The Wonder Woman armour piece of June 19 is already among the most-read pieces on this blog that were published in the last year, and quite a few people have stepped forward to give me their take on Twitter and over email. Thanks for all the responses â it’s been an unexpectedly wonderful learning experience. đ This said, one of those who replied, my friend Ishita Roy, also told me why â the logic in my piece notwithstanding â she isn’t actually disappointed by Wonder Woman’s garb in the film. I’ve reproduced her complete response below (from her Facebook comment). âVM
Your analysis of Wonder Woman armour is technically and logically sound. It should be disappointing to see her in such impractical (dangerous, as you pointed out) and male-gaze oriented “armour”. However, allow me to suggest a few reasons for the lack of disappointment here.
1. The origins: William Marston, who co-created the character with his wife, based her design on bondage (BDSM) gear. This is actually in line with the origin of Superman, whose original artist also was inspired by BDSM.
The idea here was not to cater to the male gaze, but to strike the same chord as the image of a dominatrix.
Indeed, Marston’s credentials and intentions were rather impeccable â he was a psychologist and a feminist, and in a polyamorous relationship with two other queer feminists, both of whom had heavy inputs in the making of Wonder Woman.
2. The “armour” is not actually accompanied by the male gaze.
There is not a single shot in the movie which tracks the bodies of any of the amazons. Not a single shot. The attire of the amazons is treated with superb nonchalance in the movie. Of particular note are two scenes: Diana is catcalled when she first appears in London, hidden under a cloak, and later in her green outfit – both of which would be perceived as modest by most folks. But when she appears in her armour, and starts kicking ass, she not even ogled at.
That’s a huge message to send audiences: that women’s clothing is not meant for consumption by an audience. I think giving them actual armour would have subtracted from that message – that women deserve respect regardless of whatever they wear. That even as warriors, modesty is not a requirement.
The whole amazon attire is thoroughly divorced from the concept of objectification by the cinematography, script and the very suggestive fact that amazons of all ages wear it.
3. That attire may not have been meant as armour.
The fighting style choreographed for the amazons is actively incompatible with plate-mail. It depends on ranged attacks, acrobatics and is more coordinated than single combat. Freedom of movement, along with coverage of vitals seems to be the aim here.
Now note that Diana’s attire is more revealing than the standard issue Amazonian garb. Also note that it has been depicted as a museum piece in-story, and is meant to be more ceremonial than actual armour.
Indeed the prevailing fan theory is that it is completely ceremonial, meant to be an appropriate superhero costume for the (wielder of) god-killers rather than a bulletproof vest.
Finally: re Thor and Bruce. Both guys spend a substantial amount of time with a naked torso and, in Thor’s case, wearing non-armoured clothing. Make of that what you will.
Before I begin, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not obsessed with comic books, and that what follows is based on information gleaned from googling and trawling through internet forums at 1 am. If I’ve got a detail wrong, please point it out nicely and I’m happy to make the necessary corrections.
Wonder Woman the movie was hailed so widely for being what it was but surprisingly few fixated on the protagonist’s clothing â a noticeable departure from reality, where social media commentators often pick on women’s sartorial sensibilities in various circumstances over anything else that might be contextually relevant. I do realise that what Diana Prince chooses to wear is her choice and none of my business. Then again, what about the fact that she happens to be a character created for popular consumption by a man who modelled her after his idea of women: that they feel happy when they are submissive?
There’s more. The reason I’m going to fixate on her clothing now has to do with mechanical engineering (which I studied for my undergraduate degree). Of all the things Prince wears, her breastplate is particularly interesting.
As the visions of sci-fi and fantasy films have evolved in the last few decades, there has also been a noticeable evolution in the liberties taken with set and costume design. Specifically, they have become less displays of their creators’ being awed by the possibilities of the future as well as to contain their fantasies and artistic overtures â and more humdrum, utilitarian and functional. For example, in a limited sense, filmmakers on average have reduced their attention on the “wow” factor of gadgetry, keeping audiences from getting ‘distracted’ by some outlandish vision of the future. Some of my favourite recent examples of this include Iron Man, Nolan’s Batman and Mad Max: Fury Road. The movies’ script is always such that the “wow” object isn’t introduced in our midst suddenly. Its creation process is exposed to the viewer at every step such that the ultimate effect is for the viewer to be viscerally familiar with the object by the time of its deployment in action â especially with the choices behind its more unique features.
But one area in which filmmakers have broadly seemed reluctant to get functionalist about is the breastplate of female warriors. Or at least they have become functional to the extent that their function is to make female warriors looks sexier instead of afford proper protection. For example, consider the battledress of three characters: one each from Game of Thrones, Man of Steel and Wonder Woman.
