It was not a great night for helpless mammals in Chateau Steelypips last night. SteelyKid was a little colicky, and the Queen of Niskayuna has developed some problem with her paw necessitating a vet visit today, which led to some late-night whining. Kate ended up spending several hours soothing SteelyKid, while I wound up going downstairs to comfort the dog, and falling asleep on the couch for a couple hours.
The resulting mental fog is not really conducive to posting Deep Thoughts today, so instead you get a few funny anecdotes from last week's conference.
The first is more of a vignette: in the course of the discussion on Democracy and Ethics in Science, Lee Smolin spent a lot of time defending his view of "Science as an Ethical Community" (video, microblogging), and at one point wanted to de-emphasize the concept of peer review as a means of keeping crazy people out of science (which Harry Collins was quite keen on). "My 'peer review' is whatever these guys have put in place on the arxiv," he said, waving toward Paul Ginsparg and Simeon Warner, who run it. "That's good enough for me."
Across the room, Ginsparg said "Oh, Jesus," and put his head in his hands.
(UPDATE: Paul Ginsparg emails to say that he was not the person who said that. I type corrected. I thought it was him, but all I really know is somebody over there said "Oh, Jesus" (maybe it was Jacques) and when I looked, Ginsparg had his head in his hands.)
Second anecdote: In the course of his talk, Eric Weinstein pointed out the existence of a math paper containing a statement that some condition in differential geometry holds "if and only if Mike's dog really ate his frog."
This turns out to be a hold-over from an incident in which one of the authors was going through draft after draft of a paper with his advisor, getting only the vaguest of criticisms. Suspecting that something was up, he stuck a whole mess of rhyming nonsense into the middle of the paper-- "my dog ate a frog on a log in a bog..." ending with "Raoul, are you even reading this?"
A few days later, he asked about the latest draft, and got exactly the same vague comments as before. At which point, he realized he was getting a polite blow-off because his advisor was too busy to give detailed comments, and did something else until his advisor had time to actually read the paper carefully.
Weinstein noted at the time that this paper was the sole Google result for the phrase "Mike's dog really." As you can see, thanks to this meeting, that's no longer the case.
Finally, also dealing with the power of Google, I had breakfast one morning with Paul Ginsparg (who was staying in the same hotel I was), who mentioned that the night before, he and Jacques Distler had been discussing how students learn the stuff that's general knowledge in the field, and brought up the example of the "soft pion theorem," which is apparently an important result that appears on page 60 of some 80-page paper written years ago. Ginsparg said he wondered how students would learn about the soft pion theorem, coming from outside the community where it's common knowledge.
"I'll write a blog post about it," said Distler (according to Ginsparg), "and tomorrow it will be on the first page of Google results."
"Jacques being Jacques," Ginsparg said, "I got an email at seven this morning saying 'I rest my case.'"
And that's all I've got for today.
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Gotta have peer review. Hydraulics without viscosity sounds nice until the first water hammer hits (polywater, Fifth Force, Podkletnov, cold fusion...). The trick is to critically damp the oscillator so that neither calcification nor chaos builds.
Given the size, power, staff, and budget of contemporary science we wonder why the output is not more interesting and useful. If you want to find the bottleneck, the first place to look is at the top of the bottle.
To clarify: soft pion theorems, in general, are a fairly standard, almost textbook, topic. We were talking, however, about a "new" soft pion theorem, which appears on page thirty or so, in a -- seemingly unrelated -- recent paper on N=8 supergravity.
You'd never guess from the title or abstract of the paper, and it's far enough into the PDF that the text isn't indexed by Google. In other words, essentially imposible to find, unless you knew where to look.
My blog post, on the other hand, was crawled by the Google spider within 22 minutes of posting, was entered into the index, and percolated to #3 for the phrase "soft pion theorem" in less than 12 hours.
I forgot to check that morning, but soon thereafter noticed that it's also #3 (out of 27,000) for the phrase "soft pion". Which is somehow even more impressive.
The story of Mike's dog reminded me of one from my freshman "Earth Sciences" class in HS. We were supposed to keep a diary of observations we made about the natural world, experiments we had done in class, etc. We turned them in each Friday and the teacher would hand them back on Monday with some comments and a little check mark indicating we had done the work. His comments were pretty sparse and one of my classmates suspected he wasn't reading the diaries. One week she put at the end of random paragraphs the sentence, "If you get this far, please initial here __" She had naturally very small handwriting, so they were hard to see with just a quick skim of the page. Wouldn't you know she got them back the next week with a few brief comments, her check mark, and each space initialed. He never said anything about it, which I thought was pretty funny. He was actually a good teacher and made us go outside at least once a week and investigate something.
The story with the frog is more tragicomic than actually funny. I had a friend who offered in his thesis a price to everybody reading the sentence (the price was beer-valued), nobody ever noticed it. I had another friend who managed to accidentally copy and paste some paragraphs from a random website into his thesis, again nobody "reading" it noticed (he took it out later though). There must be lots of similar stories. Lee made an interesting remark at some point when the issue came to anonymity. There is so much information out there, the important question is who or what to pay attention to. The problem has two sides: the one is an information overproduction, the other one is lack of time. Result is the bottom of the barrel is growing larger and larger. Roughly speaking, we're producing information too fast to digest it, to connect it to what we already know and to assemble pieces to useful knowledge. Could go on with similarities to the capitalist economy producing more and more stuff nobody needs...