Category: Scicomm

The Kapitza pendulum

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

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

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

You are familiar with the conventional pendulum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NYT’s ISRO coverage continues assault on sense

The New York Times refuses to learn, perpetuating views of ISRO that are equal parts blurry and illiterate, and often missing points that become clearer with just a little bit of closer reading. The launch and subsequent success of Chandrayaan 3 brought its annoying gaze the way of India and its space programme, about which it published at least one article whose interpretation was at odds with reality. But for the newspaper’s stubbornness, and unmindful of the impact it has on the minds of its large audience in India, pushback is important, even just a little, when and where possible. This is another such attempt. On August 24, the day after the Chandrayaan 3 lander module descended on the moon’s surface in the south polar region, The New York Times published an article trying to tie the mission’s success with India’s ascendancy aspirations. Annotated excerpts follow:

Meet frugality porn – when this style of administration and work is exalted without acknowledging the restrictions it imposes. We see more of it in the coming paragraphs.

It’s amusing how this question – once rightly derided as superficial – has of late come to be legitimised in articles by the BBC and now The New York Times.

Just one ISRO success and this is the crap we need to deal with. What “deeply rooted tradition”? What “pillar” of India’s rise? Name one field of research and I will point you to articles discussing deep-seated problems in it, ranging from paucity of funds for research to academic freedom, from shortcomings in research infrastructure and environments that are overcome almost entirely by enterprising researchers going out of their way to help others to bureaucratic and government interference that vitiates the uptake of research findings in the public sphere. If anything, the article suggests that the blueprint India is offering other nations is: “Get one pretty important moon mission right and the world’s most read newspaper will pretend that you have arisen, to the ignorance of very real, very bad problems.”

a) The governments of India and the US have allocated to ISRO and NASA similar fractions of their national budgets. b) Scientists are paid much better in the US than in India, at all levels, after adjusting for differences in purchasing power. c) NASA operates one of the world’s best public outreach efforts for a state-run entity while ISRO has no such department. The “potent message” that The New York Times is tooting is, in sum, hard to understand and potentially dangerous.

This is the same Modi who thought it best to plaster his portrait on all vaccination certificates (instead of photos of the respective vaccinees) but refused to investigate the Adani Group after Hindenburg’s allegations, who didn’t utter a peep about the incidents of brutal violence in Delhi, Hathras, Manipur or Nuh but whose giant face appeared on the screen about to show the last few – and most important – seconds of the Chandrayaan 3 lander’s descent on the moon’s surface, sending almost every viewer nationwide into paroxysms of rage. I’m not sure of the purpose of describing him in such positive terms vis-à-vis his communication.

The outcome of the Chandrayaan 3 mission created something that has become extremely rare in India since 2014: a success that could be celebrated sans any reservations. But it didn’t prove a way to overcome the “fiercely fractious politics”; in fact, it became yet another point – among the extant thousands – over which to deepen divisions and render impotent the effects of public debate on governance. In fact, absolutely every major national success since 2014 has been used to fuel the fire that is the “fiercely fractious politics”. And again, I fail to see these resources that India “is finally getting”.

Get a historian of science and technology in India since independence – i.e. someone who studies these things closely, going beyond appearances to examine the effects of scientific and/or technological development and practices on all classes of society – to say the same thing, and then we’ll talk. Until then, spare me the superficial and status-quoist reading of the place of science in India. Some suggested reading here, here, and here.

Finally, an acknowledgment of the problem with “frugality” and “shoestring” budgets, yet not nearly in the same context. And the second highlighted line is either a bald-faced fabrication or a reluctance to acknowledge reality: that scientists have been discouraged, silenced and/or harassed when their work is something a) that the state doesn’t know how to integrate into its nationalist narratives, b) that disputes, negates or complicates something whose public understanding the state would like to control but isn’t able to, or c) that the state simply cares little for.

The highlighted portion? True everywhere, all the time. Commendable, but not special.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Here we have The New York Times reviving the desiccated corpse of the beast that so many laboured to kill and bury: the comparison of ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) with the 2013 film Gravity and, by implication, NASA’s MAVEN mission. MOM was a technology demonstrator that cost Rs 454 crore (around $57 million), and whose scientific results did little to advance humankind’s understanding of Mars. Its principal accomplishment is that it got into orbit around Mars. MAVEN cost $582.5 million, or Rs 3,410.53 crore (assuming a conversion rate of Rs 58.55 to a dollar in 2013). For that its scientific output was orders of magnitude more notable than that from MOM.