Faora from the Superman universe (left) and Brienne of Tarth, from Game of Thrones. Source: YouTube
While Faora Hu-Ul and Wonder Woman have breastplates that cup the breasts, Brienne of Tarth wears one that doesn’t. This is important because all of them are warriors and their armours must be able to protect them in a variety of conflict situations. One of them is melee combat, and when the breastplate receives a blow, its duty is to lessen the impact on the torso by absorbing it as well as directing it away from sensitive areas. However, when the breastplate cups over the breasts, striking it on top risks the force becoming directed inwards (especially if the seam is bad), towards the ribs and the sternum. This is what Emily Asher-Perrin wrote about for Tor in May 2013:
Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword, your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body, away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe. But thatâs not all! Letâs say you even fall onto your boob-conscious armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death trapâyou are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at some of your most vulnerable body parts. Itâs just not smart.
This is particularly true of Wonder Woman, whose latest costume appears to feature a metallic lining at the helm with a prow in the middle (the ‘golden eagle’) bending into the centre of her chest as well as sharp tips angling over her breasts. How is this sensible? Imagine what would happen if she fell face-down.
A close-up view of Wonder Woman’s breastplate. Source: YouTube
I suppose you’re wondering how it matters considering it’s Wonder Goddamn Woman, a superhero who can take punches harder than any armour would be able to withstand on her bare skin and not flinch. But the same can be said of Thor, and even Dr Bruce Banner, and it’s not like either of them is walking around wearing an iron maiden or a chastity belt just because he can. In effect, while Batman got full-body armour capable of surviving a Rottweiler attack, Wonder Woman had to make do with gear that wasn’t entirely about ‘her choices’. It actually created new ways to harm her (were it not for her Amazonian outside) because it was trying to preserve other things: her sexiness and her symbols. In a March 2016 interview to Hollywood Reporter, Michael Wilkinson, the costume designer who created Wonder Woman’s armour, said:
We created a costume that looks like metal armor, but of course, in these films the fight scenes are very intense and challenging so I had to come up with a solution that would allow her to move and breathe, but also to have this very iconic, sort of hourglass shape in a modern and interesting way. âŠÂ Of course thereâs all sorts of things she has such as the eagle and WW motif throughout the costume, so I tried to use that WW motif through the belt and the gauntlets and across the breastplate. Thereâs WW throughout the costume. I think someone tried to count them and they got to 40. (Emphasis added.)
What do either of these things have to do with combat efficiency? Again, for those wondering how any of this matters, let me remind you that my point is only that the sensibilities going into designing male armour and female armour seem to be different.
In reality (i.e. when we’re not dealing with superhuman abilities), the answer to this is not to exclude bust cups from female body armour, which is feasible to do only in the case of women with small breasts â but to create new designs that don’t bring additional vulnerabilities over the baseline (i.e. male armour), to focus on individual fit and to test it well. According to an article published in Tech Beat, a magazine of the US National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Centre, in December 2014,
Soft body armors designated as female differ from male and gender-neutral vests in that they can incorporate curved or shaped protective panels to accommodate the female bust. Flat male or gender-neutral models may be suitable for female officers with smaller busts. Depending on design and materials, they may not be suitable for those with larger busts, as the busts push the front armor panel forward, enlarging the underarm gap and therefore lessening the area of coverage between the front and rear panels.
Further, according to the US Office of Justice Programs,
Generally speaking, the difference between male and female models is that for the female body armor, most manufacturers cut and stitch the material to create bust cups. ⊠When a female model is tested, the laboratory is instructed to locate the seam that is created by folding and/or stitching the material to make the bust cup, and to place one of the shots on that seam. This is done to ensure the weakest point of the vest (typically a seam) provides the minimum level of ballistic protection required by the standard. ⊠There are many different types and styles of female vests, and ways of fitting vests to accommodate all of the various sizes and shapes needed for female officers. Some manufacturers have developed methods which ‘mold’ the bust cups into the material, negating the need for cutting and stitching to create a bust cup. Other manufacturers simply alter the outside dimensions of the panel (i.e., enlarging the arm hole openings) to accommodate certain types of builds and body types (commonly referred to as a ‘unisex’ vest).
Overall, it seems to be that there can be no single way to verify the strength and integrity of women’s armour as much as subjecting each unit to a single set of tests. Then again, I wonder if there’s any point bringing all these details to bear on Wonder Woman’s armour: how, for starters, are we going to get the Young’s modulus of Amazonian amazongmetal? I’m not sure the movies (including Batman v. Superman) have a scene where Princess Diana falls face down or takes a punch from Superman. In the off chance that such a scene does come to be, I’m going to be interested in her armour’s backface deformation. From a Police One article published in December 2014,
⊠in ballistic-resistant armor testing, backface deformation (BFD) is the measurement on the indent in a clay backing material when a bullet that does not penetrate a vest makes an impression on the clay. BFD testing of very small panels of armors, as well as whether the amount of allowed deformation should be different for the breast area, could be areas for study. ⊠âThe idea is to use a supplemental test technique to ensure that when rounds impact areas of the female anatomy that they have the same level of protection as existing male armors, but when striking the bust area, we want to make sure that we provide a more biofidelic test method that specifically addresses the unique female anatomy,â Otterson says.
