, much less attributed, as some had demanded at the time, every time we find a new boson particle.
What such demands only did was to signal an expectation that the reflection of every important contribution by an Indian scientist ought to be found in every major discovery or invention. Such calls detrimentally affect the public perception of science because they are essentially contextless.
Let’s imagine that discovery of the Higgs boson was the result of series of successes, depicted thus:
O—o—o—o—o—O—O—o—o—O—o—o—o—O
An ‘O’ shows a major success and an ‘o’ shows a minor success, where major/minor could mean the relative significance within particle physics communities, the extent to which physicists anticipated it or simply the amount of journal/media coverage it received. In this sequence, Bose’s paper on a certain class of subatomic particles could be the first ‘O’ and the discovery of the Higgs boson the last ‘O’. And looking at this sequence, one could say Bose’s work led to a lot of the work that came after and ultimately led to the Higgs boson. However, doing that would diminish the amount of study, creativity and persistence that went into each subsequent finding – and would also ignore the fact that we have identified only one branch of endeavour, leading from Bose’s work to the Higgs boson, whereas in reality there are hundreds of branches crisscrossing each other at every o, big or small – and then there are countless epiphanies, ideas and flashes, each one less the product of following the scientific method and more of a mysterious combination of science and intuition.
By reducing the opportunity to celebrate Bose’s work by pointing to just the Higgs boson point on the branch, we lose the opportunities to know and celebrate the importance of Bose’s work for all the points in between, but especially the points that we still haven’t taken the trouble to understand.
Recently, a couple people forwarded to me a video on WhatsApp of an Indian-American electrical engineer named Nisar Ahmed. I learnt when in college (studying engineering) that Nisar Ahmed was the co-inventor, along with K. Ramamohan Rao, of the direct cosine transform, a technique to transmit a given amount of information using fewer bits than those contained in the information itself. The video introduced Ahmed’s work as the basis for our being able to take video-conferencing for granted; direct cosine transform allows audiovisual data to be compressed by two, maybe three orders of magnitude, making its transmission across the internet much less resource-intensive than if it had to be transmitted without compression.
However, the video did little to address the immediate aftermath of Ahmed’s and Rao’s paper, the other work by other scientists that built on it, as well as its use in other settings, and rested on the drawing just one connection between two fairly unrelated events (direct cosine transform and their derivatives, many of them created in the same decade, heralded signal compression, but they didn’t particularly anticipate different forms of communication).
This flattening of the history of science, and technology as the case may be, may be entertaining but it offers no insights into the processes at work behind these inventions, and certainly doesn’t admit any other achivements before each development. In the video, Ahmed reads out tweets by people reacting to his work as depicted on the show This Is Us. One of them says that it’s because of him, and because of This Is Us, that people are now able to exchange photos and videos of each other around the world, without worrying about distance. But… no; Ahmed himself says in the video, “I couldn’t predict how fast the technology would move” (based on his work).
Put it simply, I find such forms of communication – and thereunto the way we are prompted to think about science – objectionable because they are content with ‘what’, and aren’t interested in ‘when’, ‘why’ or ‘how’. And simply enumerating the ‘what’ is practically non-scientific, more so when they’re a few particularly sensational whats over others that encourage us to ignore the inconvenient details. Other similar recent examples were G.N. Ramachandran, whose work on protein structure, especially Ramachandran plots, have been connected to pharmaceutical companies’ quest for new drugs and vaccines, and Har Gobind Khorana, whose work on synthesising RNA has been connected to mRNA vaccines.
The Print has just published a bizarre article about Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged “mastermind” (whatever that means) of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. I know nothing about Niraj Bishnoi; the article’s problem is that it has reproduced the Delhi police’s profile of Bishnoi and indications in that profile, provided by police personnel, of Bishnoi’s alleged deviancy sans any qualification. I’ve reproduced relevant portions of the article below (with a left-indent), and my annotations are intercalated.
But first, according to Sukanya Shantha, my colleague at The Wire: “These stories are quite common. They mean nothing in court. Defence comes up with such BS everytime before arguing on quantum of punishment. We saw similar stuff during Shakti Mills, and Delhi rape too. Even Ajmal Kasab was called ‘mentally deranged’ by his lawyer.” While such claims like those by defence lawyers may be common, I don’t understand why the media – and especially independent media – has to amplify them without sparing a thought for what they ultimately imply.