As for Gravity: I’ve never understood this comparison. The film cost $80-130 million to make, according to Wikipedia; that’s 468.40-761.15 crore rupees. So what? Gattaca cost $36 million and Interstellar cost $165 million. Moon cost $5 million and Into Darkness cost $185 million. Can someone explain the comparison to me and actually have it make sense?

This is the note on which the article ends, which matters because what goes here has the privilege of delivering a psychologically impactful blow, and the writer (and/or editor) has to be careful to choose something for this portion whose blow will line up with the whole article’s overarching message. I’m disappointed that The New York Times picked this because it’s of a piece with the same casteist and classist politics and policies that, for India’s non-elite hundreds-of-millions, have disconnected “working hard” from financial, educational, biomedical, and social success even while keeping up the myth of the wholesomely gainful productivity.

Land on the moon, feet on the earth

Yesterday was fantastic. India made a few kinds of history, when one is great enough, by autonomously landing a robotic instrument in the moon’s south polar region. Some seven hours later, it deployed a rover, bringing the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s toughest phase to a resounding close and beginning its scientific mission, significant in its own right for being the first to be undertaken in situ in this part of the earth’s natural satellite. As a colleague told me yesterday, the feat is one that we can celebrate unreservedly – an exceedingly rare thing in today’s India. That, however, still hasn’t sufficed to keep either the accidental or the deliberate misinformant quiet. I woke up this morning to several WhatsApp-borne memes proclaiming, in different ways, that the moon’s south pole and/or the far side was now India’s. The spirit of the message is obvious but that doesn’t mean it can’t be mistaken. India’s feat is to do with the moon’s south polar region; the distinction of the first autonomous robotic landing on the far side belongs to China (Chang’e 4 in 2019). But the most egregious offender today (so far) seems to be The Indian Express, whose front page is this:

We are all over the moon but let’s keep our feet on the ground: India has achieved a profound thing by getting a robotic representative on the moon’s surface, and just as we took a long road to get here, there’s a long road to go. And on this road, we should develop a habit of seeing the moon as ours – including us and our collaborators – and make sure our expressions of joy have room for the spirit of cross-border teamwork. Let’s resist casting Chandrayaan-3 as comeuppance for past slights, as the triumph of a narrowly defined self-sufficiency, or as to make a mountain out of molehill – a deceptively dangerous misstep that can quickly confuse ability for entitlement. I would much rather always celebrate the former rather than admit even a little bit of the latter. Congratulations, Chandrayaan-3, and congratulations, ISRO! It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the events of August 23, 2023 – but it’s still possible.

Landing Day

Good luck, Chandrayaan 3. Good luck also to all the journalists covering this event from within India – a unique location because it’s where you will feel the most excitement today about the mission’s activities on the moon as well as the most difficult path to accessing bona fide information about them (thanks to the misinformation, sensationalism, and ISRO’s and the Indian government’s tendency to stop sharing information rather than more of it when something goes awry). So, I hope your memories serve you well and every detail that you recall is completely factual.

India is also a unique location because it’s going to the moon today. I’ve always felt somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that humans have gone to the moon. Whether you’re human or an alien to whom human geopolitics is trivial in the scheme of things, humans never went to the moon. People did. And people are divided along very many lines. Cooperation has come and gone, to the extent that there’s still considerable value for some country to have successfully executed its own moon-landing mission (robotic or otherwise). This is a bit of a tragedy given we’re all in this together and all that, but at the same time it would be naïve to believe otherwise.

And today, India will be taking its best shot at having a robotic lander autonomously soft-land on the lunar surface. I encourage you to follow the landing sequence on DD National (on TV), on YouTube livestreams of ISRO or the Press Information Bureau, or on a live blog on The Hindu (with real-time updates and analysis). Two hours before the lander’s powered descent – the label for the landing – is set to begin at 5.45 pm, ISRO will check whether all conditions are favourable to go ahead. If they are, the livestream will begin at 5.20 pm and the descent is expected to last around 19 minutes. If you’re new to all this, please check out The Hindu today for a full-page graphic on what to expect.

Making sense of Luna 25

At the outset, let’s hope the unfortunate demise of Russia’s Luna 25 mission to the moon will finally silence the social media brigade that’s been calling it a competitor to India’s Chandrayaan 3 – although I wouldn’t put it past some to thump their chests over the latter succeeding where the former couldn’t. To understand why it never made sense to claim CY 3 and Luna 25 were in a race, I highly recommend Jatan Mehta’s points.

With this behind us: there are several interesting ways to slice what happened to Luna 25, beyond the specific technical points of failure on the spacecraft. Two seem particularly notable, to my mind.