Update: Twitter user @shishiqiushi has pointed out that the proper historical comparison for breastplates would be the Roman cuirass. However, I’m not sure where this fits into my narrative because there is no evidence â whether in art or archaeology â that women wore the cuirass into battle, at least not usually. And when they did, they wore versions designed for men. Perhaps I would be able to say that the thinking going into designing men’s armour had some historical basis. For further reading, try this Gizmodo explainer.
On June 8, Nautilus published a piece by Evelyn Lamb talking about mathematical near-misses. Imagine a mathematician trying to solve a problem using a specific technique and imagine it allows her to get really, really close to a solution â but not the solution itself. That’s a mathematical near-miss, and the technique becomes of particular interest to mathematicians because they can reveal potential connections between seemingly unconnected areas of mathematics. Lamb starts the piece talking about geometry but further down she’s got the simplest example: the Ramanujan constant. It is enumerated as e^{Ï(163^0.5)} (in English, you’d be reading this as “e to the power pi-times the square-root of 163”). It’s equal to 262,537,412,640,768,743.99999999999925. According to mathematician John Baez (quoted in the same article), this amazing near-miss is thanks to 163 being a so-called Heegner number. “Exponentials related to these numbers are nearly integers,” Lamb writes. Her piece concludes thus:
Near misses live in the murky boundary between idealistic, unyielding mathematics and our indulgent, practical senses. They invert the logic of approximation. Normally the real world is an imperfect shadow of the Platonic realm. The perfection of the underlying mathematics is lost under realizable conditions. But with near misses, the real world is the perfect shadow of an imperfect realm. An approximation is âa not-right estimate of a right answer,â Kaplan says, whereas âa near-miss is an exact representation of an almost-right answer.â
It was an entirely fun article (not just because I’ve a thing for articles discussing science that has no known paractical applications). However, the minute I read the headline (‘The Impossible Mathematics of the Real World’), one other science story from the past â which turned out to be of immense practical relevance â immediately came to mind: that of the birth of non-Euclidean geometry. In 19th century Europe, the German polymath Carl Friedrich Gauss realised that though people regularly approximated the shapes of real-world objects to those conceived by Euclid in c. 300 BC, there were enough dissimilarities to suspect that some truths of the world could be falling through the cracks. For example, Earth isn’t a perfect sphere; mountains aren’t perfect cones; and perfect cubes and cuboids don’t exist in nature. Yet we seem perfectly okay with ‘solving’ problems by making often unreasonable approximations. Which one is the imperfect shadow here?
A lecture delivered by Bernhard Riemann, a student of Gauss’s at the University of Gottingen, in June 1854 put his teacher’s suspicions to rest and showed that Euclid’s shapes had been the imperfect shadows. He’d done this by inventing the mathematical tools and rules to describe a geometry that existed in more than three dimensions and could deal with curved surfaces. (E.g., the three angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to 180Âș â but draw a triangle on the surface of a sphere and the sum of the angles is greater than 180Âș.) In effect, Euclid’s geometry was a lower dimensional variant of Riemannian geometry.
But the extent of Euclidean geometry’s imperfections only really came to light when physicists* used Riemann’s geometry to set up the theories of relativity, which unified space and time and discovered that gravity’s effects could be understood as the experience of moving through the curvature of spacetime. These realisations wouldn’t have been possible without Gauss wondering why Euclid’s shapes made any sense at all in a world filled with jags and bumps. To me, this illustrates a fascinating kind of a near-miss: one where real-world objects were squeezed into mathematical rules so we could make approximate real-world predictions for over 2,300 years without really noticing that most of Euclid’s shapes looked nothing like anything in the natural universe.
*It wasn’t just Albert Einstein. Among others, the list of contributors included Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincare, Hermann Minkowski, Marcel Grossmann and Arnold Sommerfeld.
In 2015, materials scientists made an unexpected discovery. In a compound of the metals tantalum and arsenic, they discovered a quasiparticle called a Weyl fermion. A quasiparticle is a packet of energy trapped in a system, like a giant cage of metal atoms, that in some ways moves around and interacts like a particle would. A fermion is a type of elementary particle that makes up matter; it includes electrons. A Weyl fermion, however, is a collection of electrons that behaves as if it is one big fermion â and as if it has no mass.
In June 2017, physicists reported that they had discovered another kind of Weyl fermion, dubbed a type-II Weyl fermion, in a compound of aluminium, germanium and lanthanum. It differed from other Weyl fermions in that it violated Lorentz symmetry. According to Wikipedia, Lorentz symmetry is the fact that “the laws of physics stay the same for all observers that are moving with respect to one another within an inertial frame”.
