Science – Close Read

What can science education do, and what can it not?

On September 29, 2021, The Third Eye published an interview with Milind Sohoni, a teacher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas and at IIT Bombay. (Thanks to @labhopping for bringing it into my feed.) I found it very thought-provoking. I’m pasting below some excerpts from the interview together with my notes. I think what Prof. Sohoni says doesn’t build up to a coherent whole. He is at times simplistic and self-contradictory, and what he says is often descriptive instead of offering a way out. Of course I don’t know whether what I say builds up to a coherent whole either but perhaps you’ll realise details here that I’ve missed.

… I wish the textbooks had exercises like let’s visit a bus depot, or let’s visit a good farmer and find out what the yields are, or let’s visit the PHC sub-centre, talk to the nurse, talk to the compounder, talk to the two doctors, just getting familiar with the PHC as something which provides a critical health service would have helped a lot. Or spend time with an ASHA worker. She has a notepad with names of people in a village and the diseases they have, which family has what medical emergency. How is it X village has so much diabetes and Y village has none?

I’m sure you’ll agree this would be an excellent way to teach science — together with its social dependencies instead of introducing the latter as an add-on at the level of higher, specialised education.
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… science education is not just about big science, and should not be about big science. But if you look at the main central government departments populated by scientists, they are Space, Atomic Energy and Defence. Okay, so we have missile men and women, big people in science, but really, so much of science in most of the developed world is really sadak, bijli, pani.

I disagree on three counts. (i) Science education should include ‘big science’; if it doesn’t we lose access to a domain of knowledge and enterprise that plays an important role in future-proofing societies. We choose the materials with which we will build buildings, lay roads, and make cars and batteries and from which we will generate electric power based on ‘big science’. (ii) Then again, what is ‘big science’? I’m not clear what Sohoni means by that in this comment. But later in the interview he refers to Big Science as a source of “certainty” (vis-à-vis life today) delivered in the form of “scientific things … which we don’t understand”.

If by “Big Science” he means large scientific experiments that have received investments worth millions of dollars from multiple governments, and which are churning out results that don’t inform or enhance contemporary daily life, his statement seems all the more problematic. If a government invests some money in a Big Science project but then pulls out, it doesn’t necessarily or automatically redirect those funds to a project that a critic has deemed more worthwhile, like say multiple smaller science projects. Government support for Big Science has never operated that way. Further, Big Science frequently and almost by design inevitably leads to a lot of derivative ‘Smaller Science’, spinoff technologies, and advances in allied industries. Irrespective of whether these characteristics — accidental or otherwise — suffice to justify supporting a Big Science project, wanting to expel such science from science education is still reckless.

(iii) Re: “… so much of science in most of the developed world is really streets, electricity, water” — Forget proving/disproving this and ask yourself: how do we separate research in space, atomic energy, and defence from knowledge that gave rise to better roads, cheaper electricity, and cleaner water? We can’t. There is also a specific history that explains why each of these departments Sohoni has singled out were set up the way they were. And just because they are staffed with scientists doesn’t mean they are any good or worth emulating. (I’m also setting aside what Sohoni means by “much”. Time consumed in research? Money spent? Public value generated? Number of lives improved/saved?).

Our science education should definitely include Big Science: following up from the previous quote, teachers can take students to a radio observatory nearby and speak to the scientists about how the project acquired so much land, how it secured its water and power requirements, how administrators negotiated with the locals, etc. Then perhaps we can think about avoiding cases like the INO.
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The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act came along ago, and along with it came a list of 42 [pieces of] equipment, which every municipality should have: a mask, a jetting machine, pumps and so on. Now, even IIT campuses don’t have that equipment. Is there any lab that has a ‘test mask’ even? Our men are going into talks and dying because of [lethal] fumes. A ‘test mask’ is an investment. You need a face-like structure and an artificial lung exposed to various environments to test its efficacy. And this mask needs to be standard equipment in every state. But these are things we never asked IITs to do, right?

This comment strikes a big nail on the head. It also brings to mind an incident on the Anna University campus eight years ago. To quote from Thomas Manuel’s report in The Wire on the incident: “On June 21, 2016, two young men died. Their bodies were found in a tank at the Anna University campus in Chennai. They were employees of a subcontractor who had been hired to seal the tank with rubber to prevent any leakage of air. The tank was being constructed as a part of a project by the Ministry of Renewable Energy to explore the possibilities of using compressed air to store energy. The two workers, Ramesh Shankar and Deepan, had arrived at the site at around 11.30 am and begun work. By 3.30 pm, when they were pulled out of the tank, Deepan was dead and Ramesh Shankar, while still breathing at the time, died a few minutes later.”

This incident seemed, and still seems, to say that even within a university — a place where scientists and students are keenly aware of the rigours of science and the value it brings to society — no one thinks to ensure the people hired for what is casually called “menial” labour are given masks or other safety equipment. The gaps in science education Sohoni is talking about are evident in the way scientists think about how they can ensure society is more rational. A society rife with preventable deaths is not rational.
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I think what science does is that it claims to study reality. But most of reality is socially administered, and so we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science.

No, we don’t. We shouldn’t. Science offers a limited set of methods and analytical techniques with which people can probe and describe reality and organise the knowledge they generate. He’s right, most of reality is socially administered, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to forcibly bring what currently lies beyond science to within the purview of science. The scientific method can’t deal with them — but importantly it shouldn’t be expected to. Science is incapable of handling multiple, equally valid truths pertaining to the same set of facts. In fact a few paras later Sohoni ironically acknowledges that there are truths beyond science and that their existence shouldn’t trouble scientists or science itself:

… scientists have to accept that there are many things that we don’t know, and they still hold true. Scientists work empirically and sometimes we say okay, let’s park it, carry on, and maybe later on we will find out the ‘why’. The ‘why’ or the explanation is very cultural…

… whereas science needs that ‘why’, and needs it to be singular and specific. If these explanations for aspects of reality don’t exist in a form science can accommodate, yet we also insist as Sohoni did when he said “we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science”, then we will be forced to junk these explanations for no fault except that they don’t meet science’s acceptability criteria.