First, since it became clear that Luna 25 had erred with an orbit-lowering manoeuvre on August 19, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, couldn’t communicate with it until the moon was over Russia, which in turn narrowed the window Roscosmos had to troubleshoot and fix the issue. The reason Russia had this problem is because it went to war, provoking stringent sanctions from many countries worldwide, including negating opportunities to make use of a global communications network to stay in touch with Luna 25.

On the other hand, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will have assistance from the European and American space agencies to keep track of Chandrayaan 3.

The second is that, against the backdrop of the war and the consequent sanctions, Russia’s reputation as a space power is at stake. Luna 25 was in the works for more than two decades (initially under the name ‘Luna-Glob’) before it launched. When Russian’s lander-based Fobos-Grunt mission to Mars failed in 2012 – it couldn’t perform an orbit-raising manoeuvre around earth and fell back – the country decided that it wouldn’t be able to provide a lander as agreed to ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 mission by 2015, so ISRO decided to develop its own lander (whose abilities will be tested for the second time come August 23).

(This legacy is yet another reason the coincidental attempts by Luna 25 and Chandrayaan 3 to soft-land on the moon was never a race.)

Fobos-Grunt’s failure together with other commitments further delayed the launch of Luna 25. One of these commitments was a lander for the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) ExoMars mission, to deliver a rover named ‘Rosalind Franklin’ on Mars. But ESA terminated the deal in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, postponing the mission to at least 2028. Finally, by the late 2010s, Luna 25 was ready.

Taken together, Russia wasn’t able to successfully undertake an interplanetary mission since Phobos 2 in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Due to the events of yesterday, this dubious record is now extended to 34 years – an unexpected turn of events for the country that launched the world’s first satellite. It also continues to delay the intended purpose of Luna 25 according to a Roscosmos statement: to “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the moon’s surface”.

Russia has also staunchly denied allegations that its economy is groaning under the weight of the sanctions imposed by the West, but its ability to recover from the failure and plan the next mission will surely be affected by limitations on what components it can import.

As the world’s spacefaring countries are getting the moon back in their collective sight, the US and China are leading the line-drawing on this occasion. But Russia – whose Luna 25 was ultimately intended as a statement that the country’s space power status is not on the decline – drew one of its own and paid a price for it.

(To whomever this message appeals, I hope filmmakers in India take note, since they have often villainised the notion of ISRO seeking or receiving help from other agencies in films and TV shows.)

A lotus for Modi, with love from Manipur

This bit of news is so chock full of metaphors that I’m almost laughing out loud. Annotated excerpts from ‘CSIR’s new lotus variety ‘Namoh 108’ a ‘grand gift’ to PM Modi: Science Minister‘, The Hindu, August 19, 2023:

It’s a triviality today that the Indian government ministers’ relentless exaltation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not spontaneity so much as an orchestrated thing to keep his name in the news without him having to interact with the press, and to constantly reinforce the impression that Modi is doing great work. And this “Namoh 108” drives home how the political leadership of the scientific enterprise has been pressed to this task.

Also, Jitendra Singh hasn’t been much of a science minister: almost since the day he took charge of this ministry, he has been praising his master in almost every public utterance and speech. Meanwhile, the expenditure on science and research by the government he’s part of has fallen, pseudoscience is occupying more space in several spheres (including at the IITs), and research scholars continue to have a tough time doing their work.

As likely as the flower’s discovery many years ago in Manipur is a coincidence vis-à-vis the violence underway in the northeastern state, it’s just as hard to believe government officials are not speaking up about it now to catapult it into the news – to highlight something else more benign about Manipur and to give it a BJP connection as well: the lotus has 108 petals and the party symbol is a lotus.

(Also, this is the second connection in recent times between northeast India and India as a whole in terms of the state seeing value in a botanical resource, and proceeding to extract and exploit it. In 2007, researchers found the then-spiciest chilli variety in India’s northeast. By 2010, DRDO had found a way to pack it into grenades. In 2016, a Centre-appointed committee considered these grenades as alternatives to the use of pellet guns in the Kashmir Valley.)

It seems we’re sequencing the genomes of and conducting more detailed study of only those flowers that have a Hindu number of petals. Woe betide those that have 107, 109 or even a dozen, no matter that – short of the 108 petals conferring a specific benefit to the lotus plant (apparently not the case) – this is an accident of nature. Against the backdrop of the Nagoya Protocol, the Kunming-Montreal pact, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and issues of access and benefit sharing, India – and all other countries – should be striving to study (genetically and otherwise) and index all the different biological resources available within their borders. But we’re not. We’re only interested in flowers with 108 petals.

Good luck to children who will be expected to draw this in classrooms. Good luck also to other lotuses.

