The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

by Elizabeth Finkel

  In the 19th century physicists had used field theory to explain electricity, magnetism and light. In the early decades of the 20th century that concept was extended to include matter itself, an extraordinary development that took even physicists by surprise. According to the new discipline of quantum field theory, a ‘particle’ of matter is not a ‘solid’ object at all, but an undulation or ripple in a quantum field that pervades our universe. Here the very concept of ‘object’ is subverted and all our common-sense understandings of that word no longer hold true. ‘Objects’ as we are used to thinking of them don’t really exist in the universe of quantum fields. What we are offered instead is a kind of postobject worldview in which the very idea of hard, separate things is replaced by a mysterious web of influence. None of this is easy to come at, and as the great quantum pioneer Niels Bohr once remarked, ‘anyone who isn’t confused by quantum theory hasn’t understood it’. Most physicists initially found all this hard to accept themselves, yet quantum field theories are supported by equations whose experimental predictions have been borne out to dozens of decimal places. Field theories now underlie mainstream understanding of both matter and energy and are critical to the design of many contemporary technologies, including much of the telecommunication technology we have come to rely on, as well as microchips, a large class of which are made from ‘field-effect transistors’.

  Practically speaking, we are all recipients of the revolution in thinking that the field idea has wrought, and anyone who uses a mobile phone or computer has reason to be grateful that physicists have come to understand this enigmatic aspect of our world. Psychically, however, we have paid a price, for the outcome of this intellectual upheaval is a description of our world that almost no one can understand. Fields have become, in effect, the black-box controls of our universe, the theoretical equivalents of the microchip processors that control our cars. Just as the engine of the 21st century car has become a technological marvel that is inaccessible to backyard mechanics, so the 21st century universe has become an inaccessible wonder, a triumph of theory that can only be grasped by an expertly trained professional class. One way to think about what Jim Carter is doing is that he insists on a universe he can comprehend. As with the old Chryslers and Cadillacs that grace his front yard, Jim demands a cosmos he can figure out for himself.

  * * * * *

  Of all the things that human beings now do, theoretical physics is probably not one we tend to think of as accessible to a lone tinker’s insight, not in the age of string theory and multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators. Since World War II theoretical physics has become a multinational industry wrapped around some of the most complicated facilities our species has ever constructed: the Hubble Space Telescope, the CERN accelerator, the LIGO gravity wave detector, the Ice-Cube neutrino detector at the South Pole, each of which bears a billion-dollar price-tag and each of which has huge technical crews devoted to its operation. These days, when research papers in experimental particle physics are published there are often several hundred scientists listed as authors, for that is the size of the teams it now takes to do many major physics experiments. Such vast collaborative enterprises have become essential for the progress of theoretical physics, which relies on experimental verification of its predictions to retain its credibility; without such machines, contemporary physics theory is in danger of becoming a mathematical game. It is a mark of the science’s enormous success that indeed it now takes so much equipment and so many people to find something that is not already explained. The very abstraction of current theory stands as a testimony to just how much physicists do understand, for it is only because they have explained so much that they find themselves now, on the fringes of the unknown, in truly bewildering territory.

  Yet however exciting it may be to participate in such grandscale adventures, a yearning remains in some physicists’ hearts for a smaller-scale, more personal kind of science. Dr Ken Libbrecht, a physicist I know at Caltech who heads one of the gravity-wave teams, retreats in his spare time from the stage of Big Science to a tiny laboratory where he builds machines to study how snowflakes form. It is something he can do on his own, he explains. On holiday from what he calls his ‘day job’ with the LIGO team, snowflakes provide a frontier of research that he can explore by himself. In this field he is the unequivocal world leader, and, surprisingly, very little is known about the physics of ice crystallisation. Libbrecht once joked to me that with the papers he works on about gravity waves the list of authors may take up more pages than the article itself; simply keeping track of everyone’s names is a significant challenge for a group leader. With snowflakes the headline is his alone and, what’s more, he is following in the footsteps of scientific giants: Michael Faraday and Johannes Kepler, two of the most important physicists in history, both did research on snowflakes.

  Ken Libbrecht isn’t the only Caltech physicist who gets a kick from what we might call handmade science. The DIY impulse was also manifest in perhaps the most famous physicist in Caltech’s history, the quantum theorist Richard Feynman. Feynman was the scientist who electrified the world on television with his demonstration of why the space shuttle Challenger blew up at its launch, killing all the astronauts on board. Those old enough to remember will recall how he dropped a rubber O-ring into a beaker of dry ice and water, causing the O-ring to shatter and thereby explaining how the spacecraft had failed. In 1965 Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on quantum field theory, yet in 1963 he had set out to perform a task that from the perspective of the scientific mainstream was the equivalent of building a steam engine.

  The task Feynman set himself was to derive one of Newton’s most important results without using any of the powerful mathematics now available to us. Specifically, he decided to reconstruct one of Newton’s key proofs about gravity without using calculus, only using the laws of Euclidean geometry, a branch of mathematics that had been known to the ancient Greeks. Feynman wasn’t doing this to advance the state of physics. He was doing it to experience the pleasure of building a law of the universe from scratch. Like Jim Carter with his steam car project, Feynman wanted to make something important using only the most rudimentary tools.