Suspected ‘Bulli Bai’ app creator, 20-year-old Niraj Bisnoi had 153 porn film downloads and lewd, sexual content in his laptop, sources in the Delhi Police claimed Thursday. The evidence in his laptop suggest Bisnoi is a “porn addict” and “has abnormal desires towards elderly Muslim women”, the sources added.
This para – the first – sets the tone for what you can expect from the rest of the article. And The Print considers the most important point vis-à-vis this article to be that Niraj Bishnoi had 153 pornographic films on his laptop, that he is a “porn addict” – presumably the Delhi police’s words – and that he harboured “abnormal” desires “towards elderly Muslim women”. We may never know how either the police or the author of the article leaped from pornography and fantasies to an implied justification for Niraj Bishnoi’s alleged crimes.
A 2015 article in Psychology Today did a good job summarising what we knew about pornography until then, and I think the conclusions still stand: a) there’s both good and bad to viewing pornography, b) the bad that is often attributed anecdotally to pornography is grossly at odds with the effects that psychologists have found; and c) even so, causal links between consuming pornography and holding specific beliefs or committing specific acts don’t yet exist. Against this context, what The Print has found fit to print is an unfounded opinion of the Delhi police and not a cause by any stretch.
Also, echoing Sukanya Shantha’s point, why is the Delhi police rising to Niraj Bishnoi’s defence, instead of Bishnoi’s lawyers? (Assuming of course that this is a defence…)
According to sources in Delhi Police, Bisnoi was introduced to the virtual world at the age of 15 and first hacked a website a year later, as “revenge”, after his sister was denied admission by a school.
“At the age of 16, he first hacked a school’s website when his sister didn’t get admission,” a source in Delhi police claimed.
“Introduced to the virtual world”. How clandestine.
First off, this is access journalism of the worst kind – neither to make sensible claims nor to name your sources. Public officials, including the police, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with being anonymous sources in articles; if they absolutely must remain unnamed, the publisher should specify the reason that the publication has decided to grant anonymity, on every occasion. (The Wire Science recently adopted this protocol, inspired by The Verge). Otherwise, as a reader, there is no one to hold accountable.
Second, I once ‘hacked’ a website to find out the class XII board exam score of a friend. However, does it count as ‘hacking’ when the website loaded the results for all roll-numbers as HTML, on its source page, but didn’t display them on the front-end, so all I had to do was right-click on the displayed page, click ‘view source’, and be able to access all the data? How good a hacker is depends both on the hacker’s skills and how well the object of their hack is guarded; if the object is barely concealed, we can learn nothing of the hacker’s prowess. And in this case, since Niraj Bishnoi allegedly hacked a school’s website, I sincerely doubt he did more than I did.
According to police sources, the code script of the Bulli Bai app has been recovered from his laptop — a high-end gaming machine, with a heady duty graphic card. Sources claimed the laptop only had games and porn.
Please, I’m laughing. A high-end gaming machine? My laptop is a high-end gaming machine. Any devices with Apple M1 or AMD Ryzen chips are high-end gaming machines. Many smartphones these days are high-end gaming machines. And what is “only games and porn” supposed to imply? Other of course than that the case against him apparently rests on one of the most tiresome snowclones of this age.
Those who know Bisnoi personally, also claim him to be a “loner”, someone who is more active in the virtual world than in the real one around him.
Sources in Delhi Police told ThePrint that Bishnoi displayed “abnormal behavioural traits” in his interaction with the police and has threatened to commit suicide multiple times since his arrest.
“He has told the police that he will fatally hurt himself — cut his veins with a blade, hang himself to death,” the source mentioned above claimed.
A second source added: “He doesn’t eat, has to be forced to eat. Today he skipped lunch. We had to order food from outside to feed him around 3.30 pm.”
This seems like the beginnings of some kind of personality profile that’s supposed to imply that Niraj Bishnoi was mentally unsound in some way – but which is psychotic in its own right for forgetting that none of these are excuses for what he allegedly did. I’m only prompted to recall the excuses many alleged perpetrators bandied about during the height of the #MeToo allegations – that they had PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.; some only alluded to vague mental health concerns. These individuals may actually have had these conditions or disorders, as the case may be, but none of them implied any consequences that would have prevented the individuals from knowing that what they were doing – at the time they were doing it – was wrong. Yet such excuses persisted, and only served to further stigmatise others who were unwell in the same way, especially in the company of their parents, employers and others.