I’m quite certain that someone in that meeting would have coughed, sneezed, burped, farted or sniffed before that individual said “Om Namaha Vasudeva” out loud. I’m also sure that, en route to the meeting, and aware of its agenda, the attendees would have heard someone retching, hacking or spitting. “Kkrkrkrkrkrhrhrhrhrhrhrthphoooo 108” is more memorable, no?

So there was a naming committee! I’ll bet 10 rupees that after this committee came up with “Namoh”, it handed the note to Singh, added the footnote about its imperfect resemblance to “Namo”, and asked for brownie points.

Is Dias bringing the bus back?

So Physical Review Letters formally retracted that paper about manganese sulphide, in the limelight for having been coauthored by Ranga P. Dias, yesterday. The retraction notice states: “Of the authors on the original paper, R. Dias stands by the data in Fig. 1(b) and does not agree to retract the Letter.” Figure 1(b) is reproduced below.

The problem with the second plot is that its curves reportedly resemble some in Dias’s doctoral thesis from 2013, in which he had examined the same properties of germanium tetraselenide, a different kind of material. Curves can look the same to the extent that they can have the same overall shape; it’s a problem when they also reproduce the little variations that are a result of the specific material synthesised for a particular experiment and the measurements made on that day.

That Dias is the only person objecting to the retraction is interesting because it means one of his coaouthors, Ashkan Salamat, agreed to it. Salamat heads a lab in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that’s been implicated in the present controversy. Earlier this year, well after Physical Review Letters said it was looking into the allegations against the manganese sulphide paper, Scientific American reported:

Salamat has since responded, suggesting that even though the two data sets may appear similar, the resemblance is not indicative of copied data. “We’ve shown that if you just overlay other people’s data qualitatively, a lot of things look the same,” he says. “This is a very unfair approach.”

Physical Review Letters also accused Salamat of attempting to obstruct its investigation after it found that the raw data he claimed to have submitted of the group’s experiments wasn’t in fact the raw data. Since then, Salamat may well have changed his mind to avoid more hassle or in deference to the majority opinion, but I’m still curious if he could have changed his mind because he no longer thought the criticisms to be unfair.

Anyway, Dias is in the news because he’s made some claims in the past about having found room-temperature superconductors. A previous paper was retracted in September 2022, two years after it was published and independent researchers found some problems in the data. He had another paper published in March this year, reporting room-temperature but high-pressure superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. This paper courted controversy because Dias et al. refused to share samples of the material so independent scientists could double-check the team’s claim.

Following the retraction, The New York Times asked Dias what he had to say, and his reply seems to bring back the bus under which principal investigators (PIs) have liked to throw their junior colleagues at signs of trouble in the past:

[He] has maintained that the paper accurately portrays the research findings. However, he said on Tuesday that his collaborators, working in the laboratory of Ashkan Salamat, a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, introduced errors when producing charts of the data using Adobe Illustrator, software not typically used to make scientific charts.

“Any differences in the figure resulting from the use of Adobe Illustrator software were unintentional and not part of any effort to mislead or obstruct the peer review process,” Dr. Dias said in response to questions about the retraction. He acknowledged that the resistance measurements in question were performed at his laboratory in Rochester.

He’s saying that his lab made the measurements at the University of Rochester and sent the data to Salamat’s lab at the University of Nevada, where someone else (or elses) introduced errors using Adobe Illustrator – presumably while visualising the data, but even then Illustrator is a peculiar choice – and these errors caused the resulting plot to resemble one in Dias’s doctoral thesis. Hmm.

The New York Times also reported that after refusing in the past to investigate Dias’s work following allegations of misconduct, the University of Rochester has now launched an investigation “by outside experts”. The university doesn’t plan to release their report of the findings, however.

But even if the “outside experts” conclude that Dias didn’t really err and that, honestly, Salamat’s lab in Las Vegas was able to introduce very specific kinds of errors in what became figure 1(b), Dias must be held accountable for being one of the PIs of the study – a role whose responsibilities arguably include not letting tough situations devolve into finger-pointing.

What’s with superconductors and peer-review?

Throughout the time I’ve been a commissioning editor for science-related articles for news outlets, I’ve always sought and published articles about academic publishing. It’s the part of the scientific enterprise that seems to have been shaped the least by science’s democratic and introspective impulses. It’s also this long and tall wall erected around the field where scientists are labouring, offering ‘visitors’ guided tours for a hefty fee – or, in many cases, for ‘free’ if the scientists are willing to pay the hefty fees instead. Of late, I’ve spent more time thinking about peer-review, the practice of a journal distributing copies of a manuscript it’s considering for publication to independent experts on the same topic, for their technical inputs.

