Many undergraduates seem to think molecules like to hang around rather than moving on
Keith S. Taber
A representation of a small part of a layer of molecules in a solid substance – with one molecule highlighted by colour. If the solid were melted, and then refrozen, where would the highlighted molecule be?
If you are a science teacher: what would your students think?
In this article I offer my own version (actually two versions, see below) of a question I saw used in a published study (Smith & Villarreal, 2015a). As I no longer have any students, I cannot easily try this out, but perhaps a reader who is currently teaching science might be tempted to see what their pupils or students might think? (If you do, I would apreciate hearing about what you find!)
The two versions of the question can be downloaded from the links below.
The question could be given to individual learners, or as the basis of small group discussion, or perhaps just projected onto the screen for a 'show of hands' for each response option. (Exploring student thinking to detect misconceptions is known as diagnostic assessment.)
Alternative conceptions abound
I am very familiar with the extensive evidence which shows that is very common for learners, at all levels, and in any topic, to hold alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') at odds with canonical science and the target knowledge set out in the science curriculum. So, I am seldom surprised when I read about a study which reports finding learners demonstrating such conceptions.
Yet one study I read which reported learners commonly holding an alternative conception did surprise me. I would have not been surprised if the respondents had been secondary levels students, and a minority of them had demonstrated this particular conception, but I would not have expected how the study found a high incidence of the alternative conception among undergraduates studying chemistry.
The research asked about what happens when a solid is either dissolved, or melted, and then returns to the solid state. It used an instrument that presented a figure representing the particles in a small section of a solid, with one particle marked out, and asked the learners to draw the equivalent images after the solid had either dissolved and then been recrystallised, or melted and then been refrozen.
I an going to limit myself to the easier context (melt, then freeze – no solvent molecules involved). According to the researchers, the results suggested that a large proportion of the undergraduates indicated that the atom that had been marked out would be found in the same position in the solid at the end of the process: the exact proportion shifted in two versions of the study (65%, 50%) but a very rough gloss was that at least half of the learners located the marked particle back at its original point.
"These results indicated that a large proportion of the students viewed the [marked] molecule as being near to the same position after melting as it was before melting, and being in the position it was originally in after the liquid froze back to the solid."
Smith & Villarreal, 2015a: 277-278
Perhaps this should not have surprised me – I have been told by very bright A level students that on homolytic bond fusion each atom would always get its own electrons back, and this seems something of a parallel notion.
Now there was some questioning of the methodology and instrument used here (Langbeheim, 2015; see also Smith & Villarreal, 2015b) – as there often is in educational research – but it seemed a substantial proportion of learners thought the solid would reform with particles in their original positions, and this suggests a rather limited understanding of the level of molecular motion in the dissolved or molten state. I would not have been so surprised if this work had been carried out with, say, twelve year olds – but such a high level of misconception among undergraduates did surprise me as it reflects a failure to imagine the nature of the molecular world, and that surely makes learning high level (e.g., degree level) chemistry very difficult.
Now there are serious challenges in representing the nanoscale (thus the questioning of the representations used in the study) simply because molecules, ions, electron, atoms – are not the kinds of things we can draw realistically – they are fuzzy objects with no surfaces that somewhat blend into their neighbours. This raises a possible defence for students in such studies
'yes, your honour, I did show the particle as having returned to the same position, but as the focal figure had been drawn unrealistically as a set of circles I did not think authenticity was being asked for!'
It seems unlikely any learner really did think that – and the researchers did ask learners about their reasoning. The most common type of explanations were (Smith & Villarreal, 2015a: 278):
In the molten state: The molecule doesn't move far from its original position
After resolidification: The molecule ends up near where it was positioned in the liquid
Representing quanticles
Molecules, ions, atoms are 'quantum objects' which do not have the properties of familiar macroscopic objects. The nanoscopic particles in a lattice or liquid are not like the particles in table salt (grains) or sugar (granules) which each have a definite volume and surface, and which cannot be made to overlap their neighbours.
The following is my representation of a section of a layer of molecules in a solid substance. I have shown them round as that is simpler. Most molecules are not round (but 'molecules' of, say, neon or argon, are.) I have tried to show them as being fuzzy rather than as if ball-bearings with definite surfaces as the 'substance' of atoms, ions and molecules is largely electric fields and electron 'clouds' (a rather appropriate metaphor) rather than anything 'solid'. (And, of course, the word solid loses its meaning for a single molecule. We might, figuratively, suggest the atom is like a tiny liquid drop surrounded by an immense volume of gas – but it is probably best to avoid using such comparisons with learners becasue of the potential for them taking the terms literally.)
Should the molecules be touching in the solid? That is a problematic question as how do we decide whether things are touching when the things concerned do not have distinct surfaces but rather fade away to infinity? (If the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn were to ever come together, how would we decide at what point they had actually physically collided?)
Often in science teaching we cheat and show molecules touching in solids when teaching about the differences between condensed and gaseous states; but then hope students have forgotten this by the time we want to teach about thermal expansion of solids.
My diagram shows a layer of the regular crystal structure, so if you think my 'molecules' should touch then you can imagine that they would once the adjacent layers were drawn in.
The image I have used might suggest too much space between molecules…
…adding another layer might help give the appearance of close packing, but if a different colour is used this may suggest some physical difference…
yet making both layers the same colour makes the figure more dificult to interpret.
It is a problem of scale
The real issue for the novice learner here is one of scale. The scale of atoms is far beyond our ready grasp. My figure shows a much more extended section of material than that in the original study – but still, a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a solid we could readily see and manipulate. If the solid substance melted, then (e.g., around room temperature) we would expect molecular speeds of the order of hundreds of metres per second. In the gas phase that might be somewhat reflected in how far some molecules get (but diffusion is still much slowed by collisions), but in a condensed phase, so in a liquid, the molecules are not going to get very far at all before colliding with a 'neighbour' and being deflected off course.
The so-called 'random walk' of any molecule in a liquid will reflect mean speeds orders of magnitude less than the hundreds of metres per second instantaneous speed (as it is constantly being shifted to a new direction, and is just as likely to be sent back in the direction it originated).
But then, given the size of the sample represented, the distance from one end of the image to the other is of the order of maybe 0.000 000 001 metres. If a molecule with an instantaneous speed of hundreds of metres per second only has to travel of the order of perhaps 0.000 000 000 1m before colliding with the next molecule, it is going to have an awful lot of collisions each second – many billions. So, a molecule bumping around at say 300 m/s would not take very long to move 0.000 000 001 m (and so off the region of lattice shown in my figure) even with all those restrictive collisions!
Two versions of the diagnostic question for use in class
Even if the solid melts and is a liquid for only a few minutes (that is, a few hundred seconds), and even if we have placed the original solid in a tightly constricting container such that the liquid does not change overall shape, what are the chances of the molecule ending up in the same lattice position? Or even being in the frame when we represent such a small section of the lattice?
If we are only representing one layer of molecules, then what are the chances of the molecule even ending up in the same layer (it is likely to have moved 'up'/'down' just as much as laterally along the plane represented whilst in the liquid state).
Each of the options (in both versions of the question) are possible outcomes.
Given that the section of the latice shown is so limited, all the positions shown are pretty much local to the starting point, so I would argue the molecule could almost equally likely end up in any of the lattice positions in the figure (so: A, C and D are, in effect, equally likely – as would be any other lattice position you selected from the image).
What about Option B?
Option B reflects all the possibilities where the molecule ends up outside the small section of lattice layer illustrated, including all the options where it has moved to a different layer. There will be billions and billions of these options, including, at least, many thousands of options close enough for the molecule to have easily moved there in the number of 'random walk' steps feasible in the time scale.
So, the answer to the question of which option is most likely (in either version of the question) is easy – option B is by farmost likely.
But I wonder if most students who have been taught about particle models and states of matter would agree with me? If Smith and Villarreal's undergraduate sample is anything to go by, then I guess not.
Work cited:
Smith, K. C., & Villarreal, S. (2015a). Using animations in identifying general chemistry students' misconceptions and evaluating their knowledge transfer relating to particle position in physical changes [10.1039/C4RP00229F]. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 16(2), 273-282. https://doi.org/10.1039/C4RP00229F
Langbeheim, E. (2015). Reinterpretation of students' ideas when reasoning about particle model illustrations. A Response to "Using Animations in Identifying General Chemistry Students' Misconceptions and Evaluating their Knowledge Transfer Relating to Particle Position in Physical Changes" [10.1039/C5RP00076A]. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 16(3), 697-700. https://doi.org/10.1039/C5RP00076A
Smith, K. C., & Villarreal, S. (2015b). A Reply to "Reinterpretation of Students' Ideas when Reasoning about Particle Model Illustrations. A Response to 'Using Animations in Identifying General Chemistry Students' Misconceptions and Evaluating their Knowledge Transfer Relating to Particle Position in Physical Changes' by Smith & Villarreal (2015)" [10.1039/C5RP00095E]. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 16, 701-703. https://doi.org/10.1039/C5RP00095E
I was recently listening to a podcast of an episode of a science magazine programme which included two items of astronomy news, one about a supernovae, the next about a quasar. I often find little snippets in such programmes that I think work making a note of (quite a few of the analogies, metaphors and similes – and anthropomorphisms – reported on this site come from such sources). Here, I went back and listened to the items again, and decided the discussions were rich enough in interesting points to be worth taking time to transcribe them in full. The science itself was fascinating, but I also thought the discourse was interesting from the perspective of communicating abstract science. 1
I have appended my transcriptions below for anyone who is interested – or you can go and listen to the podcast (episode 'Largest ever COVID safety study' of the BBC World Service's Science in Action).
Space, as Douglas Adams famously noted, is big. And it is not easy for humans to fully appreciate the scales involved – even of say, the distance to the moon, or the mass of Jupiter, let alone beyond 'our' solar system, and even 'our' galaxy. Perhaps that is why public communication of space science is often so rich with metaphor and other comparisons?
When is a star no longer a star (or, does it become a different star?)
One of the issues raised by both items is what we mean by a star. When we see the night sky there are myriad visible sources of light, and these were traditionally all called stars. Telescopes revealed a good many more, and radio telescopes other sources that could not detected visually. We usually think of the planets as being something other than stars, but even that is somewhat arbitrary – the planets have also been seen as a subset of the stars – the planetary or wandering stars, as opposed to the 'fixed' stars.
At one time it was commonly thought the fixed stars were actually fixed into some kind of crystalline sphere. We now know they are not fixed at all, as the whole universe is populated with objects influenced by gravity and in motion. But on the scale of a human lifetime, the fixed stars tend to appear pretty stationary in relation to one another, because of the vast distances involved – even if they are actually moving rather fast in human terms.
Wikipedia (a generally, but not always, reliable source) suggests "a star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity" – so by that definition the planets no longer count as stars. What about Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A) or quasar J0529-4351?
"This image, taken with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2in 1995, shows the orange-red rings surrounding Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The glowing debris of the supernova explosion, which occurred in February 1987, is at the centre of the inner ring. The small white square indicates the location of the STIS aperture used for the new far-ultraviolet observation. [George Sonneborn (Goddard Space Flight Center), Jason Pun (NOAO), the STIS Instrument Definition Team, and NASA/ESA]" [Perhaps the supernova explosion did not actually occur in February 1987]
Supernova 1987A is so-called because it was the first supernova detected in 1987 (and I am old enough to remember the news of this at the time). Stars remain in a more-or-less stable state (that is, their size, temperature, mass are changing, but, in proportional terms, only very, very slowly2) for many millions of years because of a balance of forces – the extremely high pressures at the centre work against the tendency of gravity to bring all the matter closer together. (Imagine a football supported by a constant jet of water fired vertically upwards.) The high pressures inside a star relate to a very high temperature, and that temperature is maintained despite the hot star radiating (infra-red, visible, ultraviolet…) into space 3 because of the heating effect of the nuclear reactions. There can be a sequence of nuclear fusion reactions that occur under different conditions, but the starting point and longest-lasting phase involves hydrogen being fused into helium.
The key point is that when the reactants ('fuel') for one process have all (or nearly all) been reacted, then a subsequent reaction (fusing the product of a previous phase) becomes more dominant. Each specific reaction releases a particular amount of energy at a particular rate (just as with different exothermic chemical reactions), so the star's equilibrium has to shift as the rate of energy production changes the conditions near the centre. Just as you cannot run a petrol engine on diesel without making some adjustments, the characteristics of the star change with shifts along the sequence of nuclear reactions at its core.
These changes can be quite dramatic. It is thought that in the future the Earth's Sun will expand to be as large as the Earth's orbit – but that is in the distant future: not for billions of years yet.
Going nova
Massive stars can reach a point when the rate of energy conversion drops so suddenly (on a stellar scale) that there is a kind of collapse, followed by a kind of explosive recoil, that ejects much material out into space, whilst leaving a core of condensed nuclear matter – a neutron star. For even more massive stars, not even nuclear material is stable, as there is sufficient gravity to even collapse nuclear matter, and a black hole forms.
It was such an explosion that was bright enough to be seen as a 'nova' (new star) from Earth. Astronomers have since been waiting to find evidence of what was left behind at the location of the explosion – a neutron star, or a black hole. But of course, although we use the term 'nova', it was not actually a new star, just a star that was so far away, indeed in another galaxy, that it was not noticeable – until it exploded.
Dr. Olivia Jones (from the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at The Royal Observatory, Edinburgh) explained that neutron stars form from
"…really massive stars like Supernova 1987A or what it was beforehand, about 20 times the mass of a Sun…
So, what was SN 1987A before it went supernova? It was already a star – moreover, astronomers observing the Supernova were studying
…how it evolves in real time, which in astronomy terms is extremely rare, just tracing the evolution of the death of a star…
So, it was a star; and it died, or is dying. (This is a kind of metaphor, but one that has become adopted into common usage – this way of astronomers talking of stars as having births, lives, careers, deaths, has been discussed here before: 'The passing of stars: Birth, death, and afterlife in the universe.') What once was the star, is now (i) a core located where the star was – and (ii) a vast amount of ejected material now "about 20 light years across" – so spread over a much larger volume than our entire solar system. The core is now a "neutron star [which] will start to cool down, gradually and gradually and fade away".
So, SN 1987A was less a star, than an event: the collapse of a star and its immediate aftermath. The neutron star at is core is only part of what is left from that event (perhaps like a skeleton left by a deceased animal?) Moreover, if we accept Wikipedia's definition then the neutron star is not actually a star at all, as instead of being plasma (ionised gas – 'a phase of matter produced when material is too hot to exist as, what to us seems, 'normal' gas) it comprises of material that is so condensed that it does not even contain normal atoms, just in effect a vast number of atomic nuclei fused into one single object – a star-scale atomic nucleus. So, one could say that SN 1987A was no so much a star, as the trace evidence of a star that no longer existed.
And SN 1987A is not alone in presenting identity problems to astronomers. J0529-4351 is now recognised as being possibly the brightest object in the sky (that is, if we viewed them all from the same distance to give a fair comparison) but until recently it was considered a fairly unimpressive star. As doctoral researcher Samuel Lai (Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University) pointed out,
this one was mis-characterised as a star, I mean it just looks like one fairly insignificant point, just like all the other ones, right, and so we never picked it up as quasar before
But now it is recognised to only appear insignificant because it is so far away – and it is not just another star. It has been 'promoted' to quasar status. That does not mean the star has changed – only our understanding of it.
But is it a star at all? The term quasar means 'quasi–stellar object', that is something that appears much like a star. But, if J0529-435 is a quasar, then it consists of a black hole, into which material is being attracted by gravity in a process that is so energetic that the material being accreted is heated and radiates an enormous amount of energy before it slips from view over the black hole's event horizon. That material is not a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity either.
This video from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) gives an impression of just how far away (and so how difficult to detect) the brightest object in the galaxy actually is.
These 'ontological' questions (how we classify objects of different kinds) interest me, but for those who think this kind of issue is a bit esoteric, there was a great deal more to think about in these item.
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"
For one thing, it was not, as presenter Roland Pease suggested, strictly the 37th anniversary of the SN 1987A – at least not in the sense that the precursor star went supernovae 37 years ago. SN 1987A is about 170 000 light years away. The event, the explosion, actually occurred something like 170 000 years before it could be detected here. So, saying it is the 37th anniversary (rather than, perhaps, the 170 037th anniversary4) is a very anthropocentric, or, at least, geocentric take on things.
Then again, listeners are told that the supernova was in "the Large Magellanic Cloud just outside the Milky Way galaxy" – this is a reasonable description for someone taking an overview of the galaxies, but there is probably something like 90,000 light-years between what can be considered the edges of our Milky Way galaxy and this 'close by' one. So, this is a bit like suggesting Birmingham is 'just outside' London – an evaluation which might make more sense to someone travelling from Wallaroo rather than someone from Wolverhampton.
It is all a matter of scale. Given that the light from J0529-4351 takes about twelve billion years to reach us, ninety thousand light years is indeed, by comparison, just outside our own galaxy.
But the numbers here are simply staggering. Imagine something the size of a neutron star (whether we think it really is a star or not) that listeners were informed is "rotating…around 700 times a second". I do not think we can actually imagine that (rather than conceptualise it) even for an object the size of a pin – because our senses have not evolved to engage with something spinning that fast. Similarly, material moving around a black hole at tens of thousands of kilometres per second is also beyond what is ready visualisation. Again, we may understand, conceptually, that "the neutron star is over a million degrees Celsius" but this is just another very big number way that is outside any direct human experience.
Comparisons of scale
Thus the use of analogies and other comparisons to get across something of the immense magnitudes involved:
"If you think of our Sun as a tennis ball in size, the star that formed [SN] 87A was about as big as the London Eye."
"A teaspoon of this material, of a neutron star, weighs about as much as Everest"
the black home at the centre of the quasar acquires an entire Sun worth of mass every single day
the black hole at the centre of the quasar acquires the equivalent of about four earths, every single second
the quasar is about five hundred trillion times brighter than the Sun, or equivalent to about five hundred trillion suns
Often in explaining science, everyday objects (fridges, buses – see 'Quotidian comparisons') are used for comparisons of size or mass – but here we have to shift up to a mountain. The references to 'every single day' and 'every single second' include redundancy: that is, no meaning is lost by just saying 'every day' and 'every second' but the inclusion of 'single' acts a kind of rhetorical decoration giving greater emphasis.
Figurative language
Formal scientific reports are expected to be technical, and the figurative language common in most everyday discourse is, generally, avoided – but communication of science in teaching and to the public in journalism often uses devices such as metaphor and simile to make description and explanations seem more familiar, and encourage engagement.
Of course, it is sometimes a matter of opinion whether a term is being used figuratively (as we each have our own personal nuances for the meanings of words). Would we really expect to see a 'signature' of a pulsar? Not if we mean the term literally, a sign made by had to confirm identify, but like 'fingerprint' the term is something of a dead metaphor in that we now readily expect to find so-called 'signatures' and 'fingerprints' in spectra and D.N.A. samples and many other contexts that have no direct hand involvement.
Perhaps, more tellingly, language may seem so fitting that it is not perceived as figurative. To describe a supernova as an 'evolving fireball' seems very apt, although I would pedantically argue that this is strictly a metaphor as there is no fire in the usual chemical sense. Here are some other examples I noticed:
"we have been searching for that Holy Grail: has a neutron star formed or has a black hole been left behind"
"the quasar is not located in some kind of galactic desert"
there is a "storm, round the black hole"
"the galaxies are funnelling their material into their supermassive black hole"
"extraordinarily hot nuclear ember"
"a dense dead spinning cinder"
"the ultimate toaster"
Clearly no astronomer expects to find the Holy Grail in a distant galaxy in another part of the Universe (and, indeed, I recently read it is in a Museum in Ireland), but clearly this is a common idiom to mean something being widely and enthusiastically sought.5
A quasar does exist in a galactic desert, at least if we take 'desert' literately as it is clearly much too hot for any rain to fall there, but the figurative meaning is clear enough. The gravitational field of the black hole causes material to fall into it – so although the location, at the centre of a galaxy (not a coincidence, of course), means there is much material around, I was not sure how the galaxy was actively 'funnelling' material. This seems a bit light suggesting spilt tea is being actively thrown to the floor by the cup.
A hot ember or cinder may be left by a fire that has burned out, and one at over a million degrees Celsius might indeed 'toast' anything that was in its vicinity. So, J0529-4351 may indeed be the ultimate toaster, but not in the sense that it is a desirable addition to elite wedding lists.
Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is a particular kind of metaphor that describes non-human entities as if they had the motivations, experiences, drives, etc., of people. The references to dying stars at least suggest animism (that the stars are in some sense alive – something that was once commonly believed 6), but there are other examples (that something is 'lurking' in the supernova remnant) that seem to discuss stellar entities as if they are deliberate agents like us. In particular, a black hole acquiring matter (purely due to its intense gravitational field) was described as feeding:
quasars are basically supermassive black holes just swallowing up all the stars and rubbish around
a quasar is feeding from the accretion disc
a monstrous black hole gobbling up anything within reach
just sat [sic] there, gobbling up everything around it
it has to have been feeding for a very, very long time
it will eat about four of those earths, every single second
in a particularly nutritious galaxy
a quasar that has been declared the hungriest object in the universe
There is clearly some kind of extended metaphor being used here.
Feeding frenzy?
The notion of a black hole feeding on surrounding material seems apt (perhaps, again, because the metaphor is widely used, and so familiar). But there seems a lot more 'negative analogy' than 'positive analogy: that is the ways in which (i) a black hole acquires matter, and (ii) an organism feeds, surely have more points of difference than similarity?
For advanced animals like mammals, birds, fish, snails and the like, feeding is a complex behaviour that usually involves active searching for suitable food, whereas the black hole does not need to go anywhere.
The animal has specialist mouth-parts and a digestive system that allows it to break apart foodstuff. The black-hole just tears all materials apart indiscriminately:"it's just getting chopped up, heated up, shredded".
The organism processes the foodstuff to release specific materials (catabolism) and then processes these is very specific ways to support is highly complex structure and functioning, including the building up of more complex materials (anabolism). The black hole is just a sink for stuff.
The organism takes in foodstuffs to maintain equilibrium, and sometimes to grow in very specific, highly organised ways. The black hole just gets more massive.
A black hole surely has more in keeping with an avalanche or the collapse a tall building than feeding?
One person's garbage…?
Another feature of the discourse that I found intriguing was the relative values implicitly assigned to different material found in distant space. There is a sense with SN 1987A that, after the explosion, the neutron star in some sense deserves to be considered the real remnant of the star, whilst the other material has somehow lost status by being ejected and dispersed. Perhaps that makes sense given that the neutron star remains a coherent body, and is presumably (if the explosion was symmetrical) located much where the former star was.
But I wonder if calling the ejected material – which is what comprises the basis of "an absolutely stunning supernova [which is] beautiful" – as 'debris' and 'outer debris"? Why is this material seen as the rubbish – could we not instead see the neutron star as the debris being the inert residue left behind when the rest of the star explored in a magnificent display? (I am not suggesting either should be considered 'debris', just playing Devil's advocate.)
Perhaps the reference to being able to "isolate the core where the explosion was from the rest of the debris" suggests all that is left is debris of a star, which seems fairer; but the whole history of the universe, as we understand it, involves sequences of matter changing forms quite drastically, and why should we value one or some of these successive phases as being the real product of cosmic evolution (stars?) and other phases as just rubbish? This is certainly suggested by the reference to "supermassive black holes in the middle of a galaxy … swallowing up all the stars and rubbish".
Let's hear it for the little guys
Roland Pease's analogy to "the muck at the bottom of your sinkgoing down into the blender" might also suggest a tendency to view some astronomical structures and phenomenon as intrinsically higher status (the blender/black hole) than others (clouds of dust, or gas or plasma – the muck). Of course, I am sympathetic to the quest to better understand "these guys"(intense quasars already formed early in the universe), but as objectively minded scientists we should be looking out for the little guys (and gals) as well.
