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What causes the clouds in your coffee?

Of liars, paradoxes, and vanity

Keith S. Taber

the song works wonderfully as a kind of paradox as in a sense
the song can only be about someone whom it is not about

Are your dreams no more than clouds in your coffee?
(Image by kyuubicreeper from Pixabay)

In a popular song of the early 1970s, singer-songwriter Carly Simon reflected on having had some "clouds in my coffee", which is an intriguing reference. If this was meant as an objective observation, then it seems to invite some interpretation. What kinds of things are clouds and coffee such that clouds can be observed in coffee?

Solutions, suspensions and supersaturation

In everyday life clouds are usually observed in the sky, and are due to myriad tiny water droplets. The air always naturally contains some water vapour, and the amount depends on the conditions – air just over a hot sea is likely to have a high 'moisture' content due to the rate of evaporation. If very moist air cools then it may become supersaturated with water vapour, in which case any suitable 'nuclei' will facilitate condensation. (These nuclei may be dust particles for example – but ions can also act as condensation nuclei.)

Today everyone is taught at school about the water cycle which is so essential for life on this planet, by which water is recycled through repeated evaporation/transpiration and condensation and precipitation. (Sadly, in Isaac Newton's day the school curriculum was mostly limited to learning maths and Latin, which was unfortunate – as if he had been taught about the water cycle he might not have felt the need to posit an extraterrestrial explanation for how the seas do not dry up with all that evaporation.)

Newton had a suggestion for how the earth's seas did not dry up
(Images by 1980supra and Gordon Johnson from Pixabay)

Clouds may occur on a smaller scale, such as in cloud chambers used to detect the traces left by alpha or beta radiation. Here, material soaked with a suitable volatile liquid, such as ethanol, is placed in a chamber so that the air becomes saturated, and then, where it cools, supersaturated. An alpha or beta source will emit fast moving particles that transfer momentum by colliding with molecules in the air, often ionising them. As the alpha or beta particle moves through the chamber it leaves behind it a 'trace' in terms of a trail of ions – in a cloud chamber the alcohol or other other supersaturated vapour condenses around these ions giving a visible trail – somewhat like the vapour trails left by jets that are often still visible when the plane is too far away to be seen.

KST 2019
KST 2019

The atmosphere – nature's own cloud chamber

So, what is coffee? I think that depends on how you make it. Assuming you take your coffee black, then if you serve it in a glass, and hold the glass up to the light, it may seem to be transparent. That is, it has a brown colour, but you can see through it to what is behind. If so, that is a solution with various substances in the coffee dissolved in the solvent (hot water). Perhaps you cannot see through your coffee, and if you try shining a torch or laser pen at it you see the beam lighting up its route through the coffee? If so, as well as dissolved material, it also contains suspended particles that are too large to be in solution. You can test this – as long as you do not mind not drinking your coffee. Given enough time, if the glass is undisturbed, the suspended particles will form a sediment at the bottom, and you will be left with a clear solution above. (But your coffee will now be cold.)

Coffee is made in various ways, and whether your coffee is a solution or has both dissolved solute and suspended particles will depend on how finely the coffee solids are filtered in preparing the drink. If you take milk or something similar in your coffee, then you definitely have some suspended particles of fat or oil in there.

So, how are we to understand how clouds can form in coffee? If one had hot coffee which was purely a solution (finely filtered), and was very strong coffee, then perhaps some of the solute would be saturated – the most that could be dissolved at that temperature. If the coffee cooled, then perhaps it would become a supersaturated solution, and, if suitable nuclei were present (so perhaps not too fine a filter, so allowing a few suspended particles?), 'clouds' of precipitating coffee solids would be seen in the solution?

Song-writing as representing a poetic truth

Now, dear reader, you are probably suspecting that I am being an over-literal scientist here, as clearly Carly Simon was writing a song and not making laboratory observations. Surely, it is obvious, that the clouds in her coffee were metaphorical clouds? She is representing how she felt – as she mused over her coffee – she was sad or melancholy or at least reflective.