Most of the peer-review that happens today is voluntary: the scientists who do it aren’t paid. You must’ve come across several articles of late about whether peer-review works. It seems to me that it’s far from perfect. Studies (in July 1998, September 1998, and October 2008, e.g.) have shown that peer-reviewers often don’t catch critical problems in papers. In February 2023, a noted scientist said in a conversation that peer-reviewers go into a paper assuming that the data presented therein hasn’t been tampered with. This statement was eye-opening for me because I can’t think of a more important reason to include technical experts in the publishing process than to wean out problems that only technical experts can catch. Anyway, these flaws with the peer-review system aren’t generalisable, per se: many scientists have also told me that their papers benefited from peer-review, especially review that helped them improve their work.

I personally don’t know how ‘much’ peer-review is of the former variety and how much the latter, but it seems safe to state that when manuscripts are written in good faith by competent scientists and sent to the right journal, and the journal treats its peer-reviewers as well as its mandate well, peer-review works. Otherwise, it tends to not work. This heuristic, so to speak, allows for the fact that ‘prestige’ journals like Nature, Science, NEJM, and Cell – which have made a name for themselves by publishing papers that were milestones in their respective fields – have also published and then had to retract many papers that made exciting claims that were subsequently found to be untenable. These journals’ ‘prestige’ is closely related to their taste for sensational results.

All these thoughts were recently brought into focus by the ongoing hoopla, especially on Twitter, about the preprint papers from a South Korean research group claiming the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor in a material called LK-99 (this is the main paper). This work has caught the imagination of users on the platform unlike any other paper about room-temperature superconductivity in recent times. I believe this is because the preprints contain some charts and data that were absent in similar work in the past, and which strongly indicate the presence of a superconducting state at ambient temperature and pressure, and because the preprints include instructions on the material’s synthesis and composition, which means other scientists can produce and check for themselves. Personally, I’m holding the stance advised by Prof. Vijay B. Shenoy of IISc:

Many research groups around the world will attempt to reproduce these results; there are already some rumours that independent scientists have done so. We will have to wait for the results of their studies.

Curiously, the preprints have caught the attention of a not insignificant number of techbros, who, alongside the typically naïve displays of their newfound expertise, have also called for the peer-review system to be abolished because it’s too slow and opaque.

Peer-review has a storied relationship with superconductivity. In the early 2000s, a slew of papers coauthored by the German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, working at a Bell Labs facility in the US, were retracted after independent investigations found that he had fabricated data to support claims that certain organic molecules, called fullerenes, were superconducting. The Guardian wrote in September 2002:

The Schön affair has besmirched the peer review process in physics as never before. Why didn’t the peer review system catch the discrepancies in his work? A referee in a new field doesn’t want to “be the bad guy on the block,” says Dutch physicist Teun Klapwijk, so he generally gives the author the benefit of the doubt. But physicists did become irritated after a while, says Klapwijk, “that Schön’s flurry of papers continued without increased detail, and with the same sloppiness and inconsistencies.”

Some critics hold the journals responsible. The editors of Science and Nature have stoutly defended their review process in interviews with the London Times Higher Education Supplement. Karl Ziemelis, one of Nature’s physical science editors, complained of scapegoating, while Donald Kennedy, who edits Science, asserted that “There is little journals can do about detecting scientific misconduct.”

Maybe not, responds Nobel prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson of Princeton, but the way that Science and Nature compete for cutting-edge work “compromised the review process in this instance.” These two industry-leading publications “decide for themselves what is good science – or good-selling science,” says Anderson (who is also a former Bell Labs director), and their market consciousness “encourages people to push into print with shoddy results.” Such urgency would presumably lead to hasty review practices. Klapwijk, a superconductivity specialist, said that he had raised objections to a Schön paper sent to him for review, but that it was published anyway.

A similar claim by a group at IISc in 2019 generated a lot of excitement then, but today almost no one has any idea what happened to it. It seems reasonable to assume that the findings didn’t pan out in further testing and/or that the peer-review, following the manuscript being submitted to Nature, found problems in the group’s data. Last month, the South Korean group uploaded its papers to the arXiv preprint repository and has presumably submitted them to a journal: for a finding this momentous, that seems like the obvious next step. And the journal is presumably conducting peer-review at this point.

But in both instances (IISc 2019 and today), the claims were also accompanied by independent attempts to replicate the data as well as journalistic articles that assimilated the various public narratives and their social relevance into a cogent whole. One of the first signs that there was a problem with the IISc preprint was another preprint by Brian Skinner, a physicist then with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who found the noise in two graphs plotting the results of two distinct tests to be the same – which is impossible. Independent scientists also told The Wire (where I worked then) that they lacked some information required to make sense of the results as well as expressed concerns with the magnetic susceptibility data.