Perhaps there is a tendency here as if to say we need a universal theory of everything, but do we? We can continue to use different human intellectual and social enterprises to understand and take advantage of different parts of human experience. Science and for that matter the social sciences needn’t be, and aren’t, “everything”.
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Science has convinced us, and is delivering on its promise of making us live longer. Whether those extra five years are of higher quality is not under discussion. You know, this is the same as people coming from really nice places in the Konkan to a slum in Mumbai and staying there because they want certainty. Life in rural Maharashtra is very hard. There’s more certainty if I’m a peon or a security guard in the city. I think that science is really offering some ‘certainty’. And that is what we seem to have accepted.

This seems to me to be too simplistic. Sohoni says this in reply to being asked whether science education today leans towards “technologies that are serving Big Business and corporate profits, rather than this developmental model of really looking critically at society”. And he would have been fairer to say we have many more technological devices and products around us today, founded on what were once scientific ideas, that serve corporate profits more than anything else. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul elucidated this idea brilliantly in his book The Technological Society (1964).

It’s just that Sohoni’s example of ageing is off the mark, and in the process it is harder to know what he’s really getting at. Lifespan is calculated as the average number of years an individual in a particular population lives. It can be improved by promoting factors that help our bodies become more resilient and by dissuading factors that cause us to die sooner. If lifespan is increasing today, it’s because fewer babies are succumbing to vaccine-preventable diseases before they turn five, because there are fewer road accidents thanks to vehicle safety, and because novel treatments like immunotherapy are improving the treatment rates of various cancers. Any new scientific knowledge in the prevailing capitalist world-system is susceptible to being coopted by Big Business but I’m also glad the knowledge exists at all.

Sure, we can all live for five more years on average, but if those five years will be spent in, say, the humiliating conditions of palliative care, let’s fix that problem. Sohoni says science has strayed from that path and I’m not so sure — but I’m convinced there’s enough science to go around (and enough money for it, just not the political will): scientists can work on both increasing lifespan and improving the conditions of palliative care. We shouldn’t vilify one kind of science in order to encourage the other. Yet Sohoni persists with this juxtaposition as he says later:

… we are living longer, we are still shitting on the road or, you know, letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death, but we are living longer. And that is, I think, a big problem.

We are still shitting on the road and we are letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death. These are big problems. Us living longer is not a big problem.
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Big Technology has a knack of turning us all into consumers of science, by neutralising questions on ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work. We accept it and we enjoy the benefits. But see, if you know the benefits are divided very unevenly, why doesn’t it bother us? For example, if you buy an Apple iPhone for Rs. 75,000 how much does the actual makers of the phone (factory workers) get? I call it the Buddhufication Crisis: a lot of people are just hooked on to their smartphones, and live in a bubble of manufactured certainty; and the rest of society that can’t access smartphones, is left to deal with real-world problems.

By pushing us to get up, get out, and engage with science where it is practised, a better science education can inculcate a more inquisitive, critical-thinking population that applies the good sense that comes of a good education to more, or all, aspects of society and social living. This is why Big Technology in particular does not tempt us into becoming “consumers” of science rather than encouraging us to pick at its pieces. Practically everything does. Similarly Sohoni’s “Buddhufication” description is muddled. Of course it’s patronising towards the people who create value — especially if it is new and/or takes unexpected forms — out of smartphones and use it as a means of class mobility, and seems to suggest a person striving for any knowledge other than of the scientific variety is being a “buddhu”. And what such “buddhufication” has to do with the working conditions of Apple’s “factory workers” is unclear.
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Speaking of relationships:

Through our Public Health edition, we also seem to sit with the feeling that science is not serving rural areas, not serving the poor. In turn, there is also a lower expectation of science from the rural communities. Do you feel this is true?

Yes, I think that is true to a large extent. But it’s not to do with rural. You see, for example, if you look at western Maharashtra — the Pune-Nashik belt — some of the cleverest people live there. They are basically producing vegetables for the big urban markets: in Satara, Sangli, that entire irrigated area. And in fact, you will see that they are very careful about their future, and understand their place in society and the role of the state. And they expect many things from the state or the government; they want things to work, hospitals to work, have oxygen, etc. And so, it is really about the basic understanding of cause and effect of citizenship. They understand what is needed to make buses work, or hospitals function; they understand how the state works. This is not very different from knowing how gadgets work.

While the distinction to many others may be trivial, “science” and “scientists” are not the same thing. This equation is present throughout the interview. At first I assumed it was casual and harmless but at this point, given the links between science, science education, technology, and public welfare that Sohoni has tried to draw, the distinction is crucial here. Science is already serving rural areas — Sohoni says as much in the comment here and the one that follows. But many, or maybe most, scientists may not be serving rural areas, if only so we can also acknowledge that some scientists are also serving rural areas. “Science is not serving rural areas” would mean no researcher in the country — or anywhere, really — has brought the precepts of science to bear on the problems of rural India. This is just not true. On the other hand saying “most scientists are not serving rural areas” will tell us some useful scientific knowledge exists but (i) too few scientists are working on it (i.e. mindful of the local context) and (ii) there are problems with translating it from the lab bench to its application in the field, at ground zero.

This version of this post benefited from inputs from and feedback by Prathmesh Kher.