Appendix A: "the star hidden in the heart of [the] only supernova visible from Earth"
"If you are listening to this live on Thursday, then you're listening to the 37th anniversary of the supernova 1987A, the best view astronomers have had of an exploding star in centuries, certainly during the modern telescope era. So much astrophysics to be learned.
All the indications were, back then, that amidst all the flash and glory, the dying star should have given birth to a neutron star, a dense dead spinning cinder, that would be emitting radio pulses. So, we waited, and waited…and waited, and still there's no pulsing radio signal.
But images collected by the James Webb telescope in its first weeks of operation, peering deep into the ejecta thrown out by the explosion suggest there is something powerful lurking beneath. Olivia Jones is a James Webb Space Telescope Fellow at Edinburgh University and she helped in the analysis."
"87A is an absolutely stunning supernova , it's beautiful, and the fact that you could see it when it first exploded with the naked eye is unprecedented for such an object in another galaxy like this.
We have been able to see how it evolves in real time, which in astronomy terms is extremely rare, just tracing the evolution of the death of a star. It's very exciting."
"I mean the main point is the bit which we see when the star initially explodes , we see all the hot stuff which is being thrown out into space, and then you've got this sort of evolving fireball which has been easiest to see so far."
"Yes, what see initially is the actual explosion of the star itself right in the centre. What happens now is then we had a period of ten years when you couldn't actually see very much in the centre. You needed these new telescopes like Webb and JWST to see the mechanics of the explosion and then, key to this is what was left behind, and we have been searching for that Holy Grail: has a neutron star formed or has a black hole been left behind at the centre of this explosion. And we've not seen anything for a very long time."
"And this neutron star, so this is the bit where the middle of the original star which at the ends of its life is mostly made of iron, just gets sort of crushed under it's own weight and under the force of the explosion to turn itself entirely into this sort of ball of neutron matter."
"Yeah, it's the very, very core of the star. So the star like the Sun, right in the centre is a very dense core, but really massive stars like Supernova 1987A or what it was beforehand, about 20 times the mass of a Sun.
If you think of our Sun as a tennis ball in size, the star that formed 87A was about as big as the London Eye. So it's a very massive star. The pressure and density right in the centre of that star is phenomenal. So, it creates this really, really, compact core. A teaspoon of this material, of a neutron star, weighs about as much as Everest. So, it's a very, a very dense, very heavy, core that is left behind."
"These were the things which were first detected in the 1960s, because they have magnetic fields and they rotate, they spin very fast and they cause radio pulsations and they're called pulsars. so When the supernova first went off I know lots of radio astronomers were hoping to see those radio pulsations from the middle of this supernova remnant."
"Yes. So, we know really massive stars will form a black hole in the centre, 30, 40, 50 solar masses will form a black hole when it dies. Something around 20 solar masses you'd expect to form a neutron star, and so you'd expect to see these signatures, like you said, in the radiowaves or in optical light of this really fastly rotating – by fastly rotating it can be around 700 times a second – but you would expect to see that signature or some detection of that. But even with all these telescopes – with the radio telescopes, X-ray observatories, Hubble – we've not seen that signature, before and so we are wondering, has a black hole been formed? We've seen neutrinos, so we thought the neutron star had formed, but we've not had that evidence before now."
"So, as I understand it, what your research is doing is showing that there's some unexplained source of heat in the middle of the debris that's been thrown out, and that's what your associating which what ought to be a neutron star in the middle, is that roughly speaking the idea?"
"So, the wonderful thing thing about the Webb telescope, you can see at high resolution both the ring, the outer debris of the star, and right at the very centre where the explosion was, but it's not just images we take, so it's not just taking a photograph, we also have this fantastic instrument or two instruments, called spectrographs, which can break down light into their individual elements, so very small wavelengths of light, it's like if you want to see the blue wavelength or the red wavelength, but in very narrow bands."
"And people may have done this at school when they threw some salt into a Bunsen burner and saw the colours, it's that kind of analysis?"
"Yes. And so what we see where the star was and where it exploded was argon and sulphur, and we know that these needed an awful lot of energy, to create these, and I mean a lot, of energy. And the only thing that can be doings this, we compared to many different kinds of scenarios, is a neutron star."
"So this is basically an extraordinarily hot nuclear ember, that's sort of sitting in the middle."
"Yes, right in the middle and you can see this, cause Supernova 1987A is about 20 light years across, in total, and we can isolate the core where the explosion was from the rest of the debris in this nearby galaxy, which I think is fantastic."
"Do you know how hot the surface of this star is and is it just sort of the intense heat, X-ray heat I imagine, that's coming off, that's causing all this radiation that you're seeing."
"I hope you are ready for a very big number."
"Go on."
"The neutron star is over a million degrees Celsius."
"And so, that's just radiating heat, is it, from, I mean this is like the ultimate toaster?"
"Yes, so what eventually will happen over the lifetime of the universe is this neutron star will start to cool down, gradually and gradually and fade away. But that'll be many, many billions of years from now.
What we currently have now is one of the hottest things you can imagine, in a very small location, heating up all its surroundings. I would not want to be anywhere nearby there."
Roland Pease interviewing Dr. Olivia Jones (Edinburgh University)
Appendix B: "possibly the brightest object in our universe"
"Now 1987A was, briefly, very bright. Southern hemisphere astronomy enthusiasts could easily spot it in the Large Magellanic Cloud just outside [sic] the Milky Way galaxy. But it was nothing like as bright as JO529-4351 [J0529-4351], try memorising that, its a quasar twelve or so billion light years away that has been declared the brightest object in the universe and the hungriest. At first sight, it's an anonymous, unremarkable spot of light of trillions on [sic] an astronomical photo. But, if you are an astronomer who knows how to interpret the light, as Samual Lai does, you will find this is a monstrous black hole gobbling up anything within reach. Close to the edge of all that we can see."
"So this quasar is a record breaking ultra-luminous object, in fact it is the most luminous object that we know of in the universe. Its light has travelled twelve billion years to reach us, so it's incredibly far object, but it's so intrinsically luminous that it appears bright in the sky."
"And as I understand it, you identified this as being a very distant and bright object pretty recently though you have gone back through the catalogues and its was this insignificant speck for quite a long time."
"Yes, indeed. In fact we were working on a survey of bright quasars, so we looked at about 80% of the sky using large data sets from space satellites. Throughout our large data sets, this one was mis-characterised as a star, I mean it just looks like one fairly insignificant point, just like all the other ones, right, and so we never picked it up as quasar before. Nowadays we are in the era of extremely astronomical, pardon the pun, data sets where in order to really filter thorough them we have these classification algorithms that we use. So, we have the computer, look at the data set, and try to learn what we are looking at, and pick out between stars and quasars."
"Now, is it also interesting, they were discovered about sixty years ago, the first quasars. These are basically supermassive black holes in the middle of a galaxy that's just swallowing up all the stars and rubbish just around it, and that's the bit that for you is quite interesting in this instance?"
"Yes, exactly, and the quasar owes its luminosity to the rate at which it is feeding from this accretion disc, this material that's swirling around, like a storm, with the black hole being the eye of the storm."
"I mean, I think of it as being a bit like the muck at the bottom of your sink going down into the blender at the bottom, it's just getting chopped up, heated up, shredded, and, I mean what sort of temperatures are you talking about? What, You know, what kind of energy are you talking about being produced in this system?"
"Yes ,so the temperatures in the accretion disc easily go up to tens of thousands of degrees, but talking about brightness, the other way that we like to measure this is in terms of the luminosity of the Sun, which gives you are sense of scale. So, this quasar is about five hundred trillion times brighter than the Sun, or equivalent to about five hundred trillion suns."
"And it's been doing this sort of constantly, or for really for a long time, I mean it's just sat there, gobbling up everything around it?"
"Yeah, I mean the mass of the quasar is about 17 billion solar masses, so in order to reach that mass it has to have been feeding for a very, very long time. We work it out to be about one solar mass per day, so that's an entire Sun worth of mass every single day. Or if you like to translate that to more human terms, if you take the Earth and everybody that's on it, and you add up all of that mass together, it will eat about four of those earths, every single second."
"I suppose what I find gob-smacking about this is (a) the forces, the gravitational forces presumably involved in sweeping up that amount of material, but (b) it must be an incredibly busy place – it can't be doing this in some kind of galactic desert."
"Yes, indeed, I mean these quasars, these super-massive black holes are parts of their galaxies, right, they're always in the nuclear regions of their host galaxies, and in some way the galaxies are funnelling their material into their supermassive black hole."
"But this one must be presumably a particularly, I don't know, nutritious galaxy, I guess. It is so far away, you can't make out those kinds of details."
"We can however make out that some of that material moving around, inside the storm, round the black hole, their dynamics are such that their velocities reach up to tens of thousands of kilometres per second."
"Why are you looking for then? Is it because you just want to break records – I'm sure it's not. Or is it, that you can see these things a long way away? Is it, it tells you about the history of galaxies?"
"I mean we can learn a lot about the universe's evolution by looking at the light from the quasars. And in fact, the quasar light it tells you a lot about not just the environment that the quasar resides in, but also in anything the quasar light passes through. So, you can think of this, lights from the quasar, as a very distant beacon that illuminates information about everything and anything in between us and the quasar."
"I mean the thing that I find striking is, if I've read the numbers right, this thing is so far away that the universe was about a billion years old. I mean I suppose what I'm wondering is how did a black hole becomes so massive so early in the universe?"
"Ah see, I love this question because you are reaching to the frontier of our current understanding, this is science going as we speak. We are running into an issue now that some of these black holes are so massive that there's not enough time in the universe, at the time that we observe them to be at, in order for them to have grown to such masses as they are seen to be. We have various hypotheses for how these things have formed, but at the moment we observe it in its current state, and we have to work backwards and look into the even older universe to try to figure out how these guys came to be."
Roland Pease interviewing Dr. Samuel Lai (Australian National University)
Notes
1 Having been a science teacher, I find myself listening to, or reading, science items in the media at two levels
I am interested in the science itself (of course)
I am also intrigued by how the science is presented for the audience
So, I find myself paying attention to simplifications, and metaphors, and other features of the way the science is communicated.
Teachers will be familiar with this. Curriculum selects some parts of science and omits other parts (and there is always a debate to be had about wither the right choices are made about what to include, and what to omit). However, it is rare for the selected science itself to be presented in 'raw' form in education. The primary science literature is written by specialists for other specialists, and to a large extent by researchers for other researchers in the same field – and is generally totally unsuitable for a general audience.
Curriculum science is therefore an especially designed representation of the science intended to be accessible to learners at a particular stage in their education. Acids for twelve years olds or natural selection for fifteen year olds cannot be as complex, nuanced and subtle as the current state of the topic as presented in the primary literature. (And not just because of the level f presentation suitable for learners, but also because in any live field, the work at the cutting edge will by definition be inconsistent across studies as this is just where the experts are still trying to make the best sense of the available evidence.)
The teacher then designs presentations and sequences of learning activities to engage particular classes of learners, for often teaching models and analogies and the like are needed as stepping stones, or temporary supports, even to master the simplified curriculum models set out as target knowledge. Class teaching is challenging as every learner arrives with a unique nexus of background knowledge, alternative conceptions, relevant experiences, interests, vocabulary, and so forth. Every class is a mixed ability class – to some extent. The teacher has to differentiate within a basic class plan to try and support everyone.
I often think about this when I listen to or read science journalism or popular science books. At least the teacher usually knows that all the students are roughly the same age, and have followed more-or-less the same curriculum up to that point. Science communicators working with the public know very little about their audience. Presumably they are interested enough in the topic or science more generally to be engaging with the work: but likely of a very diverse age, educational level, background knowledge: the keen ten year old to the post-doctoral researcher; the retired engineer to the autistic child with an intense fascination in every detail of dinosaurs…
I often find myself questioning some of the simplifications and comparisons used on science reports in the media – but I do not underestimate the challenge of reporting on the latest findings in some specialist area of science in an 'academically honest' way (to borrow a term from Jerome Bruner) in a three minute radio slot or 500 words in a magazine. So, in that spirit, I was fascinated by the way in which the latest research into Supernova 1987A and J0529-4351 was communicated, at least as much as the science itself.
2 That is, the flux of material emitted by our Sun, for example, is quite significant in human terms, but is minute compared to its total mass. Our sun has cooled considerably in the past few billions of years, but that's long time for it to change! (The Earth's atmosphere has also changed over the same time scale, which has compensated.)
3 Some very basic physics (Isaac Newton's law of cooling) tells us that objects radiate energy at a rate according to their temperature. Stars are (very large and) very hot so radiate energy at a high rate. An object will also be absorbing radiation – but the 'bath' of radiation it experiences depends on the temperature of its surroundings. A hot cup of coffee will cool as it is radiating faster than it is absorbing energy, because it is hotter than its surroundings. Eventually it will be as cool as the surroundings and will reach a dynamic equilibrium where it radiates and absorbs at the same rate. (Take the cooled cup of coffee into the sauna and it will actually get warmer. But do check health and safety rules first to see if this is allowed.)
The reference to how
"what eventually will happen over the lifetime of the universe is this neutron star will start to cool down, gradually and gradually and fade away. But that'll be many, many billions of years from now"
should be understood to mean that the cooling process STARTED as soon as there was no internal source of heating (form nuclear reactions or gravitational collapse) to maintain the high temperature; although the process will CONTINUE over a long period.
4 That weak attempt at humour is a variant on the story of the museum visitors who asked the attendant how old some ancient artefacts were. Surprised at the precision of the reply of "20 012 " years, they asked how the artefacts could be dated so precisely. "Well", the attended explained, "I was told they were twenty thousand years old when I started, and I've worked here for twelve years."
Many physics teachers will not find this funny at all, as it is not at all unusual for parallel mistakes to be made by students. (And not just students: a popular science book suggested that material in meteors can be heated in the atmosphere to temperatures of up to – a rather precise – 36 032 degrees! (See 'conceptions of precision').
5 The Holy Grail being the cup that Jesus is supposed to have used at the last supper to share wine with his disciples before he was arrested and crucified. Legend suggests it was also used to collect some of his blood after his execution – and that it was later brought to England (of all places) by Joseph of Arimathea, and taken to Glastonbury. The Knights of King Arthur's Round Table quested to find the Grail. It was seen as a kind of ultimate Holy Relic.
6 Greek and Roman cultures associated the planets (which for them included the Sun and Moon) with specific Gods. Many constellations were said to be living beings that have been placed in the heavens after time on earth. Personification of these bodies by referring to them in gendered ways ('he', 'she') still sometimes occurs.
In his cosmogony, Plato had the stars given a kind of soul. Whereas Aristlotle's notion of soul can be understood as being something that emerges from the complexity of organisation (in organisms), Plato did imply something more supernatural.
Alternative conceptions underpin some, but not all, learning difficulties
Keith S. Taber
I recently wrote here about a paper published in a research journal which used a story about the romance between two electrons, Romeo and Juliet, as a context for asking learners to build models of the atom. (I thought the approach was creative, but I found it quite dificult to decode some aspects of the story in terms of the science).
But something else I noticed about that study (Aquilina et al., 2024) was that the authors listed a number of 'misconceptions' that their teaching approach was meant to address (see the Table reproduced above). These were:
Students, after studying planetary and Bohr's atomic models, cannot move beyond them easily.
Students rarely reflect on and/or understand the need for the development of new atomic models.
Students find it difficult to associate spectral lines with transitions between energy levels.
Students do not describe photon emission processes properly.
Students do not clearly understand the concept of an orbital.
Students find it difficult to understand atomic quantum-mechanical models.
But none of these actually seemed to be misconceptions.
To be clear, I think
all of these points are pertinent to the research; and they reflect
challenges to the teacher, and
learning difficulties experienced by many learners.
But they are not misconceptions.
What is a misconception?
There is a very large literature reporting student misconceptions, or alternative conceptions, in science subjects.1 A misconception, or alternative conception, is a conception that is judged to be inconsistent with the scientific account (or the version of the scientific account presented in the curriculum). The points listed in Aquilina and colleagues' table are not conceptions, so cannot be alternative conceptions – just as a postbox cannot be a red car, because it is not a car; and nor can Boyle's law be a refuted theory, because it is not a theory; and a mushroom cannot be a leafless plant, because it is fungi not plant.
So, what is a conception?
We might understand a conception to be one facet of a concept (Taber, 2019). Consider a student has some ideas about atoms. We might consider the learner's concept of the atom to be the collection of all those ideas about atoms. Imagine a learner thinks:
atoms are very small
an atom contains a nucleus
atoms contain electrons arranged in shells
there are many different types of atoms
gold atoms are gold coloured
everything is made of atoms 2
an exploding atom can destroy a city
If this was the full extent of their ideas about atoms, we might collectively see this list as comprising their atom concept. We could represent it by drawing a concept map showing how the learner sees 'atom' to be linked to other concepts such as 'nucleus', 'electron', etc.
But we might consider each one of these separate statements to be a conception.
Our conceptions vary across a number of dimensions (after Figure 2.3 in Taber, 2014)
There are complicatons:
A person may have (implicit / tacit) 'conceptions' that they could not easily put into words to express as statements. (A researcher might elicit what a learner is thinking and represent it as a sentence, but for the learner it may be more a vague intuition that they only put in words in response to the researcher's questions.)
A person may also show different levels of commitments to conceptions – perhaps our hypothetical learner is pretty certain that atoms are very small, but only has a hunch that gold atoms are gold coloured. Perhaps the learner was told by a friend that an atom bomb that is powerful enough to destroy a city is based on exploding a single atom at its centre – and our learner remembers this, but is actually very sceptical.
We usally say a learner has an alternative conception when they hold a conception which is inconsistent with (so alternative to) the scientific account. A great many such alternative conceptions have been elicited in research that explores people's thinking about science. Much of this work has been undertaken with science learners, but some simply with people in the general population (when alternative conceptions may be termed as 'folk science' or 'urban myths'). Here are just a few of the examples discussed elewhere on this site:
These are 'alternative' because they are contrary to the scientific account, and they are significant to science teachers because they are contrary to the target knowledge the teacher is expected to teach to students.
One reason to perhaps prefer the term 'alternative conception' to 'misconceptions' is that the latter term may seem to imply the outcome of misunderstanding teaching. Alternative conceptions certainly can be linked to misunderstanding teaching, but often this occurs because the learner already has an intuitive idea that is contrary to the science, and this leads to them misinterpreting teaching. But consider this example:
an atom of an element in the first period has a full shell with two eletrons, all other atoms would need to have eight electrons in the outer shell for it to be a full shell
This is an alternative conception that learners sometimes do hold, whereas eight electorns only counts as a full shell in period 2 (Li, Be, B, C, N, O, F, Ne) and not for any of the other elements. So, a chloride atom (electronic configuration 2.8.7) does not have a full outer shell when it joins with an electron to become a chloride ion (2.8.8).
But I have seen school textbooks aimed at secondary levels learners (c.14-16 year old students) that actually state quite clearly that all atoms, apart from H and He have a full outer shell with eight electrons. If a learner had read that in the textbook issued by the school, and so believes it to be so, then they have not misconceived what they read – they have accurately understood the intended meaning. But it is still an alternative conception ('misconception').
Learning blocks and misconceptions
So, something cannot be an alternative conception (misconception), unless it is both a conception, and counter to the scientific account. But there are other reasons a learner may struggle to understand the science in the curriculum.
A learner may lack specifc prerequisite background knowldge needed to make sense of a new idea; or the learner may not appreciate that cetain prior knowledge is meant to be applied in understanding the new material. Learners may indeed misinterpet teaching due to an existing alternative conception, but they may also sometimes make an unhelpful association with unrelated prior learning. (That is, they interpet teaching in terms of some prior learning that they think is related, but which from the scientific perspective is not relevant.) Sometimes that may relate to how scientific terms may be understood through the learner's language resources (such as assuming a 'neturalisation' reaction will always lead to a neutral product becasue that's exactly what a reasonable person might expect 'neutralisation' to mean!) or it may relate to not appreciating the limitations of a teacher's model, or to how an analogy or metaphor (e.g., electron shell) is intended to be figurative, not literal.
Learners may not always understand teaching as intended
So, alternative conceptions are indeed very relevant to the challenge of teaching science, but not all learning difficulties are due to alternative conceptions; and certainly not all learning dificulties should be labelled as 'misconceptions'.
Beyond misconceptions
So, what about Aquilina and colleagues' list of supposed 'misconceptions'?
Students, after studying planetary and Bohr's atomic models, cannot move beyond them easily.
Students rarely reflect on and/or understand the need for the development of new atomic models.
Students find it difficult to associate spectral lines with transitions between energy levels.
Students do not describe photon emission processes properly.
Students do not clearly understand the concept of an orbital.
Students find it difficult to understand atomic quantum-mechanical models.
There are a number of well-recognised issues here. Two in particular stand-out.
The unfamiliar abstract
For one thing the subject matter is unfamiliar and abstract. People can only understand teaching if they can link it to existing experience or prior learning. Teachers have to find ways 'to make the unfamiliar familiar'. (This is why Aquilina and colleagues devised a narrative based on a tragic love story that they expected the students to be familiar with.)
But learning about the abstract in terms of the familiar only moves a learner so far when the familiar is only a little like the target. Learners know about shells, so can imagine electrons in shells – but electron shells are not really like more familiar shells (such as those that protect snails and cockles or bird's eggs). Learners can imagine electrons spinning like spinning topics, but electron spin is not like that – the electron does not spin.
The behaviour of quanticles, quantum objects, is quite unlike the behaviour of familiar objects. An orbital is not really an object at all, but more a description of the solution of a mathematical equation – those diagrams showing the different atomic or molecular orbitals are a bit like the map of the London underground: schematic representations that are useful for some purposes, but not realistic images of the orbital/rail line.
Acquiring model nous (epistemologial sophistication)
The second issue relates to epistemological niavety, which comes from not appreciating the subtle nature of science. If we teach students that an atom is like THIS (say, electrons orbitting a central nucleus like planets orbiting the sun), why shoud we then be surprised that students think that is what an atom is like – and so then struggle to understand why we are now teaching them the atom is quite different from this? The defence that we did point out this was a model is only convincing if we are sure the students understood what a scientific model is.
We might describe thinking that electrons in atoms have definite trajectories as being a 'misconception' – but if we have taught such a model then the learner's real misconception is in thinking that such a model is meant to be a realistic representation. If we never taught them that the model was something other than a scale replica of an atom, then this is a 'pedagogic learning impediment'. That is, the student is only guilty of learning what they have been taught!
Perhaps more attention to this aspect of the nature of science throughout school science might avoid this problem. Imagine that from a young age learners had regularly been asked in their science lessons to:
devise different models and representations of various scientific phenomena
identify the strength and limitations of different models (both those produced by learners, and mulitpile representations presented by the teacher)
discuss why having several different (imperfect) models might sometimes be useful
be asked to choose between alternative models/representations for different specified purposes
In contexts where science has tended to be taught as though it offers a single, realistic account of phenomena, then we should not be surprised
that students do not see the need to move beyond the models they have been taught (they consider them as more like scale replicas than theoretical models)
nor indeed when they complain they have put a lot of effort into learning models they now feel they are being taught were wrong all along!
Learners' alternative conceptions are a major impediment to learning school and college science. However, learning of abstract ideas requires learners to make sense of teaching in terms of the interpetative resources they have available – and that is often challenging enough even when they have no existing alternative conceptions in a topic.
Aquilina, G.; Dello Iacono, U.; Gabelli, L.; Picariello, L.; Scettri, G.; Termini, G. "Romeo and Juliet: A Love out of the Shell": Using Storytelling to Address Students' Misconceptions and Promote Modeling Competencies in Science. Education Sciences, 2024, 14, 239. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14030239
Taber, K. S. (2014). Student Thinking and Learning in Science: Perspectives on the nature and development of learners' ideas. New York: Routledge.