Peer-review may not be designed to check whether the experiments in question produced the data in question but whether the data in question supports the conclusions. For example, in March this year, Nature published a study led by Ranga P. Dias in which he and his team claimed that nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride becomes a room-temperature superconductor under a pressure of 1,000 atm, considerably lower than the pressure required to produce a superconducting state in other similar materials. After it was published, many independent scientists raised concerns about some data and analytical methods presented in the paper – as well as its failure to specify how the material could be synthesised. These problems, it seems, didn’t prevent the paper from clearing peer-review. Yet on August 3, Martin M. Bauer, a particle physicist at Durham University, published a tweet defending peer-review in the context of the South Korean work thus:

The problem seems to me to be the belief – held by many pro- as well as anti-peer-review actors – that peer-review is the ultimate check capable of filtering out all forms of bad science. It just can’t, and maybe that’s okay. Contrary to what Dr. Bauer has said, and as the example of Dr. Dias’s paper suggests, peer-reviewers won’t attempt to replicate the South Korean study. That task, thanks to the level of detail in the South Korean preprint and the fact that preprints are freely accessible, is already being undertaken by a panoply of labs around the world, both inside and outside universities. So abolishing peer-review won’t be as bad as Dr. Bauer makes it sound. As I said, peer-review is, or ought to be, one of many checks.

It’s also the sole check that a journal undertakes, and maybe that’s the bigger problem. That is, scientific journals may well be a pit of papers of unpredictable quality without peer-review in the picture – but that would only be because journal editors and scientists are separate functional groups, rather than having a group of scientists take direct charge of the publishing process (akin to how arXiv currently operates). In the existing publishing model, peer-review is as important as it is because scientists aren’t involved in any other part of the publishing pipeline.

An alternative model comes to mind, one that closes the gaps of “isn’t designed to check whether the experiments in question produced the data in question” and “the sole check that a journal undertakes”: scientists conduct their experiments, write them up in a manuscript and upload them to a preprint repository; other scientists attempt to replicate the results; if the latter are successful, both groups update the preprint paper and submit that to a journal (with the lion’s share of the credit going to the former group); journal editors have this document peer-reviewed (to check whether the data presented supports the conclusions), edited, and polished[1]; and finally publish it.

Obviously this would require a significant reorganisation of incentives: for one, researchers will need to be able to apportion time and resources to replicate others’ experiments for less than half of the credit. A second problem is that this is a (probably non-novel) reimagination of the publishing workflow that doesn’t consider the business model – the other major problem in academic publishing. Third: I have in my mind only condensed-matter physics; I don’t know much about the challenges to replicating results in, say, genomics, computer science or astrophysics. My point overall is that if journals look like a car crash without peer-review, it’s only because the crashes were a matter of time and that peer-review was doing the bare minimum to keep them from happening. (And Twitter was always a car crash anyway.)

[1] I hope readers won’t underestimate this the importance of editorial and language assistance that a journal can provide. Last month, researchers in Australia, Germany, Nepal, Spain, the UK, and the US had a paper published in which they reported, based on surveys, that “non-native English speakers, especially early in their careers, spend more effort than native English speakers in conducting scientific activities, from reading and writing papers and preparing presentations in English, to disseminating research in multiple languages. Language barriers can also cause them not to attend, or give oral presentations at, international conferences conducted in English.”

The language in the South Korean group’s preprints indicate that its authors’ first language isn’t English. According to Springer, which later became Springer Nature, the publisher of the Nature journals, “Editorial reasons for rejection include … poor language quality such that it cannot be understood by readers”. An undated article on Elsevier’s ‘Author Services’ page has this line: “For Marco [Casola, managing editor of Water Research], poor language can indicate further issues with a paper. ‘Language errors can sometimes ring a bell as a link to quality. If a manuscript is written in poor English the science behind it may not be amazing. This isn’t always the case, but it can be an indication.'”

But instead of palming the responsibility off to scientists, journals have an opportunity to distinguish themselves by helping researchers write better papers.

NYT’s profile of India’s space startup scene

The New York Times published a ‘profile’ of the Indian spaceflight startup scene on July 4. The article is typical in that: a) by virtue of being published by one of the world’s most-read news outlets, it can only be a big boost to the actors in its narrative, in this case a few Indian startups; and b) it takes a superficial outside-in view that flattens complex issues and misses finer points that, to local observers, would change the meanings of some sentences in important ways.