When released as a single, the record, 'You're so vain', was a big hit in many parts of the world, no doubt in part because it was a very catchy song, but perhaps also in part because of ongoing speculation about WHOM it was Ms. Simon was accusing of vanity. Over the years she has suggested the song is about a composite of three men, and she has acknowledged one of them (the actor Warren Beatty) but speculation has continued. Perhaps if it was released today, a song that includes the line "You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive" might be viewed as reporting something darker than just a failed love affair? But what especially appeals to me about the song is its sense of paradox.

The album including the hit song 'You're so vain' proclaimed 'No secrets' but the precise target(s) of the song have remained a matter of speculation

The liar paradox

There is a famous paradox which was said to have bemused and puzzled some ancients. Imagine meeting someone who tells you:

All Cretans are liars.
I am a Cretan.

I mean no disrespect to the people of Crete, but this is how I understand the paradox was originally framed. We could substitute Venusians or politicians or whatever. A modern version could be

All members of the Bullingdon Club are liars.
I am a member of the Bullingdon Club

This is supposed to present a paradox. Either the first statement is true, in which case the second is not. Or the second is true, in which case the first is not.

If (and see below) we accept this is a paradox then it has a simple solution. As well as saying things they think are true, and things they think are false, people are also capable of saying things that do not make sense – even to themselves! Not all texts can be considered to have truth value. There is then no paradox, just a lack of consistency!

After all, we can say all kinds of things that do not relate to possible situations

  • Gas sample A contains 2g of hydrogen at a lower temperature and higher pressure than gas sample B
  • Gas sample B contains 2g of hydrogen that occupies a smaller volume than gas sample A

Oh, how much easier (if less interesting) life would be if there was a law of nature that meant we could not say or write things that were not true or not physically possible! Scholars would simply need to sit down and start writing. Anything they were able to produce would be true and we would not need the expense of CERN and all those other laboratories!

Applying hermeneutics

Now, even though what people say or write need not make good sense, one should be careful dismissing an apparently non-sensical statement too easily. I know from working with science students who may have various alternative conceptions and alternative conceptual frameworks that often they say things that do not seem to make sense. Certainly, sometimes, this may be because they are confused or are guessing an answer to a teacher's question without fully thinking it through.

But sometimes what they say makes good sense from their perspective. We only find this out by engaging them in conversation when it may transpire from the wider context of their talk that they are using a term in a somewhat non-canonical way, or have a different way of dividing up the world, or they limit certain principles to a too restricted set of contexts (or apply principles beyond their valid range of application), et cetera. That is, we apply a hermeneutic approach to seeking sense by seeking to understand a statement in terms of the wider 'text'.

Whilst, from a canonical scientific perspective, the student has still got some of the science wrong, it is much more likely a teacher can shift their thinking towards the target knowledge in the curriculum if she recognises it has coherence for the student and understands and if she engages with the student's way of thinking (for example exploring limitations, pointing out it has absurd or clearly incorrect implications), than if she simply dismisses it as 'wrong'. This, of course, is the basis of the constructivist approach to science teaching.

Read about constructivist pedagogy

Liars, and effective lairs

However, even if we take the Cretan's couplet as a paradox, it is not very convincing. A liar is someone who tells lies – not someone who only ever tells lies. A 'good liar' (if that is not an oxymoron – I mean someone good at lying), that is someone able to use lying to their advantage, presumably does this by being truthful enough of the time that people do not suspect when they are lying. Someone who announced themselves on the telephone with…

"Hi, I'm John. I am a fish. I eat oak trees for breakfast. I am four thousands years old. I used to be Napoleon Bonaparte. I can hold my breath for months at a time. I levitate when I sleep. I am England's greatest goalscorer, even though, as a fish, I do not have any feet. I am phoning from your bank because we are concerned about some suspicious activity on your account, so would like to just check with you on some recent transactions to make sure you authorised them. First of all, because we take customer privacy and security very seriously, I need to be sure who I am talking to, so would you mind giving me your full name, postcode, account number and password."

A very unconvincing scammer

…would be unlikely to be believed. Much better to start with something that is clearly true if you want to sneak in a lie without it being noticed. (The recent demise of a UK Prime Minister perhaps offers an example of how, when you already have a reputation for not telling the truth, people are more likely to suspect, scrutinise and check your claims, and, so, detect dishonest statements.)