Both ‘regular’ and type-II Weyl fermions can do strange things. By extension, the solid substance engineered to be hospitable to Weyl fermions can be a strange thing itself. For example, when an electrical conductor is placed within a magnetic field, the current flowing through it faces more resistance. However, in a conductor conducting electricity using the flow of Weyl fermions, the resistance drops when a magnetic field is applied. When there are type-II Weyl fermions, resistance drops if the magnetic field is applied one way and increases if the field is applied the other way.
In the case of a Weyl semimetal, things get weirder.
Crystals are substances whose atoms are arranged in a regular, repeating pattern throughout. They’re almost always solids (which makes LCD displays cooler). Sometimes, this arrangement of atoms carries a tension, as if the atoms themselves were beads on a taut guitar string. If the string is plucked, it begins to vibrate at a particular note. Similarly, a crystal lattice vibrates at a particular note in some conditions, as if thrumming with energy. As the thrum passes through the crystal carrying this energy, it is as if a quasiparticle is making its way. Such quasiparticles are called phonons.
A Weyl semimetal is a crystal whose phonon is actually a Weyl fermion. So instead of carrying vibrational energy, a Weyl semimetal’s lattice carries electrical energy. Mindful of this uncommon ability, a group of physicists reported a unique application of Weyl semimetals on June 5, with a paper in the journal Physical Review B.
It’s called a superlens. A more historically aware name is the Veselago’s lens, for the Russian physicist Viktor Veselago, who didn’t create the lens itself but laid the theoretical foundations for its abilities in a 1967 paper. The underlying physics is in fact high-school stuff.
When light passes through a rarer medium into a denser medium, its path becomes bent towards the normal (see image below).
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
How much the path changes depends on the refractive indices of the two mediums. In nature, the indices are always positive, and this angle of deflection is always positive as well. The light ray coming in through the second quadrant (in the image) will either go through fourth quadrant, as depicted, or, if the denser medium is too dense, become reflected back into the third quadrant.
But if the denser medium has a negative refractive index, then the ray entering from the second quadrant will exit through the first quadrant, like so:
The left panel depicts refraction when the refraction indices are positive. In the left panel, the ‘green’ medium has a negative refractive index, causing the light to bend inward. Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker
Using computer simulations developed using Veselago’s insights, the British physicist J.B. Pendry showed in 2000 that such mediums could be used to refocus light diverging from a point. (I highly recommend giving his paper a read if you’ve studied physics at the undergraduate level.
This is a deceptively simple application. It stands for much more in the context of how microscopes work.
A light microscope, of the sort used in biology labs, has a maximum zoom of about 1,500. This is because the microscope is limited by the size of the thing it is using to study its sample: light itself. Specifically, (visible) light as a wave has a wavelength of 200 nanometers (corresponding to bluer colours) to 700 nanometers (to redder colours). The microscope will be blind to anything smaller than these wavelengths, imposing a limit on the size of the sample. So physicists use an electron microscope. As waves, electrons have a wavelength 100,000-times shorter than that of visible-light photons. This allows electron microscopes to magnify objects by 10,000,000-times and probe samples a few dozen picometers wide. But as it happens, scientists are still disappointed: they want to probe even smaller samples now.
To overcome this, Pendry had proposed in his 2000 study that a material with a negative refractive index could be used to focus light â rather, electromagnetic radiation â in a way that was independent of its wavelength. In 2007, British and American physicists had found a way to achieve this in graphene, which is a two-dimensional, single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms â but using electrons instead of photons. Scientists have previously noted that some electrons in graphene can flow around the material as if they had no mass. In the 2007 study, when these electrons were passed through a p–n junction, a type of junction typically used between semiconductors in electronics, the particles’ path bent inward on the other side as if the refractive index was negative.
In the June 5 paper in Physical Review B, physicists demonstrated the same phenomenon â using electrons â in a three-dimensional material: a Weyl semimetal. According to them, a stack of two Weyl semimetals can be engineered such that the Weyl fermions from one semimetal compound can enter the other as if the latter had a negative refractive index. With this in mind, Adolfo Grushin and Jens Bardarson write in Physics:
Current [scanning tunnelling electron microscopes (STMs)] use a sharp metallic tip to focus an electron beam onto a sample. Since STMâs imaging resolution is limited by the tipâs geometry and imperfections, it ultimately depends on the tip manufacturing process, which today remains a specialised art, unsuitable for mass production. According to [the paper’s authors], replacing the STM tip with their multilayer Weyl structure would result in a STM whose spatial resolution is limited only by how accurately the electron beam can be focused through Veselago lensing. A STM designed in this way could focus electron beams onto sub-angstrom regions, which would boost STMâs precision to levels at which the technique could routinely see individual atomic orbitals and chemical bonds.
This is the last instalment in a loose trilogy of pieces documenting the shape of the latest research on topological materials. You can read the other two here and here.
A topological insulator is a material that conducts electricity only on its surface. Everything below, through the bulk of the material, is an insulator. An overly simplified way to understand this is in terms of the energies and momenta of the electrons in the material.