By and large, the article seems like a swing in the opposite direction from that distasteful cartoon in 2014 – even if there is still that note of surprise, and that fixation on ISRO doing things at a lower cost, overlooking that it has not infrequently come at the expense of lower efficiency on many fronts. Then again, the article’s protagonists are the space startups, and I’m sincerely excited about their work.

In this post, I want to point out one issue that I think The New York Times could have fixed before publishing: the word “heavy” has been used in a confusing way in the article even if it’s been used only twice. First (emphasis added):

As ISRO … makes room for new private players, it shares with them a profitable legacy. Its spaceport, on the coastal island of Sriharikota, is near the Equator and suitable for launches into different orbital levels. The government agency’s “workhorse” rocket is one of the world’s most reliable for heavy loads. With a success rate of almost 95 percent, it has halved the cost of insurance for a satellite — making India one of the most competitive launch sites in the world.

In the launch-vehicle sector, the word ‘heavy’ has a specific meaning and can’t be used directly in its colloquial sense. The “workhorse” referred to here is obviously the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which, like the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), is classified as a medium-lift launch vehicle. ‘Medium-lift’ means being able to lift 2-20 tonnes to the low-earth orbit (LEO). This in turn implies that the article’s (first) use of “heavy” means just colloquially heavy. The second use creates the confusion (emphasis added):

It was Elon Musk who stole India’s — and the world’s — thunder on the space business. His company, SpaceX, and its relaunchable rockets brought down the cost of sending heavy objects into orbit so much that India could not compete. Even today, from American spaceports at $6,500 per kilogram, SpaceX’s launches are the cheapest anywhere.

One could think that since both the PSLV and SpaceX’s reusable launch vehicle, Falcon 9, lift “heavy” payloads, they have the same capacity, affirmed by the line that SpaceX stole India’s thunder. This is not true: Falcon 9 (in the Block 5 configuration currently in use) can lift 22.8 tonnes to the LEO and 8.3 tonnes to the higher geostationary transfer orbit; the PSLV can manage only 1.4 tonnes to the latter.

A clarifying quote follows:

“We are more like a cab,” Mr. Chandana [of Skyroot] said. His company charges higher rates for smaller-payload launches, whereas SpaceX “is more like a bus or a train, where they take all their passengers and put them in one destination,” he said.

Given the masses involved, the PSLV was always a “cab” compared to the Falcon 9. In fact, ISRO is currently working on its own reusable launch vehicle with a payload capacity of around 20 tonnes to the LEO and an expected mass-to-orbit cost of $4,000/kg, down from around $20,000 today. This thing, whenever it is ready, will create an actual opportunity for thunder-stealing on either side (it has already been considerably delayed).

There are many other niggles that, as I said, I won’t get into, but I must say that I’m very curious why “pharmaceuticals” has been singled out here, together with “information technology”:

An image of India’s first satellite graced the two-rupee note until 1995. Then for a while India paid less attention to its space ambitions, with young researchers focused on more tangible developments in information technology and pharmaceuticals. Now India is not only the world’s most populous country but also its fastest-growing large economy and a thriving center of innovation.

What is this secret revolution that I’ve missed, a revolution that, by implication, contributed to the country’s economic position today? Perhaps it’s generic drugs – but it pales in comparison to the growth of the IT sector and there has been no indication that it was led by “young researchers”. So, curious…

The identity of scientific papers

This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie’s response to a suggestion in an editorial “first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter” – that scientists should write their scientific papers as if they were telling a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The act of storytelling produces something entertaining by definition, but it isn’t the same as when people build stories around what they know. That is, people build stories around what they know but that knowledge, when it is first produced, isn’t and in fact can’t be reliably produced through acts of storytelling. This is Ritchie’s point, and it’s clearly true. As Ash Jogalekar commented on Twitter on Ritchie’s post

(This is different from saying scientific knowledge shouldn’t be associated with stories – or that only it should be, a preference that philosopher of science Robert P. Crease calls “scientific gaslighting”.)

Ritchie’s objection arises from a problematic recommendation in the 2021 editorial, that when writing their papers, scientists present the “take-home messages” first, then “select” the methods and results that produced those messages, and then conclude with an introduction-discussion hybrid. To Ritchie, scientists don’t face much resistance, as they’re writing their papers, other than their own integrity that keeps them from cherry-picking from their data to support predetermined conclusions. This is perfectly reasonable, especially considering the absence of such resistance manifested in science’s sensational replication crisis.

But are scientific papers congruent with science itself?

The 2021 editorial’s authors don’t do themselves any favours in their piece, writing:

“The scientific story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. These three components can, and should, map onto the typical IMRaD structure. However, as editors we see many manuscripts that follow the IMRaD structure but do not tell a good scientific story, even when the underlying data clearly can provide one. For example, many studies present the findings without any synthesis or an effort to place them into a wider context. This limits the reader’s ability to gain knowledge and understanding, hence reducing the papers impact.”