  He presented the fruits of his labour to a class of undergraduates at Caltech as one of his legendary Feynman Lectures, and it was an achievement from which he had evidently gained an enormous amount of pride. Almost 300 years after Newton had presented his proof, Feynman set out to reprise the master’s geometrical reasoning for his Caltech class. ‘I’m giving this lecture just for the fun of it,’ he explained. Many of the students might already have done the proof for themselves with calculus – that is now an undergraduate exercise, and can be done with a single page of equations. Feynman himself noted that ‘it’s much easier to do with calculus’, and some of the students must have wondered why their professor was bothering them with this antediluvian version of the problem. Then Feynman described what he had in mind: ‘For your entertainment and interest,’ he said, ‘I want you to ride in a buggy, for its elegance, instead of a fancy automobile.’

  What Feynman set out to do was to prove that if Newton’s law of gravity is correct then the planets must travel around the sun in elliptically shaped orbits. Newton himself had shown that this was true and his proof played a pivotal role in helping to convince people of the 17th century that his gravitational law should be taken seriously. One must bear in mind that in the 17th century the idea of a mathematical law describing gravity was almost inconceivable. In that century, the very idea of an invisible force acting throughout space was itself heretical, for it seemed to smack of magic, and all that the new mechanistic science was trying to overthrow. Newton understood that his cosmology depended on the gravity law and that the fate of the new physics as a whole rested on his ability to convince his colleagues that what he was saying was real. In order to make them believe in his law he felt he had to demonstrate its truth using only the kind of mathematics they would completely
trust. That meant he had to forego the new-fangled calculus he’d been inventing and use only the tried and true tools of geometry, tools that even the most conservative mathematicians would accept. Newton presented his gravity law, along with his geometrical proof about the planetary orbits, in the book that launched Newtonian science upon the world, the Principia Mathematica. Feynman wanted to understand exactly what he had done.

  In the preparatory notes Feynman made for his lecture he wrote: ‘Simple things have simple demonstrations’, then, tellingly, he crossed out the second ‘simple’ and replaced it with ‘elementary’. For it turns out there is nothing simple about Newton’s proof. Although it uses only rudimentary mathematical tools, it is a masterpiece of labyrinthine intricacy. So arcane is Newton’s proof that Feynman could not understand it. That is because in the age of calculus, physicists no longer learn much Euclidean geometry; like stonemasonry, it has become something of a dying art. Feynman was rather surprised that he couldn’t follow a piece of scientific reasoning now three centuries old, and he seems to have taken that as a personal challenge. Because he couldn’t understand Newton’s proof he decided he had to do a version of it himself. The task nearly defeated him and the result of his work, when it was finally published, occupies close to 100 typewritten pages. It appears in a marvellous book called Feynman’s Lost Lecture, by Caltech physicist David Goodstein and his wife Judith Goodstein, a former Caltech archivist.

  Most of Feynman’s students probably didn’t follow his proof either, but he knew he could expect their applause and he ended his lecture with a flourish, like the showman he was. When he had found that he couldn’t understand Newton’s proof Feynman could have abandoned his idea for the lecture, since no one knew he was planning to give it. But he could not let the challenge go, and it is evident from his notes that he derived a tremendous amount of pleasure from his ‘ride in a buggy’. For a man who would soon be granted the highest honour in science, it was a DIY triumph whose primary value was the pride and joy that derive from being able to say ‘I did it!’

  Feynman apparently devoted a fair bit of time to the ‘buggy’ exercise, yet when all is said and done he was a man on his way to a Nobel Prize, and at the end of his lecture he made a remark that very likely resonated with his Caltech audience: ‘One should not ride in a buggy all the time,’ he told the class. ‘One has the fun of it and then gets out.’ The question that stands at the heart of this essay is: What happens if one doesn’t have the option of getting out of the buggy? To extend Feynman’s metaphor, what happens if a buggy is the only form of transportation available to you? For Richard Feynman, a highly trained theoretician with an exceptional gift for mathematical abstraction, a joyride in ‘a buggy’ was a pleasurable diversion; while he manifestly enjoyed the experience, he did not have to rely on a handmade vehicle for his serious travel needs. He also had access to the Ferrari of quantum field theory. We may go even further: Feynman and his fellow theoretical insiders had access to an entire fleet of fancy automobiles outfitted with all the brilliant black-box controls that 20th century physics has been able to deliver. These indeed are the men and woman who design the black boxes of contemporary science.

  As a Nobel Prize-winning theoretician Feynman had the keys to the scientific equivalent of the executive garage. But what if one doesn’t have the keys to that garage? What if one doesn’t have access to any of the ‘fancy automobiles’? Metaphorically speaking, with respect to theoretical physics, that is the position of the majority of people on Earth. From the perspective of a contemporary theoretical physics insider, what the rest of us understand about the workings of the universe is the equivalent of riding a bike. That is what so many popular physics books keep telling us: that the majority of what we believe about our world is wrong. While the rest of us saunter along in a kind of bucolic ignorance, academic theoretical physicists have been putting in place a network of freeways on which they cruise their ever-more-complicated Ferraris and Lamborghinis. It is a vast and deeply impressive network that provides the infrastructure for the delivery of all kinds of services that we rely on in our lives, but it is a network that few us can ever hope to ‘travel’ on ourselves. What unites Jim Carter and other theoretical outsiders is their belief that the freeways of fundamental physics are a public resource. Not only do these men want access to those roads; they insist that the vehicles they build themselves are just as legitimate as any of the insiders’ fancy automobiles.