Taber, K. S. (2019). The Nature of the Chemical Concept: Constructing chemical knowledge in teaching and learning. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry.
Notes:
1 There are a number of other related terms used in the literature, such as intuitive theories and preconceptions. Sometimes these different terms refect subtle distinctions (so preconceptions refers to alternative conceptions a learner has prior to being taught anything about a topic). But, in practice, there is no real consisitency in how various terms are used across different authors.
I try to reserve the term alternative conceptual framework for more large scale conceptual structures than discrete alternative conceptions. (But again, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably) So, for example, the 'octet' framework is a network of related conceptions built around the core alternative conception that chemical change is driven by atoms needing full electron sells or octets of electrons:
2 A teacher might want to ask students what they means by their words. If a student suggests they believe that everythings is made of atoms, or everything is made from atoms, then this may be a canonical understanding, or an alternative conception:
motto
is a short-hand way of suggesting
alternative conception
everythings is made of atoms
all material substances found under normal conditions can be shown to contain atomic cores surrounded by electrons
if we could examine all materials we would find they are comprised of lots of discrete atoms just stuck together
everything is made from atoms
we can envisage that any substance could be built up by chemiclly joining together a certain number of atoms of various elements – all molecules and other structures can be imagined as being built up from atoms
chemical reactions produce different substances by starting with lots of atoms of the relevant elements
Do plants deceive insects by deliberately pretending to be rotting meat? (Spoiler alert. No, they do not.) [Image credits: Rafflesia – Maizal, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Amorphophallus titanum – ailing moose, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; fly and beetle – by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay]
Mysterious plants
Earlier this week I heard an episode of BBC Radio 4's 'Start the Week' programme entitled 'Mysterious Plants' 1 (which can be heard here). It is always good to hear science-related episodes of series such as this. The mysterious plants included Amorphophallus titanum2 believed to have the largest un-branched inflorescence of any plant in the world; and the parasitic genus Rafflesia, one species of which is thought to have the largest individual flowers in the world. 3
I could not help notice, however, that according to the guests, some plants are sentient beings, able to reflect on their circumstances, and to deliberately act in the world. Botanist Dr Chris Thorogood (of University of Oxford's Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum) described the parasitic plant Rafflesia as being 'pretty sneaky'. This is anthropomorphic, because – if taken literally – it implies deliberate behaviour.
No insects were deceived in the making of this programme
He was outdone, in this sense though, by evolutionary chemical ecologist Dr Kelsey Byers (of The John Innes Centre, Norwich) who told listeners,
"So these flies and beetles like to lay their eggs on rotting meat', and the flower goes 'oh, what if I also looked and smelled like rotting meat', or like the Amorphophallus titanum you might see at Kew Gardens for example, 'what if I also emitted heat, just like a pile of rotting meat?' …
So, what it's attracting are flies and beetles that essentially are going 'Ooh, that smells like food, that looks like food, I'm going to lay my eggs here, it's going to be great, my babies will have a great chance to survive'.
But there's, there's no food, it is deceiving them, it's basically saying 'I'm, mimicking the food, come and stay'."
Dr Kelsey Byer speaking on Radio 4
Now, I assume that Dr Byers does not intend this as a literal account of the biology discussed. In strict scientific terms, it is rather misleading
"flies and beetles like to lay their eggs on rotting meat"
I get a little uneasy when non human entities are described as liking things, as this does not reflect the subjective human experience of liking, say chocolate or Pink Floyd. But this unease probably links to the common alternative conception that students acquire in chemistry that atoms 'like' or 'want' full shells of electrons. Dr Byers could quite reasonably suggest that "flies and beetles tend to lay their eggs on rotting meat"; that their behaviour reflects a preference; and that is what 'likes' means. Fair enough.
"the flower goes 'oh, what if I also looked and smelled like rotting meat' … 'what if I also emitted heat, just like a pile of rotting meat?'…"
Now, flowers do not express themselves in language, and in any case (I'm fairly certain) do not have thoughts to potentially be expressed in language. Plato (2008) has his spokesperson Timaeus suggest that plants were "the kind of living being that…knows nothing of belief, reasoning, and intelligence". 4 So, no, plants do not do this – at least not literally.
"flies and beetles essentially are going 'Ooh, that smells like food, that looks like food, I'm going to lay my eggs here, it's going to be great, my babies will have a great chance to survive'…"
So insects are animals, and I can be less sure they do not have any kind of thought processes. (But it seems likely conscious thought requires a much more complex nervous system than that of any insect.) The 'essentially' means that Dr Byers is not suggesting they are directly expressing these ideas, but only indirectly (perhaps, those behavioural preferences again?) But I am pretty sure that even if insects could be said to 'think' at some level, they do not have formal concepts of food. I do not doubt that the fly experiences something when it eats that is different to when it is not eating, but I really doubt it is meaningful to suggest a fly has any concept of eating or can be said to 'know' when it is eating.
Surely, a fly feeding is pure instinct. It responds to cues (smell much more than sight I should think given the fly's compound eye {perhaps excellent for spotting movement, but – identifying potential meals?}, and the likely distance away that food might be found) to approach some material (without thinking, 'oh good, that smells like food!') and then further cues (greater intensity of the smell, perhaps; texture underfoot?) trigger eating, or egg laying. To be honest, I think even as a human I have sometimes behaved this way myself when distracted by a problem occupying all my conscious attention! (To clarify, that's when eating, not laying eggs.)
I do not think flies or beetles have any concept of 'babies'. I am pretty sure they do not know that egg laying is a reproductive function (even if they can be said to have any awareness that they are laying eggs), and will lead to offspring. I'm also pretty sure they are not aware of the issue of infant mortality, and that that they have a greater chance to be a grandparent if they choose the right place to lay their eggs.
The plant is deceiving the insects, it's basically saying 'I'm, mimicking the food, come and stay'.
Again, the plant is not saying anything. If does not have a notion of mimicry, and is not aware it is mimic. It does not have any notions. It is not deliberately deceiving the flies or beetles. It does not know there are flies or beetles in the world. It does not do anything deliberately.
I am not even sure it is right to say the plant deceives. You can only deceive an entity capable of being deceived. Insects are not deceived, just following instincts. The plant does not do anything to deliberately attract or entice the insects – their attraction to the plant is just a consequence of a match of the animal's instincts (not under the control of the insect), and the plant's evolved anatomy, physiology and biochemistry.
Now, as I suggested above, I am pretty sure Dr Byers knows all this (much better than me!) Perhaps this is just a habitual way of talking she has adopted to discuss her work, or perhaps she was deliberately using figurative language on this occasion to help communicate the science to a diverse radio audience. To 'make the unfamiliar familiar' the abstract concepts of science need to be related to more familiar everyday experiences. The narrative here helps to humanise science.
This type of figurative language is anthropomorphic. That is, it treats non-humans (flowers, whole plants, insects, clouds, atoms…) as if they were human – with human cognition (concepts, deliberate conscious thinking) and motivations and emotions. Humans are part of the natural world, and the extent to which anthropomorphism distorts scientific accounts surely varies. An atom cannot be jealous. Nor a bacterium. But I would think a chimp can be.5 What about a fish?
This is a serious issue for science educators because learners often use anthropomorphic language in science lessons, and it is less clear they are doing so figuratively. They may mean this literally – and even if not, may come to habitually use this kind of language and so feel that in doing so they really they can explain phenomena 'scientifically'. But from a technical scientific perspective these are only pseudo-explanations (Taber & Watts, 2000).
So, sodium reacts with chlorine because the atoms want to fill their shells (Taber & Watts, 1996). So wrong, on so many levels, but so many students think that is the scientific account! Bacteria want to infect us, and seek to become resistant to antibiotics. And so many more examples.
The canonical biological explanation is that living things are the way they are because they have evolved to be so, through natural selection. It is natural selection that has led to insects laying eggs in conditions where they are likely to hatch – such as in rotting meat. It is natural selection that has led to some plants attracting insect pollinators by becoming similar to rotting meat – similar, that is, in how those plants are perceived within the insect's unwelt.
But lay people often tend to prefer teleological explanations because they appeal more to our own instincts. It seems that things are the way they are for a purpose: as if a plant was guided towards a new structure because there is an end point, identified from the outset, of becoming attractive to insects that will fertilise the flowers.
As humans behave deliberately and work towards goals, it is easy to transfer this familiar scheme to non-human species. Because human artefacts (the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the iPhone, the international space station) have been designed and built with purposes in mind, it is easy to also see the intricate and effective structures and mechanisms of the living world as also designed with purpose in mind.
Of course, some of these biological structures can seem so unlikely to have evolved through 'chance' or 'trial and error' that many people find the canonical scientific account non-feasible. (And, it is very hard for people to conceptualise the sheer number of generations over which species have evolved.) Of course, although chance is involved, at each step there is feedback into the system: there is preferential selection of some outcomes. What 'works' is selected not so much because it works, but by virtual of it working.
Evolution is contingent – natural selection can only select the features that are 'in play' at a particular time. But which features remain in play is not just down to chance. 6 So, to adopt an analogy, natural selection is not simply a matter of chance, like a number coming up on a roulette wheel. It is more like a game of poker where the cards dealt may be at random, but one can then select which cards to keep, to build up a winning hand. 7
Darwin's book on 'various contrivances'
Darwin was very aware of this general problem, and the specific example of how it came to be that some plants need to be fertilised in very particular ways, by particular insects – and would seem to have structures so specific and well matched to their pollinators that it seems incredible they could have evolved rather than had been deliberately designed.
Darwin knew that many people found his account of evolution unconvincing in the face of the subtlety and intricacies of natural forms. He chose to study the orchids in some detail because they showed great diversity in flower structures and often seemed especially well 'designed' (with 'various contrivances') for their particular animal fertilisers. Darwin argued that all these odd structures could be understood to have slowly evolved from a common ancestor plant by myriad small modification of ancestral structures that collectively led to the wide diversification of forms (Darwin, 1862)
A difficult balance for science communicators
So, science communicators – whether teachers or journalists or scientists themselves – have a challenge here. The kind of language that is most likely to engage an audience and make science seem accessible can actually come to stand in the way of genuine understanding of the scientific principles.
I do not think that means figurative language should be completely avoided in discussing science, but it is very important to remember that an account which is intended to obviously be metaphorical may be understood literally because anthropomorphism and teleology seem to make perfectly good sense to most people.
These kinds of pseudo-explanations may not score any credit in science exams, but this way of thinking is perhaps as instinctively appealing to many humans as, say, laying eggs in rotting meat is to some insects.
Work cited:
Darwin, C. (1862) On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing. London: John Murray
Plato (2008) Timaeus and Critias (Translator: Robin Waterfield).Oxford University Press, 2008.
Taber, K. S. and Watts, M. (1996) The secret life of the chemical bond: students' anthropomorphic and animistic references to bonding, International Journal of Science Education, 18 (5), pp.557-568. (Download this paper)
Taber, K. S., & Watts, M. (2000). Learners' explanations for chemical phenomena. Chemistry Education: Research and Practice in Europe, 1(3), 329-353. (Download this paper)
Notes:
1 The enticing episode description is:
"The plant Rafflesia has the world's largest flowers and gives off one of the worst scents; it's also something of a biological enigma, a leafless parasite that lives off forest vines. For the botanist Chris Thorogood, an expert in parasitic and carnivorous plants at the Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, Rafflesia is also an obsession. In his book, Pathless Forest, he goes in search of this mysterious plant in some of the last wildernesses in South East Asia.
Dr Kelsey Byers is an evolutionary chemical ecologist who specialises in floral scent and its influence on the evolution of flowering plants. In her laboratory at the John Innes Centre in Norwich she studies how flowers use different smells to attract their pollinator of choice. From sweet aromas to the stink of rotting flesh, she explores how plants use con-artistry and sexual deception to thrive.
The ethnobotanist William Milliken from Kew Gardens has spent much of his career working with indigenous people in the Amazon to preserve traditional plant knowledge. Now he's focused on collecting folklore about the use of plants to treat ailments in animals in Britain. From wild garlic treating mastitis in cows, to cabbage for flatulence in dogs, he hopes to uncover a cornucopia of plant-based veterinary medicines."
2 Dr Thorogood helpfully explained that what Amorphophallus titanumactually means is 'giant distorted penis'.
Does a sunflower have large flowers?
3 Some plants have a great many flowers on the same 'head' or inflorescence. Consider the sunflower. From a distance it seems each of the flowers are large, but, on closer inspection, each inflorescence has a great many tiny individual flowers – each one able to produce pollen and be fertilised.
A bee on a sunflower collecting nectar and pollen. Each of the tiny structures is an individual flower.
A photo-essay showing sunflowers at different stages of development including close-ups of the structures can be seen here.
4 Although, to be fair, he went on to suggest that a plant "is aware only of the pleasures and pains that accompany its appetites". I would suggest, not.
5 Am I over-cautious? We assume all normal humans beings can potentially feel anger, jealousy, love, fear, etc. But actually no one really knows if anyone else has the same subjective experiences when two people report they are envious, or in love. People could be experiencing something quite different and still using the same label. (This is the qualia issue – e.g., how do I know if the experience I have of red is what you experience? This is something quite different from agreeing on which objects are red.) After all, some people find odours and flavours attractive that others find unpleasant, and the same mode of tickling can lead to quite different responses from different patients.
I think a dog could be sad, and a rabbit can be scared. But I doubt [sic, I mean really doubt] an earthworm could be proud. Unless we can decide where to draw the lines, we really have to wonder if these terms meaningfully transfer across species.
6 At the level of an individual's survival and reproduction, there is a lot of chance involved. Being in the right, or wrong, place when a mate, or a predator, appears; or when a flood, or a forest fire, happens, may have little to do with the variations in features within a population. But a slight advantage in attracting the mate or escaping the peril means that over a large population, across many generations, some features will be preferentially passed on.
7 Strictly these processes are not random, but 'near enough' for human purposes. A roulette ball is large enough to be a classical object (that is we can ignore the indeterminacy that seems to be part of quantum mechanics) so given the spin of the wheel, and the initial trajectory and entry point of the ball (and such factors as the fiction produced due to the materials involved) it is in principle possible to consider this a deterministic process. That is, particular, precise, starting conditions will lead to distinct, in principle predictable, outcomes. In practice though, no human could control the wheel and ball precisely enough to manufacture a specific outcome. It may as well not be deterministic.
Much the same is true of a pack of cards. Given the original order of the deck and a finite number of specific moves to shuffle the deck, only one new order is possible. It is however again difficult to deliberately shuffle a deck and control the new order (though perhaps not quite impossible – which is why often the person shuffling the deck invites other players to choose cuts within the process).
Sometimes in research, the methodology adopted requires randomisation (for example of individual participants to different experimental conditions) and usually such process as rolling dice or drawing blind ballots are 'good enough' even if not strictly random, as no person could control the outcomes obtained.
A new study reports a creative approach to modelling the atom motivated by a love story
Keith S. Taber
Perhaps it would be better not to introduce an orbital model until we feel learners are ready to appreciate the quantum jump from concentric orbits to fuzzy, overlapping, infinitely-extended patterns of electronic probability, and the associated complex patterns of energy levels they generate.
"Grade: B-. Comment: Your model of the heteronuclear molecule of Romeo-Juliet was creative and aesthetically pleasing, but it was inconsistent because you used rope to stand for the covalent bond when you are representing electrons with apples." (Image by Николай Оберемченко from Pixabay)
The science curriculum contains a good deal of abstract material that is both challenging, and – sadly – not always found intrinsically interesting, to many learners. The teacher has to find what can 'make the unfamiliar familiar', something I have written quite a lot about on this site.
One such abstract topic is the structure of 'the' atom1 – an area where learners will likely come across multiple models and diverse representations, and where what is being modelled and represented (as a quanticle – a quantum object) simply cannot be adequately represented concretely. Given that, it is hardly surprising that often even keen and capable learners show alternative conceptions in this topic (Taber, 2002 [Download paper]).
I was therefore intrigued by a recent research paper that described an approach to progressing learners' ideas about atomic structure by asking them to engage with a story. Narrative is a recognised way of helping make the unfamiliar familiar, and here a story was referenced that is familiar to many people: that of Shakespeare's 'star-crossed lovers': Romeo and Juliet.
So, in the storyline, electrons were named after characters from the tragic tale. It is common to relate abstract chemical ideas to social relations (chemistry uses such metaphors as 'sharing electrons', 'nucleus loving' species, reagent species that 'attack' other molecules, and substances that 'compete') – but this does risk the anthropomorphism (that is, treating non-human entities as if they have human qualities) actually confusing learners.
That is, molecules and ions, and nuclei and electrons are not like people, and do not think or have desires, and so they do not act from motivations such as love or hate or jealousy…
Perhaps this seems SO OBVIOUS that only the weakest student could possibly get confused and think otherwise?
But I know from my own research (e.g., Taber & Watts, 1996 [download paper]) that actually even studious, intelligent learners can come to habitually use anthropomorphic language without noticing that they are explaining chemistry in terms that would only make sense if atoms and molecules and ions and electrons did have preferences, and could think for themselves, and did actaccordingly!
Atoms can not care about anything – so they do not care about how many electrons they have, and they never deliberately do anything in order to obtain full shells or octets (as they cannot act under their own volition, of course). But many generally successful, hard-working, intelligent, learners in chemistry classes all over the world seem to think otherwise (Taber, 1998 [Download paper]).
Likewise, electrons do not care if they are in an atom or not, or whether they are spin-paired or not (and if so, which other, indistinguishable, electron they are paired with), or which energy level of a system they populate.
The authors of the recent paper (which is open access, so freely available for anyone who wishes to download/read it) claim that students found the story-related activity engaging (which certainly seems likely) and that it helped address some misconceptions about atomic structure. They note that:
"Students do not clearly understand the concept of an orbital" (Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024)
This is a topic that has long interested me so I took a look at the activity the researchers had devised. The learners were
"10th-grade classes, with the participants' average age being between 15 and 16, attending a technical computer science high school 1…[who] had already studied the atomic model in their chemistry classes during the first half of the year."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
I have taught a basic (planetary) model of atomic structure to students at this age, and also more advanced models to 16-19 year old learners (on A level courses), so I was keen to read about the activity. The authors did not include an explicit statement of the curriculum content which was being treated as target knowledge, although they did include a discussion of their rationale for the story, as well as comments on student work, from which some features could be deduced or inferred. (I would have found it useful to have read an explicit statement of just what the learners were expected to know – what the 'correct' model was meant to be – at the outset of the paper.)
I approached the paper thinking it was ambitious to teach an orbital model of the atom to students of this age. My reading of the story (reproduced below) reinforced that initial impression (I admit, I was challenged in places!) – although the authors certainly felt the students in their research coped well with the challenge.
Although I felt I struggled interpreting some features of the narrative,
A student with a specific learning disorder (SLD), mentioned, "The connection of a fairly complicated topic with such a simple story"
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
It is important to note that the teaching scheme adopted a dialogic approach, where class discussions were included at two points after the students had worked in groups on parts of the activity. The activity was also conceptualised as being part of an enquiry-based learning cycle. So, the material below should be read accordingly, as it does not reflect this wider classroom context.
The story is broken into four parts, each leading to a task for the learners (working in groups) to engage in.
Prologue
"Romeo is a bold and dynamic electron found in an atom with seven energy levels. He is at the 4s energy level, together with the faithful Mercutio, his companion on raids. Always upside down compared to him, but then there is no place for two equal electrons in their crew. The two are part of the Montague family, known for being particularly lively.
Juliet is an electron in 2s, she is more tied to her nucleus and in fact she is a Capulet, a rival family to that of the Montagues and decidedly more calm. Juliet is always accompanied by her nurse; they too are turned upside down with respect to each other.
There is a grand ball to which everyone is invited, and, to better organize their arrangement, there is a need to schematize their position."
[Instructions to learners: "Discuss with your classmates what should be the design of the atom where the two families «are» and build a model"]
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Chapter 1 – part 1
"At one point during the dance, Romeo notices Juliet in her orbital, and, even if he occasionally gets close to her, he is unable to stay there permanently: quivering with love, he asks who knows her and what her tastes are in terms of radiations (electrons are well known to be romantics). He discovers that Juliet is obsessed with color harmony and that the color she prefers is purple "486 nm". To get noticed he wants to perform his famous photon–spectroscopic serenade and jump to emit a purple trail.
[Instructions to learners: "Discuss with your teammates to help Romeo understand how far he will have to jump and whether or not he would have gotten closer to Juliet in this way."]
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Chapter 1 – part 2
"The two are deeply in love and would like to spend the rest of their days together. But Juliet's family hinders them, crying scandal: a Montague cannot be so tied to the nucleus! What to do? The nurse offers Romeo the chance to take her place, but, for her, this would mean losing her place next to Juliet. Romeo and Juliet, very hesitant, then decide to move towards the orbitals occupied by the Montagues. But how to get up there?
While the couple is tormented by this problem, an enlightened friar, Lory, arrives to their rescue with two THz 457s, offering to give them a lift. Despite this help, Romeo and Juliet are unable to reach the Montague orbital, so they loudly invoke another friar, Enzo, asking for new help.
[Instructions to learners: Discuss with your teammates to understand how far they will jump thanks to the first photons and which photons Fra Enzo will have to carry for the two lovers to reach the Montague orbital."]
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Chapter 2 and epilogue
"Juliet's escape has thrown the entire atomic balance into crisis, forcing some Montagues to change levels in order to maintain overall stability. Then, when the couple comes to the Montagues, they cry out for revenge, and the couple is then forced to flee again.
The Montagues set out in search of Romeo and Juliet but fail because it is not possible to reconstruct the trajectory followed by the two lovers.
The story unfortunately ends in tragedy: the two do manage to free themselves from the influence of their families, but they still understand that they cannot be together. Now condemned to separation, the two lovers decide to draw up a schema of the place (the atom) where they met to remember it forever.
[Instructions to learners: "Discuss with your teammates why this trajectory cannot be reconstructed. End the story with a tragic ending, explaining the reasons for the separation sentence.
EPILOGUE Construct with your teammates a possible model of the scheme realized by Romeo and Juliet."]
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Interpreting the narrative
Reading the account I had a very mixed response. I am very keen on approaches that use the familiar everyday as ways into teaching complex, abstract ideas; but subject to two provisos:
these everyday analogies are interim supports ('scaffolds'), to be withdraw as soon as they are no longer needed;
teaching needs to focus on the 'negative analogy' (things that do not map across) as well as the 'positive analogy' (the aspects of the comparison that 'work').
The approach here seemed somewhat different. The learners had already been taught a model of the atom earlier in the year, and this activity was intended to be an opportunity to review this prior learning and apply it – and an opportunity for teachers to identify any alternative conceptions elicited by the activity.
Metaphorical meanings?
Romeo and Juliet are not the lovers in the stage play, but electrons. Therefore, in reading the story I identified scientific information (electron Romeo is in a 4s orbital in an atom) and material that seemed to be metaphorical (the electrons Romeo and Mercutio go on 'raids'). I therefore saw the task of reading the story as being in part a decoding of the metaphors that were used.
So, the idea of Romeo and Mercutio being relatively "upside down" was not to be taken literally (electrons do not have ups or downs) but to be a metaphor for spin +1/2 and spin –1/2, often referred to metaphorically as 'spin up' and 'spin down'. Going on raids was more tricky: in some chemical reactions electron pairs are considered to shift during bond formation (or bond breaking, but that would not refer to an atomic species), but 'raid' suggests a temporary excursion.
I could not understand in what sense Mercutio (the electron, not the fictional character) could be said to be faithful. Electrons respond to physical forces, not personal attachments. Perhaps, I was over-thinking this, and not all the narrative elements did map onto the atomic system? Perhaps that was meant to be part of the challenge for the learners?
A fundamental concern with this kind of comparison is that all electrons are inherently identical, and are only distinguished by the accidental features they acquire in a particular system.
