Tag Archives: How Scientists Think

Quantum kind of day: metaphors, language and nanotechnology

I had a bonanza day on the Nanowerk website yesterday as I picked up three items, all of which featured the word ‘quantum’ in the title and some kind of word play or metaphor.

From the news item, Quantum dots go with the flow,

Quantum dots may be small. But they usually don’t let anyone push them around. Now, however, JQI [Joint Quantum Institute] Fellow Edo Waks and colleagues have devised a self-adjusting remote-control system that can place a dot 6 nanometers long to within 45 nm of any desired location. That’s the equivalent of picking up golf balls around a living room and putting them on a coffee table – automatically, from 100 miles away.

There’s a lot of detail in this item which gives you more insight (although the golf ball analogy does that job very well) into just how difficult it is to move a quantum dot and some of the problems that had to be solved.

Next, A quantum leap for cryptography,

To create random number lists for encryption purposes, cryptographers usually use mathematical algorithms called ‘pseudo random number generators’. But these are never entirely ‘random’ as the creators cannot be certain that any sequence of numbers isn’t predictable in some way.

Now a team of experimental physicists has made a breakthrough in random number generation by applying the principles of quantum mechanics to produce a string of numbers that is truly random.

‘Classical physics simply does not permit genuine randomness in the strict sense,’ explained research team leader Chris Monroe from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland in the US. ‘That is, the outcome of any classical physical process can ultimately be determined with enough information about initial conditions. Only quantum processes can be truly random — and even then, we must trust the device is indeed quantum and has no remnant of classical physics in it.’

This is a drier piece (I suspect that’s due to the project itself) so the language or word play is in the headline. I immediately thought of a US tv series titled, Quantum Leap where, for five seasons, a scientist’s personality/intellect/spirit is leaping into people’s bodies, randomly through time. There are, according to Wikipedia, two other associations, a scientific phenomenon and a 1980s era computer. You can go here to pursue links for the other two associations. This is very clever in that you don’t need to have any associations to understand the base concept in the headline but having one or more association adds a level or more of engagement.

The final item, Scientists climb the quantum ladder,

An EU [European Union]-funded team of scientists from Cardiff University in the UK has successfully fired photons (light particles) into a small tower of semiconducting material. The work could eventually lead to the development of faster computers. …

The scientists, from the university’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said a photon collides with an electron confined in a smaller structure within the tower. Before the light particles re-emerge, they oscillate for a short time between the states of light and matter.

While I find this business of particles oscillating between two different states, light and matter, quite fascinating this particular language play is the least successful. I think most people will do what I did and miss the relationship between the ‘tower’ in the news item’s first paragraph and the ‘ladder’ in the headline. I cannot find any other attempt to play with either linguistic image elsewhere in the item.

Given that I’m  a writer I’m going to argue that analogies, metaphors, and word play are essential when trying to explain concepts to audiences that may not have your expertise and that audience can include other scientists. Here’s an earlier posting about some work by a cognitive psychologist, Kevin Dunbar, who investigates how scientists think and communicate.

Alberta and Texas collaborate on nanotechnology and greenish energy; a meta analysis of public perceptions of nanotechnology risks; how scientists think

The Premier of Alberta (Canada), Ed Stelmach, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rice University (Texas, US) President, David Leebron, to collaborate through nanoAlberta (Alberta Advanced Education and Technology) and the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology (Rice University). The two institutions will collaborate in the energy, environmental, medical,  agriculture, and forestry sectors. From the news item on Azonano,

Wade Adams, director of the Smalley Institute, said the interests of nanoAlberta and those of his team at Rice are perfectly aligned. “We want to help them figure out how to extract oil from their resources in a more environmentally friendly way, a more efficient way and one that will cause less damage to their own territory as well as provide oil for the needs of the human race, as they become a more important source of it.”

When I read the title for the item I thought they were referring to green or bio fuels but, as you can see from the quote, the intention is altogether different. From a pragmatic perspective, since we have to depend on fossil fuels for a while longer, it’s best if we can find more environmentally friendly ways to extract it while developing other renewable sources.

This reminds me of the recent invite I received from the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) for the Perverse Incentives: The Untold Story of Federal Subsidies for Fossil Fuels event held on Sept. 18, 2009. Unfortunately, the webcast isn’t available quite yet but I think that in light of this memorandum it could be interesting viewing and might provide a critical perspective on the initiative.

PEN is holding another somewhat related event on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 at 12:30 pm EST, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, and Biofuels: What does the public think? If you’re in Washington, DC, you can attend the event live but you should RSVP here, otherwise there’s a live webcast which is posted a few days later on their website.  (There’s a PEN event tomorrow, Sept. 23, 2009 at 12 pm to 2:30 pm EST, titled Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation: Securing the Promise of Nanotechnologies. If you wish to attend the live event, you can RSVP using the link I’ve posted previously. If you’re interested in this event, in June I posted a more complete description of it here.)

One more Canadian development on the nanotechnology front, a meta analysis of 22 surveys on public perceptions of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology has been published at Nature Online as of Sept. 20, 2009. The article (lead author from the University of British Columbia, Canada)  is behind a paywall but you can read more about it in the news item on Nanowerk (from the news item),

Previous studies have found that new and unknown technologies such as biotechnology tend to be regarded as risky, but that’s not the case for nanotechnology, according to this research. People who thought nanotechnology had more benefits than risks outnumbered those who perceived greater risks by 3 to 1 in this study. The 44 percent of people who didn’t have an opinion either way surprised the researchers. “You don’t normally get that reluctance,” says Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia in Canada, lead author of the study and a collaborator with CNS-UCSB [Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara].

In almost three years of scanning, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two announcements that both feature a Canadian nanotechnology development of sorts. This is a banner day!

Topping today off, I’m going to segue into How Scientists Think.  It’s a paper about how scientists creatively problem solve.  From the news item on Physorg.com,

Her [Dr. Nancy J. Nersessian] study of the working methods of scientists helps in understanding how class and instructional laboratory settings can be improved to foster creativity, and how new teaching methods can be developed based on this understanding. These methods will allow science students to master model-based reasoning approaches to problem solving and open the field to many more who do not think of themselves as traditional “scientists.”

I’ve been interested in how scientists think because I’ve been trying to understand why the communication with ‘non scientists’ can be so poor. To some extent I think it is cultural. After years of training in special skills and a special language, scientists are members of a unique occupational culture, which has given birth to many, many subcultures. People who are immersed in their own cultures don’t always realize that the rest of us may not understand what they’re saying very well. (Try reading art criticism if you don’t have an understanding of art history and critical theory.) That’s my short answer and, one of these days, I’m going to write a paper with my long answer.

I had every intention of writing another part of my science communication series today but I have a couple of projects to start or finish and these series postings take more time than I have to spare.