The electrons that an atom can spare to share with other atoms â and so form chemical bonds â are called valence electrons. In a metal, these electrons can have various momenta, but unless they have a sufficient amount of energy, theyâre going to stay near their host atoms â i.e. within the valence band. If they do have energies over a certain threshold, then they can graduate from the valence band to the conduction band, flowing throw the metal and conducting electricity.
In a topological insulator, the energy gap between the valence band and the conduction band is occupied by certain âstatesâ that represent the materialâs surface. The electrons in these states arenât part of the valence band but theyâre not part of the conduction band either, and canât flow throw the entire bulk.
The electrons within these states, i.e. on the surface, display a unique property. Their spins (on their own axis) are coupled strongly with their motion around their host atoms. As a result, theirs spins become aligned perpendicularly to their momentum, the direction in which they can carry electric charge. Such coupling staves off an energy-dissipation process called Umklapp scattering, allowing them to conduct electricity. Detailed observations have shown that the spin-momentum coupling necessary to achieve this is present only in a few-nanometre-thick layer on the surface.
If youâre talking about this with a physicist, she will likely tell you at this point about time-reversal symmetry. It is a symmetry of nature that is said to (usually) âprotectâ a topological insulatorâs unique surface states.
There are many fundamental symmetries in nature. In particle physics, if a force acts similarly on left- and right-handed particles, it is said to preserve parity (P) symmetry. If the dynamics of the force are similar when it is acting against positively and negatively charged particles, then charge conjugation (C) symmetry is said to be preserved. Now, if you videotaped the force acting on a particle and then played the recording backwards, the force must be seen to be acting the way it would if the video was played the other way. At least if it did it would be preserving time-reversal (T) symmetry.
Physicists have known some phenomena that break C and P symmetry simultaneously. T symmetry is broken continuously by the second law of thermodynamics: if you videographed the entropy of a universe and then played it backwards, entropy will be seen to be reducing. However, CPT symmetries â all together â cannot be broken (we think).
Anyway, the surface states of a topological insulator are protected by T symmetry. This is because the electronsâ wave-functions, the mathematical equations that describe some of the particlesâ properties, do not âflipâ going backwards in time. As a result, a topological insulator cannot lose its surface states unless it undergoes some sort of transformation that breaks time-reversal symmetry. (One example of such a transformation is a phase transition.)
This laboured foreword is necessary â at least IMO â to understand what it is that scientists look for when theyâre looking for topological insulators among all the materials that we have been, and will be able, to synthesise. It seems theyâre looking for materials that have surface states, with spin-momentum coupling, that are protected by T symmetry.
Physicists from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, have found that topological insulators needn’t always be crystals â as has been thought. Instead, using a computer simulation, Adhip Agarwala and Vijay Shenoy, of the institute’s physics department, have shown that a kind of glass also behaves as a topological insulator.
The band theory described earlier is usually described with crystals in mind, wherein the material’s atoms are arranged in a well-defined pattern. This allows physicists to determine, with some amount of certainty, as to how the atoms’ electrons interact and give rise to the material’s topological states. In an amorphous material like glass, on the other hand, the constituent atoms are arranged randomly. How then can something as well-organised as a surface with spin-momentum coupling be possible on it?
In their study, [Agarwala and Shenoy] assume a box with a large number of lattice sites arranged randomly. Each site can host electrons in one of several energy levels, and electrons can hop between neighboring sites. The authors tuned parameters, such as the lattice density and the spacing of energy levels, and found that the modeled materials could exhibit symmetry-protected surface currents in certain cases. The results suggest that topological insulators could be made by creating glasses with strong spin-orbit coupling or by randomly placing atoms of other elements inside a normal insulator.
The duo’s paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters on June 8. The arXiv preprint is available to read here. The latter concludes,
The possibility of topological phases in a completely random system opens up several avenues both from experimental and theoretical perspectives. Our results suggest some new routes to the laboratory realization of topological phases. First, two dimensional systems can be made by choosing an insulating surface on which suitable [atoms or molecules] with appropriate orbitals are deposited at random (note that this process will require far less control than conventional layered materials). The electronic states of these motifs will then [interact in a certain way] to produce the required topological phase. Second is the possibility of creating three dimensional systems starting from a suitable large band gap trivial insulator. The idea then is to place âimpurity atomsâ, again with suitable orbitals and âfriendlyâ chemistry with the host⊠The [interaction] of the impurity orbitals would again produce a topological insulating state in the impurity bands under favourable conditions.
Agarwala/Shenoy also suggest that “In realistic systems the temperature scales over which one will see the topological physics ⊠may be low”, although this is not unusual. However, they don’t suggest which amorphous materials could be suitable topological insulators.
Thanks to penflip.com and its nonexistent autosave function, I had to write the first half of this article twice. Not the sort of thing I can forgive easily, less so since I’m loving everything else about it.