A cynical archaeology

From ‘ASI submits Bhojshala survey report to Madhya Pradesh High Court’, The Hindu, July 15, 2024:

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on July 15 submitted its scientific survey report of the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal-Maula mosque complex to the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. … On July 4, the High Court ordered the ASI to present by July 15 the complete report of the nearly three-month-long survey on the premises of the disputed 11th-century monument, the subject of a wrangle between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu community considers Bhojshala as a temple of Vagdevi (Goddess Saraswati), while the Muslim side calls it Kamal Maula mosque. The HC on March 11 ordered the ASI … to conduct a scientific survey of the complex … It then gave six weeks to the ASI to complete the survey. The ASI later sought more time for the report submission. The ASI began surveying the disputed complex on March 22 which ended recently.

Isn’t it cynical of ASI to engage in these exercises? New structures will often be built on old ones. But undertaking a study, then preparing a study is just disingenuous. It is also disingenuous to appeal to science to settle questions that are otherwise devoid of reason. I wish history scholars and scientists spoke up more vociferously on this instead of engaging in this charade. It’s practically why a separate nodal agency of archaeological study and deliberation exists, and not to be a mute provider of ‘archaeological services’ when called upon…

India-based neutrino oblivion

In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by those from IMSc Chennai and TIFR Mumbai conceived of the INO, identified places around India where it could be built, finalised a spot in Theni (in Tamil Nadu), and received Rs 1,350 crore from the Union government for it, only for the project to not progress a significant distance past this point.

Nandita’s article, published in The Hindu on July 14, touches on two reasons the project was stalled: “adverse environmental impacts” and “the fear of radioactivity”. These were certainly important reasons but they’re also symptoms of two deeper causes: distrust of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and some naïvety on the scientists’ part. The article mentions the “adverse environmental impacts” only once while “the fear of radioactivity” receives a longer rebuttal — which is understandable because the former has a longer history and there’s a word limit. It bears repeating, however.

Even before work on the INO neared its beginning, people on the ground in the area were tense over the newly erected PUSHEP hydroelectric project. Environmental activists were on edge because the project was happening under the aegis of the DAE, a department notorious for its opacity and heavy-handed response to opposition. The INO collaboration compounded the distrust when hearings over a writ petition Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Vaiko filed in the Madras high court revealed the final ecological assessment report of the project had been prepared by the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), which as the law required at the time hadn’t been accredited by the Quality Council of India and was thus unfit to draft the report. Members of the INO collaboration said this shouldn’t matter because they had submitted the report themselves together with a ‘detailed project report’ prepared by TANGEDCO and a geotechnical report by the Geological Survey of India. Perhaps the scientists thought SACON was good enough, and it may well have been, but it’s not clear how submitting the report themselves should have warranted a break from the law. Given all the other roadblocks in the project’s way, this trip-up in hindsight seems to have been a major turning point.

Locals in the area around the hill, under which the INO was to be built, were also nervous about losing access to part of their grazing land and to a temple situated nearby. There was a report in 2015 that police personnel had blocked people from celebrating a festival at this temple. In an April 2015 interview with Frontline, when told that local police were also keeping herders from accessing pastureland in the foothills, INO spokesperson Naba Mondal said: “The only land belonging to INO is the 26.825 ha. INO has no interest in and no desire to block the grazing lands outside this area. In fact, these issues were discussed in great detail in a public meeting held in July 2010, clearly telling the local people this. This is recorded in our FAQ. This was also conveyed to them in Tamil.” In response to a subsequent question about “propaganda” that the project site would store nuclear waste from Tamil Nadu’s two nuclear power facilities, Mondal said: “The DAE has already issued a press statement in this regard. I do genuinely believe that this has allayed people’s concerns.”

Even at the time these replies hinted at a naïve belief that these measures would suffice to allay fears in the area about the project. There is a difference between scientists providing assurances that the police will behave and the police actually behaving, especially if the experience of the locals diverges from what members of the INO collaboration believe is the case. Members of the collaboration had promised the locals they wouldn’t lose access to grazing land; four years later, the locals still had trouble taking their word. According to an investigation I published at The Wire in 2016, there was also to be a road that bypassed the local villages and led straight to the project site, sparing villagers the noise from the trucks ferrying construction material. It was never built.

One narrative arising from within the scientific community as the project neared the start of construction was that the INO is good for the country, that it will improve our scientific literacy, keep bright minds from leaving to work on similar projects abroad, and help Indians win prestigious prizes. For the national scientific enterprise itself, the INO would make India a site of experimental physics of global importance and Indian scientists working on it major contributors to the study of neutrino physics. I wrote an article to this effect in The Hindu in 2016 and this is also what Takaaki Kajita said in Nandita’s article. But later that year, I also asked an environmental activist (and a mentor of sorts) what he was thinking. He said the scientists will eventually get what they want but that they, the activists et al., still had to do the responsible thing and protest what they perceived to be missteps. (Most scientists in India don’t get what they want but many do, most recently like the ‘Challakere Science City’.)

Curiously, both these narratives — the activist’s pessimism and the scientists’ naïvety — could have emerged from a common belief: that the INO was preordained, that its construction was fated to be successful, causing one faction to be fastidious and the other to become complacent. Of course it’s too simplistic to be able to explain everything that went wrong, yet it’s also of a piece with the fact that the INO was doomed as much by circumstance as by historical baggage. That work on the INO was stalled by an opposition campaign that included fear-mongering pseudoscience and misinformation is disagreeable. But we also need to ask whether some actors resorted to these courses of action because others had been denied them, in the past if not in the immediate present — or potentially risk the prospects of a different science experiment in future.