Reductio ad absurdum

So, an improvement on the Cretan liar paradox is the card which has a statement on each side:

  • the statement on the other side of this card is true
  • the statement on the other side of this card is a lie

This corrects for the need to understand 'liar' as someone who only tells lies.

If the statement on the first side is correct, then the statement on the other side is true, which means the statement on the first side was a lie, so not correct.

But if the statement on the first side is a indeed a lie (as we are informed by the statement on the other side) then the statement the second side is not true, which means the statement on the first side was not a lie, and is true…

Either way, whichever statement we begin by accepting we find is contradicted later. This reflects the method of 'reductio ad absurdum' which is a technique used to demonstrate false arguments.

Imagine we wanted to demonstrate that atoms can be divided. Let us posit that atoms are indivisible. This would lead us to conclude there are not discrete subatomic particles. Yet electrons, alpha particles, neutron, protons have all been shown to be subatomic particles. Therefore our premise (atoms are indivisible) must be false.

An even simpler version of the liar paradox is the statement:

  • this statement is a lie

The statement claims to be a lie, but if it is a lie that means the truth is contrary to what it claims. So (as it claims to be a lie) it is true. But if it is true, then the statement must be correct. So if it is correct, as it claims to be a lie, it is a lie. So, if true it is a lie. But then if it is a lie…

Clearly we have self-contradiction. Again, there is no real mystery here – it is simply a clever statement that is neither true nor false but lacks coherent sense. What is a mystery, is who 'is so vain'?

Do the vain think themselves vain?

The hook of the song is the chorus

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain (you're so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don't you don't you?

This seems a nice reflection of the Cretan paradox. Carly's ex-lover would have to be very vain to think she would be so obsessed with him that she would write a song about him. So, if he thinks the song is about him, he is indeed 'so vain'.

Except of course, the song may actually be about him. If an ex-lover whom the song is about thinks it is about him then is that vanity? Surely, not. It is not vanity for someone to acknowledge, say, being a Nobel prize winner, if she is indeed a Nobel laureate. Vanity is thinking you should have won the Nobel that was given to someone else!

The song contains some specific biographic details, such as

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

So, someone hearing the song who had been a lover of Ms. Simon several years earlier, and had been up to Saratoga to watch a horse race where his own horse had won the race, and had flown himself to Nova Scotia in his own Leah jet to see the total eclipse, surely would have good grounds for feeling this could well be him.

In particular, we might think, if they recognised themselves as being vain! But this is what makes the song delicious lyrically, as surely a vain person does not recognise themselves as vain?

So, if someone thinks the song is about them, when it is not, they are vain enough to think an ex-lover would write a song about them. BUT that is not someone the song is actually about, so not whom is being accused of being 'so vain'.

If the person whom is being written about does not think it is them, then they are presumably not so vain. If they do recognise themselves, then they are justified in doing so, so that is not really evidence of vanity, either!

So, the song works wonderfully as a kind of paradox as in a sense the song can only be about someone whom it is not about! Did Carly Simon realise that when she wrote the song. I assume so. Does this contribute to its continuing popularity? Perhaps, if you, dear reader, know this song, do you too appreciate this aspect of it? Or, perhaps most people just sing along with the catchy tune and let the lyrics flow? They are poetry after all, not formal knowledge claims.

Explaining the clouds in the coffee

So, were the clouds in the coffee just meant as a metaphor for how Carly was feeling about the plans she had had during her time with her ex-lover?

Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee clouds in my coffee and
You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you

On a number of websites Ms. Simon is quoted as explaining (in 2001) that

"'Clouds in my coffee' are the confusing aspects of life and love. That which you can't see through, and yet seems alluring…until. Like a mirage that turns into a dry patch. Perhaps there is something in the bottom of the coffee cup that you could read if you could (like tea leaves or coffee grinds)"

Carly Simon quoted on a range of websites

However, Carly has also explained she took the line from a comment her friend and pianist Billy Mernit made when they were served coffee on a plane – "As I got my coffee, there were clouds outside the window of the airplane and you could see the reflection in the cup of coffee. Billy said to me, 'Look at the clouds in your coffee.  That's like a Truffaut shot!'."