The probe so far has revealed that Bisnoi is addicted to the internet and his laptop, claimed sources. They also claimed that the 20-year-old is accustomed to creating fake accounts and user handles on social media platforms.
Is my tax money paying for this probe? Also, I once created 22 GMail accounts, simply because each one comes with 15 GB of space on Google Drive. The point is none of this is dispositive proof – or even points towards dispositive proof – that Niraj Bishnoi did what he allegedly did. Wouldn’t the bit about fake handles on social media platforms be true for every troll out there? The story so far only suggests that the Delhi police is building a loseable case and/or that it is colluding with Niraj Bishnoi’s lawyers to manufacture sympathy for his plight.
“Bishnoi has said that he doesn’t talk to anyone much in the outside world, that he doesn’t like to talk to anyone and that he has no friends in the real world. His only interactions are under assumed names and identities in the virtual world. His day starts and ends with the internet and laptop,” the second source claimed.
Police claims of the accused’s being a recluse are repeated by acquaintances who knew Bishnoi while he was a school student, and who spoke to ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
All of them described the accused as a “loner”, someone who was used to staying “aloof” and “didn’t interact much with the outside world” since he was a teenager.
“He has created his own virtual world around him,” claimed an acquaintance doesn’t want to be identified.
Ah, the stereotype has landed. As another colleague of mine said, Niraj Bishnoi probably lives in his mother’s basement, too.
And Naomi Barton, yet another colleague, said: “Also, lots of people are loners who spend the majority of their time in digital spaces – and that can be both good and bad, for instance queer children who don’t have any community in real life. What this story is doing is pretty much just blowing innocuous, if generationally different, habits out of proportion to scare-monger.”
Referring to another of the accused’s behavioural traits, the second police source claimed: “Whenever the interrogation hits a certain peak, he urinates in his pants. He has done this three-four times. We have checked if this is because he has a medical issue, but he doesn’t.”
If The Print hadn’t already crossed a line, it has now – by forwarding as it if were a knock-knock joke on WhatsApp the Delhi police’s claim that Niraj Bishnoi can urinate on demand when the “interrogation hits a certain peak”. Hits a certain peak? Is this a euphemism for the intensity of the interrogation? And what sort of ‘behavioural trait’ is this in which the bearer of the trait urinates – the insinuation being that he does this for reasons other than what might make people pee in these situations – for anything other than because something has prompted him to?
According to the source, the 20-year-old has also not expressed remorse for his alleged involvement in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app.
“He said he did the right thing,” claimed the source.
Finally, something that doesn’t sound ridiculous, although it isn’t worth publishing.
Ultimately, if Niraj Bishnoi – and others, to be sure – was responsible in any part for the ‘Bulli Bai’ app, he needs to be brought to justice and he needs to have a fair (and sensible) trial. But what we could all do without is a ‘news report’ that brings the nonsensical claims of the Delhi police – words that appear to be designed to exonerate the alleged actions of Niraj Bishnoi, but which may yet backfire, and nothing to remain sensitive to the people that the app has harmed – out to thousands of readers, if not more, without qualifying/rebutting them as warranted instead of letting them rot in the rooms in which they were manufactured.
Physicists have reported that they have finally observed helium 3 existing in a long-predicted type of superfluid, called the ß phase.
This is an important discovery, if it’s borne out, for reasons that partly have to do with its isotope, helium 4. Helium 4 is a fascinating substance because the helium 4 atom is a boson – a type of particle whose quantum properties and behaviour are explained by rules called Bose-Einstein statistics. Helium 3, on the other hand, is a fermion, and fermions are governed by Fermi-Dirac statistics.
Bosons and fermions have one important difference: bosons are allowed to disobey Pauli’s exclusion principle, and by doing so they can assume exotic states of matter rarely found in nature, with many unusual properties.
For example, when helium 4 is cooled below a certain temperature, it becomes a superfluid: a liquid that flows without experiencing any resistance. If you poured a superfluid into a bowl, it will be able to climb the walls of the bowl and spill out without any help. But helium 3 atoms are fermions, so they are bound to obey Pauli’s exclusion principle and can’t become a superfluid.
At least this is what physicists believed for a long time, until the early 1970s, when two independent groups of physicists found – one in theory and the other in experiments – that helium 3 could indeed enter a superfluid phase, but at a temperature 1,000-times lower than the critical temperature of helium 4. The theory group, led by Anthony Leggett at the University of Sussex, had in fact made a significant discovery.