Physics is often far removed from the precepts of behavioural science and social justice but public healthcare is closer. There is an important parallel between the scientists’ attempts to garner public support for the project and ASHA workers’ efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to vaccinate people in remote rural areas. These latter people were distrustful of the public healthcare system: it had neglected them for several years but then it was suddenly on their doorstep, expecting them to take a supposedly miraculous drug that would cut their chances of dying of the viral disease. ASHA workers changed these people’s minds by visiting them again and again, going door to door, and enrolling members of the same community to convince people they were safe. Their efficacy is higher if they are from the same community themselves because they can strike up conversations with people that draw on shared experiences. Compare this with the INO collaboration’s belief that a press release from the DAE had changed people’s minds about the project.

Today the INO stares at a bleak future rendered more uncertain by a near-complete lack of political support.

This post benefited from Thomas Manuel’s feedback.

The problem with a new, rapid way to recycle textiles

Researchers from the University of Delaware have developed a chemical reaction that can break polyester in clothing down to a simpler compound that can be used to make more clothes. The reaction also spares cotton and nylon, allowing them to be recovered separately from clothing that uses a mix of fibres. Most of all, given sufficient resources, the reaction reportedly takes only 15 minutes from start to finish, which the researchers have touted as a significant achievement because I believe the prevailing duration for other chemical material-recovery processes in the textile industry is in the order of days, and have said they hope to be able to bring it down to a matter of seconds.

The team’s paper and its coverage in the popular press also advance the narrative that the finding could be a boon for the textile industry’s monumental waste problem, especially in economically developing and developed regions. This is obviously the textile industry’s analogue of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, whereby certain technical machinations remove carbon out of the atmosphere and other natural reservoirs and sequester it in human-made matrices for decades or even centuries. The problem with CCS is also the problem with the chemical recycling process described in the new study: unless the state institutes policies and helps effect cultural changes in parallel that discourage consumption, encourage reuse, and lower emissions, removing contaminants from the environment will only create the impression that there is now more room to pollute, so the total effective carbon pollution will increase. This is not unlike trying to reduce motor vehicle traffic by building more roads: cities simply acquire more vehicles with which to fill the newly available motorway space.

All this said, however, there is one more thing to be concerned about vis-à-vis the 15-minute chemical recovery technique. In their paper, the researchers described a “techno-economic assessment” they undertook to understand the “economic feasibility” of their proposed solution to the textile waste problem. Their analysis flowchart is shown below, based on a “textile feed throughput of 500 kg/hour”. A separate table (available here) specifies the estimated market value of textile components — polyester, nylon, cotton, and 4,4′-methylenedianiline (MDA) — after they have been recovered from the 15-minute reaction’s output and processed a bit. They found their process is more economically feasible, achieving a profitability index of 1.29 where 1 is the breakeven point, when the resulting product sales amount to $148.7 million. I don’t know where the latter figure comes from; if it doesn’t have a sound basis and is arbitrary, the ‘1.29’ figure would be arbitrary too. The same goes for their ‘low sales’ scenario in which the profitability index is 0.95 if sales amount to $85.3 million.

Source: DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado6827

Importantly, all these numbers presume demand for recycled clothes, which I assume is far more limited (based on my experiences in India) than the demand for new clothes. In fact the researchers’ paper begins by blaming fast fashion for the “rising demand for textiles and [their] shorter life span compared to a generation ago”. Fast fashion is a volume business predicated among other things on lower costs. (Did you hear about the mountain of clothes that went up in flames in the middle of the Atacama desert in 2022 because it was cheaper to let them go that way?) Should fast-fashion’s practices be accounted for in the techno-economic assessment, I doubt its numbers would still stand. They certainly won’t if implemented in the poorer countries to which richer ones have been exporting both textile manufacturing and disposal. Second, the profitability indices presume continuing, if not increasing, demand for new clothes, which is of course deeply problematic: demand untethered from their socio-economic consequences is what landed us in the present soup. That it should stay this way or further increase in order to sustain a process that “holds the potential to achieve a global textile circularity rate of 88%” is a precarious proposition because it risks erecting demand as the raison d’être of sustainability.

Finally, militating against solutions like CCS and this chemical recovery technique because they aren’t going to be implemented within the right policy and socio-cultural frameworks is reasonable even if the underlying technologies have matured completely (they haven’t in this case but let’s set that aside). On the flip side, we need to push governments to design and implement the frameworks asap rather than delay or deny the use of these technologies altogether. The pressures of climate change have shortened deadlines and incentivised speed. Yet business people and industrialists have imported far too many such solutions into India, where their purported benefits have seldom come to fruition — especially in their intended form — even as they have had toxic consequences for the people depending on these industries for their livelihoods, for the people living around these facilities, and, importantly, for people involved in parts of the value chain that come into view only when we account for externalised costs. A few illustrative examples are sewage treatment plants, nuclear reactors, hazardous waste management, and various ore-refining techniques.

In all, making the climate transition at the expense of climate justice is a fundamentally stupid strategy.

Featured image: People sort through hundreds of tonnes of clothing in an abandoned factory in Phnom Penh, November 22, 2020. Credit: Francois Le Nguyen/Unsplash.

Clocks on the cusp of a nuclear age

You need three things to build a clock: an energy source, a resonator, and a counter. In an analog wrist watch, for example, a small battery is the energy source that sends a small electric signal to a quartz crystal, which, in response, oscillates at a specific frequency (piezoelectric effect). If the amount of energy in each signal is enough to cause the crystal to oscillate at its resonant frequency, the crystal becomes the resonator. The counter tracks the crystal’s oscillation and converts it to seconds using predetermined rules.

Notice how the clock’s proper function depends on the relationship between the battery and the quartz crystal and the crystal’s response. The signals from the battery have to have the right amount of energy to excite the crystal to its resonant frequency and the crystal’s oscillation in response has to happen at a fixed frequency as long as it receives those signals. To make better clocks, physicists have been able to fine-tune these two parameters to an extreme degree.