A 2s electron is on average closer to the nucleus, and experiences a greater effective core charge (it is not shielded as much from the nucleus as a 4s electron is) – so the 'tie' (bond) to the nucleus can be understood as analogous to the attractive force operating between the electron and nucleus. 2
The reference to being more calm perhaps refers to how the 2s level is at a 'lower' energy so the 'particularly lively' 4s electrons can be more dynamic?
If Romeo and Mercutio, or even Romeo and Juliet, were swapped it could make absolutely no difference and no one could tell. By giving electrons personal identities they seem to be more like us and less like electrons. Electrons cannot be bold or calm. Romeo and Juliet behave differently because they are in different orbitals at different energy levels, not because they are different electrons. Could learners miss this critical point? If Juliet (or Romeo) moved to a different energy level then she (or he) would change 'personality' – but that would undermine the narrative.
I was not sure how the two families related to anything. Within an atom we could class some electrons alike because they are in the same 'shell' (have the same principal quantum number) – so perhaps the two families were in the n=2 and n=4 levels (the L and N shells being their metaphorical 'houses'). I also could not understand where the ball was meant to be held:
were the electrons to be moved to a new set of orbitals (requiring promotion)
were the electrons meant be moved to outside the atom (requiring ionisation), or
was the ball to take place with the electrons in their current orbitals (but for some reason behaving differently than when no dance was taking place?)
The attraction between Romeo and Juliet (the electrons, not the fictional lovers) was difficult to understand. Certainly, if we adopt a model of electrons moving about in different orbitals 3 then they could sometimes be nearer to each other as atomic orbitals interpenetrate – and if so they would influence each other more (due to their charge and spin) at these times: but this would primarily be a repulsion.
Interpenetrating fields of play. If two sports pitches were marked out overlapping on the same ground, then there would be places that were part of both fields of play.
(Consider a school with very limited space for sports pitches. Perhaps they mark up a soccer pitch and a field hockey pitch overlapping. If both soccer and hockey players train at the same time there will be places that are part of both pitches, and players from the two sports can come close together in those areas. {This is just an analogy. The two sports would need to schedule practice at different times to avoid accidents!})
It seemed to me that the learners were being asked to read the account at two levels – some features of the story were metaphors (such as when the lovers left the atom only to find they had separate indeterminate trajectories) when other features seemed to be simply plot devices to provde an engaging narrative. I thought that the students were being asked to work out which bits of the story they should take seriously as corresponding to part of an atomic model, and which just moved the narrative on. I though this might be challenging for the 14-15 year old learners (as I was struggling!)
Orbitals and transitions
Some features of the story seemed potentially likely to encourage alternative conceptions. Juliet's preference for light of wavelength 486 nm risks the association of a spectral line with an electron or an energy level, rather than with a transition.
The specific references to 486 nm and 457 THz radiation seemed to suggest that a quantative model was needed – where an atom would actually show spectral lines reflecting transitions associated with radiation of these specific characteristics.
The rationale
Unlike the students, I had access to some of the resource designers' thinking as the paper included a rationale for the storyline. This acknowledged that
The specific location of the grand ball remains implicit [?], as it is challenging to conceive of electrons dancing outside the metaphorical context of "moving swiftly". However, all the other character details are essential for initiating the story and allowing mathematical and physical problems and situations to emerge."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
This seemed to confirm that the learners were expected to build a quantitative model. This was reiterated later in the rationale
"Through calculations of energy transitions and the resulting orbital distances, students gain insight into the quadratic proportionality that underlies these phenomena [?], prompting a gradual reshaping of their personal notions regarding orbital distances."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
I was not sure what was mant by 'orbital distances', and return to this point below. I was also not sure how quadratic proportionality underlay energy transitions.
This was only one of the points in the paper where I got the impression that in the teaching model adopted, energy levels and orbitals were not only being associated, but at times almost seen as equivalent and interchangeable.
A diagnostic assessment opportunity
The rationale seemed to confirm that the activity was deliberately testing whether students associated spectral lines with energy levels rather than transitons between levels,
"To elucidate the intriguing connection between emission and electron transitions to different energy levels, we introduce a romantic-comedic twist, employing Juliet's passion for color harmony as a plot device. Juliet's preference for the color purple is strategically chosen to align with her energy level, prompting students to contemplate the intriguing relationship between spectroscopy lines and electron energy transitions."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
On the other hand, my suspicion that I had been reading too much into the narrative, and trying too hard to interpret plot twists was ratherundermined by being told,
"Take, for instance, Romeo's desire to gain Juliet's attention and their joint pursuit of a life away from their feuding families. This narrative intricately parallels the fundamental interplay of orbitals within the model, establishing a direct and compelling link between the characters' human drama and the pivotal role of orbitals in the model."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Indeed? I was struggling to map across some of the story, even when (unlike the students) I had access to the rationale:
"At the outset, the consequences of Romeo and Juliet's choices become apparent: the voids within the nucleus [?] are replenished with new electrons [?], ultimately disturbing the equilibrium of the two feuding families. This disruption leads them to share orbits [sic], not fueled by anger but by fate. The Montagues seek revenge, yet they grapple with the inability to reconstruct the electrons' orbitals due to the uncertainty principle."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
A lot of this went over my head.
The uncertainty principle would not interfere with characterising orbitals, only with being able to posit specific electron trajectories. The orbitals do not belong to electrons ("the electrons' orbitals") but are characteristic of an atomic system with its configuration of charges.
A hybrid model?
Perhaps, in part, my confusion was due to my not being clear about what the target knowledge was- exactly which kind of model was it hoped the students would produce?
"After studying the planetary and Bohr atomic models, students cannot easily move beyond them"
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
It seemed clear from the paper that the learners were expected to have moved beyond a model with planetary orbits, to a model with orbitals, and so from the idea of electrons moving on definite trajectories, to being found somewhere within the orbitals. 3
There was historically a range of models of the atom (even 'the Bohr model' was actaully a series of models), and long ago Rosaria Justi and John Gilbert (Justi & Gilbert, 2000) pointed out that often in teaching we end up presenting 'hybrid' models – that is, models which have features drawn from across several of the different scientific models. Did the curriculum these students followed set out such a hybrid model for students to learn? 4
An atom with seven energy levels?
At the start of the story, the students were told "Romeo is …found in an atom with seven energy levels". I am not sure any real atom could only have seven energy levels. My understanding is that any atom has in principle an infinite number of energy levels, but the the spacing of the levels gets successively smaller, so they converge on a limit (which makes ionisation feasible). Even the hydrogen atom has an infinite number of energy levels, but only one is populated with an electron.
So, I wondered if possibly this was meant to be read as "Romeo is …found in an atom with seven populated energy levels"?
A sensible starting point for a student is to assume the atom is initially in its ground state (as under normal circumstances they usually are). If the reference to seven energy levels means populated energy levels, and students are to assume the atom starts in the ground state then presumably learners are meant to assume the atom they need to model is one of the first transition series (i.e., elements with electronic configurations from 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d1 to 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10: that is an atom from one of the elements scandium to zinc).
However, later there is a reference to electron Romeo wanting to "jump to emit a purple trail". But he needs to jump 'down' (to a lower energy level) both to get closer to Juliet and indeed to "emit a purple trail" (i.e., for Romeo to be promoted, light would need to be absorbed not emitted) – which is only possible if the atom is NOT initially in its ground state, so that there will be an orbital at a lower energy level not fully occupied. That potentially complicates the model to be built.
For one thing, if the atom is not in its ground state, then atoms of elements of lower atomic mass than scandium might be the target atom to be modelled? Indeed, any atom from the element nitrogen (in the highly excited configuration 1s1 2s1 2p1 3s1 3p1 4s1 3d1 ) on to zinc could theoretically have seven occupied energy levels. It did not help that there seemed to be no information on how many electrons were in this atom – four were specified, and we are told unspecified other 'family' members lived there, and two other characters were name-checked without it being explicit if they were also in the atom or just passing (from the local Abbey perhaps – would that be an atom of a noble gas?)
Interorbital distances?
As noted above, the authors refer to how they "delve into the concept of interatomic orbital distances", but this seems an oxymoron.
"From the analysis of the drawings, it emerges that the students' final drawings can be traced back to three different types of atom representation (R):
R1: orbits/orbitals represented at varying distances to convey the concept of energy levels more effectively;
R2: orbits/orbitals represented at correct distances according to the radius;
R3: attempt to depict the concept of orbitals and the correct distances between them."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
The authors refer to how in a figure assigned to category R3, "The distances between the spheres reflect the correct distances according to n2", but this does not strictly relate to an orbital model.
Orbitals do not have edges, so it is not possible to measure how far they are from anything. Strictly, every orbital reaches to infinity (even if the electron density soon gets so rare that it becomes effectively zero). The point is that this is a gradual falling-off and there is no sudden drop that we might think of as an edge.
Commonly orbitals are represented either with
probability contour lines, or
colour or shading showing differnt levels of electron density (i.e., the relative probabilities of an electron in the orbital being 'found' at different regions of the orbital), or
more simply with probability envelopes.
Those envelopes show where, say, 90% or 95% of the electron density is located – which means 10% or 5% of the electron density (that is inside the orbital) lies outside the envelope drawn. So, these lines are to soem degree arbitrary, conventional and do not correspond to anything physical ('real').
One could measure the distance between the centres of two different orbitals, but this would be a trivial issue when the orbitals are in the same atom. (That is, the atomic orbitals are all centred on the nucleus, so the centres have no distance between each other.)
This is different to a planetary type model where electrons are considered to be a certain distance from the nucleus, so the orbits have quantifiable radii. In moving to an orbital model we have to think of fuzzy overlapping volumes of space, and the notion of there being set distances between orbitals just does not work in this model.
Imagine being asked to report the distance between the soccer pitch and the hockey pitch.
And then imagine having that task when there are no marked out edges to the pitches.
The energy levels associated with the orbitals can be considered to have specific values, and so there are definite differences ('distances'?) between the levels in that sense – but these would be energy gaps: analogical 'distances' on an energy scale, not actual distances.
The authors suggest that,
Despite their discussion about orbitals, [for the students' final drawings] all groups drew orbits, representing them as lines depicting the trajectories of electrons
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
But that is not so clear from the diagrams of the models and the students' own comments.
Student 1: "In a circle, we drew lines. But we know that electrons don't follow that precise path; they exist in orbitals, which are regions where electrons are more likely to be found. So, we don't know the precise radius because it's a region. Therefore, in my opinion, since the radius can always vary, you can't use the radius to depict the atomic model; it's more accurate to use energy levels."
…
Teacher: "Here you have drawn the distances increasingly closer. Why?"
Student 2: "Because it represented differences in energy levels."
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Some groups of students seem to have drawn concentric circles representing energy levels rather than orbits or shells or orbitals. Normally, energy level diagrams are not drawn like that, but this seems a perfectly reasonable form of representation providing it is explained.
Spherical orbitals
We also have to bear in mind that only s-orbitals have spherical symmetry. (A 'shell' of orbitals in an atom would be spherically symmetrical only if each orbital was singly or fully occupied. But it was not clear how many electrons were in this atom.)
The first seven energy levels in any atom or ion with more than one electron will be associated with p- and d-orbitals as well as s-orbitals. So, even if orbitals were represented with probability envelopes, and these were treated (incorrectly) as if the edges of the orbitals, then there would be no fixed 'distances' between the edges of any comparisons involving these non-spherical orbitals.
Not all orbitals have spherical geometry (Image by Smiley _p0p from Pixabay)
At this point it is interesting to examine the samples of student models represented in the paper. All of them are drawn with circles. The authors of the paper seemed satisfied with this aspect of the models.
Making sense of 486 nm and the 'THz 457s'
I pointed out above that my reading of the information given about the atom that it seemed the target atom could be from one of a wide range of elements. It seems I got this completely wrong,
We conclude this paper by highlighting a limitation of the story we have designed from a physical point of view. Our story does not fit the real atomic structure. Indeed, we chose to consider a hydrogen atom with multiple electrons because we thought it was easier for the students to manipulate. We are aware of the fact that this may represent a critical point of our story, but in the classes where we experienced the activity it has not created problems, since the students noticed this inconsistency and talked about it with the teacher.
Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024
Now, by definition, a model is never quite like what is modelled – or it ceases to be a model and becomes a perfect replica. But "a hydrogen atom with multiple electrons" is not an atom at all, but an ion. I am not clear why this is "easier to manipulate" than an atom of a different element, as in models of this kind the nucleus is in effect just a minute point charge – so its composition does not complicate the model in any significant way. If that nuclear charge is +7, say, rather than +1, it makes a difference, certainly (to energy levels), but that does not add any further complexity.
Perhaps the authors chose to retain a hydrogen nucleus because they wanted students to use data from hydrogen spectra? (But if so, this was a little naughty.)
The Balmer series
Again, it did not help that I did not know what the target knowledge set out in the curriculum was.4 But, knowing now that hydrogen was the target atom led me to suspect 486 nm and 457 THz radiation linked to lines in the hydrogen spectra – lines in the Balmer series associated with transitions between n=3 and n=2 (656 nm) and n=4 and n=2 (486 nm).
That was all very well, but those transitions referred to the hydogen atom and not to a hydrogen ion. The extra electrons repelling each other in the ion (assuming the ion could be considered stable, which is itself problematic) mean the energy levels (and so the energy gaps; and so the spectral lines) would all be different.
But, if we pretended the ion was stable, and if we pretended that the additional electrons did not change the energy levels (what is what I meant by being somewhat naughty), then the numbers made sense.
A sleight of hand?
Indeed, if we were to adopt the hydrogen atom as the model for our ion, then I sensed I understood why the orbitals were all drawn as circles. In the hydrogen atom, the energy levels are only associated with the principle quantum number. The 2p orbital is at just the same energy level as the 2s orbital. A transition from the N shell to the L shell has the same energy associated with, and so the same frequency of radiation, regardless of whether it involved 2s-4s or 2p-4s or 2s-4p or 2p-4p or 2s-4d or 2p-4d (or indeed 2s-4f or 2p-4f)5. That is a considerable simplification, that would make the task much easier for learners.
So, if we are modelling the hydrogen atomic energy levels, we only need to worry about the principle quantum number as there is one level for each value of n. The student diagrams reproduced in the paper suggested all the students understood the reference to an atom with seven energy levels to mean n (that is the principle quantum number related to 'shell') = 1-7.
But an energy level is not an orbital. The n=2 energy level in a hydrogen atom is associated with 4 orbitals, only one of which has spherical symmetry. The n=3 level is associated with 9 orbitals, only one of which has spherical symmetry.
Moreover, this assumption that all the orbtials in a shall are at the same energy level ('degenerate') only applies to a hydrogenic species (H, He+, Li2+, etc.) – that is, atom-like species with a single electron. The 'atom' (ion) with Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio and the nurse and the rest of the Capulets and Montagues (and possibly some clergy) would not have 2s and 2p orbitals that were degenerate. The presence of interacting electrons (repelling each other, that is, not lusting after each other and "quivering with love") would raze the degeneracy- so the 2s and 2p orbitals would actually be at different energy levels. And so also with 3s and 3p and 3d.
It is not the presence of a hydrogen nucleus which leads to degeneracy between the orbitals within each value of n (each shell), but a system of one nucleus and one electron. So if this 'atom' (ion) had seven energy levels, these would not equate to seven shells of electrons.
The model
So, it looks like the target model was an ion with a hydrogen nucleus, and 7 energy levels occupied by an unspecified number (>4) of electrons, which has the same energy structure and levels as a hydrogen atom, but where each energy level only contained an s orbital.
Models simplify, and in modelling we deliberately leave aside some complexity and nuance. However, we have to balance the gain in simplicity with the loss of authenticity.
A highly charged hydrogen ion could not exist (unless maintained by some very powerful external field)
Atoms have an infinite number of energy levels (but there is no harm in asking learners to ignore most of them for the time being when working on a task)
A hydrogen atom has orbitals of different types (s, p, d…) not all of which are of spherically symmetrical.
The electronic transitions in an ion would not be those found in the related atom, as energy levels of the system depend on the configuration of charges that are interacting. The ion would have many more potential transitions than a single-electron system (such as a hydrogen atom), and these would not have the same energies/frequencies/wavelengths as in the hydrogen atom.
Orbitals do not have edges, and they interpenetrate, so the concept of interatomic orbital distances does not correspond to anything 'realistic' in the orbital model of the atom.
So, the model seems to put aside a lot of the subtlety of the science. But then are these nuanced ideas suitable for treatment with most 15-16 year olds? I would have suspected not (which is why I started from a position of thinking this whole activity was somewhat ambitious), and that may well be why compromises were made in the teaching model adopted in this study.
But perhaps it would be better not to introduce an orbital model until we feel learners are ready to appreciate the quantum jump from concentric orbits to fuzzy, overlapping, infinitely-extended patterns of electronic probability, and the associated complex patterns of energy levels they generate. (But, again, the teaching model used may simply have been reflecting the target knowledge set out in the school curriculum in this particular national context? 4)
After all, as the authors had noted,
"Students do not clearly understand the concept of an orbital" (Aquilina, Dello Iacono, Gabelli, Picariello, Scettri & Termini, 2024)
Encouraging a new alternative conception?
To take one point. The 486 nm and 457 THz radiation is associated with transitions between n=3 and n=2 (656 nm) and n=4 and n=2 (486 nm) in the hydrogen atom, but NOT in the 'atom' populated with Montagues and Capulets.
Does this matter? After all, the point of the exercise is not to remember these specific values, but to be able to link radiation emitted or absorbed to electronic transitions – so, the particular values of 486 nm and 457 THz are irrelevant. True, but what students are potentially learning here is that the values of energy levels are not affected by the number of electrons repelling each other (here we have an ion with many electrons, but we can simply use the values for a hydrogen atom) – which is an alternative conception.
I also know that this is an alternative conception that learners are likely to readily develop. When students study ionisation energies, and make comparisons between different atoms, they often fail to allow for how the same designation of orbital does not imply an equivalence between differently populated electronic structures.
So, for example, a 2p orbital in an oxygen atom is not only not equivalent to a 2s orbital in the same atom: nor is it equivalent to a 2p orbital in a nitrogen atom. Nor, for that matter, is it entirely equivalent to a 2p orbital in the o2- anion.
This is not the most serious alternative conception that students can acquire, but given the complexity and challenge of this whole topic area, it might be wise to avoid risk misleading students when possible.
Or am I just being over-critical because I myself found the task too challenging? ☹️
To see through an orbital clearly?
This was an interesting project, and I hope the authors explore the idea further, and perhaps use their experiences with this implementation to further refine the activity. But I am not sure it is helpful in the long term to encourage learners to work with a model that is so constrained that it is likely to encourage new alternative conceptions.
But would that be the case? If the activity is part of a dialogic teaching sequence and the catalyst for engaging students in a discussion of these abstract ideas – a discussion that the teacher carefully steers towards the canonical account – then perhaps the outcome can be more productive. I guess we can only conjecture about this, until someone investigates the long-term effects of learning from the activity.
As usual, it is fair to say "more research is needed".
Aquilina, G.; Dello Iacono, U.; Gabelli, L.; Picariello, L.; Scettri, G.; Termini, G. "Romeo and Juliet: A Love out of the Shell": Using Storytelling to Address Students' Misconceptions and Promote Modeling Competencies in Science. Education Sciences, 2024, 14, 239. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14030239
Justi, R., & Gilbert, J. K. (2000). History and philosophy of science through models: some challenges in the case of 'the atom'. International Journal of Science Education, 22(9), 993-1009.
Taber, K. S. (1998) An alternative conceptual framework from chemistry education, International Journal of Science Education, 20 (5), pp.597-608. [Download paper]
Taber, K. S. (2002) Conceptualizing quanta – illuminating the ground state of student understanding of atomic orbitals, Chemistry Education: Research and Practice in Europe, 3 (2), pp.145-158 [Download paper]
1 Of course there are many atoms, and indeed many kinds of atoms – so the use of the definite article ('the') is strictly inappropriate. But, this is common usage,
What seems potentially more problematic is the use of the definitive article when the referent is not a specific individual specimen. Chemistry teachers will say things like "the ammonia molecule is pyramidal" when no ammonia molecule is either specified directly or can be inferred to be the case in point from the context. This probably does not seem problematic for the simple reason that it does not matter which ammonia molecule is being referred to: they are all pyramidal. So, statements such as the ammonia molecular is pyramidal; the chlorine atom readily accepts an electron; the K shell is nearest the nucleus; and the iodide ion is a good leaving group; etcetera, will be true regardless.
These statements 'work' in a way that some apparently parallel statements from outside of chemistry would not: the house has a blue door, the man walks with a limp, the baby sneezed all night, the bicycle has squeaky brakes, etcetera. Some houses have blue doors – many do not…So, we should not say 'the house has a blue door' unless we have made it clear which house we are referring to. Yet, we do not need to say which particular water molecule is polar, as they all are (i.e., it may be considered an essential quality of a water molecule). So, the question here is why a teacher would say 'the ammonia molecule is pyramidal' when they are not actually referring to a particular specimen, and the point they are making is actually that (all) ammonia molecules are pyramidal.
Taber, 2019, p.128
And, even if we can refer to 'the carbon atom' when we mean any and all carbon atoms, to simply refer to 'the atom' seems a slight to the periodic table – surely we need to say which (kind of) atom we are modelling? That point certainly proved to be critical in the context of the modelling task discussed in this article!
2 The force is symmetrical – the same magnitude force acts on the nucleus and the electron, with each being pulled towards the other. Students commonly have alternative conceptions about this such as thinking the force only acts in one direction (from nucleus to electron) or that the force on the electron is greater.
3 In the planetary model of the atoms, electrons moved in orbits. In the orbital model we can think of electrons moving about the orbital, and the 'electron density' as a kind of average over time of where they have been. However, it may be more in keeping with the quantum model of the atom to suggest the electrons do not actually move around but rather have probabilities of being located at different points under conditions of observation. (According to a very common interpretation of quantum theory, the notion of an electron being somewhere specific only makes sense at the point of observation.) This is pretty difficult to appreciate (especially for most school-age learners), and I suspect most chemists are happy enough most of the time to think of the electrons moving around in their orbitals.
4 Five of the six authors, including the corresponding author, were based in Italy (the other author gave an affiliation based in Canada), so I assume the schools from which the work is reported is in Italy. The paper reports the task set and the student responses in English, so it is not clear if English was used as the language of instruction in the school (this seems unlikely unless this was an International School, but the paper does not report that material has been translated into English).
5 4f orbitals are not usually relevant to atomic structure till we consider cerium, element 58. But the familiar order of filling orbitals as we imagine we are building up atoms (1s < 2s < 2p< 3s < 3p < 4s < 3d < 4p… *) refers to species with more than one electron. For a hydrogen atom, a 4f orbtial is at the same energy level as the 4s orbital, as when occupied the atom's electron, neither would be sheilded at all from the nucleus by other electrons.
(* Ironically, the familiar descriptions of the discrete orbitals designated in this way are based on calculations for a hydrogen atom and do not strictly apply to multi-electron atoms. However the moodel generally works well, and is widely used.)
Can one blog post bring about "substantial financial detriment" to a global publishing corporation?
Keith S. Taber
"…our marketing strategies, particularly the use of alternate identities by our editors and reviewers to engage potential authors… our editors' and reviewers' marketing strategies …Thus, the use of virtual identities for initial outreach efforts"
email from legals@globaljournals.org
Immediate Cease and Desist Demand – Defamatory and Harmful Content
One regular theme of these posts is the questionable behaviour of some publishers of academic journals, especially when I consider they have been behaving in dishonest ways in order to mislead scholars.
Last month I received an email with the subject heading "Immediate Cease and Desist Demand – Defamatory and Harmful Content". The email came from the address <legals@globaljournals.org> and was signed by someone claiming to be the Chief Legal Officer of "Global Journals Incorporated, a conglomerate with operational bases in the United States, United Kingdom, and India".
