Tag: Occam’s razor

Questions we should be asking more often

1. Okay, but where’s the money coming from?

In a lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, where I was in the audience as a student, P. Sainath told us that if we needed one rule following which we’d be able to produce good stories, it’s “follow the money”. It’s remarkable how often this suggestion has been borne out (in the right contexts, of course) – and it’s even more remarkable how many people don’t follow it. Asking where the money is coming from also serves to enlighten people about why journalism works the way it does. I’m often asked by aspiring science journalists why a journalistic magazine devoted to, say, astronomy, physics or genomics doesn’t exist in India. I’ve always had the same answer: tell me how you’re going to make money (as in profits, not just revenues).

2. Okay, but what’s the power source?

The next time you receive a WhatsApp forward about a newfangled device that can do remarkable things, ask yourself where it could be getting its power – especially the requisite amount of electric power. Very few claims of amazing feats survive this check, especially as they pertain to very small objects like chips or transmitters being embedded in things and beaming signals to satellites. Depending on the medium through which they’re transmitting – air, soil, water, stone, etc. – and the distance to which they need to transmit, you can get a fair idea of the device’s power needs, and then set about figuring where the power is coming from. This question is analogous to ‘follow the money’; the currency here is energy.

3. Okay, but who’s behind the camera?

We seldom stop to think about the person behind the camera, especially if the picture is striking in some way. This goes for photos and videos about terrifying events like natural disasters, objects deep underwater and strange things in space. Pictures purporting to show something amazing but are actually fake are often taken from impossible vantage points, with a resolution that should be impossible to achieve with the device in use, with an impossible spatial scale, at locations that should have been impossible to reach at that time or by a cameraperson whose presence at the scene defies explanation. At other times, the photos appear as if they could only have been captured by specific people, and that in turn may impose some limitations on their public availability. For example, images captured by fighter-jet pilots shouldn’t be easily available – while those captured by policemen during riots could have been planted.

4. Okay, but who said so?

Ad hominem makes for bad arguments – but it’s very useful in fact-checking. It’s important who makes a certain claim so you can check their expertise and if they’re qualified to make the statement they did. If you’re looking for problems with Darwin’s theory of evolution, listen to an evolutionary biologist, not a geologist – not even if they’re a Nobel-Prize-winner. Asking for the source also helps push back on ‘data supremacy’, the tendency to defer to data just because it’s data and without checking for its provenance or quality, and on a general laziness to ascertain that a claim has been traced to its first-hand source, instead of feeding off of second-hand, third-hand, etc. sources.

5. Okay, but how many things had to fall in place?

The idea of the Occam’s razor has captured the imagination of many a rookie analyst, so much so that some of them over-apply its prescriptions to draw reductive conclusions. In their view, only the likeliest event happens all the time; when something unlikely happens, they smell something rotten – like conspiracy theorists do with the novel coronavirus. However, the mathematics of probability allows unlikely events to happen more often than you think, often because they were only seemingly unlikely to begin with. For example, the novel coronavirus was quietly evolving through other ‘forms’ in the wild before it became the strain adapted to infecting humans – the most widespread animal species on the planet. Even now, there may be other strains circulating in the wild, but we remain fixated on the one infecting us.

Anil Ananthaswamy in conversation with Anita Nair

I attended an event at the Bangalore International Centre yesterday, Anita Nair in conversation with Anil Ananthaswamy about narrative non-fiction. Anil spoke for 45-55 minutes about what it was like to write his first book, The Edge of Physics (2010), and the different kinds of decisions he had to make as the narrator to keep the book interesting and engaging. Then Anita and Anil had a conversation for 30 minutes about the challenges of constructing narratives in fiction and non-fiction, followed by a short Q&A.

I quite enjoyed the evening because, though it was the third or maybe fourth time I have heard Anil speak about his books, the highlight every time has been the questions people have asked about them and his answers. This occasion was no different; in fact, Anita – who is an accomplished writer of fiction (whose books have been translated into 31 languages, as I and others in the audience discovered yesterday) – was particularly engaging. She was able to focus on the differences and the overlaps between the two kinds of exercises that I personally found illuminating.

The following are some of my notes from their conversation, together with my takes:

§ When Anita asked Anil how he chooses what to write, he said his decisions are almost always driven by curiosity. I thought that is a wonderful place to be in if you are a non-fiction writer: to have the liberty to pursue the stories that interest you, beyond considerations of marketability and the economics of feature-publishing. Anil has been a science journalist for two decades and there is little surprise as to how he got to this place. Nonetheless, his comment merits thinking about how writers and journalists balance the pull of their curiosity with the push(back) of the more pragmatic aspects of their vocation.

§ A quote about science writing from Tim Bradford, former science editor of The Guardian, that Anil recalled: “Never overestimate what the reader knows, never underestimate the reader’s intelligence”. In other words, the difference between you and your readers is simply the amount of information; if presented right, they likely possess the cognitive and intellectual faculties to process it.