Today, as a result, we have clocks that don’t lose more than one second of time every 30 billion years. These are the optical atomic clocks: the energy source is a laser, the resonator is an atom, and the counter is a particle detector.

An atomic clock’s identity depends on its resonator. For example, many of the world’s countries use caesium atomic clocks to define their respective national “frequency standards”. (One such clock at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi maintains Indian Standard Time.) A laser imparts a precise amount of energy to excite a caesium-133 atom to a particular higher energy state. The atom soon after drops from this state to its lower ground state by emitting light of frequency exactly 9,192,631,770 Hz. When a particle detector receives this light and counts out 9,192,631,770 waves, it will report one second has passed.

Caesium atomic clocks are highly stable, losing no more than a second in 20 million years. In fact, scientists used to define a second in terms of the time Earth took to orbit the Sun once; they switched to the caesium atomic clock because “it was more stable than Earth’s orbit” (source).

But there is also room for improvement. The higher the frequency of the emitted radiation, the more stable an atomic clock will be. The emission of a caesium atomic clock has a frequency of 9.19 GHz whereas that in a strontium clock is 429.22 THz and in a ytterbium-ion clock is 642.12 THz — in both cases five orders of magnitude higher. (9.19 GHz is in the microwave frequency range whereas the other two are in the optical range, thus the name “optical” atomic clock.)

Optical atomic clocks also have a narrower linewidth, which is the range of frequencies that can prompt the atom to jump to the higher energy level: the narrower the linewidth, the more precisely the jump can be orchestrated. So physicists today are trying to build and perfect the next generation of atomic clocks with these resonators. Some researchers have said they could replace the caesium frequency standard later this decade.

But yet other physicists have also already developed an idea to build the subsequent generation of clocks, which are expected to be at least 10-times more accurate than optical atomic clocks. Enter: the nuclear clock.

When an atom, like that of caesium, jumps between two energy states, the particles gaining and losing the energy are the atom’s electrons. These electrons are arranged in energy shells surrounding the nucleus and interact with the external environment. For a September 2020 article in The Wire Science, IISER Pune associate professor and a member of a team building India’s first strontium atomic clock Umakant Rapol said the resonator needs to be “immune to stray magnetic fields, electric fields, the temperature of the background, etc.” Optical atomic clocks achieve this by, say, isolating the resonator atoms within oscillating electric fields. A nuclear clock offers to get rid of this problem by using an atom’s nucleus as the resonator instead.

Unlike electrons, the nucleus of an atom is safely ensconced further in, where it is also quite small, making up only around 0.01% of the atom’s volume. The trick here is to find an atomic nucleus that’s stable and whose resonant frequency is accessible with a laser.

In 1976, physicists studying the decay of uranium-233 nuclei reported some properties of the thorium-229 nucleus, including estimating that the lowest higher-energy level to which it could jump required less than 100 eV of energy. Another study in 1990 estimated the requirement to be under 10 eV. In 1994, two physicists estimated it to be around 3.5 eV. The higher energy state of a nucleus is called its isomer and is denoted with the suffix ‘m’. For example, the isomer of the thorium-229 nucleus is denoted thorium-229m.

After a 2005 study further refined the energy requirement to 5.5 eV, a 2007 study provided a major breakthrough. With help from state-of-the-art instruments at NASA, researchers in the US worked out the thorium-229 to thorium-229m jump required 7.6 eV. This was significant. Energy is related to frequency by the Planck equation: E = hf, where h is Planck’s constant. To deliver 3.5 eV of energy, then, a laser would have to operate in the optical or near-ultraviolet range. But if the demand was 7.6 eV, the laser would have to operate in the vacuum ultraviolet range.

Further refinement by more researchers followed but they were limited by one issue: since they still didn’t have a sufficiently precise value of the isomeric energy, they couldn’t use lasers to excite the thorium-229 nucleus and find out. Instead, they examined thorium-229m nuclei formed by the decay of other elements. So when on April 29 this year a team of researchers from Germany and Austria finally reported using a laser to excite thorium-229 nuclei to the thorium-229m state, their findings sent frissons of excitement through the community of clock-makers.

The researchers’ setup had two parts. In the first, they drew inspiration from an idea a different group had proposed in 2010: to study thorium-229 by placing these atoms inside a larger crystal. The European group grew two calcium fluoride (CaF2) crystals in the lab doped heavily with thorium-229 atoms, with different doping concentrations. In a study published a year earlier, different researchers had reported observing for the first time thorium-229m decaying back to its ground state while within calcium fluoride and magnesium fluoride (MgF2) crystals. Ahead of the test, the European team cooled the crystals to under -93º C in a vacuum.

In the second part, the researchers built a laser with output in the vacuum ultraviolet range, corresponding to a wavelength of around 148 nm, for which off-the-shelf options don’t exist at the moment. They achieved the output instead by remixing the outputs of multiple lasers.

The researchers conducted 20 experiments: in each one, they increased the laser’s wavelength from 148.2 nm to 150.3 nm in 50 equally spaced steps. They also maintained a control crystal doped with thorium-232 atoms. Based on these attempts, they reported their laser elicited a distinct emission from the two test crystals when the laser’s wavelength was 148.3821 nm. The same wavelength when aimed at the CaF2 crystal doped with thorium-232 didn’t elicit an emission. This in turn implied an isomeric transition energy requirement of 8.35574 eV. The researchers also worked out based on these details that a thorium-229m nucleus would have a half-life of around 29 minutes in vacuum — meaning it is quite stable.