Encouraging scientists to do such things as build tension and release it with a punchline, say, could be a recipe for disaster. The case of Brian Wansink in fact fits Ritchie’s concerns to a T. In the most common mode of scientific publishing today, narrative control is expected to lie beyond scientists – and (coming from a science journalist) lies with science journalists. Or at least: the opportunities to shape science-related narratives are available in large quantities to us.

A charitable interpretation of the editorial is that its authors would like scientists to take a step that they believe to be marginal (“right there,” as they say) in terms of the papers’ narratives but which has extraordinary benefits – but I’m disinclined. Their words hew frustratingly but unsurprisingly close to suggesting that scientists’ work isn’t properly represented in the public imagination. The most common suggestions I’ve encountered in my experience are that science journalists don’t amplify the “right” points and that they dwell on otherwise trivial shortcomings. The criticisms generally disregard the socio-political context in which science operates and to which journalists are required to be attuned.

This said, and as Ritchie also admits, the scientific paper itself is not science – so why can’t it be repurposed to ends that scientists are better off meeting than one that’s widely misguided? Ritchie writes:

“Science isn’t a story – and it isn’t even a scientific paper. The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words … is itself a distortion of reality. Every time scientists make a decision about “framing” or “emphasis” or “take-home messages”, they risk distorting reality even further, chipping away at the reliability of what they’re reporting. We all know that many science news articles and science books are over-simplified, poorly-framed, and dumbed-down. Why push scientific papers in the same direction?”

That is, are scientific papers the site of knowledge production? With the advent of preprint papers, research preregistration and open-data and data-sharing protocols, many papers of today are radically different from those a decade or two ago. Especially online, and on the pages of more progressive journals like eLife, papers are accompanied by peer-reviewers’ comments, links to the raw data (code as well as multimedia), ways to contact the authors, a comments section, a ready-reference list of cited papers, and links to other articles that have linked to it. Sometimes some papers deemed to be more notable by a journal’s editors are also published together with commentary by an independent scientist on the papers’ implications for the relevant fields.

Scientific papers may have originated as, and for a long time have been, the ‘first expression’ of a research group’s labour to produce knowledge, and thus perfectly subject to Ritchie’s concerns about transforming them to be more engaging. But today, given the opportunities that are available in some pockets of research assessment and publishing, they’re undeniably the sites of knowledge consumption – and in effect the ‘first expression’ of researchers’ attempts to communicate with other scientists as well as, in many cases, the public at large.

It’s then effectively down to science journalists, and the resistance offered by their integrity to report on papers responsibly – although even then we should beware the “seduction of storytelling”.

I think the 2021 editorial is targetting the ‘site of knowledge consumption’ identity of the contemporaneous scientific paper, and offers ways to engage its audience better. But when the point is to improve it, why continue to work with, in Ritchie’s and the editorial’s words, a “journal-imposed word count” and structure?

A halfway point between the editorial’s recommendations and Ritchie’s objections (in his post, but more in line with his other view that we should do away with scientific papers altogether) is to publish the products of scientific labour taking full advantage of what today’s information and communication technologies allow: without a paper per se but a concise description of the methods and the findings, an explicitly labeled commentary by the researchers, the raw code, multimedia elements with tools to analyse them in real-time, replication studies, even honest (and therefore admirable) retraction reports if they’re warranted. The commentary can, in the words of the editorial, have “a beginning, a middle and an end”; and in this milieu, in the company of various other knowledge ‘blobs’, readers – including independent scientists – should be able to tell straightforwardly if the narrative fits the raw data on offer.

All this said, I must add that what I have set out here are far from where reality is at the moment; in Ritchie’s words,

“Although those of us … who’ve been immersed in this stuff for years might think it’s a bit passé to keep going on about “HARKing” and “researcher degrees of freedom” and “p-hacking” and “publication bias” and “publish-or-perish” and all the rest, the word still hasn’t gotten out to many scientists. At best, they’re vaguely aware that these problems can ruin their research, but don’t take them anywhere near seriously enough.”

I don’t think scientific papers are co-identifiable with science itself, or they certainly needn’t be. The latter is concerned with reliably producing knowledge of increasingly higher quality while the former explains what the researchers did, why, when and how. Their goals are different, and there’s no reason the faults of one should hold the other back. However, a research communication effort that has completely and perfectly transitioned to embodying the identity of the modern research paper (an anachronism) as the site of, among other things, knowledge consumption is a long way away – but it helps to bear it in mind, to talk about it and to improve it.