§ Anil mentioned (in response to an audience-member’s question, I think) that all three of his books are geared towards making the reader understand what the major unanswered questions (in the respective fields: cosmology, neuroscience, quantum mechanics) are and aren’t concerned with providing a resolution at the end. He had already mentioned towards the close of his talk that he is principally concerned with the bigger picture and getting a grip on where we all come from, etc., but I have never asked him if he consciously set out to write books like this or if the books simply reflect his own curiosity-driven pursuit to understand our universe, so to speak.

Edit: I asked him over email and he said, “I think it’s more a reflection of my own pursuit – the topics that interest me seem to be those for which we are at the cusp of some understanding.”

§ Through Two Doors At Once, Anil’s third book, tracks how our understanding of quantum mechanics evolved by examining multiple iterations of a single experiment created over 200 years ago. Late last year, I prepared to excerpt a few pages from the book for The Wire Science when I realised that this was harder to do the farther I got away from the first chapter (final excerpt here). This was because of the book’s extremely linear narrative; the superlative is warranted because each chapter builds on concepts carefully erected in the previous one, so it would have been nearly impossible for you to start the book from the tenth chapter and understand what was going on. This is partly due to the counterintuitive and complicated nature of quantum mechanics and partly to the author’s decision to frame the narrative around one experiment.

Anil pointed out yesterday that this was in contrast to both The Edge of Physics and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2016), his second book, which follow what I like to call the radial narrative: each chapter begins at the centre of a circle and moves along the radius towards the circumference. But the next chapter doesn’t begin at the circumference; it begins at the centre again, reasserting the theme of the book and moving along another tack to a different point on the circumference. This way, it is possible for the reader to open the book on chapter 10 and understand what is going on; the author is less railroaded and has more room to explore different interpretations of the book’s theme; and editors like me have more portions to consider excerpting from.

§ My favourite part of the conversation was when Anita and Anil were springboarding off of the ideas discussed in his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, which examines how – to rephrase Anil – the body and the mind work together to construct the sense of self. Anil does this with a quest through different neurocognitive conditions that affect the mind in unique ways, providing insights into where the person’s sense of ‘I’ could be located in the brain.

I should mention here that this was an interesting passage of conversation but, for the same reason, one in which my neurons were going berserk and I don’t clearly remember how one part connected to another now. However, I do know that the following things were discussed:

  • Anita said that this journey of discovery (in Anil’s book) parallels her own when she is writing a novel. As the work of writing the book progresses, Anita the author gets more and more into the character’s skin so that she can write convincingly about the character’s actions and motivations. However, this process can be uniquely painful when the character molests a child, for example; according to Anita, it felt worse when she was able to make the transition from herself to her character, the child-molester, and slip back out almost effortlessly.
  • This was related to a question about the narrative growing its own legs and, every now and then, leading the author away in unintended directions. Anil said that in his case, it was a factor of how much reporting he had done. That is, the more knowledge and perspectives he had available, the more ideas he could explore in the same story. He also said that such narrative drift (my words) is more likely to happen in fiction than in non-fiction.

This is fascinating. It probably happens more with fiction because the rationale is that it is easier to invent than to infer, and because reality offers to railroad the author in non-fiction. However, narrative drift may not necessarily be more likely in fiction-writing. This is because, in my view, fiction also places a bigger premium on the author’s self-imposed limitations on inventiveness, since Occam’s razor applies equally to both forms of writing. And with fiction, unrestrained inventiveness imposes a greater cost on the story’s readability and even interestingness than unrestrained inference imposes on non-fiction-writing. I am curious to know, therefore, the different causes of narrative drift in fiction and (long-form) non-fiction – assuming there are differences – and how much time authors spend working against them.

Next courses of action: Read The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Cut-Like Wound.

There’s something wrong with this universe.

I’ve gone on about natural philosophy, the philosophy of representation, science history, and the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives when studying modern science. There’s something that unifies all these ideas, and I wouldn’t have thought of it at all hadn’t I spoken to the renowned physicist Dr. George Sterman on January 3.

I was attending the Institute of Mathematical Sciences’ golden jubilee celebrations. A lot of my heroes were there, and believe me when I say my heroes are different from your heroes. I look up to people who are capable of thinking metaphysically, and physicists more than anyone I’ve come to meet are very insightful in that area.

One such physicist is Dr. Ashoke Sen, whose contributions to the controversial area of string theory are nothing short of seminal – if only for how differently it says we can think about our universe and what the math of that would look like. Especially, Sen’s research into tachyon condensation and the phases of string theory is something I’ve been interested in for a while now.

Knowing that George Sterman was around came as a pleasant surprise. Sterman was Sen’s doctoral guide; while Sen’s a string theorist now, his doctoral thesis was in quantum chromodynamics, a field in which the name of Sterman is quite well-known.


– DR. GEORGE STERMAN (IMAGE: UC DAVIS)

When I finally got a chance to speak with Sterman, it was about 5 pm and there were a lot of mosquitoes around. We sat down in the middle of the lawn on a couple of old chairs, and with a perpetual smile on his face that made one of the greatest thinkers of our time look like a kid in a candy store, Sterman jumped right into answering my first question on what he felt about the discovery of a Higgs-like boson.