Mermet recalls on his blog that he had actually compared the image to a scene from a Godard film: "what I had talked about was a Godard shot, namely the overhead close-up of a coffee cup from [the film] 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.

A still from the Jean-Luc Godard film '2 or 3 Things I Know About Her' – clouds? I see galaxies!

Clearly Carly [sic] may have been in a reflective mood, but the clouds that appeared to be in her coffee were due to a different kind of reflection. So, it seems there was a sound physical interpretation, after all.

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POEsing assessment questions…

…but not fattening the cow

Keith S. Taber

A well-known Palestinian proverb reminds us that we do not fatten the cow simply by repeatedly weighing it. But, sadly, teachers and others working in education commonly get so fixated on assessment that it seems to become an end in itself.

Images by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from PixabayOpenClipart-Vectors and Deedster from Pixabay

A research study using P-O-E

I was reading a report of a study that adopted the predict-observe-explain, P-O-E, technique as a means to elicit "high school students' conceptions about acids and bases" (Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, p.555). As the name suggests, P-O-E asks learners to make a prediction before observing some phenomenon, and then to explain their observations (something that can be specially valuable when the predictions are based on strongly held intuitions which are contrary to what actually happens).

Read about Predict-Observe-Explain

The article on the publisher website

Kala and colleagues begin the introduction to their paper by stating that

"In any teaching or learning approach enlightened by constructivism, it is important to infer the students' ideas of what is already known"

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, p.555
Constructivism?

Constructivism is a perspective on learning that is informed by research into how people learn and a great many studies into student thinking and learning in science. A key point is how a learner's current knowledge and understanding influences how they make sense of teaching and what they go on to learn. Research shows it is very common for students to have 'alternative conceptions' of science topics, and often these conceptions either survive teaching or distort how it is understood.

The key point is that teachers who teach the science without regard to student thinking will often find that students retain their alternative ways of thinking, so constructivist teaching is teaching that takes into account and responds to the ideas about science topics that students bring to class.

Read about constructivism

Read about constructivist pedagogy

Assessment: summative, formative and diagnostic

If teachers are to take into account, engage with, and try to reshape, learners ideas about science topics, then they need to know what those ideas are. Now there is a vast literature reporting alternative conceptions in a wide range of science topics, spread across thousands or research reports – but no teacher could possibly find time to study them all. There are books which discuss many examples and highlight some of the most common alternative conceptions (including one of my own, Taber, 2014)

A book that describes and discusses a good many alternative conceptions – but by no means all!

However, in any class studying some particular topic there will nearly always be a spread of different alternative conceptions across the students – including some so idiosyncratic that they have never been reported in any literature. So, although reading about common misconceptions is certainly useful to prime teachers for what to look out for, teachers need to undertake diagnostic assessment to find out about the thinking of their own particular students.

There are many resources available to support teachers in diagnostic assessment, and some activities (such as using concept cartoons) that are especially useful at revealing student thinking.

Read about diagnostic assessment

Diagnostic assessment, assessment to inform teaching, is carried out at the start of a topic, before the teaching, to allow teachers to judge the learners' starting points and any alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') they may have. It can therefore be considered aligned to formative assessment ('assessment for learning') which is carried out as part of the learning process, rather than summative assessment (assessment of leaning) which is used after studying to check, score, grade and certify learning.

P-O-E as a learning activity…

P-O-E can best support learning in topics where it is known learners tend to have strongly held, but unhelpful, intuitions. The predict stage elicits students' expectations – which, when contrary to the scientific account, can be confounded by the observe step. The 'cognitive conflict' generated by seeing something unexpected (made more salient by having been asked to make a formal prediction) is thought to help students concentrate on that actual phenomena, and to provide 'epistemic relevance' (Taber, 2015).

Epistemic relevance refers to the idea that students are learning about things they are actually curious about, whereas for many students following a conventional science course must be experienced as being presented with the answers to a seemingly never-ending series questions that had never occurred to them in the first place.