Physicists finally had their long-sought prize: the information required to build a nuclear clock by taking advantage of the thorium-229m isomer. In this setup, then, the energy source could be a laser of wavelength 148.3821 nm; the resonator could be thorium-229 atoms; and the counter could look out for emissions of frequency 2,020 THz (plugging 8.355 eV into the Planck equation).

Other researchers have already started building on this work as part of the necessary refinement process and have generated useful insights as well. For example, on July 2, University of California, Los Angeles, researchers reported the results of a similar experiment using lithium strontium hexafluoroaluminate (LiSrAlF6) crystals, including a more precise estimate of the isomeric energy gap: 8.355733 eV.

About a week earlier, on June 26, a team from Austria, Germany, and the US reported using a frequency comb to link the frequency of emissions from thorium-229 nuclei to that from a strontium resonator in an optical atomic clock at the University of Colorado. A frequency comb is a laser whose output is in multiple, evenly spaced frequencies. It works like a gear that translates the higher frequency output of a laser to a lower frequency, just like the lasers in a nuclear and an optical atomic clock. Linking the clocks up in this way allows physicists to understand properties of the thorium clock in terms of the better-understood properties of the strontium clock.

Atomic clocks moving into the era of nuclear resonators isn’t just one more step up on the Himalayan mountain of precision timekeeping. Because nuclear clocks depend on how well we’re able to exploit the properties of atomic nuclei, they also create a powerful incentive and valuable opportunities to probe nuclear properties.

In a 2006 paper, a physicist named VV Flambaum suggested that if the values of the fine structure constant and/or the strong interaction parameter change even a little, their effects on the thorium-229 isomeric transition would be very pronounced. The fine structure constant is a fundamental constant that specifies the strength of the electromagnetic force between charged particles. The strong interaction parameter specifies this vis-à-vis the strong nuclear force, the strongest force in nature and the thing that holds protons and neutrons together in a nucleus.

Probing the ‘stability’ of these numbers in this way opens the door to new kinds of experiments to answer open questions in particle physics — helped along by physicists’ pursuit of a new nuclear frequency standard.

Featured image: A view of an ytterbium atomic clock at the US NIST, October 16, 2014. Credit: N. Phillips/NIST.

Buildings affect winds

A 2022 trip to Dubai made me wonder how much research there was on the effects cities, especially those that are rapidly urbanising as well as are building taller, wider structures more closely packed together, had on the winds that passed through them. I found only a few studies then. One said the world’s average wind speed had been increasing since 2010, but its analysis was concerned with the output of wind turbines, not the consequences within urban settlements. Another had considered reducing wind speed within cities as a result of the Venturi effect by planting more trees. I also found a The New York Times article from 1983 about taller skyscrapers directing high winds downwards, to the streets. That was largely it. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.

On June 11, researchers in China published a paper in the Journal of Advances in Modelling Earth Systems in which they reported findings based on a wind speed model they’d built for Shanghai city. According to the paper, Shanghai’s built-up area could slow wind speed by as much as 50%. However, they added, the urban heat-island effect could enhance “the turbulent exchange in the vertical direction of the urban area, and the upper atmospheric momentum is transported down to the surface, increasing the urban surface wind speed”. If the heat-island effect was sufficiently pronounced, then, the wind may not slow at all. I imagine the finding will be useful for people considering the ability of winds to transport pollutants to and disperse them in different areas. I’m also interested in what the model shows for Delhi (which can be hotter), Mumbai (wetter), and Chennai (fewer tall buildings). The relationship between heat-islands and the wind energy is also curious because city parts that are windier are also less warm.

But overall, even if the population density within skyscrapers may be lower than in non-skycraping buildings and tenements, allowing them to built closer together, as is normal in cities like Dubai, where these buildings are almost all located in a “business district” or a “financial district”, could also make it harder for the wind to ventilate these spaces.

You’re allowed to be interested in particle physics

This page appeared in The Hindu’s e-paper today.

I wrote the lead article, about why scientists are so interested in an elementary particle called the top quark. Long story short: the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle, and because all elementary particles get their masses by interacting with Higgs bosons, the top quark’s interaction is the strongest. This has piqued physicists’ interest because the Higgs boson’s own mass is peculiar: it’s more than expected and at the same time poised on the brink of a threshold beyond which our universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. To explain this brinkmanship, physicists are intently studying the top quark, including measuring its mass with more and more precision.

It’s all so fascinating. But I’m well aware that not many people are interested in this stuff. I wish they were and my reasons follow.

There exists a sufficiently healthy journalism of particle physics today. Most of it happens in Europe and the US, (i) where famous particle physics experiments are located, (ii) where there already exists an industry of good-quality science journalism, and (iii) where there are countries and/or governments that actually have the human resources, funds, and political will to fund the experiments (in many other places, including India, these resources don’t exist, rendering the matter of people contending with these experiments moot).

In this post, I’m using particle physics as itself as well as as a surrogate for other reputedly esoteric fields of study.

This journalism can be divided into three broad types: those with people, those concerned with spin-offs, and those without people. ‘Those with people’ refers to narratives about the theoretical and experimental physicists, engineers, allied staff, and administrators who support work on particle physics, their needs, challenges, and aspirations.

The meaning of ‘those concerned with spin-offs’ is obvious: these articles attempt to justify the money governments spend on particle physics projects by appealing to the technologies scientists develop in the course of particle-physics work. I’ve always found these to be apologist narratives erecting a bad expectation: that we shouldn’t undertake these projects if they don’t also produce valuable spin-off technologies. I suspect most particle physics experiments don’t because they are much smaller than the behemoth Large Hadron Collider and its ilk, which require more innovation across diverse fields.

‘Those without people’ are the rarest of the lot — narratives that focus on some finding or discussion in the particle physics community that is relatively unconcerned with the human experience of the natural universe (setting aside the philosophical point that the non-human details are being recounted by human narrators). These stories are about the material constituents of reality as we know it.

