Back from a Long Break

Astute readers of this blog will notice that it’s been about a month since I last posted. My apologies to you who come here regularly to visit with me, it wasn’t intentional and it wasn’t your fault. Life happens sometimes, and I got in the way of a speeding train that combined a heavy workload and an injury to a close family member, both of which claimed pretty much my full attention for about 3.5 weeks.  But, things have settled out now, and I’m back in the blogging saddle.

Of course, the cosmos has kept going in my absence, and there have been some pretty cool cosmic happenings the past few weeks. Things like diamond stars and dark matter are still being as intriguing as ever. I was quite amazed to see that the Curiosity rover has been on Mars for one entire Martian year now (686 days), and wow has it accomplished a lot!  As a Martian at heart, it seems like we’re making good headway in understanding the Red Planet, but we still have a LONG way to go. I can’t wait until the first human missions are on the way. I’d love to be ON one of them, but it could be a while, so I’ll have to content myself with looking at Mars in the night sky (and yes, it’s UP right near the bright star Spica on these July evenings).

There are a couple of undercurrents in media about science that have intrigued me lately. One of them is about how Facebook has been doing experiments on its readers and publishing the results. Now, at first you might think, so what’s the big deal?  And how is this about science?  It is in the sense that FB wants to claim a scientific background for its “research”, but it has engaged in what appears to be unethical research practices by not following human research rules.

Yes, there ARE specific rules in place when scientists (of all stripes, including medical, social, hard sciences) want to do experiments on human subjects. I had to follow them when I was in graduate school. They’re meant to protect people from vague, weird experiments, not just their bodies but their privacy. Human Subject Research is bound by rules of confidentiality and also by the rule that subjects must consent to being tested.  That means active consent, not just a vague word in a user agreement (such as FB has claimed).  The rules are clear: if you want to experiment on people in ANY science, you have to get their informed consent. This, FB did NOT do. It’s not scientific and it’s certainly not passing the stink test among those of us who DID do HSR and had to get permission and review for something so simple as a questionnaire.  This is worth thinking about the next time you read FB, and the next time you are asked for permission to participate in any study.  Most researchers with integrity will ask your permission before using you.  Think about that.

The other topic I sort of followed while I was head-down in work and family matters was the discussion about whether or not recent BICEP results showed “smoking gun” proof of gravitational waves by studying the expansion era right after the Big Bang. Now that the original data have been released, and the team is restudying its work, there is some discussion (and possibly some doubt) on the original conclusions announced in March. People unschooled in how science works are taking this as a sign that science doesn’t work and that the researchers leapt to the wrong conclusions.

Actually, this re-examination is EXACTLY how science works. In science (as opposed to art or religion or politics), there is always room for debate and second and third and fourth and nth looks at data to understand what they are telling us. This happens over and over in science, particularly as scientists get new tools or devise advanced methods for analyzing data. It’s exactly analogous to understanding what stars are. Early in our scientific history, stars were considered to be the campfires of the gods. That’s an early conclusion based on naked-eye observation and a lack of knowledge about basic scientific processes and events. Eventually, people developed better tools (telescopes, cameras, spectroscopes, etc.) to observe stars, and we figured out that they’re incandescent spheres of superhot gases and that stars contain hydrogen and helium, and mixes of other elements.

I expect that the BICEP experimental data will be taken again, reproduced by others, studied with new tools, and in time, a fuller interpretation of the results will be announced. But, this doesn’t mean the original data interpretations were dead wrong, or that science failed. It worked as it was supposed to. That’s the beauty of science. It works, and it works best when we let it work the way it’s supposed to: without preconceptions, unsupported theories, wild-eyed interpretations, and all the rest that the media focus on instead of the real processes of science.

Related to this is the ongoing discussion about Pluto as a planet. Never mind the process at the IAU, or the personal opinions of Pluto-huggers, Pluto-haters, misguided scientist wannabes and all the rest who are weighing on this “debate” as if it mattered.

Here’s a hint. It doesn’t matter what you call Pluto. What matters is what you understand about it as an object in the solar system. And where it fits in the spectrum of objects that DO exist in our solar system.

Pluto IS, in fact, a planet. It is a dwarf planet.  It fits nicely into the ongoing study of planets and their types. That’s it.  We have terrestrial planets, gas giant planets, ice giant planets, and dwarf planets.  A hundred years ago, we had rocky and gas giants.  Things are changing. Classification more closely follows and describes an object’s size, shape, place in space, its interior processes, atmosphere (if it has one), and other characteristics.  Hence, we get dwarf stars, giants, supergiants, dwarf galaxies, spiral galaxies, and so on.

This is a function of astronomy: to determine what and how things behave in space. NOT necessarily what we call them. The outcry over naming of things is a smokescreen and this whole hubbub over it needs to stop. I don’t particularly give a rat’s patootie about what the IAU did or didn’t do. That mistake is in the past, and it doesn’t reflect actual science.  Let’s let science do its job.  To paraphrase Bones in Star Trek: The Next Generation, (Encounter at Farpoint), “Science. Let it do its job, it’ll always bring you home.”

As a measure of “doing science” at Pluto, there IS  a very cool mission headed that way, set to arrive and fly by Pluto in July 2015. It’s called New Horizons, and it will give us our first look at the King of Kuiper Belt (Pluto), and possibly other Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs)as well. In fact, Hubble Space Telescope time has been granted to the team so that its scientists can search for any KBOs on the way to and from Pluto as New Horizons continues its explorations. Stay tuned — it’ll be great science!