Read about the Predict-Observe-Explain technique

Students are asked to provide an explanation for what they have observed which requires deeper engagement than just recording an observation. Developing explanations is a core scientific practice (and one which is needed before another core scientific practice – testing explanations – is possible).

Read about teaching about scientific explanations

To be most effective, P-O-E is carried out in small groups, as this encourages the sharing, challenging and justifying of ideas: the kind of dialogic activity thought to be powerful in supporting learners in developing their thinking, as well as practicing their skills in scientific argumentation. As part of dialogic teaching such an open-forum for learners' ideas is not an end in itself, but a preparatory stage for the teacher to marshal the different contributions and develop a convincing argument for how the best account of the phenomenon is the scientific account reflected in the curriculum.

Constructivist teaching is informed by learners' ideas, and therefore relies on their elicitation, but that elicitation is never the end in itself but is a precursor to a customised presentation of the canonical account.

Read about dialogic teaching and learning

…and as a diagnostic activity

Group work also has another function – if the activity is intended to support diagnostic assessment, then the teacher can move around the room listening in to the various discussions and so collecting valuable information on what students think and understand. When assessment is intended to inform teaching it does not need to be about students completing tests and teachers marking them – a key principle of formative assessment is that it occurs as a natural part of the teaching process. It can be based on productive learning activities, and does not need marks or grades – indeed as the point is to help students move on in their thinking, any kind of formal grading whilst learning is in progress would be inappropriate as well as a misuse of teacher time.

Probing students' understandings about acid-base chemistry

The constructivist model of learning applies to us all: students, teachers, professors, researchers. Given what I have written above about P-O-E, about diagnostic assessment, and dialogic approaches to learning, I approached Kala and colleagues' paper with expectations about how they would have carried out their project.

These authors do report that they were able to diagnose aspects of student thinking about acids and bases, and found some learning difficulties and alternative conceptions,

"it was observed that eight of the 27 students had the idea that the "pH of strong acids is the lowest every time," while two of the 27 students had the idea that "strong acids have a high pH." Furthermore, four of the 27 students wrote the idea that the "substance is strong to the extent to which it is burning," while one of the 27 students mentioned the idea that "different acids which have equal concentration have equal pH."

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, pp.562-3

The key feature seems to be that, as reported in previous research, students conflate acid concentration and acid strength (when it is possible to have a high concentration solution of a weak acid or a very dilute solution of a strong acid).

Yet some aspects of this study seemed out of alignment with the use of P-O-E.

The best research style?

One feature was the adoption of a positivistic approach to the analysis,

Although there has been no reported analyzing procedure for the POE, in this study, a different [sic] analyzing approach was offered taking into account students' level of understanding… Data gathered from the written responses to the POE tasks were analyzed and divided into six groups. In this context, while students' prediction were divided into two categories as being correct or wrong, reasons for predictions were divided into three categories as being correct, partially correct, or wrong.

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, pp.560

GroupPredictionReasons
❀correctcorrect
❁correctpartially correct
✯correctwrong
✿wrongcorrect
❂wrongpartially correct
✤wrongwrong
"the written responses to the POE tasks were analyzed and divided into six groups"

There is nothing inherently wrong with doing this, but it aligns the research with an approach that seems at odds with the thinking behind constructivist studies that are intended to interpret a learner's thinking in its own terms, rather than simply compare it with some standard. (I have explored this issue in some detail in a comparison of two research studies into students' conceptions of forces – see Taber, 2013, pp.58-66.)

In terms of research methodology we might say it seem to be conceptualised within the 'wrong' paradigm for this kind of work. It seems positivist (assuming data can be unambiguously fitted into clear categories), nomothetic (tied to 'norms' and canonical answers) and confirmatory (testing thinking as matching model responses or not), rather than interpretivist (seeking to understand student thinking in its own terms rather than just classifying it as right or wrong), idiographic (acknowledging that every learner's thinking is to some extent unique to them) and discovery (exploring nuances and sophistication, rather than simply deciding if something is acceptable or not).