Today, we know that the flow of superfluid helium 4 is analogous to the flow of electrons in a conventional superconductor, which also move around as if they face no resistance from the surrounding atoms. Leggett and co. found that the theory used to explain these superconductors could also be used to explain helium 3 superfluidity. This theory is called Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory, and the materials whose superconductivity it can explain are called BCS superconductors.
Electrons are fermions and cannot ‘super-flow’. But in a BCS superconductor that has been cooled below its critical temperature, some forces in the material cause the electrons to overcome their mutual repulsion (“like charges repel”) and pair up. These electron pairs, while being made of two individual fermions, actually behave like bosons. Similarly, Leggett and co. found that helium 3 atoms could pair up to form a bosonic composite and super-flow.
Over many years, physicists used what they had learnt through these discoveries to expand our understanding of this substance. They found, among other things, that superfluid helium 3 can exist in many phases. The superfluidity would persist in each phase but with different characteristics.
Superfluid helium 3 was first thought to have two phases, called A and B. The temperature-pressure plot below clearly shows the conditions in which each phase emerges.
Credit: E.V. Thuneberg, Encyclopedia of Condensed Matter Physics, 2005
When physicists subjected superfluid helium 3 in its A phase to a strong magnetic field, they found another phase that they called A1, whose atom-pairs had different spin characteristics.
In 2015, a group of researchers led by Vladimir Dmitriev, at the P.L. Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow, discovered a fourth phase, which they called the polar, or P, phase. Here, they confined helium 3 in a nematic aerogel and exposed the setup to a low magnetic field. Aerogels are ultra-light materials that are extremely porous; nematic means its molecules were arranged in parallel. The aeorogel in the Dmitriev and co. experiment was 98% porous, and whose pores “were much longer than they were wide” (source). That is, the team had found that the shape of the container in which helium 3 was confined also affected the phase of its superfluidity.
In August 2021 (preprint), the same team reported that it had observed a long-expected-to-exist fifth phase called the ß phase.
They reported that they took the setup they used to force superfluid helium 3 into the P phase, but this time exposed it to a high magnetic field. According to their paper, they found that while the superfluid earlier moved into the P phase through a single transition, as the temperature was brought down, this time it did so in two steps. First, it moved into an intermediate phase and then into the P phase. The intermediate is the ß phase.
(If this sounds simple, it wasn’t: the discoveries were each limited by the availability of specially designed instruments capable of picking up on very small-scale changes unavailable to the naked eye. Second, researchers also have had to know in advance what changes they should expect to happen in each phase, and this requires the corresponding theoretical clarity.)
The temperatures at which the phase transition between the two polar phases differ as the magnetic field strength increases. The gap between the two phases is bridged by the ß phase. Source: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.265301
I have considerably simplified helium 3’s transition from the ‘normal’ to the superfluid phase in this post. To describe it accurately, physicists use advanced mathematics and associated concepts in high-energy physics. One such concept is symmetry-breaking. When a helium 3 atom pairs up with another to form a bosonic composite, the pair must have a ‘new’ spin and orbital momentum; and their combined wavefunction will also have a ‘new’ phase. All these steps break different symmetries.
There’s a theory called Grand Unification in particle physics, in which physicists expect that at higher and higher energies, the three fundamental forces that affect subatomic particles – the strong-nuclear, the weak-nuclear and the electromagnetic – will combine into a single unified force. Physicists have found in their mathematical calculations that the symmetries that will break in this super-transition resemble those broken by helium 3 during its transition to superfluidity.
Understanding helium 3 can also be rewarding for insights into the insides of neutron stars. Neutron stars are extreme objects – surpassed in their extremeness only by black holes, which exist at the point where known theories of gravitational physics collapse into meaninglessness. A few lakh years after a neutron star is born, it is expected to have cooled sufficiently for its interiors to be composed of superfluids and superconductors.
We may never be able to directly observe these materials in their natural environment. But by studying helium 3’s various phases of superfluidity, we can get a sense of what a neutron star’s innards could be like, and whether their interactions among themselves and the neutrons on the surface could explain these objects’ still-mysterious characteristics.
Featured image: The liquid helium is in the superfluid phase. A thin invisible film creeps up the inside wall of the cup and down on the outside. A drop forms. It will fall off into the liquid helium below. This will repeat until the cup is empty – provided the liquid remains superfluid. Caption and credit: Alfred Leitner, public domain.