There was a rash of articles published online recently â such as this one â about how the adult human mind, when confronted with information that contradicts its existing beliefs, does not reorganise what it knows but rejects the information’s truthfulness itself. During political conversations, this aspect of how we think and learn is bound to influence both the way opposing parties argue and the effects of propaganda on people. However, this notion’s impact seems to me to be more dire w.r.t. the issue of genetically modified (GM) crops.
Even when confronted with evidence in support of GM crops from the scientific literature, anti-GM activists reflexively take recourse in the deficiencies inherent in the scientific method, even if the deficiencies themselves are well-known.
In the specific example of GM mustard, there is no clear answer: the variant developed by Deepak Pental & co. has lower yield than some non-GM varieties but higher pest-resistance and is easier to breed. As a result, any single discussion of GM mustard’s eligibility to be a food crop (it hasn’t been released into the market yet) should address its pros and cons together instead of singling out its cons.
It would seem anti-GM activists are aware of this pressure because whenever scientists raise the pros of GM mustard, the activists’ first, and often last, line of reasoning is to quote even other studies. They are in turn rebutted by more studies, and the backs and forths go on until the entire debate becomes hinged on disagreements over minutiae. Granted, allowing bad GM crops to be commercialised can have deadly consequences. But this is also true of a score other enterprises in which we are happy to go along with approximations. Why the selective outrage?
It can’t be that farmer suicides touch a nerve because they are driven not just by crop failure but also by crop insurance, grain storage/distribution and pricing indices (such as the differences between rural CPI and MSP). Estimating these three factors is a task ridden with inaccuracies, many ill-supported assumptions and, frequently, corruption. However, we don’t seem to have raged against them with as much intensity as we have against GM mustard. We should have because of what Harish Damodaran eloquently expressed in The Indian Express on June 1:
Why is there so much opposition to a technology developed, after all, by Indian scientists in the public sector? Yes, the original patent for the [Barnase-Barstar-Bar hybridisation] system was filed by Plant Genetics Systems (now part of Bayer CropScience), but the CGMCP scientists improved upon it, for which they obtained patents (three US, two Canadian, one European Union and Australian each). Yet, we see no value in their work. The opponents â from the so-called Left or the Right â havenât even bothered to visit the CGMCP, most accessibly located in Delhi Universityâs South Campus, while taking time out for anti-GMO jamborees in Brussels and The Hague. All this opposition is reflective of a unique Us and Them syndrome. For âusâ, nothing but the latest would do. But farmers will have no right to grow GM mustard and assess its performance on the field.
The persuasion to constantly reject one study for another and our hypocritical stand on the ownership of GM crops together suggest that the pro/anti-GM debate is going to be settled by neither of these tactics. They are both the effects of a common flaw: ideological stubbornness. Even I â being pro-GM â am inclined to consign some farmers’ opposition to GM mustard to fear-mongering by activists. Sometimes I can find something easily refuted but at others, I struggle to change my mind even if the facts are evident. Anyway, while I can’t think of what it is that we can do to make ourselves less stubborn (each to her own, perhaps?), I do think it’s important we stay aware of our biases’ impact on our public conversations.
PS: If my post seems one-sided, addressing the behaviour of only anti-GM groups, one reason is that anti-GM expression in the mainstream as well as social media overshadows pro-GM expression. I’m also biased, of course.
(In case Dorigo deletes his tweets, screenshots here, here and here.)
If you didn’t know: Katherine Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist at Melbourne University and Tommaso Dorigo is an Italian particle physicist working at CERN. Mack’s Twitter feed is one of the best places to learn about astrophysics, and Dorigo’s blog is one of my preferred sources of information and analysis of LHC results. I consider them both very knowledgeable people. At least, I used to â until this short exchange on Twitter disabused me of the notion that they might be equally knowledgeable.
As my friend put it, Dorigo’s comment “makes it sound like being bi is a privilege” â especially since Mack goes on to detail the non-privileges being bisexual comes with. While I’m familiar with the issues surrounding gender and sexuality, I’m not entirely conversant with them, and yet even I know that Dorigo is being facile and refusing to engage substantively with the topic at hand. His response to Mack’s sharing the link is proof enough, conflating two attributes in a way that makes no sense:
I’m inclined to call this “Dorigo’s fall from my graces”. Some would argue that we ought to separate his technical expertise with his views on topics that seem to not directly relate to what made me pay attention to him in the first place. But I’m becoming increasingly wary of this line, particularly since allegations of sexual harassment were visited upon Woody Allen in 2014. While many hold that an appreciation of his films doesn’t require one to be okay what kind of a person he is, I disagree because the separation of professional achievements and personal conduct overlooks how one might enable the other, and together help establish structures of power and authority.