  Outsiders

  Beating gravity

  The ill-effects of quackery v scientific evidence

  Cassandra Wilkinson

  Following the untimely death of Steve Jobs there has been continuing speculation about the extent to which his treatment was critically delayed by early efforts to employ alternative medicine.

  Fortune magazine reported that the Apple founder had tried to treat his condition with alternative therapies for nine months. When these efforts proved futile, he had a Whipple procedure, a liver transplant and surgery to remove a tumour. Walter Isaacson, who wrote Jobs’s authorised biography, has said publicly that Jobs understood at the end that he had made a mistake.

  It’s not clear from second-hand reports exactly what Jobs was doing, but it appears to have required at one point that meals be prepared without pans. This may sound like the kind of eccentricity we expect from genius but, disturbingly, a large number of mainstream Australians are putting their faith in unproven health treatments.

  Vitamin company Blackmores courted controversy with its launch of a pharmacy-only range of what it described as ‘complementary treatments’, which it proposed would be recommended by pharmacists in conjunction with prescription medication. The company claimed the treatments were ‘products that are backed by scientific evidence’. Facing criticism that these products had no proof of efficacy, Marcus Blackmore argued: ‘Any criticism of their potential benefit highlights the need for further healthcare professional education.’ Which basically means anyone who doesn’t agree with him needs to be educated on how to agree with him.

  Blackmore went on to say: ‘Consumers are well protected by one of the strictest regulatory systems in the world under which every manufacturer must hold the evidence to support the claims they make.’

  This claim is certainly true of companies that make actual medicine. It’s far less true of companies that sell ‘alternative therapies’ and ‘complementary medicine’. Under Australian law, complementary medicines are not assessed for efficacy but companies must certify to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) that they hold evidence of their claims.

  Carol Bennett, chief executive of Consumers Health Forum, points out that the National Prescribing Service has reported that most producers fail to meet compliance requirements, 33 per cent have had their listing cancelled by the TGA and 15 per cent of products have been withdrawn when informed that TGA was investigating their claims. She wrote in Crikey: ‘A large number of these products are little more than placebos. Almost all complementary medicines are able to obtain the [TGA’s] Australian label, whether they work or not.’

  Ken Harvey, of La Trobe University’s school of public health, writing in Australian Prescriber, summed up the problem as ‘a proliferation of products of dubious efficacy, with promotional claims that cannot be substantiated’.

  Notwithstanding this, and despite criticism by the Australian Medical Association, most private health insurers cover complementary medicines including, for instance, homeopathy. Leaked reports recently suggested that the National Health and Medical Research Council was considering declaring homeopathy baseless and unethical ‘for the reason that homeopathy (as a medicine or procedure) has been shown not to be efficacious’. Homeopathy is based on the principles of ‘like cures like’ and ‘ultra-dilutions’. Which, in plain speaking, means you are treated with more of what’s making you sick, but in doses too small to have any possible impact. So it’s poison – which would be mad – but in microscopic quantities, so there’s no chance of
you getting sick … or, for that matter, better.

  A 2010 evaluation of homeopathy by the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declared it ‘scientifically implausible’. Not surprising, when the journal Spectrum of Homeopathy cites the use of cheetah’s blood for multiple sclerosis and tiger’s blood for depression. If people want relaxation services, good luck to them, but when such ‘treatments’ risk displacing real medicine, it presents a serious problem for public health. There are countless tragic cases of people delaying or denying medical treatment in favour of quackery. Jobs is only a high-profile example of a growing problem.

  Several industry bodies have recommended tighter regulation. Choice has proposed an independent evaluation on an optin, cost-recovery basis where approved products could get a mark of approval similar to the National Heart Foundation’s ‘tick’ for healthy food.

  The National Prescribing Service has supported the tighter regulation of alternative therapies, saying in a media release: ‘All health professionals have a responsibility to ensure these products are used safely.’

  But the argument for greater regulation is flawed and dangerous. With public hospitals taking up about one-third of state government budgets, we do not have unlimited funds for public health.

  Each dollar diverted from efficacious, proven treatment into what can at best be called nutritional supplements is a dollar less for drugs that have been proven to extend life for people with serious conditions.

  Regulating products with no evidence base risks giving them a false credibility. Fifty-four per cent of people surveyed about alternative medicines think products listed by the TGA have been tested.

  The simpler, cheaper, more honest solution would be to discontinue listing and regulating these products and confirm under the Act that they are not medicine. Alternative medicine is an oxymoron; in the words of Australia’s leading sceptic pianist Tim Minchin, alternative medicines that have been proven to work are just called medicine.