"Ah, a 'Cease and Desist' notice…do you want us to fight it?" (Actor John Stride as solicitor David Maine in Yorkshire Television's 'The Maine Chance')
"contains unfounded, derogatory statements that malign our business and overall reputation"
The email explained
what they objected to in my post
whythey considered it mattered to them
what they wanted me to do about it
and what the consequences would be for me if I did not do as they asked
The complaint
Global Journals complained that
"Your publication unjustly criticizes our marketing strategies, particularly the use of alternate identities by our editors and reviewers to engage potential authors…Specifically, your blog post criticizing our editors' and reviewers' marketing strategies casts malicious aspersions on their integrity and wrongly implies unethical conduct."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
It then discussed some emails I had received from the address <chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org> claiming to be written by a Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt, Managing Editor of the 'Department of Humanities and Social Science' 'at Global Journals'. 'Dr Auffahrt' wrote to me, so the email claimed, because she had been impressed by my work, and had discussed it with colleagues who were also impressed, and she wanted to network with me. The email claimed that 'Dr Auffahrt' had a D.Litt in Teaching Education (and the publisher's website suggested she also held a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Arts from Ottawa University, USA [sic]).
However, when I did some checking-up (details are given in the original post), as far as I could tell, there was no such person as Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt.
Now, in the email from <legals@globaljournals.org>, Global Journals Incorporated were not denying that they were sending out letters from non-existent academics, they readily acknowledged that, but they still seemed to think it was bad form of me to highlight this as if it was in some sense questionable. According to Global Journals,
"…the use of alternate identities by our editors and reviewers to engage potential authors. This practice is not only commonplace for privacy preservation on the internet but is also legally sanctioned in jurisdictions such as Delaware and [sic] the United States, where our corporation is duly registered. The allegations you posit, suggesting unethical conduct on the part of our representatives, are devoid of factual basis and amount to a direct assault on our distinguished reputation, painstakingly cultivated over two decades.
Specifically, your blog post criticizing our editors' and reviewers' marketing strategies casts malicious aspersions on their integrity and wrongly implies unethical conduct. Thus, the use of virtual identities for initial outreach efforts is lawful in Delaware, United States, where our company is incorporated and is commonly employed worldwide for privacy and safety."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
The 'dispute', then, was not over whether Global Journals sent emails signed by non-existent editors – they freely agreed they did so (and suggested they also sent marketing emails from non-existent reviewers!) – but whether, or not, it was unfair of me to suggest that such deception amounted to something dishonest, inappropriate or unethical.
The damage done
Now anyone who writes a blog (or anything else for public consumption) is likely to hope some people will read it and that it might in some small way influence them. I was aware of people commenting on my post to the extent that they had already been sceptical about approaches from 'Dr Auffahrt' and other imaginary Global Journals editors, and had found it useful that I had looked into the (non)existence of Auffahrt.
So, I can readily believe that perhaps Global Journals have lost a few 'customers' who might share my view that it is not desirable to do business with a publisher that seeks to deceive potential authors by pretending imaginary editors have a particular interest in their work. Even if Global Journals thinks that sending such invitation emails is "commonplace", "legally sanctioned" and "lawful"(and even if editors who work for Global Journals for some reason feel a need to hide their identities 'for privacy and safety' when academic editors of most academic journals do their best to advertise their appointments to such positions), I can well believe there are other scholars out there who might share my view that misrepresenting yourself to someone is not a promising way to initiate a meaningful, productive relationship.
However, according to Global Journals,
"Your allegations are baseless and directly harm our company's reputation, resulting in substantial financial losses.
The implications of your actions have been far-reaching, causing substantial financial detriment to our corporation, quantified in significant revenue losses."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
So, supposedly, enough people
(i) seeking outlets for their manuscripts and
(ii) receiving the emails from fictitious editors had
(iii) read my blog, and
(iv) accordingly decided to give Global Journals' publications a miss,
for them to claim that I had caused:
substantial financial losses
substantial financial detriment
significant revenue losses
And this was supposedly due to one post on a retired teacher's personal blog?
Somehow, I felt it was, let me suggest, unlikely that this claim was correct, and I felt that it was even more unlikely that Global Journals would be able to produce any convincing evidence to substantiate it (for example in a Court of Law – see below).
'Demands'
The email claimed I had defamed Global Journals by calling-out their (in my view, dubious) practices:
"Given your role as the editor of several journals that are in direct competition with our publications, your statements could be construed as defamatory, motivated by competitive bias, and, thus, carry severe legal consequences….
This behavior not only contravenes professional ethics but also breaches UK defamation law.
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
Their letter specified a number of journals they considered me to be an editor of. I have not been a journal editor for some years. It seems that, despite representing an international publisher of academic journals, the author of the email did not appreciate the difference between formally contracted editors (who could be therefore considered to have a financial interest in a journal they edit) and those who serve unpaid on journal boards in a purely advisory capacity.
A section of the email headed 'Demands' told me:
Cease & Desist: You must immediately stop publishing defamatory content about Global Journals, our editors, and our practices
Content Removal: The offending blog post must be entirely deleted from your website within 48 hours.
Formal Retraction: We strongly recommend issuing a retraction on your website to mitigate damages.
Of course, if Global Journal's email had persuaded me that my post had been unfair to them (and certainly if it had persuaded me that it was defamatory) I would have been very keen to quickly take action to put matters right.
But, to my mind, the most relevant part of their email was the confirmation that the reason that I had not been able to find any evidence of an academic record for 'Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt' was that she had never existed. She was a fiction, or as Global Journals prefer to phrase the matter, one of the 'alternate identities' they employ to disguise (in order to 'protect') the actual identifies of their editors (and reviewers).
The threat
This would all have been mildly amusing, had it not been for the threat of legal action. The email from <legals@globaljournals> warned me that
"Failure to comply will immediately initiate legal action in the United Kingdom. We will seek substantial damages for losses incurred and decisively pursue all legal costs.
This letter constitutes a formal legal notice, and non-compliance will necessitate legal action in the UK, USA, and India, with all associated costs, including but not limited to legal fees, being recovered from you.
We strongly advise you to take this notice with the utmost seriousness and to seek legal counsel to fully comprehend the ramifications of your published content and the potential legal proceedings that may ensue.
We anticipate your prompt action to rectify this situation, and we expect your full compliance."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
Now I will happily admit that was quite scary. I am lucky that, even though I had to retire early on health grounds, I had built up sufficient pension to be able to live comfortably enough. But here was a global corporation claiming that I had caused it significant and substantial financial losses which it intended to recover by suing me. I imagine that substantial financial losses of a global publisher are some orders of magnitude greater than any funds I may have left in savings for a rainy day.
The sensible, pragmatic part of me thought that it would be very easy to take down one web-page, apologise, and hopefully all would be forgotten. Surely that is the obvious thing to do, even if one thinks that any such legal action has a small chance of succeeding? What is, say, a 1% chance of being financially ruined against deleting one post from a blog?
Global Journals' email suggested that I take legal advice – which might imply that they were confident in having a case against me (why send me to a lawyer who would tell me otherwise?) but of course legal advice costs money, and 'unpublishing' a blog post does not. I suspected that was a bluff.
Moreover, there is another part of me which is the self-righteous, campaigning, principled me that really hates such ploys as lying and bullying and is naive enough to beleive the world would be a better place without 'those two impostors'. As 'alternate' identities are in play; if taken to court, I might want the fictitious lawyer David Maine from Castelton & Maine handling my case: someone who could be just as arrogantly pompous and self-righteous as myself!
A defence?
I have already suggested that I did not think it was at all likely that any damages I had caused to Global Journals could really be large enough to substantially damage their business (certainly, unless it was really very, very flaky to start with, such that a proverbial final straw might be enough the break the poor camel's back); and that it seemed incredible that they might be able to produce evidence to persuade a Court that enough people reading my blog had been sufficiently influenced to bring about any such significant losses.
However, the critical factor in my thinking was what is meant by defamation. Global Journals helpfully informed me that:
"Under the Defamation Act 2013, a statement is considered defamatory if it:
Causes or is likely to cause serious harm to an individual or company's reputation.
Refers to even an unidentifiable [*] person connecting with an entity.
Is published (communicated) to a third party."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 13th February, 2024
(* And of course a person would be 'unidentifiable' if they disguised their identify behind a fake name and qualifications.)
My post certainly referred to a person pretending to be one highly qualified Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt who claimed an association with Global Journals, and it was a form of publication. So, would a court consider my post "causes or is likely to cause serious harm to an individual or company's reputation"?
It might be reasonable to suggest it led to some very small harm (loss of a few submissions, perhaps), certainly. But serious harm? To an established global corporation?
The best defence to a defamation claim
Of course, Global Journals failed to mention one key criterion for any published statement to be considered defamatory: it has to be untrue. No matter how bad the things you accuse someone of, that is not defamation unless you are wrong. You cannot defame Adolf Hitler by claiming he was the leader of an evil regime which carried out genocide, and arranged the murder of a great many men, women and children simply because of a hateful and unscientific belief in human 'races' and racial 'purity'.
Global Journals could only successfully sue me, and potentially ruin me, if they could show I had made claims about their corporation that were both damaging and untrue. Yet, Global Journals confirmed my exposé was correct: editors who sign (at least some of) their emails do not exist.
It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained of is substantially true.
Any case Global Jounrals brought would therefore presumably rest, not on that agreed fact, but on what I suggested about this being unethical, improper, and misleading. These were my interpretations and I think anyone reading the blog could either agree with them or not. The factual basis of the post was that Global Journals were sending out emails from a Dr Nicoleta Auffahr who claimed to have a personal interest in my works, and to have discussed them with her colleagues, when such a person did not seem to exist; and Global Journals were not disputing that fact – rather they were confirming in writing that this was indeed how they proceeded. This was part of Global Journals' "marketing strategies…our editors' and reviewers' [sic] marketing strategies".
Surely, anyone reading the blog who, like Global Journals Incorporated, thought it was fine to send out such fictional invitation emails would have no reason to change their attitude to Global Journals, and only those, who agreed with me, that this was inappropriate for an academic publisher would be likely to behave accordingly and avoid sending them submissions.
A revised approach
So, I decided not to take down my post (at least, not yet) but to spend time writing a robust response to the Global Journals' legal officer – that is, to 'call their bluff' as it were. (I've reproduced my message below, in 'Annexe 1'.) This took up time and energy, but if Global Journals' legal team thought an 'Immediate Cease and Desist Demand' was well-motivated, then it deserved a considered response.
My reply led to a response within hours, which had a rather different tone. So, the next morning I faced a new communication from <legals@globaljournals.org>, again signed by the Chief Legal Officer of Global Journals Incorporated. This reiterated a key point from the original 'cease and desist' notice,
"The practice of using alternate identities, as mentioned in our initial letter, is a measure taken strictly for privacy and security reasons on the internet. We ensure that all communications, including those from alternate identities, are truthful and transparent about the nature and purpose of the outreach. Contrary to the allegation, we do not endorse or engage in the dissemination of false or misleading information."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 14th February, 2024
Now I could see myself getting into an involved argument here. The original approach sent from <chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org> and supposedly from a Dr. Nicoleta Auffahrt, did invite me to submit work to a journal, but this was presented almost as a "oh, and by the way…" clause:
"I am writing this email with regard to your research paper, 'Secondary Studentso [sic] Values and Perceptions of Science-Related Careers Responses to Vignette-Based Scenarios' I read it and felt that your work is worthy of admiration. I have shared the finding of the paper with my colleagues. Other scholars of our research community have also commended them. It shows your potential to influence and inspire fellow researchers and scholars.
Your quest to explore dimensions in your field that matches our journal's scope compels me to know more about your current research work. I can also connect you with our network of eminent researchers of your stream, along with recognizing your university.
Additionally, as I am also Managing Editor at Global Journals, I cordially invite you to send your future research articles/papers for publication in Global Journal of Human-Social Science, CrossRef DOI: 10.34257/GJHSS."
email from chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org, 20th January 2023
Now I accept that I was not fooled by this (which is why I investigated the supposed author), and in any case I suspect that my university (i.e., the University of Cambridge) probably does not need recognition from Global Journals.
Perhaps, this was never intended to mislead the recipient. Perhaps, now that we all live in a post-truth world, any recipient should have simply smiled at the conceit, realising that even if Auffret existed, we were not meant to take the claims about her reading and admiring the recipient's work seriously.
How spamming works
But I suspect that the whole point of seemingly personalised approaches like this (apart from disguising an email mail shot which is in breach of UK regulations on mass marketing) is that if one in ten, or one in twenty, or even one in a hundred, of the recipients are fooled (in the sense of thinking someone really has read their work, and really does think is it of sufficient merit to seek out that scholar, and really wants to network with them), then this hooks enough potential customers to justify the effort commercially. The minimal cost of sending thousands of such invitations is easily justified if one recipient submits some work to the publisher and pays the cost of US$ 1126 * for publication. That is how spam emails work – most people know they are not to be taken at face value, but it only needs a few people to be taken-in to generate profit.
At least Global Journals were no longer explicitly threatening court action (perhaps, bluff called?), but,
"Our concern remains that the content published on your blog, which criticizes our marketing strategies and operational practices, could be interpreted as defamatory under this legal standard. While we acknowledge your right to express personal opinions and critiques, we must also protect our corporate reputation against statements that we believe to be unfounded and potentially damaging."
email from legals@globaljournals.org, 14th February, 2024
They were still looking towards a "resolution". But now they wanted to invite me to a meeting to disucss the 'issues' and referred to "Collaborative Efforts" whereby "we can work together to promote ethical practices in academic publishing and contribute positively to the scholarly community".
This was a clever strategy: I was relieved that immediate court proceedings were not being explicitly threatened now, and, as an academic who claims to value dialogue, I was being invited to talk – and it was even being hinted that perhaps the corporation could benefit from my advice on how to ensure their procedures were ethical.
Having replied immediately to the first email from <legals@globaljournals.org>, I decided that now I needed some 'time out' to think. I wrote back to acknowledge receipt of their message, and to tell them I would be replying, but not immediately.
If a publisher acknowledges that it sends out emails from fictitious editors, why accept the authenticity of an email claiming to be from its 'legal department'? (original images by Peggy_Marco and Gordon Johnson, from Pixabay)
The publisher who cried wolf
The story of the boy who cried wolf tells of a young shepherd looking after the sheep who called-out the villagers to defend against the wolf without good cause. Eventually, when the wolf actually came along to feed on the sheep, the boy again cried "wolf!" – but no one came to help, because he had lied before and was no longer considered trustworthy. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf]
Over the next few days I was composing possible responses in my head. An initial feeling that "at least they are looking to be reasonable, I suppose I should give them the benefit" soon hardened.
Would a global corporation "cultivated over two decades" really need, or want, to engage in authentic dialogue to learn from me why it might not be best to promote their journals with fictitious editors?
Were they looking for a genuine meeting of minds, or did they want to talk only to try to bamboozle me with lawyerese – looking to get concessions out of me by putting me under pressure?
This brought to mind a short period when I had acted as the National Union of Teachers representative at the Comprehensive School where I taught. On a Friday afternoon, I had a message from the head teacher that he would like to see me before I went home. I went to his office (pretty tired at the end of the working week) to find him there flanked by two deputies. He made some points about why the school management wanted such-and-such. I politely explained why the teaching staff had decided they did not agree to whatever-it-was. He then explained why we were wrong (from his perspective) and repeated his initial points. I politely pointed out that I understood his perspective, but that what he wanted did not look desirable from the teachers' perspective. He then told me, again, why we were wrong and, again, why his position was the one to be adopted.
We went through this cycle several times: my respectfully accepting that what he wanted made sense to management but not to the teaching staff; and his then explaining how I must be wrong because I did not accept his obviously correct opinion. It seemed clear to me that there was no intention to have a meaningful discussion, just an attempt to wear me down by outnumbering me at a point in the week when I was especially vulnerable. So, I made my excuses and went home. Since then I have been wary of mooted meetings with people who do not seem to have any flexibility in the outcome they seek.
A moment of insight
(source: 20th Century Fox)
A 'doh' moment
I decided to leave my reply to the weekend, although I still found myself mentally drafting possible points to include. But then I (rather belatedly!) had a moment of insight:
My first contact with Global Journals was a marketing email that came from the email address: <chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org>
That email was signed by a Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt who claimed to be a highly qualified managing editor – but who did not exist
I was now receiving emails from an address <legals@globaljournals.org>…
…signed by someone who claimed to be the corporation's Chief Legal Officer
But, ('doh!') if Global Journals use misleading email addresses and fictional employee identities, then
how did I know the recent emails were really from a legal department and not just the marketing people again?
how did I know the email was written by someone who had the name and title used in the signature?
I thought it was worth doing an email search to see if I could confirm the name of Global Journal's Chief Legal Officer – perhaps someone with such a senior position would be reported somewhere on the web? I was not over-hopeful, as India (where the Chief Legal Officer was supposed to be based) is the most populous country in the world, and I suspected I would find numerous lawyers there with that name.
What I actually found was no record at all of anyone with the name of the supposed Chief Legal Officer. That did not prove my supposed correspondent was not a real person, but it was highly suggestive. Lawyers may not tend to be as obvious on the web as academics, but there cannot be many senior professionals (such as a chief legal officer of an international company) that do not leave some digital trace that can be found in a web-search?
This hardened my resolve. If I suspected that the emails from <legals@globaljournals.org> were also not open about who I was really corresponding with, then I would write back to close the correspondence pending any good evidence that I really was being contacted by the legal department (see 'Annexe 2'!)
I was rather disappointed at myself. I had been contacted by a corporation that was happy to use fictional identifies, and even readily admitted it, but I then took communication at face value for being what it claimed.
I was brought up to be honest and truthful, and believe lying and deceit is only justifiable in extremis. Society can only work harmoniously – indeed, at all – if our default assumption is people we interact with are who they say they are and that they at least believe the claims they make. If, we strictly follow the advice of another fictional character, the investigative agent Fox Mulder, and 'trust no one', we soon come to a complete state of inaction and paranoia.
On the other hand, as the proverb suggests,
fool me once, shame on you
fool me twice, shame on me
* as according to the web-page https://globaljournals.org/journals/human-social-science/author-charges, accessed on 2nd March 29024
Annexe 1
Threat of legal action by Global Journals Incorporated
Dear Mr ********
Thank you for your email of 13th instant, entitled "Immediate Cease and Desist Demand – Defamatory and Harmful Content". I note the contents, and that you consider this a "formal legal notice".
Factual inaccuracies
Firstly, may I point that, contrary to your letter, I am not currently an editor of any academic journals [and to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, this includes International Journal of Science Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis); Foundations of Chemistry (Springer); Teacher Development (Routledge/Taylor & Francis); Centre for Education Policy Studies Journal (Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana); Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research (Springer)] and my only active editorial position is as a book series editor-in-chief. You seem to be confusing journal editors (who have a formal contractual role, for which they normally receive consideration), with other senior academics who in roles such as editorial board members offer free advice to journal editors and publishers. I currently have no financial arrangements with any of the journals that you list.
I do indeed have a bias, though I would not consider this a prejudice. My bias is towards those journals which follow honest and open processes led by named academics with well-established reputations; and against journals which use dubious practices, such as those that send untruthful approaches to potential contributors, and hide their actual editors behind imaginary personas with faked academic qualifications. I would hope most other serious scholars would share this bias.
Breach of professional ethics
If you truly believe, as you suggest, that my behaviour "contravenes professional ethics" then, as I am a Fellow of two Learned Scientific Societies that also operate as Professional Bodies (namely, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics) you should refer the matter to these two institutions so they can investigate whether I have indeed broken the professional codes of ethics that I am expected to uphold. I would expect to offer a strong defence of my actions. I actually believe that as a senior academic who has worked as a journal editor and has taught novice researchers about publication ethics on post-graduate courses there is an ethical imperative for me to call-out examples of scholarly malpractice, such as those you acknowledge being part of Global Journals Incorporated's businesses practices, where I come across them.
Damage caused by my publicising Global Journals Incorporated's dishonest communications
I note you suggest I may be subject to court action under the Defamation Act 2013 because my blog posting has been "resulting in substantial financial losses…far-reaching, causing substantial financial detriment to our corporation, quantified in significant revenue losses". I find it very unlikely that a retired academic's personal blog can have caused such a substantive effect (and even more unlikely this could be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a court).
To the extent that my personal blog may have influenced some authors to avoid engaging with your company, this is not due to my claims about your company's dishonest practice in isolation, but is a due to a combination of factors: that is,
a) your company choosing to use dishonest and untrue communications (as you acknowledge in your email); AND b) my pointing this out in my blog; AND c) readers agreeing that they consider such practices as unethical and inappropriate in scholarly publishing.
Anyone reading my blog who feels 'that's okay, companies are allowed to use fictitious editors with made-up qualifications who pretend to have liked and recommended my work' is not going to change their submission intentions. Global Journals Incorporated's use of marketing emails containing false claims may indeed, as you suggest, be strictly legal in some jurisdictions such as "Delaware and [sic] the United States", but it is dishonest, and to my mind (if not yours) that makes it unethical. The academic literature will be worth nothing if scholars do not adhere to principles of openness and honesty – as who can trust anything in journals that do not hold truthfulness to be an important value? In any case, I suspect your marketing emails are in breach of UK regulations governing electronic mail marketing which both (i) do not allow you to send such email to "prospective customers or new contacts" unless they have opted in, and (ii) specify that even then "you must not disguise or conceal your identity".
Defamation Act 2013
I am struggling to understand the basis of your complaint as you seem to object to my criticising "the use of alternate [sic., i.e., fictitious] identities by our editors and reviewers to engage potential authors", yet you confirm that Global Journals Incorporated is doing that just that. I am not a lawyer (but I would assume that you, as a company's Chief Legal Officer, are legally qualified), and I do not understand how you expect to make a claim under the law of defamation if you accept that Global Journals Incorporated is indeed sending out invitations to academics from fictitious editors with imaginary doctorates who supposedly have read and been impressed by the work of those they are contacting. These emails contain lies, as you seem to acknowledge. There would seem to no basis there for an action of defamation!
Perhaps I have misunderstood, and you feel that there is/are one or more other statement(s) in my blog post which is/are both:
a) factually inaccurate; and b) potentially damaging.
If this is so, I WOULD CERTAINLY BE PREPARED TO ADDRESS THIS, AND TO DO SO AS A PRIORITY. But you would need to specify where I have made a false claim, and convince me it is false. So far, you have only objected to (i) statements about Global Journals Incorporated's practices that you seem to acknowledge are true, and to (ii) my opinion (which I am fairly sure I am entitled to) on the ethical status of those practices.
Otherwise, I do not see any validity underpinning your 'Immediate Cease and Desist Demand' request. I would assume that you, as a Chief Legal Officer, would appreciate that true statements are not considered defamatory in English Law (as "It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained of is substantially true"), in which case your communication (confirming, as I imagine any court would recognise, the truth of 'the statement complained of') would seem to be an attempt to tempt me into acting out of fear of malicious and spurious court action ("Failure to comply will immediately initiate legal action in the United Kingdom. We will seek substantial damages for losses incurred and decisively pursue all legal costs"…"We will seek substantial damages for losses incurred and decisively pursue all legal costs"), rather than in accord with the facts of the case at hand.
I strongly suspect that even if you could find an officer of the English courts who would take on a case on the basis you have outlined, the case would, on request to the court, be summarily struck out under rule 3.4 of the procedure rules for civil courts. I therefore think that your threat by a corporation to come after an individual retired teacher for "substantial damages" and "legal costs" for speaking truth about unethical practices paints Global Journals Incorporated in a very poor light, suggesting that its legal team either does not understand English law, or is prepared to make misleading representations of it to try to cover-up the company's dubious publishing practices.
