Silly science policies threaten progress

Suppose you were a politician in charge of shaping your country's science policy. Let's also suppose you are actually interested in promoting the welfare of the nation and humanity at large (hopefully not all politicians are driven by sociopathic greed, and after all, we are talking about you here). Let's also suppose that you are not entirely stupid. What kind of science policy would you make?

Presumably, you would not come up with the kind of ultra-shortsighted policy that the UK has now come up with in determining to weight research proposals' (short-term) 'economic and social impact' by 25% in assessing their merits.

The point with fundamental research, however, is that one just simply cannot make any reliable statement about its likely impact on society. When Dirac postulated the existence of the positron on the basis of his equation, he didn't think of positron emission tomography revolutionising cancer diagnostics. When Einstein described stimulated emission of radiation, he certainly didn't have DVDs in mind. And while Peter Grünberg might have had some applications in mind when he made his discovery of giant magnetoresistance, he probably didn't imagine the iPod (otherwise he'd be very, very rich).

The only research that will fare well under such a short-sighted policy is industrial and quasi-industrial research that has a clear product (i.e. a product that can be readily imagined with current knowledge) in mind. Such applied research is important, sure. But fundamental research is far more important for the overall progress of the human race, because it creates the foundations upon which the applied research of the future is going to rest. Moreover, applied research generates revenue for industry, and therefore it behooves industry to fund it. The government's job in science is the support of fundamental research that will not easily get industry support -- corporations are notoriously short-sighted, rarely looking beyond next year's balance sheet. The government should have more foresight.

Nobel Laureates are leading the fight against this silly policy; you can hear from Chemistry Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan at nature.com. UK-based readers can sign a petition against the silliness at ucu.org.uk.

On Deadlines

Human behaviour being what it is, conference proceedings tend to be written only when the deadline is practically elapsed. This can be seen on hep-lat every year. I remember reading somewhere (in PhysicsWorld, maybe?) that someone had studied the number of proceedings submitted per time period as a function of time until the deadline and had found a power-law behaviour. If that is correct (Google fails me for this, and the paper appears not to be on the arXiv), it would show again that even aggregates of (presumably free-willed) humans can be described well by statistical physics (thankfully, because if the free-will theorem is to be believed, spin-1 particles have free will if humans have). Does anyone know what the reference for the power-law behaviour of conference submissions was?

LATTICE 2009 reports open thread

It appears that this blog is not accessible from within the Great Firewall of China (I suppose blogs are inherently subversive, even if they are about as innocuous a topic as Lattice QCD). There is thus little point in having lots of empty comment threads for participants to report their impressions from the Lattice 2009 conference in Beijing, and those threads have accordingly disappeared. This post exists for any comments that people may have about Lattice 2009; comments may also be sent to me by email, and will then be published here (anonymously, if desired).

LATTICE 2009 programme online

The programme for the LATTICE 2009 conference in Beijing is up on the Web (here). This gives me the opportunity to remind my readers of the need for guest bloggers to cover the conference, since I will not attend this year.

我不去 LATTICE 2009 北京

I hope I didn't maltreat the 汉字 above too badly in my ignorance -- in any case, what I'm trying to say is that I am not going to the Lattice conference this year. Yes, that means no conference blog from me.

"But how are we going to survive without the annual conference blog?" I hear a reader exclaim. To which I reply, without so much as batting an eyelid: "You will have to write it yourself." Okay, I admit that imaginary exchange is just silly, but the reality is that I'd still like to cover the Lattice meeting in Beijing, but obviously can't do the reporting myself. So I would like to encourage my readers to volunteer as guest bloggers and cover a session or two from their own point of view. Any conference reports (except for those of a libelous, pornographic or defamatory nature) submitted as comments or by email will be published, with or without attribution as desired by their respective authors.

To make this a more tempting offer I will add a prize for the most productive (by number of sessions covered, by words in case of equal numbers of sessions) guest blogger, who will win my Lattice 2008 Williamsburg baseball cap (autographed or unautographed at the winner's discretion).

Austria will not leave CERN

Public pressure has been successful: Austrian chancellor Faymann has decided to veto the pull-out from CERN that his science minister had announced. Over 32,000 people have signed the online petition against the proposed withdrawal, and together with open letters by Nobel laureates and other public figures, this seems to have been enough to convince the Austrian government that leaving CERN would have been bad PR. I suppose that's another example of "yes, we can!"