Read about paradigms in educational research

The approach used seemed more suitable for investigating something in the science laboratory, than the complex, interactive, contextualised, and ongoing life of classroom teaching. Kala and colleagues describe their methodology as case study,

"The present study used a case study because it enables the giving of permission to make a searching investigation of an event, a fact, a situation, and an individual or a group…"

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, pp.558
A case study?

Case study is a naturalistc methodology (rather than involving an intervention, such as an experiment), and is idiographic, reflecting the value of studying the individual case. The case is one from among many instances of its kind (one lesson, one school, one examination paper, etc.), and is considered as a somewhat self contained entity yet one that is embedded in a context in which it is to some extent entangled (for example, what happens in a particular lesson is inevitably somewhat influenced by

  • the earlier sequence of lessons that teacher taught that class {the history of that teacher with that class},
  • the lessons the teacher and student came from immediately before this focal lesson,
  • the school in which it takes place,
  • the curriculum set out to be followed…)

Although a lesson can be understood as a bounded case (taking place in a particular room over a particular period of time involving a specified group of people) it cannot be isolated from the embedding context.

Read about case study methodology

Case study – study of one instance from among many

As case study is idiographic, and does not attempt to offer direct generalisation to other situations beyond that case, a case study should be reported with 'thick description' so a reader has a good mental image of the case (and can think about what makes it special – and so what makes it similar to, or different from, other instances the reader may be interested in). But that is lacking in Kala and colleagues' study, as they only tell readers,

"The sample in the present study consisted of 27 high school students who were enrolled in the science and mathematics track in an Anatolian high school in Trabzon, Turkey. The selected sample first studied the acid and base subject in the middle school (grades 6 – 8) in the eighth year. Later, the acid and base topic was studied in high school. The present study was implemented, based on the sample that completed the normal instruction on the acid and base topic."

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, pp.558-559

The reference to a sample can be understood as something of a 'reveal' of their natural sympathies – 'sample' is the language of positivist studies that assume a suitably chosen sample reflects a wider population of interest. In case study, a single case is selected and described rather than a population sampled. A reader is left to rather guess what population being sampled here, and indeed precisely what the 'case' is.

Clearly, Kala and colleagues elicited some useful information that could inform teaching, but I sensed that their approach would not have made optimal use of a learning activity (P-O-E) that can give insight into the richness, and, sometimes, subtlety of different students' ideas.

Individual work

Even more surprising was the researchers' choice to ask students to work individually without group discussion.

"The treatment was carried out individually with the sample by using worksheets."

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, p.559

This is a choice which would surely have compromised the potential of the teaching approach to allow learners to explore, and reveal, their thinking?

I wondered why the researchers had made this choice. As they were undertaking research, perhaps they thought it was a better way to collect data that they could readily analyse – but that seems to be choosing limited data that can be easily characterised over the richer data that engagement in dialogue would surely reveal?

Assessment habits

All became clear near the end of the study when, in the final paragraph, the reader is told,

"In the present study, the data collection instruments were used as an assessment method because the study was done at the end of the instruction/ [sic] on the acid and base topics."

Kala, Yaman & Ayas, 2013, p.571

So, it appears that the P-O-E activity, which is an effective way of generating the kind of rich but complex data that helps a teacher hone their teaching for a particular group, was being adopted, instead, as means of a summative assessment. This is presumably why the analysis focused on the degree of match to the canonical science, rather than engaging in interpreting the different ways of thinking in the class. Again presumably, this is why the highly valuable group aspect of the approach was dropped in favour of individual working – summative assessment needs to not only grade against norms, but do this on the basis of each individual's unaided work.

An activity which offers great potential for formative assessment (as it is a learning activity as well as a way of exploring student thinking); and that offers an authentic reflection of scientific practice (where ideas are presented, challenged, justified, and developed in response to criticism); and that is generally enjoyed by students because it is interactive and the predictions are 'low stakes' making for a fun learning session, was here re-purposed to be a means of assessing individual students once their study of a topic was completed.