My example of choice with which to illustrate this is Bora Zivkovic, the former ‘All Father’ of Scientific American‘s famous network of blogs. His leadership as well as abilities as a communicator made young and aspiring writers flock to him for advice and favours. However, a string of allegations (of harassment and impropriety) emerged in 2013 that put paid to his job and, at least temporarily, his career. It was obvious at the time the scandal broke out that Zivkovic had abused his position of power to take advantage of trustful women and solicit crass things from them. When I first heard the news, I was devastated.
Now, science â rather, STEM â and science journalism already have a problem retaining women in their ranks. When they do, sexual abuse, harassment and sexism are rampant, often ensconced within organisational structures that struggle to remain cognisant of these issues. So when you embed men like Zivkovic and Dorigo â and, of course, Geoff Marcy â into these structures, you automatically infuse the structures with insensitivity, ignorance, etc., as well as increase the risk of women running into such men. And by paying attention to Dorigo â even when he’s talking about hadron-hadron collisions â I feel like I will be feeding his sense of relevance and legitimising his persistence as a scholar of note.
(Caveat: I’m keenly aware that mine could be a precarious position because it could displace a very large number of people from my self-aggrandising graces, but I choose to believe that there are still very many people who are good, who are aware, sensible and sensitive, who are not abusive. Katherine Mack is a living example; Dorigo would’ve been, too, if he’d had the good sense to apologise and back off.)
So where does Paul Feyerabend fit in?
From his Against Method (fourth edition, 2010; p. 169-170):
I have much sympathy with the view, formulated clearly and elegantly by Whorf (and anticipated by Bacon), that languages and the reaction patterns they involve are not merely instruments for describing events (facts, states of affairs), but that they are also shapers of events (facts, states of affairs), that their ‘grammar’ contains a cosmology, a comprehensive view of the world, of society, of the situation of man which influences thought, behaviour, perception. ⊠Covert classifications (which, because of their subterranean nature, are ‘sensed rather than comprehended â awareness of [them] has an intuitive quality â which ‘are quite apt to be more rational than over ones’ and which may be very ‘subtle’ and not connected ‘with any grand dichotomy’) create ‘patterned resistances to widely divergent points of view’.
(Emphases in the original.) Our language influences the weltanschauung we build together. While Feyerabend may have written his words in relation to his idea of incommensurability in the philosophy of science, their implications are evident in many spheres of human endeavour. For example, consider product advertisement: a brand identity is an intangible thing, an emotion trapped within a cage of words, yet it is built and projected through tangible things like design and marketing all embodying that emotion.
Similarly, involving this or that scientist in a conversation is to include a certain point of view that â even in the presence of robust safeguards â suggests not an endorsement but definitely a willingness to ignore something that may not always be ignorable.
Featured image credit: coldbrook/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
This map represents a fascinating thing I learnt today: as of June 2015, the harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis) had been found in 59 countries outside of its native range (11 countries more than the last time anyone checked, which was in 2011). That’s a lot of new ground for a bug to have expanded into naturally, including landmasses separated by oceans.
Obviously, it had help. According to this study, whose authors also produced the map, humans either accidentally imported the bug from different locations (e.g. with foodstuff) or deliberately introduced it into certain ecosystems so the bug could invade them and displace other nuisance-bugs. But come 2016, and the harlequin ladyird has itself become a nuisance-bug â mostly to native Coccinellidae (the same family as all ladybugs) and particularly to the two-spot ladybug. According to a study published in 2000,
Ironically, many biotic invasions are apparently facilitated by cultivation and husbandry, unintentional actions that foster immigrant populations until they are self-perpetuating and uncontrollable. Whatever the cause, biotic invaders can in many cases inflict enormous environmental damage: (1) Animal invaders can cause extinctions of vulnerable native species through predation, grazing, competition, and habitat alteration. (2) Plant invaders can completely alter the fire regime, nutrient cycling, hydrology, and energy budgets in a native ecosystem and can greatly diminish the abundance or survival of native species. (3) In agriculture, the principal pests of temperate crops are nonindigenous, and the combined expenses of pest control and crop losses constitute an onerous âtaxâ on food, fiber, and forage production. (4) The global cost of virulent plant and animal diseases caused by parasites transported to new ranges and presented with susceptible new hosts is currently incalculable.
In May 2013, Ed Yong had written for Nature about how the harlequin ladybird gets to be so deadly:
Some scientists had previously thought that the harlequin owed its success to harmonine, a toxic antibacterial chemical found in its blood (or haemolymph). Harmonine allows the harlequin to resist certain diseases and to poison native ladybirds that eat its eggs. However, Vilcinskas and his team found that high concentrations of harmonine do not kill seven-spot ladybirds â but a dose of the harlequinâs haemolymph does. When Vilcinskas and his colleagues looked at the harlequin’s haemolymph under a microscope, they found the culprit: a microsporidian parasite. These exist in the eggs and larvae of all harlequin ladybirds, but in a dormant and apparently harmless state.