Where Sheldon Stone was obstinately practical, Sterman was courageously aesthetic. After the (now usual) bit about how the discovery of the boson was a tribute to mathematics and its ability to defy 50 years of staggering theoretical advancements by remaining so consistent, he said, “But let’s think about naturalness for a second…”

The moment he said “naturalness”, I knew what he was getting it, but more than anything else, I was glad. Here was a physicist who was still looking at things aesthetically, especially in an era where lack of money and the loss of practicality by extension could really put the brakes on scientific discovery. I mean it’s easy to jump up and down and be excited about having spotted the Higgs, but there are very few who feel free to still not be happy.

In Sterman’s words, uttered while waving his arms about to swat away the swarming mosquitoes while discussing supersymmetry:

“There’s a reason why so many people felt so confident about supersymmetry. It wasn’t just that it’s a beautiful theory – which it is – or that it engages and challenges the most mathematically oriented among physicists, but in another sense in which it appeared to be necessary. There’s this subtle concept that goes by the name of naturalness. Naturalness as it appears in the Standard Model says that if we gave our any reasonable estimate of what the mass of the Higgs particle should be, it should by all rights be huge! It should be as heavy as what we call the Planck mass [~10^19 GeV].”

Or, as Martinus Veltman put it in an interview to Matthew Chalmers for Nature,

“Since the energy of the Higgs is distributed all over the universe, it should contribute to the curvature of space; if you do the calculation, the universe would have to curve to the size of a football.”

Naturalness is the idea in particle physics specifically, and in nature generally, that things don’t desire to stand out in any way unless something’s really messed up. For instance, consider the mass hierarchy problem in physics: Why is the gravitational force so much more weaker than the electroweak force? If either of them is a fundamental force of nature, then where is the massive imbalance coming from?

Formulaically speaking, naturalness is represented by this equation:

Here, lambda (the mountain) is the cut-off scale, an energy scale at which the theory breaks down. Its influence over the naturalness of an entity h is determined by how many dimensions lambda acts on – with a maximum of 4. Last, c is the helpful scaling constant that keeps lambda from being too weak or too strong in some setting.

In other words, a natural constant h must be comparable to other nature constants like it if they’re all acting in the same setting.

(TeX: hquad =quad c{ Lambda }^{ 4quad -quad d })

However, given how the electroweak and gravitational forces – which do act in the same setting (also known as our universe) – differ so tremendously in strength, the values of these constants are, to put it bluntly, coincidental.

Problems such as this “violate” naturalness in a way that defies the phenomenological aesthetic of physics. Yes, I’m aware this sounds like hot air but bear with me. In a universe that contains one stupendously weak force and one stupendously strong force, one theory that’s capable of describing both forces would possess two disturbing characteristics:

1. It would be capable of angering one William of Ockham

2. It would require a dirty trick called fine-tuning

I’ll let you tackle the theories of that William of Ockham and go right on to fine-tuning. In an episode of ‘The Big Bang Theory’, Dr. Sheldon Cooper drinks coffee for what seems like the first time in his life and goes berserk. One of the things he touches upon in a caffeine-induced rant is a notion related to the anthropic principle.

The anthropic principle states that it’s not odd that the value of the fundamental constants seem to engender the evolution of life and physical consciousness because if those values aren’t what they are, then a consciousness wouldn’t be able to observe them. Starting with the development of the Standard Model of particle physics in the 1960s, it’s become known that these constants are really fine in their value.

So, with the anthropic principle providing a philosophical cushioning, like some intellectual fodder to fall back on when thoughts run low, physicists set about trying to find out why the values are what they are. As the Standard Model predicted more particles – with annoying precision – physicists also realised that given the physical environment, the universe would’ve been drastically different even if the values were slightly off.

Now, as discoveries poured in and it became clear that the universe housed two drastically different forces in terms of their strength, researchers felt the need to fine-tune the values of the constants to fit experimental observations. This sometimes necessitated tweaking the constants in such a way that they’d support the coexistence of the gravitational and electroweak forces!

Scientifically speaking, this just sounds pragmatic. But just think aesthetically and you start to see why this practice smells bad: The universe is explicable only if you make extremely small changes to certain numbers, changes you wouldn’t have made if the universe wasn’t concealing something about why there was one malnourished kid and one obese kid.


Doesn’t the asymmetry bother you?

Put another way, as physicist Paul Davies did,

“There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned’ for life. The conclusion is not so much that the Universe is fine-tuned for life; rather it is fine-tuned for the building blocks and environments that life requires.”

(On a lighter note: If the universe includes both a plausible anthropic principle and a Paul Davies who is a physicist and is right, then multiple universes are a possibility. I’ll let you work this one out.)

Compare all of this to the desirable idea of naturalness and what Sterman was getting at and you’d see that the world around us isn’t natural in any sense. It’s made up of particles whose properties we’re sure of, of objects whose behaviour we’re sure of, but also of forces whose origins indicate an amount of unnaturalness… as if something outside this universe poked a finger in, stirred up the particulate pea-soup, and left before anyone evolved enough to get a look.

(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on January 6, 2013.)