When I say I wish more people were interested in particle physics today, I wish they were interested in all these narratives, yet more so in narratives that aren’t centred on people.

Now, why should they be concerned? This is a difficult question to answer.

I’m concerned because I’m fascinated with the things around us we don’t fully understand but are trying to. It’s a way of exploring the unknown, of going on an adventure. There are many, many things in this world that people can be curious about. It’s possible there are more such things than there are people (again, setting aside the philosophical bases of these claims). But particle physics and some other areas — united by the extent to which they are written off as being esoteric — suffer from more than not having their fair share of patrons in the general (non-academic) population. Many people actively shun them, lose focus when reading about them, and at the same time do little to muster focus back. It has even become okay for them to say they understood nothing of some (well-articulated) article and not expect to have their statement judged adversely.

I understand why narratives with people in them are easier to understand, to connect with, but none of the implicated psychological, biological, and anthropological mechanisms also encourage us to reject narratives and experiences without people. In other words, there may have been evolutionary advantages to finding out about other people but there have been no disadvantages attached to engaging with stories that aren’t about other people.

Next, I have met more than my fair share of people that flinched away from the suggestion of mathematics or physics, even when someone offered to guide them through understanding these topics. I’m also aware researchers have documented this tendency and are attempting to distil insights that could help improve the teaching and the communication of these subjects. Personally I don’t know how to deal with these people because I don’t know the shape of the barrier in their minds I need to surmount. I may be trying to vault over a high wall by simplifying a concept to its barest features when in fact the barrier is a low-walled labyrinth.

Third and last, let me do unto this post what I’m asking of people everywhere, and look past the people: why should we be interested in particle physics? It has nothing to offer for our day-to-day experiences. Its findings can seem totally self-absorbed, supporting researchers and their careers, helping them win famous but otherwise generally unattainable awards, and sustaining discoveries into which political leaders and government officials occasionally dip their beaks to claim labels like “scientific superpower”. But the mistake here is not the existence of particle physics itself so much as the people-centric lens through which we insist it must be seen. It’s not that we should be interested in particle physics; it’s that we can.

Particle physics exists because some people are interested in it. If you are unhappy that our government spends too much on it, let’s talk about our national R&D expenditure priorities and what the practice, and practitioners, of particle physics can do to support other research pursuits and give back to various constituencies. The pursuit of one’s interests can’t be the problem (within reasonable limits, of course).

More importantly, being interested in particle physics and in fact many other branches of science shouldn’t have to be justified at every turn for three reasons: reality isn’t restricted to people, people are shaped by their realities, and our destiny as humans. On the first two counts: when we choose to restrict ourselves to our lives and our welfare, we also choose to never learn about what, say, gravitational waves, dark matter, and nucleosynthesis are (unless these terms turn up in an exam we need to pass). Yet all these things played a part in bringing about the existence of Earth and its suitability for particular forms of life, and among people particular ways of life.

The rocks and metals that gave rise to waves of human civilisation were created in the bellies of stars. We needed to know our own star as well as we do — which still isn’t much — to help build machines that can use its energy to supply electric power. Countries and cultures that support the education and employment of people who made it a point to learn the underlying science thus come out on top. Knowing different things is a way to future-proof ourselves.

Further, climate change is evidence humans are a planetary species, and soon it will be interplanetary. Our own migrations will force us to understand, eventually intuitively, the peculiarities of gravity, the vagaries of space, and (what is today called) mathematical physics. But even before such compulsions arise, it remains what we know is what we needn’t be afraid of, or at least know how to be afraid of. 😀

Just as well, learning, knowing, and understanding the physical universe is the foundation we need to imagine (or reimagine) futures better than the ones ordained for us by our myopic leaders. In this context, I recommend Shreya Dasgupta’s ‘Imagined Tomorrow’ podcast series, where she considers hypothetical future Indias in which medicines are tailor-made for individuals, where antibiotics don’t exist because they’re not required, where clean air is only available to breathe inside city-sized domes, and where courtrooms use AI — and the paths we can take to get there.

Similarly, with particle physics in mind, we could also consider cheap access to quantum computers, lasers that remove infections from flesh and tumours from tissue in a jiffy, and communications satellites that reduce bandwidth costs so much that we can take virtual education, telemedicine, and remote surgeries for granted. I’m not talking about these technologies as spin-offs, to be clear; I mean technologies born of our knowledge of particle (and other) physics.

At the biggest scale, of course, understanding the way nature works is how we can understand the ways in which the universe’s physical reality can or can’t affect us, in turn leading the way to understanding ourselves better and helping us shape more meaningful aspirations for our species. The more well-informed any decision is, the more rational it will be. Granted, the rationality of most of our decisions is currently only tenuously informed by particle physics, but consider if the inverse could be true: what decisions are we not making as well as we could if we cast our epistemic nets wider, including physics, biology, mathematics, etc.?

Consider, even beyond all this, the awe astronauts who have gone to Earth orbit and beyond have reported experiencing when they first saw our planet from space, and the immeasurable loneliness surrounding it. There are problems with pronouncements that we should be united in all our efforts on Earth because, from space, we are all we have (especially when the country to which most of these astronauts belong condones a genocide). Fortunately, that awe is not the preserve of spacefaring astronauts. The moment we understood the laws of physics and the elementary constituents of our universe, we (at least the atheists among us) may have realised there is no centre of the universe. In fact, there is everything except a centre. How grateful I am for that. For added measure, awe is also good for the mind.