Per another study published in 2007, in six locations sampled within a 40-hectare area at the North Florida Research and Education Center, Monticello, the number of predator-bugs had reduced from sixteen to two in nine years. Researchers attributed this dramatic decline exclusively to the fact that the harlequin ladybird had been introduced in these areas at the start of the period. They wrote:
Following its arrival, H. axyridis appears to have become the dominant predator and populations of the [yellow pecan aphid complex]Â and native predator species were dramatically reduced. No native coccinellids, syrphids, mirids or anthocorids were detected in these âafterâ samples. Brown or green lacewing larvae or adults were rarely recorded in pecan. Only spiders and reduviids, some species of which likely engage in intraguild predation on H. axyridis, were present in any detectable numbers.
Introducing one species to displace another from the latter’s native range makes the former a bio-control agent. Such agents are considered ‘classical’ if they are natural enemies of the target species (but not necessarily in all environments). Ecologists are generally favourable towards the use of classical agents, especially if they are selected and introduced carefully. There have been many success stories wherein bio-control agents have been used to suppress target populations so humans continue to have access to natural resources they consider valuable. However, as the authors of the 2000 study have acknowledged, the “prevention of invasions is much less costly than post-entry control”, such as when an agent is introduced that doesn’t specifically suppress one other species but goes after a large number of them. The finest example of this is Australia’s cane-toad experiment. Even CRISPR/Cas9 offers no easy way out.
Featured image: A harlequin ladybird. Credit: spacebirdy/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Wissenschaft im Dialog is hosting “a special series about the role of science communication and science journalism in various countries”. At their request, and thrilled for the opportunity, I wrote the India edition, available to read here. The initial limit was 1,000 words but the version that got published has around 1,400 words. For allowing this spillover â i.e. letting me go on and on â but more so for helping me compose and edit the thing, I owe thanks to Esther KĂ€hler and Arwen Cross.
Excerpt:
There are many reasons for [science stories of a certain type being popular today]Â â but two of them in particular dominate. The first is that, like everywhere else in the world, Indian journalism outlets are making a painful transition from print to the web. However, the business of journalism is tougher in India because the purchasing power is lower while the costs remain high. As a result, tested models of money-making such as online subscriptions and paywalls developed for the West canât be adopted in India. Second â and again, like everywhere else in the world â political nationalism is on the rise. (Even if Emmanuel Macron received 65% of the French vote, it is startling that Marine Le Pen secured 35%.) One consequence of this has been that right-wing ideologues, politicians and supporters are becoming less tolerant towards journalism that criticises homegrown innovations. Instead they want stories that amplify national pride by glorifying âsuccessesâ that, in most contexts, would simply be seen as low-hanging fruit.
For someone who reads very slowly (a 300-page book usually takes a week), Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes offered an astonishingly enjoyable experience*. A week after I picked it up at a secondhand books store, I’m 534 pages in and keep going back to it. While Hobsbawm’s celebrated breadth of knowledge intimidated me enough to get writer’s block, the book exhibits just the right level of topical fluency, insightfulness and, fortunately, snark.
My only grouse is that Hobsbawm had to have a separate section on the natural sciences in the book’s last chapter. As a result, it is as if he acknowledges that the unique traits of 20th century science don’t quite fit into the stories of anything else that happened in 1914-1991 â which is disappointing. It requires the reader to assimilate advances in quantum mechanics, relativity, semiconductor electronics and ICT by themselves and not together with how the 77 years panned out politically, economically and socially. Of course, Hobsbawm tries every now and then (in the natural sciences section) to contextualise scientific and technological advancements in issues and narratives of societal development, but this doesn’t quite click.
Nonetheless, Age of Extremes is highly recommended, doubly so because, even if the science section seems like an afterthought, it still offers a carefully considered picture of modern science and its philosophical roots. (While some sections seemed facile, this may have been because I regularly read on these topics.) One paragraph in particular (p. 530) caught my eye: Hobsbawm argues that anti-science beliefs took root in the world because its subjects were becoming increasingly specialised, abstracted, and whose contents were becoming removed further from both common sense and sense experience â and, ultimately, from the common man. He then offers the following:
The suspicion and fear of science was fuelled by four feelings: that science was incomprehensible; that both its practical and moral consequences were unpredictable and probably catastrophic; and that it underlined the helplessness of the individual, and undermined authority. Nor should we overlook the sentiment that, to the extent that science interfered with the natural order of things, it was inherently dangerous.
In these lines, I see the perfect raison d’ĂȘtre of the science journalist. It is the task of the science journalist to dispel the pall of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility surrounding science, to lay out its practical and moral consequences, to inspire confidence in those who would doubt its effects, to invite them to participate in it, and to expose its processes so scientists cannot claimauthority over the ignorant. And if Authority perceives a threat to itself emerging from science, it is likelier than not that it is advocating for a scientific idea that is of Authority’s own making and that it is not a ‘natural entity’. In this case, the exposition of the processes of science can be used to challenge Authority.