Kala and colleagues certainly did identify some learning difficulties and alternative conceptions this way, and this allowed them to evaluate student learning. But I cannot help thinking an opportunity was lost here to explore how P-O-E can be used in a formative assessment mode to inform teaching:

  • diagnostic assessment as formative assessment can inform more effective teaching
  • diagnostic assessment as summative assessment only shows where teaching has failed

Yes, I agree that "in any teaching or learning approach enlightened by constructivism, it is important to infer the students' ideas of what is already known", but the point of that is to inform the teaching and so support student learning. What were Kala and colleagues going to do with their inferences about students ideas when they used the technique as "an assessment method … at the end of the instruction".

As the Palestinian adage goes, you do not fatten up the cow by weighing it, just as you do not facilitate learning simply by testing students. To mix my farmyard allusions, this seems to be a study of closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.

Work cited
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Acute abstracts correcting Copernicus

Setting the history of science right

Keith S. Taber

I recently read a book of essays by Edward Rosen (1995) who (as described by his publisher) was "the editor and translator of Copernicus' complete works, was the leading authority on this most celebrated of Renaissance scientists". Copernicus is indeed, rightly, highly celebrated (for reasons I summarise below *).

The book was edited by Rosen's collaborator, Erna Hilfstein 1, and although the book was an anthology of reprinted journal articles, none of the chapters (articles) had abstracts. This reflects different disciplinary norms. In the natural and social sciences most journals require abstracts – and some even offer a menu of what should be included – but abstracts are not always expected in humanities disciplines.

Read about the abstract in academic articles

A collection of published papers from various journals – all lacking abstracts

It is not unusual for an academic book to be a compilation of published articles – especially when anthologising a single scholar's work. I was a little surprised to find the different chapters in the same book having different formats and typefaces – it had been decided to reproduce the articles as they had originally appeared in a range of journals (perhaps for authenticity – or perhaps to avoid the costs of new typesetting?)

But it was the absence of article abstracts that most felt odd. The potential reader is given a title, but otherwise little idea of the scope of an article before reading. Perhaps it was my awareness of this 'omission' that led me to thinking that for a number of the chapters it would be possible to offer a very minimal abstract (an acute abstract?) that would do the job! Certainly, for some of these chapters, I thought a sentence each might do.

That is not to dismiss the scholarship that has gone into developing the arguments, but Rosen often wrote on a very specific historical point, set out pertinent ideas from previous scholarship, and then argued for a clear position contrary to some earlier scholars.

So, here are my suggestions for 'acute' abstracts

Six summary encapsulations

Chapter 6: on the priest question

Abstract:

Copernicus has often been described as a priest, but Copernicus was never ordained a priest.

Copernicus was a canon in the Roman Catholic church, but this made him an administrator (and he also acted as physician), but he never became a monk or a priest.

Chapter 7: on the notary question

Abstract:

Copernicus has been described as a 'happy notary' but Copernicus was not a notary.

Although Copernicus had various roles as an administrator, even as something of a diplomat, he never took on the role of a legal notary.

Chapter 8: on the disdain question

Abstract:

Copernicus is sometimes said to have had a dismissive attitude to the common people, but there is no evidence that this was so

A comment of Copernicus on not being concerned with the views of certain philosophers seems to have been misinterpreted.

Chapter 11: on the axioms question

Abstract:

It has been claimed that Copernicus misused the term axioms in his work, but his use was perfectly in line with authorities

Today axioms are usually expected to be the self-evident starting points for developing a deductive argument, but Aristotle's definition of axioms did not require them to seem self-evident.

Chapter 16: on the papal question

Abstract:

It has been claimed that Copernicus' 'Revolutions' was approved by the pope before publication, but the manuscript was never shown to the pope

This seems to be a confusion regarding an anecdote concerning a completely different scholar.

Chapter 17: on the Calvin question

Abstract:

It has been suggested that Calvin was highly critical of Copernicus, but it seems unlikely Calvin had ever heard of him

While Calvin's writing strongly suggest he was committed to a stationary earth and a sun that moved around the earth, there is no evidence he had specifically come across Copernicus.

A manifold chapter

Having noticed how so many of Rosen's articles took one claim or historically contentious idea and developed it in the light of various sources to come to a position, I was a little surprised when I reached Chapter 20, 'Galileo's misstatements about Copernicus', to find that Rosen was dealing with 5 distinct (if related) points at once – several of which he had elsewhere made the unitary focus of an article.