I look forward to your clarification of any public statements of mine regarding Global Journals Incorporated that you feel are factually incorrect, and that I should look to address. I can assure you that I will make all reasonable efforts to ensure apparent factual claims on my website are indeed in accord with the facts. Perhaps Global Journals Incorporated might consider adopting a similar policy in regard with its communications with potential authors?
Best wishes
Keith
Annexe 2
Dear Mr. ********
Thank you again for your follow-up email of 14th instant.
I have now taken time to carefully re-read the blog post that you refer to, i.e., at https://science-education-research.com/earning-a-higher-doctorate-without-doing-any-research/. I am confident that any factual statements made there are accurate to the best of my knowledge. I am not infallible of course, and repeat that I am open to considering evidence that might persuade me that a correction is needed due to an error of fact. I have also checked on the reasonableness of those statements that are clearly intended to be understood as my own opinions and interpretations rather than objective statements of fact.
However, the crux of my blog post is suggesting that communications I received from Global Journals were signed by a fictitious academic. You have in your recent emails (13th, 14th inst.) confirmed that Global Journals Incorporated uses 'alternate identities' in its communications. You suggest that such a policy is both legal and justified ("a measure taken strictly for privacy and security reasons"). In reviewing my published post, I find no suggestion that I was claiming this practice was illegal or unlawful. (As I suggested in my previous reply, I do suspect that Global Journals Incorporated is breaking UK regulations in sending unsolicited email marketing, as I had not signed up for your marketing emails and had no previous business with your organisation. I suspect that is relevant, as this may be why Global Journals Incorporated chooses to seek to disguise these emails as not being the widely broadcast marketing they are {i.e., what most recipients might consider spam} but a personal contact by a fellow academic {from an organisation with the domain "socialscienceresearch.org"} who is impressed by a specific scholar's work and wishes to engage with that individual at a personal level {something I believe may also be breach of UK regulations on email marketing which do not allow you to "disguise or conceal your identity"}.) However, to reiterate and avoid any possible doubt, I do not claim that falsifying the identify of an email author is, in itself, unlawful: I am not qualified to comment on that, and I offer no opinion on the legal status of this dubious practice.
Dialogue
I took some time to reflect on your offer to enter into further dialogue. As you will have suspected, this appeals in principle to a scholar. However, I considered (a) that I wrote twice in response to the initial email from chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org (on 20th January and 24th January 2023, that is before composing the blog post) without receiving clarification from Global Journals that I was corresponding with an 'alternate identity'; (b) your own initial contact earlier this was week was not focused on dialogue, but comprised a threat of legal action (albeit one that any lawyer would surely have realised was hollow). Entering into a meaningful dialogue would require trust on behalf of both parties, and Global Journals Incorporated's behaviour to date – misrepresentation and threat – does not encourage me to assume Global Journals Incorporated's good faith.
Collaborative efforts
I retired from my teaching role in 2020 on health grounds and although I still do some pro bono work for journals that I hold in high regard and have an association with, I am not seeking further consultancy opportunities. However, I would recommend that if Global Journals Incorporated is serious about adopting ethical publishing practices, then it should consider the work of COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics (https://publicationethics.org), which is an organisation of publishers and others involved in academic publishing. This organisation offers a forum for sharing practices and seeking guidance on best practice.
Defamation
In your follow-up letter (14th instant.), you once again suggest that my blog post "could be interpreted as defamatory", again ignoring the fundamental legal principle that true statements cannot defame (which is why I am confident that it could NOT be REASONABLY interpreted as defamatory). To reiterate, I believe that factual statements in my public post are accurate, and that opinions and interpretations are reasonable and are not presented as if facts.
Truthful communications
You claim that "all communications [from Global Journals], including those from alternate identities, are truthful and transparent about the nature and purpose of the outreach". To be persuaded of that, you would need to demonstrate to me that the email that I was sent on 20th January 2023, although not written by the person who signed it:
a) was written by a person holding that status (managing editor) in the organisation; b) was written by someone who held the same (or substantially the same) academic qualifications (M.A., Ph.D., D.Litt in Teaching Education) as claimed for the fictitious 'alternate identify'; c) was written by someone who had actually read the work cited; d) was written by someone who had actually discussed the merits of the work with her(/his) colleagues, including others who had specifically commended the work; e) was written by someone who genuinely held the work, and through the work its author, in the esteem suggested.
Unless that is so, then clearly these were misrepresentations that were not truthful and were designed to misdirect the recipient into believing they had been contacted by someone with a strong personal interest in their work, when any personal interest was actually phoney. (That is a very common practice which is indicative of predatory journals.) You will appreciate that the comments from colleagues around the world, who took time to respond to my post to the effect that they have received substantially identical emails, only reinforces my suspicions about the truthfulness of these statements. However, if I was provided with a suitable, properly notarised, affidavit from the true author, affirming all of these points (a-e) I would he prepared to add a statement to acknowledge this clarification at the end of the post.
Transparency
One of the key quality indicators of a good journal is that its editors are highly qualified and recognised as leading academics in a relevant field. I cannot consider any email from an academic publisher that claims editor qualifications which have never been awarded (clearly no university has awarded anyone called Nicoleta Auffahrt the degrees Global Journals claimed she had earned) to be 'transparent'.
Privacy
You justify the use of false identities for "editors and reviewers" as offering "privacy and protection" to your colleagues. Academic reputations and careers are based on certifiable scholarly contributions such as publications (sic, which by definition are in the public record and open to public interrogation) and publicly verifiable roles in academic journals. There is no logic to a genuine academic not wishing to be publicly associated with a journal where they have an editorial role (unless they believe association with that specific journal would actively harm their academic reputation because they know it is what is commonly called a predatory journal). Academic journal editorship is a PUBLIC role. Global Journals is a PUBLIsher PUBLIshing academic PUBLICations, where disguising the identify of editors should be considered anathema. Privacy, in that regard, would not be desirable for the scholar. Similarly, reviewers get kudos for their work for academic journals, and offer their specific referee reports through a procedure that can be (and usually is) anonymised to anyone outside the editorial office, so there would be no rationale for hiding the identity of those acting as referees unless they were ill-qualified for the role.
Moving forward
Finally, I am aware that when communicating with an organisation that believes it is acceptable to use 'alternate identities' in its communications, I have no assurance of the identity of my correspondent. I have no more reason to trust your emails were written by a 'Mr ******* *******' than that Global Journal's earlier email was written by a 'Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt'; nor do I have any better reason to believe that that your emails were written by someone who is actually the company's Chief Legal Officer, than I had to believe the earlier email was written by someone who really was Managing Editor. Evidence of a real lawyer called Mr ******* ******* seems to be as lacking on the internet as evidence of the fictitious scholar Dr Nicoleta Auffahrt.
Of course, the usual convention is to believe that people who contact us will be honest and open, until we have reason to doubt that. I have good reason to doubt whether communications from Global Journals can be trusted as honest in this sense. After all, if an email from the address "chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org" was actually written and sent by someone in Global Journal's marketing department, what reason do I have to trust that an email from "legals@globaljournals.org" does indeed originate from the legal department, rather than being another attempt at misdirection? If you really are Mr *******, and you really are Chief Legal Officer of Global Journals, then please excuse my suspicions – but I believe they must be judged reasonable in the circumstances.
Closing the correspondence
To reiterate, I have not, and do not, claim that Global Journals use of fictitious correspondents is in itself necessary illegal (I offer no view on that) but I maintain that it is a dishonest practice; one that cannot be justified in academic publishing where a concern for openness and the truth is paramount; and one which deliberately seeks to misrepresent a mass marketing email as a personal approach based on a close professional engagement with a scholar's work. In that, it reflects a very common practice of predatory journals. You have offered me no reasons to revise my opinions of this practice.
I am now considering this correspondence closed, at least unless and until I am offered compelling reasons to trust the identity and role of my correspondent, along with good grounds to consider any remedial action is needed on my part.
I have notified the Legal Services Division of my University (https://www.legal.admin.cam.ac.uk) of the 'Immediate Cease and Desist Demand' sent earlier this week, and will inform them of any further approaches supposedly from Global Journals' legal team.
I would like to pose a simple quiz question. I think (?) the answer may be obvious to many science teachers, and advanced chemistry learners – but I wonder…
Consider the table below:
List 1
List 2
acid
alcohol
alkane
ether
metal
salt
protein
sugar
Two classes of chemical vocabulary?
The table contains some terms used in science, and especially in chemistry. But I have separated them into two lists, and I would suggest that there is a valid reason to class them into two separate categories in this way.
The ordering in the list is simply alphabetical – they are not intended to be paired (acid-alcohol, etc.): just in two categories.
This is not intended as a comprehensive classification – there are other examples (alkali, alkene, etc.) that could be added to the table.
The question is simple – what is the basis for this discrimination; what is different about the items in list 1, compared with those in list 2?
Too easy?
(As a bonus question: one of the entries, in one of the lists, might be considered to reflect the quality associated with the entries in that list in a more extreme form. Can you spot which item this is?)
I will post my reasoning in due course. But perhaps I will not need to (if you think you know the answer, please comment below).
The World Economic Forum has been compared to a chemical reaction between disparate molecules. (A group of Kenyans in traditional dress, Apple's co-founder Steve Jobbs, former UK minister Rachel Maclean, musician and activist will.i.am, and journalist Gillian Tett – includes images accessed from Pixabay)
Analogy is a key tool in the teacher's toolbox when 'making the unfamiliar familiar'. Science teachers are often charged with presenting ideas that are abstract and unfamiliar, and sometimes it can help if the teacher can point out how in some ways a seemingly obscure notion is just like something already familiar to the learner. An analogy goes beyond a simile (which simply suggests something is a bit like something else) by offering a sense of how the structure of the 'analogue' maps onto the structure of the 'target'.
Apologies are useful well beyond the classroom. They are used by science journalists reporting on scientific developments, and by authors writing popular science books; and by scientists themselves when explaining their work to the public. But analogies have a more inherent role in science practices: not only being both used in formal scientific accounts written to explain to and persuade other scientists about new ideas, but actually as a tool in scientific discovery as a source of hypotheses.
Sometimes, however, one comes across an analogy from a scientific concept or phenomenon to something else – rather than the other way round. The logic of using analogies is that the source analogue needs to already be familiar to a reader or listener if it is to help explain something that is novel. So, an analogy between the concept of working memory capacity and fatty acid structure might be used
to explain something about working memory to a chemist – but could also be used
to explain fatty acid structureto a psychologist who already knew about working memory.
So, the use of a scientific idea as the source analogue for some other target idea suggests the user assumes the audience is also familiar with the science. Therefore I deduce that Gillian Tett, journalist at the Financial Times presumably is confident that listeners to BBC Radio 4 will be familiar with the concept of chemical reactions.
Tett was discussing her experience of the annual World Economic Forum meeting that has just been held in the snow of the Swiss skiing resort of Davos, and suggested that the mixing of various politicians and industry and media and lobbyists had the potential to lead to interesting outcomes – like some kind of chemistry experiment,
"I got jammed into a room with will.i.am, the rapper, who was talking about his views for A.I., and suddenly you've got these activists standing next to somebody from some of the big tech. companies, and a government minister, and a group from Kenya, all talking about whether A.I. could actually be a tool to reduce social inequality, rather than increase it. So, it is a bit like a chemistry experiment where you take all of these ambitious, self-selecting, hustling molecules from around the world, shove them into one test-tube, apply maximum pressure, and force them to collide with each other at close quarters with no sleep, and see what kind of compounds arise."
An experiment (by definition) has uncertain results, and Tett used the analogue of the chemistry experiment to imply that the diverse mixes of people collected together at Davos could lead to unexpected outcomes – just like mixing a diverse range of substances might. Tett saw the way such diverse groups become 'jammed' into rooms in arbitrary combinations as they make their ways around the meeting as akin to increasing the pressure of a reaction mixture of arbitrary reagents. This reflects something of the popular media notion of dangerous 'scientific experiments', as carried out by mad scientists in their basements. Real scientific experiments are carried out in carefully controlled conditions to test specific hypothesis. The outcome is uncertain, but the composition of the reaction mixture is carefully chosen with some specific product(s) in mind.
The figure below represents the mapping between the analogue (a rather undisciplined chemistry experiment) and the reaction conditions experienced by delegates in the melting pot of Davos.
the World Economic Forum at Davos is like a chemical experiment because…
Inspection of my figure suggests some indiscipline in the analogy. The reaction conditions are to "apply maximum pressure, and force [the molecules] to collide with each other at close quarters with no sleep". Now this phrasing seems to shift mid-sentence,
from the analogue (the chemical experiment:"apply maximum pressure, and force [the molecules] to collide with each other")
to the target (being jammed into a room at the conference: "at close quarters with no sleep").
One explanation might be that Gillian Tett is not very good at thinking though analogies. Another might be that, as she was being interviewed for the radio, she was composing the analogy off-the-cut without time to reflect and review and revise…
Either of those options could be correct, but I suspect this shift offered some ambiguity that was deliberately introduced rhetorically to increase the impact of the analogy on a listener. Tatt ('an anthropologist by training' and Provost of King's College, Cambridge) had described the molecules anthropomorphically: just as molecules do not sleep,
they cannot be 'ambitious', as this is a human characteristic;
they are not sentient agents, so cannot be 'self-selecting'; and
nor can they 'hustle' as they have no control over their movements.
But the journalists, politicians, activists and industrialists can be described in these terms, reinforcing the mapping between the molecules and the Davos delegates. So, I suspect that whilst this disrupted the strict mapping of the analogy, it reinforced the metaphorical way in which Tett wanted to convey the sense that the ways in which the Davos meeting offered 'experimental' mixing of the reacting groups had the potential to produce novel syntheses.
Looking to check out some music videos on YouTube, and being presented with irrelevant advertisements, I was amazed to learn of a revolutionary new type of electrical heater that can potentially offer consumers vast savings on their electricity bill. Revolutionary, as the inventor, a disgraced London student, seems to have rewritten the laws of physics.
Revolutionary design: "a perpetual heating loop" (a coil of wire that can be left connected to a power supply?)
Warning. The copyright in the images included here does not belong to me. I think much the video looks like it uses stock footage, but if not, and IF the company behind this product believes they can genuinely support their claims as reported here, they may get in touch to explain why I am misguided.
I generally look to respect copyright in other's work, but I believe it is in the public interest to call out attempts to scam people through misrepresenting science in material in the public domain.
The revolutionary new design of heater is a small plug-in device which can heat up a room very quickly, and moreover it is so efficient that it does not waste energy – like those other more traditional types of heaters some people might still be using.
This technological advance:
can heat a home in 90 seconds
can save a householder thousands of pounds a year
"can warm any space at 90% less cost than conventional heating methods"
avoids any waste: "by reusing the heat it produces, so none of it is wasted"
on testing, it warmed university classrooms "from 10˚C to 21˚C in only 2 minutes"
uses "89% less energy" than regular heating systems
Wow. If not too good to be true, that would certainly help with the climate crisis by reducing electricity demands.
What is the new technology?
The video advertising this new type of heater offer some clues to its design. It begins by illustrating the "trick" which can "heat your home in 90 seconds" and "save thousands of pounds" off the Winter heating bill:
So, it seems you need to get some tea lights, and place them under a large inverted ceramic flower pot? I am pretty sure that's not going to do the 'trick'. Perhaps this was meant as some kind of metaphor…?
Reinstate Jason!
The video explains how 'Jason' "a clever student from UK, London University" creates the new type of heater because the University heating system was not functioning properly. He designed the new heater to support his classmates who were having to work in rooms at 10˚C.
When Jason refused to earn a fortune from his invention by selling the rights, the University responded within three days by expelling him. 1
Jason's professor thought his idea was revolutionary (but he may not be that up to date in his subject knowledge – most of the scientific community adopted metric units decades ago 2)
Apparently Jason achieved this scientific breakthrough by 'reverse-engineering' a standard heater. Presumably the available text books did not explain the physics of heaters (in essence, you connect (i) a piece of conducting material that can withstand heating and that has suitable resistance, to (ii) a power supply); so he had take apart heaters to find out how they worked.
Here he seems to be drawing up the specifications for his new design, helped by a sophisticated paper model.
The video shows how Jason studied circuit components called 'resistors' and found out how to read those little coloured lines on them (as children do in UK schools).
So what was revolutionary about the physics?
Of course, the manufacturers do not want to give away too many commercial secrets (even if Jason had nobler instincts), but the video does offer some clues.
Induction heating
One technique shown in the film is described as "a special device that creates a perpetual heating loop".
The special device illustrated seems to be a coil of thick copper wire, able to pass a large alternating current, which is heating a metal rod 'by induction'.
This works because the coil produces a large constantly changing magnetic field, which induces a changing e.m.f. in the rod. Now this technique only produces heating in an electrical conductor as the magnetic field cannot transfer energy to an insulator, such as air (which is not substantially influenced by the magnetic field). It seems Jason's genius must have been to somehow produce heating of ordinary air by this method. That would be the kind of breakthrough reflecting new physicsdeserving of a Nobel prize!
The dual Thomson effects
My ageing hearing told me that Jason's revolutionary design used the Joule-Thomson effect. This surprised me a little, as to my mind this technique would produce cooling, not heating. This effect can be experienced in everyday effects – such as in the material propelled from an aerosol can which often feels cold, or when noting the cold air passing out of the valve of a tyre being quickly deflated.
Energy is always conserved in all processes. The conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental principles in science, and is generally believed to be universal in its application. (Thus my annoyance at how the English National Curriculum includes a logically flawed reference to it.) When a compressed gas (such as in the tyre) is allowed to expand through a small opening it does work pushing back the surrounding air, and the temperature drops by a corresponding amount. 3
So, I was mystified at how an effect that usually produced cooling here gives the opposite effect. But then I spotted (from the kindly provided subtitles) that I (or else, the person making the subtitles?) had misheard. It seems Jason was using a different effect: 'dual Thomson' physics.
I have to confess to not being familiar with 'dual Thomson' physics. Indeed I only found a handful of references on the www through an internet search, and these referred to specialised instruments designed to detect ion velocities in high energy physics research.
I am not sure what that has to do with plug-in wall heaters, and I am pretty sure that that was not what was illustrated in the accompanying footage.
Testing the new design
A powerful device?
According to the video being pushed at viewers by YouTube, Jason "took this amazing gadget to the University and the outcomes were fantastic" where "classrooms went from 10˚C to 21˚C in only 2 minutes".
Before and after – the small device heated a classroom 11˚C in 12o seconds. Hm. (Move the slider to see the images)
Now that would be pretty impressive, as any lecturer who has arrived in a cold teaching room and then dragged in the electric heater from their office would know (I write from experience).
We are not told the size of the room used in this supposed trial but a lecture room would be something of the order of a thousand cubic metres. If we assume that the heater transfers all of its energy to the air in the room (and that in the short time it is used, none of this heat is lost to outside, or warms up anything else in the room – like the furnishings or the walls or ceilings – or the people who were feeling too cold) then we can calculate the energy needed, and so the power of the heater. My-back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this would be about 100 kW. 4
Now I am not going to claim that a hundred kilowatts heater cannot be made, but I am prepared to suggest that no technology available today could safely get near, anywhere near, this power rating with this scale of device.
Larger heaters designed for industrial use are available rated for a few kilowatts, but a 100 kW plug-in heater for domestic use seems fantasy. (Especially as "You can move it around without worrying about burning yourself" according to the website.)
Am I wrong? TechTrends, the website selling the devices (sorry, independently assessing, 😉, 😉, the devices and telling us where to buy them), does not seem to offer any details on this testing, so I assume it was not carried out by competent investigators and reported in a peer reviewed journal. If indeed, given the non-viability of the claim, it really took place. Anyone reading this form TechTrends – if I am wrong please enlighten us? (Comments welcome below.)
Greater efficiency?
We are asked to accept this magical outcome because the device is so energy efficient (that in itself I believe – I expect an electric heater to be very efficient), compared with standard technology. The video claims that the new heater "used 89% less energy" than "regular heating systems". That is clearly nothing other than an outright lie!
Feel the difference – almost 90% apparently (Move the slider to see the images)
Many machines are inefficient in the sense that the energy input does not match the desired work output as some energy is 'lost' or perhaps better 'diverted'. Now energy is always conserved, so this means that, say, 100 Joules of energy are 'taken' from some supply to power some activity, but perhaps only 6oJ does what we intend (so in this case, 60% efficiency) and the other 40J has some other effect.
A key idea in thermodynamics is that engines have an inherent limit to efficiency. A car engine exhausting into the atmosphere well above absolute zero (at around 300K rather than 0K) will necessarily only direct a fraction of the energy sourced into the desired locomotion. Achieving higher temperatures in the engine (a technical challenge) can improve what is possible; but only releasing exhaust gases at 0K would make 100% efficiency even theoretically possible. So, is it feasible that normal electrical heaters would be so inefficient?
Filament lamps are only inefficient in the Summer
…or…
Why would anyone manufacture a light bulb completely encased in a solid metal shade?
The notion that a standard electric heater might be no more than 11% efficient might not sound too unlikely to some people watching these commercials as they wait for their music videos (or cats juggling, or whatever their taste may be). One reason filament lamps have been phased out is because they were notoriously inefficient – indeed, 11% efficiency is the kind of figure that was sometimes quoted. A 100 W filament lamp might only be generating visible light at around 11W, which seems quite a waste (especially as the utility company will be billing for all 100W).
I have always considered such lamps to be inefficient in the Summer, but that this is less of an issue in the Winter. That's because that other 89W will be heating up the room – unhelpful or even problematic in Summer, but perhaps acceptable in Winter when we are deliberately heating the rooms anyway. Does it matter if a little more of your heating comes from the light bulbs and a little less from the 'heaters'.
Indeed, when I was a child, before the days when most people had central heating, we used to have a device that was basically a light bulb inside a big metal shield. When turned on, it emitted no light. The bulb did, of course, but not the device. These were used on Winter evenings as bed warmers to avoid getting into a very cold bed. The lamp may have given out 11% light, but it all ultimately got absorbed into the metal and contributed to the heat transfer from filament to bed warmer and so onto the bedding. 5
Generally, energy inefficiencies in machines involve energy released as heat that goes to make molecules move about a bit faster on average rather than going where intended to do useful jobs. We might think of heat (or strictly, the dispersed thermal energy of matter, that heat leads to) as the lowest quality form of energy, that all other forms of energy are ultimately, eventually, degraded into.
This unintended 'heat leakage' may be an issue in lamps and motors and televisions and many other devices – but clearly not in heaters.
The same old hot air…
The video suggests one feature of the revolutionary new design is that instead of only heating cold air, the promoted device is able to recycle warm air to minimise waste. What could this mean?
Now if you take an electric heater out into the garden on a cold day when there is a breeze, then it is quite likely that the air that passes through the heater will be blown away quite quickly, and so the heater is always heating air from the same ambient starting point. That would be a bit of a waste. (Hint: do not use an electric heater to keep you warm in the garden – put on warm clothes or move around instead).
Inside a well insulated room, the air that is passing through the heater will soon already have been warmed, so the heater can achieve a higher room temperature for the same power input (compared with when it is operating in your garden, that is). I do not think any reasonable reading of 'standard system' for home heating would not "recycle warm air" rather that continuously heating only cold air, so to my reading this is simply a clear lie.
Some made up numbers from the website 'reviewing' (actually, promoting) the device
90% less cost to the householder?
I therefore consider the claim that the new design of heater "can warm any space at 90% less cost than conventional heating methods" is also a simple lie. Your standard home plug-in heater might not be as well designed, and may have some flaws, but it will not be converting 89 0r 90% of the energy supply into something other than heat. Inefficient machines produce heat instead of other (generally more useful) forms of output.
No, it cannot.
Not unless we've had some basic physics completely wrong for a long time and no one had noticed.