Openness >> fraud

In the most recent edition of PhysicsWorld, there are two articles that on the face of it have little to do with each other: one is about Jan Hendrik Schön, the physicist formerly famous for creating the first organic superconductor and the first single-molecule transistor, and now most famous for having simply made up all of those results out of thin air, the greatest kind of scientific fraud in physics. The other article, by Michael Nielsen, is about how the internet is transforming scientific communications, looking at which new means of scientific communication failed (such as Physics Comments and scientists contributing to Wikipedia -- although Scholarpedia is taking off quickly at the moment, probably because its signed and peer-reviewed authorship model is more in line with academic customs than Wikipedia's semi-anarchistic one) and which succeeded (the arXiv, of course) in making the dissemination of scientific results quicker and more transparent.

At first glance these two topics appear to have little to do with each other. At second glance, however, they are closely intertwined.

Schön's deception was only possible because the researchers who tried and failed to replicate his results didn't have access to his primary data. Once doubts had been raised over the appearance of two completely identical graphs supposedly representing two completely different sets of experimental data, Schön's primary data were subjected to close scrutiny and were found to be non-existent -- his labbooks had been destroyed, and his samples were damaged beyond recovery. This raises the question whether it would have been possible to even contemplate such a fraud in an environment where scientists are genuinely expected to hide nothing, and in particular to make their primary data publicly available after publication.

The more radically open schemes, where raw data are being made public before publication, are unlikely to take off largely because of concerns over the enormous plagiarism potential. But once results have been published and priority has thus been established by the original authors, there is no immediately obvious reason not to allow other researchers to perform their own analyses of the primary data, either to confirm (or possibly to refute) the original analysis, or to use their own methods to obtain results from the data that the original authors didn't (either because they weren't interested or because they didn't have the relevant analysis methods at their disposal). Some access controls are needed, of course, in order to ensure that the later researchers will duly acknowledge the use of the original group's datasets.

It is hard to see how a fraud like the Schön case could have occurred under a scheme like this; the groups who wasted years on trying to replicate his results to no avail would likely have realised the fraud if they had had access to Schön's lab books.

Just like with the arXiv (which after all started out as a specialised High Energy Physics preprint server and now has revolutionised publishing in most of physics and mathematics, plus assorted other areas), particle physicists are pushing ahead with schemes to open access to raw data, and lattice QCD is right at the forefront of the movement: since the most expensive step in unquenched simulations is the actual generation of the gauge configurations, using those just once for whatever analysis or analyses interests one specific group would be an irresponsible waste of computer resources, postdocs' lifetime and taxpayers' money.

It has therefore been common for a long time now for lattice theorists to form larger collaborations that pool their resources to generate their configurations and then perform different analyses on them (policies differ: some collaborations publish all of their papers as a collaboration, some break up into smaller groups for most analyses). But with the huge effort needed for unquenched simulations on large ultrafine lattices with very light quarks, even that becomes inefficient; in particular, groups that don't belong to any of the major collaborations would be left out in the quenched darkness. Therefore, it is becoming an increasingly common policy to make gauge configurations available to the larger lattice community after performing some initial analyses that the collaboration generating the ensemble is particularly keen on doing (generally, that includes the hadron spectrum, plus some other stuff).

Configurations have been available for a while at NERSC's Gauge Connection, and are now quickly beginning to be available on the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG). This way the many CPU cycles that have been invested in generating these ensembles are put to even better use by enabling other groups to run their analyses on them.

Just like in the case of the arXiv, it may take a while for other disciplines to follow suit, but it appears likely that if and when more and more scientists choose to make their raw data public after publication (and those that don't therefore become increasingly subject to suspicion by their peers), a fraud case like that of Jan Hendrik Schön will become quite impossible at some point in the future.

Austria to leave CERN?

Austria's Science Minister Johannes Hahn has announced that Austria is to pull out of CERN. The reason given is that the 20 M$/year that Austria contributes to CERN is too much in these economically difficult times. Given the amounts handed out to bankrupt banks these days, that seems like an odd argument against participating in the greatest international endeavour of our time, an endeavour whose spinoffs include among others the WWW, no less. Maybe the crackpots convinced Mr Hahn that the LHC was going to end the world? Or maybe the Austrian government just wants to reap the global benefits of international research without contributing anything to it? You can sign a petition against this piece of political silliness here.

arXiv goes Facebook

Remember my slightly tongue-in-cheek question when we'd see a "My arXiv papers" application for Facebook? Well, it has happened, and apparently not on April Fool's Day. In fact, it is a part of the new author identifiers system introduced by the arXiv, which will help identify papers by the same author (since not everyone has the advantage of having a name that is unique within his field).