It might seem like a terrible cliché to quote Oscar Wilde here — “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” — but it’s a cliché precisely because we have often wanted to be able to dream, to have the simple act of such dreaming contain all the profundity we know we squander when we live petty, uncurious lives. Then again, space is not simply an escape from the traps of human foibles. Explorations of the great unknown that includes the cosmos, the subatomic realm, quantum phenomena, dark energy, and so on are part of our destiny because they are the least like us. They show us what else is out there, and thus what else is possible.

If you’re not interested in particle physics, that’s fine. But remember that you can be.

Featured image: An example of simulated data as might be observed at a particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider. Here, following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced that decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. Caption and credit: Lucas Taylor/CERN, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The pitfalls of Somanath calling Aditya L1 a “protector”

In a WhatsApp group of which I’m a part, there’s a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled ‘Sun’s Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A Watchful Space Protector’. The article was published after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) published images of the Sun the Aditya L1 spacecraft (including its coronagraph) captured during the May solar storm. The article also features quotes by ISRO chairman S. Somanath — and some of them in particular prompted the discussion. For example, he says:

“Aditya L1 captured when the Sun got angry this May. If it gets furious in the near future, as scientists suggest, India’s 24x7X365 days’ eye on the Sun is going to provide a forewarning. After all, we have to protect the 50-plus Indian satellites in space that have cost the country an estimated more than ₹ 50,000 crore. Aditya L1 is a celestial protector for our space assets.”

A space scientist on the group pointed out that any solar event that could fry satellites in Earth orbit would also fry Aditya L1, which is stationed at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (1.5 million km from Earth in the direction of the Sun), so it doesn’t make sense to describe this spacecraft as a “protector” of India’s “space assets”. Instead, the scientist said, we’re better off describing Aditya L1 as a science mission, which is what it’d been billed as.

Another space scientist in the same group contended that the coronagraph onboard Aditya L1, plus its other instruments, still give the spacecraft a not insignificant early-warning ability, using which ISRO could consider protective measures. He also said not all solar storms are likely to fry all satellites around Earth, only the very powerful ones; likewise, not all satellites around Earth are equally engineered to withstand solar radiation that is more intense than usual, to varying extents. With these variables in mind, he added, Aditya L1 — which is protected to a greater degree — could give ISRO folks enough head start to manoeuvre ‘weaker’ satellites out of harm’s way or prevent catastrophic failures. By virtue of being ISRO’s eyes on the Sun, then, he suggested Aditya L1 was a scientific mission that could also perform some, but not all, of the functions expected of a full-blown early warning system.

(For such a system vis-a-vis solar weather, he said the fourth or the fifth Earth-Sun Lagrange points would have been better stations.)

I’m putting this down here as a public service message. Characterising a scientific mission — which is driven by scientists’ questions, rather than ISRO’s perception of threats or as part of any overarching strategy of the Indian government — as something else is not harmless because it downplays the fact that we have open questions and that we need to spend time and money answering them. It also creates a false narrative about the mission’s purpose that the people who have spent years designing and building the instruments onboard Aditya L1 don’t deserve, and a false impression of how much room the Indian space programme currently has to launch and operate spacecraft that are dedicated to providing early warnings of bad solar weather.

To be fair, the NDTV article says in a few places that Aditya L1 is a scientific mission, as does astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury in the last paragraph. It’s just not clear why Somanath characterised it as a “protector” and as a “space-based insurance policy”. NDTV also erred by putting “protector” in the headline (based on my experiences at The Wire and The Hindu, most readers of online articles read and share nothing more than the headline). That it was the ISRO chairman who said these things is more harmful: as the person heading India’s nodal space research body, he has a protagonist’s role in making room in the public imagination for the importance and wonders of scientific missions.

The BHU Covaxin study and ICMR bait

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

India can do it!

Against the background of the H5N1 pandemic in birds and an epidemic among cattle in the US, the Government of Victoria, in Australia, published a statement on May 21 that the province had recorded the country’s first human H5N1 case. This doesn’t seem to be much cause (but also not negligible cause) for concern because, according to the statement as well as other experts, this strain of avian influenza hasn’t evolved to spread easily between people. The individual in question who had the infection — “a child”, according to Victoria’s statement — had a severe form of it but has since recovered fully as well.

But this story isn’t testament to Australia’s pathogen surveillance, at least not primarily; it’s testament to India’s ability to do it. In Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War — purportedly about the efforts of Bharat Biotech, the ICMR, and the NIV to develop Covaxin during the COVID-19 pandemic — Raima Sen, who plays the science editor of a fictitious publication called The Daily Wire, says about developing the vaccine in a moment of amusing cringe on a TV news show that “India can’t do it”. Agnihotri didn’t make it difficult to see myself in Sen’s character: I was science editor of the very real publication The Wire when Covaxin was being developed. And I’m here to tell you that India, in point of fact, can: according to Victoria’s statement, the child became infected by a strain of the H5N1 virus in India and fell ill in March 2024.

And what is it that India can do? According to Victoria’s statement, spotting the infection required “Victoria’s enhanced surveillance system”. Further, “most strains don’t infect humans”; India was able to serve the child with one of the rare strains that could. “Transmission to humans” is also “very rare”, happening largely among people who “have contact with infected birds or animals, or their secretions, while in affected areas of the world”. Specifically: “Avian influenza is spread by close contact with an infected bird (dead or alive), e.g. handling infected birds, touching droppings or bedding, or killing/preparing infected poultry for cooking. You can’t catch avian influenza through eating fully cooked poultry or eggs, even in areas with an outbreak of avian influenza.”

So let’s learn our lesson: If we give India’s widespread dysregulation of poultry and cattle health, underinvestment in pathogen surveillance, and its national government’s unique blend of optimism and wilful ignorance a chance, the country will give someone somewhere a rare strain of an avian influenza virus that can infect humans. Repeat after me: India can do it!