Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

I’ve been reading it for a few months now and loving every issue.  It’s definitely accessible to the layman.  So far the best article I’ve read in the latest issue is an interview with Darius Rejali, an expert on torture:

If it doesn’t work, why does it persist?

Myths and rumours. There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only “real men” know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn’t. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they’d thought he’d be tortured.

Definitely worth subscribing.

Also, a comment on another article:

Donald Braben argues that peer review of funding has stifled scientific creativity.  And maybe he’s right.  However, I dislike one of the historical comparisons that he makes:

Furthermore, the scientific successes of the last century were inspired by a relatively small number of top scientists – around 400, according to my research, roughly the number who won Nobel prizes. These high-flyers – including the likes of Planck, Einstein, Fleming, Avery, Townes, Franklin, Crick and Watson, whom together I call the “Planck club” – thrived in the environment of academic freedom that prevailed and made generic discoveries that opened the way to such wonders as lasers, nuclear power, biotechnology, computers and telecoms. If today’s rigid policies had applied throughout the 20th century, a lot of their key ideas would have got short shrift. No one at the time predicted they would lead to great discoveries, for they challenged consensus and met no perceived need.

I absolutely hate arguments based on some sort of allegedly superior glory days.  Einstein had trouble finding a faculty job.  Heisenberg almost flunked out of graduate school.  And while the achievements of physicists in that era are superb, it’s not like fundamental and widely applicable insights have stopped appearing.  Just look at optical physics in the past 20 years:  Quantum information theory (yes, I count it in optics, since it involves photons), photonic bandgap materials, negative index materials, and the emerging field of subdiffraction imaging and lithography all represent very fundamental insights that are starting to yield and will continue to yield major technological and economic benefits.  Those who want to can argue that the fact that these things are 20+ years old (in some cases) and only starting to yield applications shows just how rotten the state of physics is, but Braben specifically cites a revolution that spanned 30 years in the early 20th century as the driver of technological progress in the late 20th century.  I’m trying to compare apples to apples here.

If you think that the only cool and fundamental stuff happened before 1930, then of course the present sucks.  But if you want to offer a more useful critique of very real problems in how science is organized and conducted, critique the way that we’re falling short of what we could be doing, not the fact that (in the opinion of some) we’re not as cool as those guys from the early 20th century.