As has been often pointed pointed out, any claim that begins "in fact…" should be treated suspiciously. There is no logical difference between writing
"these claims are inconsistent with the laws of physics", and
"in fact, these claims are inconsistent with the laws of physics"
'In fact' tends to be used rhetorically when what is being said might of itself not seem a very convincing 'fact', and could otherwise be surprising, as in,
"in fact, Albert Einstein never actually found physics interesting"
In fact, this is another lie.
The video directs readers to what seems at first sight to be a consumer website praising the new heaters, although they've dropped the story about poor, mistreated Jason,
"This simple but rather genius concept was developed in 2019 by a group of electrical engineers from the EVI (Electric Vehicle Industry)."
There seem to be at least two versions directing to the same basic copy promoting 'EcoWell' and 'HeatFlow' on different webpages. Some customers (such as a 'Daniel Walker') seem to have even sought out both designs, presumably to match their decor in different rooms?
The web-pages do not repeat the more obviously fraudulent claims, but rather seem to suggest the heater is going to save money by pointing out how much heat produced by a domestic heating system is leaving the home. This is important, but it is worth n0oting that (assuming that a house can never have perfect thermal insulation) then when the home has reached a constant temperature (and the external temperature is not changing), the amount of heat being lost to the environment matches that produced by the heaters. That is, 100% of the energy being used for heating is being transferred to the outside. It is important to try to slow that rate, but all heating systems, "leak energy, warming up basements and underground lines", not just those that are "outdated and inefficient" as the TechTrends website implies.
It still claims that "99.8% efficiency ensures all your electricity gets turned into heat, saving you thousands" (where any heater will be highly efficient at producing heat – the issue is how it is distributed), but acknowledges.
"One HeatFlow heater can heat up a room up to 12 square meters. Depending on your needs, you might want to purchase several heaters for continuous warmth in all rooms or keep one to bring with you where you need it the most."
"One EcoWell heater can heat up a room up to 12 square meters. Depending on your needs…"
(The EcoWell design looks very similar to an alternative available from a well-established and reputable manufacturer selling their product on Amazon at £20 when I checked today. Whereas TrechTrends tells readers that with the half price discount "At the moment of writing this review, you can get EcoWell[*] for just £49.99!" [* or HeatFlow if you prefer the tiny coal fireplace look]
So, if you stop heating the house, and just have one single plug-in device that you move around to the room that you are going to be occupying, it will save money on your energy bills. But that will not work if you like frequently moving between rooms in your house, or have a family that like some privacy. (Of course, you can save even more money on your bills by wearing a good many layers of clothing and not using any heaters. )
Still, the website shows there have been many favourable customers' comments, which I rather spoiled yesterday with my own cynical offering:
But that was yesterday, and checking back today I was un-amazed to find my comment wiped. In any case, there is an acknowledgement showing the site is an advert, and the photos are of 'models' not real purchasers:
But it is presented in faint text on a black background seemingly designed to make sure it is not easily noticed 6 .
There is of course a special price if you buy now within 24 hours…
As there was yesterday.
Does it matter?
So these advertisements contain some very misleading 'bad science' (or, perhaps – as the claims are inconsistent with well-studied science – magical claims). Misinformation like this is is common in the post-truth age – but here it is masquerading as engineering and physics.
Anyone who has been to school and benefited from science education should not be taken in by the sillier claims about this new design of heater. They may be very useful, compact, convenient, and perhaps even powerful-for-their-size heaters. But the more extreme claims being made are lies, contrary to basic physics.
They cannot heat a classroom in 2 minutes. They are not 97% more cost effective. They will not save people thousands of pounds if used to replace other plug-in heaters. They do not use induction (or tea lights) to heat the air or dual Thomson physics. And although they recycle hot air, so does every other type of room heater. They may well be over 99% efficient, but that's because heat is the lowest grade of energy and so increasing machine efficiency is about avoiding 'high grade' energy being reduced to heat. The claim here is like claiming your teenager is better than the standard model because it can turn an organised bedroom into arbitrarily organised chaos – as if that was a rare quality, given that most teenagers are only ever able to mess up part of a room.
The video is in breach of UK law and YouTube should have done due diligence before accepting advertising money for such deliberately dishonest films. I feel somewhat offended that YouTube would think that an educated person would fall for this – but presumably plenty do. If people are listening to/watching this nonsense and not spotting a problem, then science education has not done a very good job. This kind of scam relies on low levels of scientific literacy.
But, I suspect these companies are getting plenty of sales from their dishonest advertising as in October 2022 I wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to complain about very similar adverts:
"Brand/product:AlphaHeater or Elite Heat
Your complaint: After watching a football match on you tube there was a misleading video, which directed viewers to a misleading website. The video claimed that a revolutionary new heater using jet engine technology would heat a room "using 90% less energy" (screen shot below). This is nonsense (I am a Chartered Physicist, Fellow of the Institute of Physics: heat is the lowest quality form of heat, so (unlike say the working of a motor) a heater cannot be produced so much more more efficiently.). The website was pretending to be an independent review (HeatReviewGuide) of the heater but had dummy links and was only advertising that product (see below). …
Acknowledgement of complaint: October 2022
seems familiar?
The ASA replied
"Thank you for contacting the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about ads online for this heating device and for your patience while your complaint was considered.
We acknowledge your concern about this ad and so we have put an alert out to have it taken down through our ASA Scam Ad Alert System. We will share the details of this ad with our network of key industry partners, including all the major social media platforms and ad networks operating in the UK, so that the content is taken down and to help stop similar ads appearing in future."
Outcome of compliant: November 2022
I guess criminals behind these scams respond to this regulation of advertisements by changing the name or other minor details of their products, and then just carrying on. Time for another message to the ASA?
Merry Christmas everyone.
Notes
1 Even if we believe that Universities still readily expel fee-paying 'customers' for the most vile of offences, and even if we think that refusing to become a billionaire amounts to grounds for such an expulsion (why?) – the idea that a university could act in three days on a student disciplinary matter and follow due process does not ring true. (I know from personal experience there are plenty of people in universities who are prepared to ignore principles of natural justice, but luckily the institutions themselves have careful and balanced procedures to protect members from false and malicious claims). Jason could always have got his University's Enterprise department to help him arrange the commercialisation of the design, and then signed over any personal interests to generate income for a charitable trust.
2 I am assuming that psi means pounds per square inch. The scientific units are pascals (that is newtons per square metre) which were already been taught in school when I was a pupil half a century ago.
3 Temperature is NOT the same as heat, of course, but a certain temperature change in a sample of a substance involves the transfer of a related amount of energy that for a characterised material can be calculated (heat = product of mass by specific heat capacity by temperature change; 𝚫H = mc𝛉).
4 I used:
The density of air is about 1200 grammes per cubic metre
the specific heat capacity of air is about 1 Jg-1K-1
power = energy transferred / time [= 120s]
5 We usually think of light and heat as discrete. But heating is energy transferred due to a difference in temperature: so when radiation is emitted by a hot body and absorbed by a colder one it counts as heat, even if it is light. So heat is not necessary light, but light often counts as heat. As they say, there's often 'more heat than light'.
6 Just in case you are finding the text difficult to make out, it reads:
"THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT AND NOT AN ACTUAL NEWS ARTICLE, BLOG, OR CONSUMER PROTECTION UPDATE
ADVERTISING DISCLOSURE: THIS WEBSITE AND THE PRODUCTS & SERVICES REFERRED TO ON THE SITE ARE ADVERTISING MARKETPLACES. THIS WEBSITE IS AN ADVERTISEMENT AND NOT A NEWS PUBLICATION. ANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF PERSONS USED ON THIS SITE ARE MODELS. THE OWNER OF THIS SITE AND OF THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES REFERRED TO ON THIS SITE ONLY PROVIDES A SERVICE WHERE CONSUMERS CAN OBTAIN AND COMPARE."
I was reading the latest edition of Education in Chemistryand came across an article entitled "Fun in the sun alters water chemistry. How swimming and tubing are linked to concerning rises in water contaminants" (Notman, 2023). This was not an article about teaching, but a report of some recent chemistry research summarised for teachers. [Teaching materials relating to this article can be downloaded from the RSC website.]
I have to admit to not having understood what 'tubing' was (I plead 'age') apart from its everyday sense of referring collectively to tubes, such as those that connect Bunsen burners to gas supplies, and was intrigued by what kinds of tubes were contaminating the water.
The research basically reported on the presence of higher levels of contaminants in the same body of water at Clear Creak, Colorado on a public holiday when many people used the water for recreational pursuits (perhaps even for 'tubing'?) than on a more typical day.
This seems logical enough: more people in the water; more opportunities for various substances to enter the water from them. I have my own special chemical sensor which supports this finding. I go swimming in the local hotel pool, and even though people are supposed to shower before entering the pool: not everyone does (or at least, not effectively). Sometimes one can 'taste' 1 the change when someone gets in the water without washing off perfume or scented soap residue. Indeed, occasionally the water 'tastes' 1 differently after people enter the pool area wearing strong perfume, even if they do not use the pool and come into direct contact with the water!
The scientists reported finding various substances they assumed were being excreted 2 by the people using the water – substances such as antihistamines and cocaine – as well as indicators of various sunscreens and cosmetics. (They also found higher levels of "microbes associated with humans", although this was not reported in Education in Chemistry.)
I'm not sure why I bother having a shower BEFORE I go for a swim in there… (Image by sandid from Pixabay)
It makes sense – but is there a convincing case?
Now this all seems very reasonable, as the results fit into a narrative that seems theoretically feasible: a large number of people entering the fresh water of Clear Creek are likely to pollute it sufficiently (if not to rename it Turbid Creek) for detection with the advanced analytical tools available to the modern chemist (including "an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer and a liquid chromatography high resolution mass spectrometer").
However, reading on, I was surprised to learn that the sampling in this study was decidedly dodgy.
"The scientists collected water samples during a busy US public holiday in September 2022 and on a quiet weekday afterwards."
I am not sure how this (natural) experiment would rate as a design for a school science investigation. I would certainly have been very critical if any educational research study I had been asked to evaluate relied on sampling like this. Even if large numbers of samples were taken from various places in the water over an extended period during these two days this procedure has a major flaw. This is because the level of control of other possibly relevant factors is minimal.
The independent variable is whether the samples were collected on a public holiday when there was much use of the water for leisure, or on a day with much less leisure use. The dependent variables measured were levels of substances in the water that would not be considered part of the pristine natural composition of river water. A reasonable hypothesis is that there would be more contamination when more people were using the water, and that was exactly what was found. But is this enough to draw any strong conclusions?
Considering the counterfactual
A useful test is to ask whether we would have been convinced that people do not contaminate the water had the analysis shown there was no significant difference in water samples on the two days? That is to examine a 'counterfactual' situation (one that is not the case, but might have been).
In this counterfactual scenario, would similar levels of detected contaminants be enough to convince us the hypotheses was misguided – or might we look to see if there was some other factor which might explain this unexpected (given how reasonable the hypothesis seems) result and rescue our hypothesis?
Had pollutant levels been equally high on both days, might we have sought ('ad hoc') to explain that through other factors:
Maybe it was sunnier on the second day with high U.V. levels which led to more breakdown of organic debris in the river?
Perhaps there was a spill of material up-river 3 which masked any effect of the swimmers (and, er, tubers?)
Perhaps rainfall between the two sampling dates had increased the flow of the river and raised its level, washing more material into the water?
Perhaps the wind direction was different and material was being blown in from nearby agricultural land on the second day.
Perhaps the water temperature was different?
Perhaps a local industry owner tends to illegally discharge waste into the river when the plant is operating on normal working days?
Perhaps spawning season had just started for some species, or some species was emerging from a larval state on the river bed and disturbing the debris on the bottom?
Perhaps passing migratory birds were taking the opportunity to land in the water for some respite, and washing off parasites as well as dust.
Perhaps a beaver's dam had burst up stream 3 ?
Perhaps (for any panspermia fans among readers) an asteroid covered with organic residues had landed in the river?
Or…
But: if we might consider some of those factors to potentially explain a lack of effect we were expecting, then we should equally consider them as possible alternative causes for an effect we predicted.
Maybe it was sunnier on the first day with high U.V. levels which led to more breakdown of organic debris in the river?
…
Perhaps a local industry owner tends to illegally discharge waste into the river on public holidays because the work force are off site and there will be no one to report this?
… etc.
Lack of control of confounding variables
Now, in environmental research, as in research into teaching, we cannot control conditions in the way we can in a laboratory. We cannot ensure the temperature and wind direction and biota activity in a river is the same. Indeed, one thing about any natural environment that we can be fairly sure of is that biological activity (and so the substances released by such activity) varies seasonally, and according to changing weather conditions, and in different ways for different species.
So, as in educational research, there are often potentially confounding variables which can undermine our experiments:
In quasi-experiments or natural experiments, a more complex design than simply comparing outcome measures is needed. …this means identifying and measuring any relevant variables. …Often…there are other variables which it is recognised could have an effect, other than the dependent variable: 'confounding' variables.
class of day (busy holiday versus quiet working day)
dependent variables
concentrations of substances and organisms considered to indicate contamination
confounding variables
anything that might feasibly influence the level of concentrations of substances and organisms considered to indicate contamination – other than the class of day
In a controlled experiment any potential confounding variables are held at fixed levels, but in 'natural experiments' this is not possible
The best we can do to mitigate for the lack of control is rigorous sampling. If water samples from a range of days when there was high level of leisure activity, and a range of days when there was low level of leisure activity were compared, this would be more convincing that just one day from each category. Especially so if these were randomly selected days. It is still possible that factors such as wind direction and water temperature could bias findings, but it becomes less likely – and with random sampling of days it is possible to estimate how likely such chance factors are to have an effect. Then we can at least apply models that suggest whether observed differences in outcomes exceed the level likely due to chance effects.
I would like to think that any educational study that had this limitation would be questioned in peer review. The Education in Chemistry article cited the original research, although I could not immediately find this. The work does not seem to have been published in a research journal (at least, not yet) but was presented at a conference, and is discussed in a video published by the American Chemical Society on YouTube.
"With Labor Day approaching, many people are preparing to go tubing and swimming at local streams and rivers. These delightful summertime activities seem innocuous, but do they have an impact on these waterways? Today, scientists report preliminary [sic] results from the first holistic study of this question 4, which shows that recreation can alter the chemical and microbial fingerprint of streams, but the environmental and health ramifications are not yet known."
American Chemical Society Meeting Newsroom, 2023
In the video, Noor Hamdan, of John Hopkins University, reports that "we are thinking of collecting more samples and doing some more statistical analysis to really, really make sure that humans are significantly impacting a stream".
This seems very wise, as it is only too easy to be satisfied with very limited data when it seems to fit with your expectations. Indeed that is one of the everyday ways of thinking that science challenges by requiring more rigorous levels of argument and evidence. In the meantime, Noor Hamdan suggests people using the water should use mineral-based rather than organic-based sunscreens, and she "recommend[s] not peeing in rivers". No, I am fairly sure 'tubing' is not meant as a euphemism for that. 5
1 Perhaps more correctly, smell, though it is perceived as tasting – most of the flavour we taste in food is due to volatile substances evaporating in the mouth cavity and diffusing to be detected in the nose lining.
2 The largest organ of excretion for humans is the skin. The main mechanism for excreting the detected contaminating substances into the water (if perhaps not the only pertinent one, according to the researchers) was sweating. Physical exertion (such as swimming) tends to be associated with higher levels of sweating. We do not notice ourselves sweating when the sweat evaporates as fast as it is released – nor, of course, when we are immersed in water.
One of those irregular verbs?
I perspire.
You sweat.
She excretes through her skin
(Image by Sugar from Pixabay)
3 The video suggests that sampling took place both upriver and downriver of the Creek which would offer some level of control for the effect of completely independent influxes into the water – unless they occurred between the sampling points.
4 There seem to be plenty of studies of the effects of water quality on leisure use of waterways: but not on the effects of the recreational use of waterways on their quality.
5 Just in case any readers were also ignorant about this, it apparently refers to using tyre inner tubes (or similar) as floatation devices. This suggests a new line of research. People who float around in inner tubes will tend to sweat less than those actively swimming – but are potentially harmful substances leached from the inner tubes themselves?
Richard Feynman was special. Any one who wins the Nobel prize has to be pretty special, but physics laureate Feynman was even more remarkable as he was an exceptionally high achieving research physicist also known for his…teaching. No one gets a Nobel for being a good teacher, and it is often considered in Academia that teaching (that is, if one tries to give teaching the time and energy required to do it well – as students deserve) distracts from research to such an extent that it is rare to excel in both.
Feynman had something a lot of scientists do not not: great charisma. (That is no insult to fellow scientists – most plumbers and greengrocers and bus drivers and accountants and hairdressers do not – that is what makes it notable). He might be considered the Albert Einstein of the second half of the twentieth century, and because of that timescale we are lucky to have quality recordings of him talking and teaching in a way that could not have happened with previous generations. (A great shame in many cases: if perhaps a blessing with some – Isaac Newton's lectures were apparently avoided by most of his own students.)
Like many people, I find Feynman bewitching – he had a sparkle about him – almost a permanent mischievous twinkle in the eye – and an ability to somehow express the excitement of science (of working out why things are as they are) whilst being able to talk in ways that could be understood by people that lacked his expertise. That is perhaps one trait of a great teacher – being able to talk at the level of the audience, despite personally understanding at a higher, more complex and subtle, level.
That is by way of preamble – as I want to consider an explanation Feynman once offered of surface tension.
Screenshot of Richard Feynman explaining why water forms into drops.
Why does it rain in drops?
The extract I am discussing is taken from a 1983 BBC series of short episodes in a series called 'Fun to Imagine'. Although, at the time of writing, the episodes are "not currently available" from the BBC site, there is a compilation on YouTube. One of the topics Feynman discusses is the origin of surface tension – although he only introduces the technical term after explaining the phenomenon that water forms into droplets,
"you see a little drop of water, a tiny drop And the atoms [sic, molecules] attract each other, they like to be next to each other They want as many partners as they can get Now the guys that are at the surface have only partners on one side here, in the air on the other side, so they're trying to get in And you can imagine…this teeming people, all moving very fast all trying to have as many partners as possible and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous and they keep pounding in trying to get in, and that makes it a tight ball instead of a flat and that's what, you know, surface tension When you realise when you see how sometimes a water drop sits like this on a table then you start to imagine why it's like that because everybody is trying to get into the water"
Richard Feynman speaking in 1983
Is this a good explanation?
Well, we might suggest Feynman makes a schoolchild error – water is not an atomic substance, but molecular. It does not contain discrete atoms, so he should be referring to the molecules attracting each other. But I do not think this is an error in the sense that Feynman was mistaken, simply that although the distinction is of great importance in chemistry, physicists sometimes use the term 'atom' generically to refer to the individual particles in a gas, for example. That might be unhelpful to a secondary school student studying for examinations, but if Feynman thought of his television audience for the recording as lay people, the general public, then perhaps the distinction between atoms (arguably a more familiar term in everyday discourse) and molecules would be considered an unhelpful detail? I am certainly prepared to give him that. I think it was the wrong choice, but not that Feynman was in error.
But what about the overall argument here. The 'atoms' want to have partners all around them 2 so they try to get inside the volume of the liquid. The overall effect of everyone, including these guys at the edge, trying to get inside the water is that it forms a sphere-like shape: "a tight ball instead of [something more] flat". Is that a convincing explanation – and is it a valid one?
What makes for a good explanation?
If anything is central to both science and science teaching, it is explanation.
"Explanation would seem to be central to the essence of science. A naïve view might claim that science discovers knowledge about the World, although it might be more accurate to suggest that science creates knowledge through the development of theories. The theories are used in turn to understand, predict and sometimes control the world, and in these activities, scientific explanations play the key role. We might consider theories and models to be the resources of science, but explanations to be the active processes through which theory is applied to contexts of interest…
An explanation is an answer to a 'why' question: but that in itself neither makes for a good explanation, nor for a scientific one. There is no simple answer to what does count as a good explanation, in science or elsewhere. Explanations have audiences, and to some extent, a good explanation is one that satisfied its audience – in other words it meets the explainee's purpose in seeking an explanation. Additionally, it has been known since at least Aristotle's time that we can talk of different kinds of causes, which suggests that many 'why questions' might have different types of acceptable responses, depending on the type of cause being sought."
That passage is taken from a chapter where I described some activities used with secondary school students to help teach them about the nature of scientific explanation. (Read about the classroom activities here.) In that context, working with learners who were about 14 years of age, students were told that a good scientific explanation would be logical, and would draw upon scientific theory,
"pupils were told that scientific explanations needed to take into account logic and theory, i.e., that the explanation needs to be rational, and the explanation needs to draw upon accepted scientific ideas. As the notion of 'theory' is itself known to be difficult for students, they were also told that scientific theories are ideas about the world which are well supported by evidence; are internally consistent; and which usually fit with other accepted theories."
In that regard, Feynman's explanation can be considered logical, even if it omits (i.e., he takes as assumed) an important step* that is needed to explain the (approximately) spherical shape of the water drop.
If water quanticles (let's leave aside whether they are atoms or molecules) want to have many partners 2, and so try to get inside the volume, then we can understand* that the water drop will tend to the smallest surface area possible, so as few quanticles end up at the surface (with the tenuous air, rather than congregating water partners, on one side) where they will be nervous, and as many quanticles as possible are in the interior of the drop where they will be happy.
* The missing step is to state that a spherical drop will have a smaller surface area than any other shape with the same volume and so fewest quanticles at the surface. Perhaps Feynman assumed everyone would know/see that. Probably there is no such thing as a totally complete explanation.
So, is this a good explanation?
Explanations can have different purposes. Scientific explanations allow us to make effective predictions (and so often to control situations – the application of science through technology). But, in everyday life, explanations have a more subjective purpose ("explanations have audiences, and to some extent, a good explanation is one that satisfied its audience").
If, as a result of hearing Feynman's explanation, the viewers of the BBC televison programme
felt they now understood why sphere-like drops of water form, and
considered they had made sense of some science, and so
appreciated the value of science in explaining everyday phenomena,
then perhaps the explanation achieved its purpose?
Was Feynman's explanation scientific?
Of course, if I am being my usual pedantic self, I could point out that although Feynman's explanation was logical, that does not make it scientific unless it also drew upon accepted scientific principles. It was logical because the explicandum (what was to be explained – here, the drop shape) followed from the premise (i.e., ifwater quanticles want to have many partners, and act accordingly, then…)
But, in science, quanticles are not understood as sentient actors, but as inanimate entities that are not (and cannot be) aware of their situation and cannot act deliberately to work towards personal goals. Therefore, no matter how convincing someone may have found this explanation, it does not qualify as a scientific explanation as it is not based on accepted scientific principles (…or at least, not directly).
An anthropomorphic explanation
Feynman's explanation uses anthropomorphism, which from a scientific perspective makes it a pseudo-explanation. A pseudo-explanation takes the form of an explanation in that it is presented as if an answer to a why question, but does meet the requirements for a formal explanation (e.g., it does "not logically fit the phenomenon to be explained into a wider conceptual scheme", Taber & Watts, 2000.)
There are various kinds of pseudo-explanations such as tautology (circular explanations that rely on the conclusions as premises) and simply offering a label for the explicandum (e.g., water absorbs a lot of heat for a small change in its temperature because it has a high heat capacity – this is a kind of disguised tautology, as a 'high heat capacity' is a way of characterising something that absorbs a lot of heat for a small change in its temperature).
Anthropomorphism explains by assuming that the entities involved can be considered to be like people, and, so, to be sentient, have feelings and opinions and preferences, and be able to plan and carry out actions that are intended to being about desired consequences.
It relies on an analogy that may not be appropriate:
if people were in a situation like this, they are likely to behave in a certain way
if we treat these entities as if they were people then we might expect them to behave as people would, therefore…
It is an open question to what extent we can assume animals (chimpanzees, dogs, birds, etc.) can be considered to share aspects of human-like experiences, emotions, thoughts, etcetera. Perhaps it is reasonable to suggest a dog can be sad or a chimp can be jealous. It may not be stretching credibility to suggest that members of some species of animals want to be in large groups, like to be in large groups, and perhaps may even get nervous when isolated? However, it stretches credibility when we are told that viruses are clever or that a bacterium can be happy.
And, there is a pretty strong scientific consensus that at the level of individual molecules there is no possibility of emotions, opinions, desires, thoughts, or deliberate actions. Atoms do not want to fill their electron shells, and genes cannot be selfish, except in a figurative sense.
So, in order to accept Feynman's explanation as valid, we would have to assume that the quanticles in water, water molecules,
like to be next to each other
want as many partners as they can get 2
can be unhappy and nervous
try to have as many partners as possible 2
try to get into the inside of the volume
So, to find this explanation convincing, we have to accept (contrary to science) that something like a water molecule is able to
have desires and preferences,
be aware of the extent to which is current situation matches its preferences, and,
deliberately act to bring about desired outcomes
[Feynman does not explicitly state that the quanticles know about their situation (point 2), but clearly this is implied as otherwise they would have no reason to be nervous and unhappy, nor to act to bring about change.]
These requirements are clearly not met. A being with a central nervous system as complex as a human can meet these requirements, but there is no conceivable mechanism by which molecules can be considered sentient, or to be deliberate agents in the world.
So, even if Feynman's explanation of surface tension satisfies viewers of the recording (i.e., is is subjectively an effective explanation) it fails as an objective, scientific, explanation. Feynman may indeed have been a 'genius' (Gleick, 1994), and a great physicist, but his explanation here is invalid and simply fails as good science.
Now a reader may suspect I have gone after a 'straw man' target here. Surely, Feynman was speaking figuratively, and not literally. Of course he was, but figurative language cannot support a logical explanation, except through an analogy we suspect to hold.
Consider the following hypothetical claim and two possible consequences if the claim was true
Claim
Consequence 1
Consequence 2
"I managed to get tickets for Toyah and Fripp's sold out concert in Bury St Edmunds, and these tickets are gold dust."
"I could sell these tickets at quite a mark up"
"I could put a sample of these tickets in a mass spectrometer and would find they had an atomic mass of 197."
If the claim was literally true, then consequence 2 would follow. But of course, it is meant as a figurative claim, where 'gold dust' is a metaphor for something of high value because it is rare. So, actually consequence 1 might follow, but not consequence 2.
In the same way, if water particles do not have likes, and do not try to do things, Fenyman's argument seems to fall apart…
A teaching model?
Now I would not presume to know better than Richard Feynman, and I am pretty sure (i.e., about as certain as I can be of anything) that Feynman would not have fallen into the mistake of thinking that atoms or molecules actually act like humans and want things, or try to do things. He surely knew this was not a scientific explanation, but he clearly thought this was a useful way of explaining (to his audience) why water forms into a drop.
Now, I suggested above that Feynman's narrative account of the origin of surface tension "is not based on accepted scientific principles (…or at least, not directly)". But near the outset of this account Feynman states that the water particles "attract each other":
"the [molecules] attract each other, they like to be next to each other"
Feynman was not only a researcher, but a teacher, and teachers use teaching models. I think this is what Feynman is doing here:
"[according to science] the [molecules] attract each other [and we can think of this as if] they like to be next to each other"
Affinity in the sense of human experience is used as a kind of analogy for the affinity between water molecules (which leads to hydrogen bonding and dipole-dipole interactions). Once we model inter-molecular forces as being like attractions between people, we can extend the analogy in terms of how people feel when they do not get what they want, and how they respond by acting in ways that they hope will get them what they want.
Looked at this way, Feynman is doing something that good teachers often do when they judge a scientific model is too abstract, sophisticated, complex, subtle, for their audience; they simplify by substituting a teaching model which represents the scientific model in terms more familiar and accessible to the learners.
From this perspective, Feynman's explanation may not have been a valid scientific explanation, but we might ask if it was an effective intermediate explanation set out in terms of a teaching model. That is, perhaps Feynman's explanation may have satisfied viewers, and also potentially acted as a possible foundation for building up to a more technical, scientifically acceptable explanation.
Teachers and other science communicators often use anthropomorphism as a way of offering accounts of complex scientific topics that will appeal and make sense to learners of a public audience.
This can be effective to the extent that it engages learners, leaves the audience with a subjective sense of making sense of the science, and provides accounts that are often remembered later.
Of course that is not so helpful if the audience is studying a science course, and think they have learnt an account which will get them credit in formal examinations! I know from my own teaching career that learners often find anthropomorphic explanations readily come to mind, even when then they have been taught more technical accounts they are expected to apply when assessed.
In public science communication, then, anthropomorphic accounts may be valuable in offering people some sense of the science. But in formal education we need to be careful as even if anthropomorphism offers a useful way of getting learners familiar with some abstract topic (what might be called 'weak' anthropomorphism: Taber & Watts, 1996), we need to avoid them learning and committing to that metaphoric 'social' account thinking it is a valid scientific account ('strong' anthropomorphism).
Mapping Feynman's explanation
If we see Feynman as offering an analogy as a teaching model then we might seek to 'translate' his terms into more scientific concepts. He tells us that attraction is 'liking', and we can perhaps think of 'wanting' and being 'nervous' as indicating a higher (excited) energy state, 'pounding' as being subject to unbalanced forces, and 'trying to get in' as tending to evolving toward a lower energy configuration. At least, someone who already understood the scientific account could suggest such mappings. It seems unlikely any one who did not appreciate the science already could interpret it that way without a knowing and careful guide.
And like all anthropomorphic explanations, it 'suffers' from the very quality that it offers a narrative which is likely to be more easily understood, better related to, and more readily recalled, than the scientific account. This is why I have very mixed feelings about the use of anthropomorphism in formal science teaching, as even when it (a) does a great job of engaging learners and offering them some level of understanding, this may be at the cost of (b) offering an account which many students will find it hard to later let go of and progress beyond.
Screenshot of Richard Feynman explaining why water forms into drops.
As a good teacher, Feynman would know to pitch his teaching for particular audiences depending on their likely level of background knowledge. The explanation discussed here was not how Feynman taught about surface tension in his undergraduate classes at the California Institute of Technology (Feynman, Leighton & Sands, 1963). We can imagine that had he told students at Caltech that water formed into spherical drops because all the molecular guys are trying to get into the water, he might indeed had heard the retort: Surely you are joking, Prof. Feynman? 1
Work cited:
Feynman, R. P., Leighton, R. B., & Sands, M. (Eds.). (1963). The Feynman Lectures on Physics (3 Volumes). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Gleick, J. (1994) Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics. Abacus.
1 My subtitle is a reference to the book 'Surely you're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character' in which Feynman tells anecdotes from his life.
2 Water was perhaps a poor example to choose as there is extensive hydrogen bonding in liquid water,
"I suspect even some experienced chemists may underestimate the extent of hydrogen bonding in water. According to one source…, in liquid water at the freezing point, the typical water molecule is at any time bonded by three or four hydrogen bonds – compared with the four bonds in the solid ice structure."
Taber, 2020, p.98
So, in Feynman's analogy, a water molecules does not become happy (lower energy state) when it is surrounded by as many other water molecules as possible, but when it is aligned with 3 or 4 other molecules to hydrogen bond, if only transiently. Without the hydrogen bonding, the drop would still be approximately spherical, but it would be smaller and denser as the molecules could get even closer together, but it would evaporate away more readily.
An update on the 'first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes'
Keith S. Taber (masquerading as a learned academic)
if he wanted me to admit I had been wrong, Hussain could direct me to the released survey results and assure me that the data collected for the survey was not being used for other purposes. That is, he should given me grounds to think the survey was a genuine piece of research and not 'sugging'
Some months ago I published an article in this blog about a message I received from an organisation called Acaudio, that has a website where academics can post audio recordings promoting their research, that invited me to participate in "the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes". I was suspicious of this invitation for a number of reason as I discuss at 'The first annual International Survey of Gullible Research Centres and Institutes')
Several things suggested to me that this was not a genuine piece of academic research, including the commitment that "We will release the results over the next month" which seemed so unrealistic as to have been written either by someone with no experience of collecting and analysing large scale survey data – or someone with no intention of actually following through on the claim.
Sugging?
Having taken a look at the survey questions, I felt pretty sure thus was an example of what has been labelled as 'sugging'. Sugging is a widely recognised, and indeed widely adopted, unethical practice of collecting marketing information by framing it as a survey. The Market Research Society explains that,
Sugging is a market research industry term, meaning 'selling under the guise of research'. Sugging occurs when individuals or companies pretend to be market researchers conducting a research, when in reality they are trying to build databases, generate sales leads or directly sell product or services….
The practices of sugging and frugging [fundraising under the guise of market research] bring discredit on the profession of research… and mislead members of the public when they are being asked for their co-operation…
Failing to clearly specify the purpose for which the data is being collected is also a breach of…the first principle of the Data Protection Act 1998.
Although I thought the chances of the results of the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutesactually being released within the month, or even within a few months to allow for a modest level of over-promising, were pretty minuscule, I did think I should wait a few months and then do a search to see if such a report had appeared. I did not think I was likely to find such a report released into the public domain, but any scientist has to be open-minded enough to consider they might be wrong – and certainly in my own case I've collected enough empirical evidence over the years to know I am not just, in principle, fallible.
Acaudio doth protest too much, methink
But (being fallible) I'd rather forgotten about this and had not got round to doing a web search. Until, that is, I was prompted to do so by receiving an email from the company founder, Hussain Ayed, who had had his attention drawn to my blog, and was – understandably perhaps – not happy about my criticisms:
Hussain's letter did not address my specific points from the blog (as he did not want to "get into the nitty gritty of it all"), but assured me his company was genuinely trying to do useful work, and there was no scamming.
Of course, I had not suggested Acaudio, the organisation, was itself a 'scam': in my earlier article I had pointed that Acaudio was offering a free, open-access, service which was likely to be useful to academics – and even briefly pointed out some positive features of their website.
But Acaudio's 'survey' was a different matter. It did not meet the basic requirements for a serious academic study, and it asked questions that seemed to be clearly designed as linked to potential selling points for a company that was offering services to increase research impact (so, perhaps, Acaudio).
And it promised a fantastic time-scale. Perhaps a very large organisation, with staff fully dedicated to analysis and reporting could have released international survey results within a month of collecting data – perhaps? But Acaudio was a company with one company officer that reported employing one person.
Given the scale of the organisation, what Acaudio have achieved with their website in a relatively short time is highly impressive. But…
…where is that survey report?
I replied to Hussain, as below.
Dear Hussain Ayed
Thank you for your message.
I have not written "a comprehensive attack on [your] company" and do not have a sufficient knowledge-base to have done so. I have indeed, however, published a blog article criticising your marketing techniques based on the direct evidence in messages you have sent me. In particular, I claimed that,
(i) (despite being registered as a UK based company) you did not adhere to the UK regulations concerning direct marketing. (I assume you are not seeking to challenge this given the evidence of your own emails)
(ii) that you were also 'sugging': undertaking marketing under the guise of carrying out a survey.
If I understand your complaint, you are suggesting in regard to point (ii) that you really were carrying out a survey for the public good (rather than to collect information for your own commercial purposes) and that any apparent failure of rigour in this regard actually resulted from a lack of relevant expertise within the company. If so, perhaps you will send me, or tell me where I can access, the published outcome of the survey (due to be available by the middle of June 2023 according to your earlier message). I have looked on line for this, but a Google search (using the term "International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes") failed to locate the report.
Can you offer me an assurance that information collected for the survey was ONLY used for the analysis that led to the published survey report (assuming there is one you can point me to), and that this information was not retained by your organisation as a basis for contacting individuals with regard to your company's services? If you can offer appropriate assurances then I will be happy to add an inserted edit into the blog to include a statement along the lines that the company assures me that all information collected was only used for the purposes of producing a survey report, and was not retained or used in any other way by the company.
So, to summarise regarding point (ii), if this survey was not a scam, please (a) point me to the outcomes, and (b) give me these assurances about not collecting information under false premises.
You also have the right to reply directly. If you really think anything in my article amounted to "misleading bits of 'evidence' " then please do correct this. You are free to submit a response in the comments section at the bottom of the page. If you wish to do that, I will be happy to publish your reply (subject to my usual restrictions which I am sure should not be any impediment to you – so, I will not publish anything I think might be libellous of a third party, nor anything with obscenity/profanity etc. Sadly, I do sometimes have to reject comments of these kinds.)
I recognise that comments have less prominence than the blog article they follow, and that indeed some readers may not get that far in their engagement with an article. Therefore, if you do submit a reply I am happy to also add a statement at the HEAD of my article to point out out to readers that there is a reply on behalf of the company beneath the article, so my readers see that notice BEFORE proceeding to read my own account. I am not looking for people/organisations to criticise for the sake of it, but have become concerned about the extent of unethical practice in the name of academic work (such as the marketing of predatory journals and conferences) and do point out some of the examples that come my way. I believe such bad practice is very damaging, and especially so for students who are new to the academic world, and for those working working in under-resourced contexts who may be under extreme pressure to achieve 'tenure'. People spend their limited funds on getting published in journals that have no serious peer review (and so are not taken seriously by most academics), or presenting at conferences which 'invite' contributions from anyone prepared to pay the fees. I do not spend time looking for such bad practice: it arrives in my inbox on a fairly frequent basis.
Perhaps your intentions are indeed honourable, and perhaps you are doing good work. Perhaps you are indeed "working to tackle inequality in higher education and academia", which obviously would be valuable, although I am not sure how this is achieved by working with groups at Cambridge such as the Bioelectronic Systems Tech Group – unless you perhaps charge fees to those in wealthy institutions to allow you to offer a free service for those elsewhere? If you do: good on you. Even so, I would strongly suggest you 'clean up your act' as far as your marketing is concerned, and make sure your email campaigns are within the law. By failing to follow the regulations you present your organisation as either being unprofessional (giving the impression no one knows what they are doing) or dodgy (if you* know the regulations, but are choosing not to follow them). *I assume you are responsible for the marketing strategy, but even if someone else is doing this for you, I suspect you (as the only registered company officer) would be considered ultimately responsible for not following the regulations.
If you are genuine about wishing to learn more about undertaking quality surveys, there are many sources of information. My pages on research methods might be a place to get some introductory background, but if this to be a major part of your company's activity I would really suggest you should employ someone with expertise, or retain a consultant who works in that area.
Thank you for the offer to work with you, but I am retired and have too many existing projects to work on – and in any case you should work with someone you genuinely respect, not someone that you consider only to "masquerade as a learned academic" and who has "shaky morals".
Best wishes
Keith
My key point was that if he wanted me to admit I had been wrong, Hussain could direct me to the released survey results and assure me that the data collected for the survey was not being used for other purposes. That is, he should given me grounds to think the survey was a genuine piece of research and not 'sugging'.
The findings of the survey are 'reserved'
Later that day, I got the following reply:
So, it seems the research report that was supposed to have been released ("over the next month" – according to Acaudio's email dated 15th May 2023) was not available, and – furthermore – would not be made available to me.
A key principle of scientific research is that the outcomes are published – that is made available to the public: and not "reserved" for certain people the researchers select!
A key feature of ethical research is that a commitment is made to make outcomes available (as Acaudio did) and this is followed through (as Acaudio did not).
What is the research data being used for?
Hussain also failed to offer any assurances that the data collected under the claim (pretence, surely) of carrying out survey research was not being used for commercial purposes – as a basis for evaluating the potential merits of approaching different respondents to tender for services. I cannot prove that Acaudio was using the collected information for such purposes, but if my suspicions were misplaced (and if Hussain really wanted to persuade me that the survey was not intended as a scam) it would have been very easy to simply include a sentence in his response to that effect – to have assured me that the research data was being analysed anonymously and handled separately from the company's marketing data with a suitable 'ethical wall' between.1
That is, Hussain could have simply got into enough of the "nitty gritty" to have offered an assurance of following an ethical protocol, instead of choosing to insult me…as I pointed out to him:-
Dear Hussain
Thank you for your message.
So, the 'survey' results (if indeed any such document actually exists) that you indicated to me would be released by mid-June are still not actually available in the public domain. As you say: 'Hmm'.
You are right, that I would have no right to ask you to provide me with anything – except that YOU ASKED ME to believe I misjudged you, and to withdraw my public criticisms; and so I ASKED YOU to provide the evidence to persuade me by (i) proving there was a survey analysis with published results, and (ii) giving an assurance that you did not use, for your company's marketing purposes, data supposedly collected for publishable research. There is of course no reason why you should have provided either the results or the assurances, unless you actually did feel I had judged Acaudio too harshly and you wanted to give me reason to acknowledge this. The only thing that might give me "some sort of power over [you]" in this regard is your suggestion to me that I might wish to "take back the claims that [I] made". Can I remind you: you contacted me. You contacted me, unsolicited, in December 2022, and then again in May 2023. This morning, you contacted me again specifically to suggest my suggestions of wrong-doing were misjudged. But you will not back that up, so you have simply reinforced my earlier inferences.
For some reason that is not clear to me, you think that my mind is on money – that is presumably why I spend some of my valuable time highlighting poor academic practices on a personal website that brings in no income and is financed from my personal funds. Perhaps that is the company director finding it hard to get inside the mind of a retired teacher who worked his entire career in the public sector? (That is not meant as an insult – I probably have the reverse difficulty in understanding the motivations of the commercial mind. Perhaps that is why these are "things that are beyond [my] understanding"?) I do not have any problem with you setting up a company to make money (good luck to you if you work hard and treat people with due respect), and think it is perfectly possible for an organisation to both make money and produce public goods – I am not against commercial organisations per se. My 'vested interests' relate to commitments to certain values that I think underpin both good science and academic activities more broadly. A key one is honesty (which is one fundamental aspect of treating people with due respect). We are all entitled (perhaps even have a duty?) to make the strongest arguments for our positions, but when people knowingly misrepresent (e.g., "We will release the results over the next month" but no publication is forthcoming) in order to to advance their interests, this undermines the scholarly community. Anyone can be wrong. Anyone can be mistaken. Anyone can fail in a venture. (Such as promising a report, genuinely intending to produce one, but finding the task was more complex than anticipated. Had that been your response, I might have found this feasible. Instead, you promised to release the results, but now you claim you have "every right to ignore [my] request for the outcomes". Yes, that is so – if the commitment you made means nothing.) As long as we can trust each other to be open and honest the system will eventually self-correct in cases when there are false (but honestly motivated) claims. Yet, these days, academics are flooded with offers and claims that are not mistaken, but deliberately misleading. That is what I find so troublesome that I take time to call out examples. That may seem strange to you, but you have to remember I have worked as a school, college, and university, teacher all my working life, so I identify at a very deep level with the basic values underpinning the quest for knowledge and learning. When I get an email from someone claiming they are doing a survey, but which seems to be an attempt to market services, I do take it personally. I do not like to be lied to. I do not like to be treated as a fool. And I do not like the thought that perhaps less experienced colleagues and graduate students may take such approaches at face value and not appreciate they are being scammed. Can does not equate to should: you may have "the ability to write and say what [you] want", but that does not mean you have the right to deliberately mislead people. You say you will not be engaging with me any more. Fine. You started this correspondence with your unsolicited approaches. I will be very happy if you remove me from your marketing list (that I did not sign up for) and do not contact me again. That might be in both our interests.
And despite all this, I wish you well. Whatever your mistakes in the past, if you do genuinely wish to make a difference in the way you suggest, then I hope you are successful. But please, if you believe in your company and the contribution it can make, seek to be totally honest with potential clients. If you are in this for the long term, then developing trust and a strong reputation for ethical business practices will surely create a fund of social capital that will pay dividends as you build up the organisation. Whereas producing emails of the kind you have sent me today is likely to be counter-productive and just alienate people: using ad hominem points – I am masquerading as a learned academic, out of touch, arrogant, unfit and entitled; with shaky morals and vested interests; things are beyond my understanding; I write nonsense – simply suggests you have no substantive points to support your position. By doing this you automatically cede the higher ground. And, moreover, is that really the way you want your company represented in its communications?
Best wishes
Keith
As I wrote above, Acaudio seem to be doing a really good job in setting up a platform where researchers can post accounts of their research – and given the scale of the organisation – I assume much (if not all) of that is down to Hussain. That, he can be proud of.
However, using the appearance of an international survey as a cover for collecting data that can be used to market a company's services is widely recognised as a dishonest and unethical (if not illegal 2) practice. I think he should less proud of himself in that regard.
If Hussain still wants to maintain that his request for contributions to the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes was intended as a genuine attempt at academic research, rather than just a marketing scam, then he still has the option of publishing a report of the study so that the academic community can evaluate the extent to which the survey meets the norms of genuine research; and so that, at very least, he will have met one key criterion of academic research (publication).
This would also show that Acaudio are prepared to meet their side of the contract they offered to potential respondents (i.e.,please contribute to this survey – in consideration we will release the results over the next month). Any reputable business should be looking to make good on its promises.
Notes
1 The idea of an ethical wall (sometimes referred to as a 'Chinese wall') is important in businesses where there is the potential for conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, firms of lawyers that may have multiple clients, and where information offered in confidence by one client could have commercial value for another. The firm is expected to have protocols in place so that information about one client is not either leaked to another client, or (deliberately or inadvertently) influences advice given to another client. To avoid inadvertent influence, it may be necessary to ensure staff working with one client are not involved in work for another client that may be seen to have conflicting interests.
A company may hire a market research organisation to carry out market research to inform then about future strategies – so the people analysing the data have no bias due to preferred outcomes, and no temptation to misuse the data for direct marketing purposes. The commissioned report will not identify particular respondents. Then there is an ethical wall between the market researchers who report on the overall state of the market, and the client company's marketing and sales section.
My reference to the small size of Acaudio is not intended as an inherent criticism. My original point was that such a small company was unlikely to have the capacity to carry out a meaningful international survey (which does not imply the intention to do so was necessarily inauthentic – Acaudio might have simply overstretched itself).
However, a very small company might well have inherent difficulties in carrying out genuine research which did not leak information about specific respondents to those involved in sales.
Many surveys invite people to offer their email if they wish for feedback or to make themselves available for follow-up interviews – but offer an assurance the email address will not be used for other purposes, and need not be given to participate. Acaudio's survey required identifying information.2 This is a strong indicator that the primary purpose was not scholarly research.
"Everyone responsible for using personal data has to follow strict rules called 'data protection principles'. They must make sure the information is:
used fairly, lawfully and transparently
used for specified, explicit purposes
used in a way that is adequate, relevant and limited to only what is necessary
accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date
kept for no longer than is necessary
handled in a way that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unlawful or unauthorised processing, access, loss, destruction or damage"
Acaudio's survey is nominally about research institutes not individual people.
However, it asks questions such as
"How satisfied are you with…"
"How much time do you spend…"
"Do you feel like…"
"What are the biggest challenges you face…"
"Who do you feel is…"
"How effective do you think…"
"Do you agree…"
"What would you consider..."
"How much would you consider…"
"Would you be interested in…"
"How do you decide…"
"What do you hope…"
This is information about a person, moreover a person of known email address:
" 'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier…"
So, if information collected by this survey was used for purposes other than the survey itself –
say perhaps for identifying sales leads {e.g., "How satisfied are you with the level of awareness people have of your centre / institute?" "How effective do you think your current promotion methods are?"; "How important is building an audience for the work of the research centre / institute?"};
and/or profiling potential clients
in terms of level of resource that might be available to buy services {e.g., "How much would you consider to be a reasonable amount to spend on promotional activities?"},
or priorities for research impact strategies {e.g., "What mediums [sic] would you consider using to promote your research centre / institute?"; "Do you agree it is important to have a dedicated person to take care of promotional activities?"}
– would that not be a breach of UK data protection law?