Rather than write my own abstract, I could here suggest a couplet of sentences from the text might have done the job,

"According to Galileo, (1) Copernicus was a priest; (2) he was called to Rome; (3) he wrote the Revolutions by order of the pope; (4) his book was never adversely criticised; (5) it was the basis of the Gregorian calendar. Actually, Copernicus was not a priest; he was not called to Rome; he did not write the Revolutions by order of the pope; the book received much adverse criticism, particularly on the ground that it contradicted the Bible; it was not the basis of the Gregorian calendar."

Rosen, 1958/1995, pp.203-204

I noticed that this was the earliest of Rosen's writings that had been included in the compilation – perhaps he had decided to dispense his ideas more sparingly after this paper?

Actually, there's a lot to be said for abstracts that pithily précise the key point of an article, a kind of tag-line perhaps, acting for a reader as an aide-mémoire (useful at least for readers like me who commonly stare at rows of books thinking 'I read something interesting about this, somewhere here…'). I have also read a lot of abstracts in research journals that would benefit from their own (further) abstracts, so perhaps such acute abstraction might catch on?

* Appendix: A scientific giant

Copernicus is indeed 'celebrated', being seen as one of the scientific greats who helped establish modern ways of thinking about the world – part of what is often perceived as a chain that goes Copernicus – Kelper – Galileo – Newton.

Copernicus is most famous for his book known in English as 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres', or just 'Revolutions'. The key point of note is that at a time when it was almost universally agreed that the earth was stationary at the centre of 'the world', i.e., the cosmos, and that everything else revolved around the earth, Copernicus proposed a system that put the sun at the centre and had the earth moving around the sun.

The geocentric model of the cosmos was widely accepted for many centuries
(Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)

From our modern worldview, it is difficult to imagine just how, well yes, revolutionary, that move was (even if Copernicus only moved the centre of the universe from earth to the sun, so our solar system still had a very special status in his system). This is clear from how long it took the new view to become the accepted position, and the opposition it attracted. Newton later realised that strictly the centre of revolution was the centre of mass of the solar system not the sun per se. 2

One problem was that there was no absolute observational test to distinguish between the two models and there were well-established reasons to accept the conventional geocentric model (e.g., we do not feel the earth move, or a great wind as it spins beneath its atmosphere; as the most dense element earth would naturally fall to the centre of the world, beneath water, air, fire, and the ether that filled the heavens {although the Earth was not considered a pure form of the element earth, it was earthy, considered mostly earth in composition 3}; and scriptures, if given a literal interpretation, seemed to suggest the earth was fixed and the sun moved.)

Copernicus' model certainly had some advantages. If the earth is still, the distant sphere with all the fixed stars must be moving about it at an incredible rate of rotation. But if the earth spun on its axis, this stellar motion was just an illusion. 4 Moreover, if everything revolves around the earth, some of the planets behave very oddly, first moving one way, then slowing down to reverse direction ('retrograde' motion), before again heading off in their original sense. But, if the planets are orbiting the sun along with the earth (now itself seen as a planet) but at different rates then this motion can be explained as an optical illusion – "these phenomena…happen on account of the single motion of the earth" – the planets only seem to loop because of the motion of the earth.

Despite this clear improvement, Copernicus model did not entirely simplify the system as Copernicus retained the consensus view that the planets moved in circles: the planets' "motions are circular or compounded of several circles,…since only the circle can bring back the past". With such an assumption the observational data can only be made to fit (either to the heliocentric model or its geocentric alternative) by having a complex series of circles rather than one circle per planet. Today when we call the night sky 'the heavens', we are using the term without implying any supernatural association – but the space beyond the moon was once literally considered as heaven. In heaven everything is perfect, and the perfect shape is a circle.

It was only when Kepler later struggled to match the best observational data available (from his employer Tycho Brahe's observatory) to the Copernican model that, after a number of false starts, he decided to see if ellipses would fit – and he discovered how the system could be described in terms of planets each following a single elliptical path that almost repeated indefinitely.

A well-known story is how by the time Copernicus had finished his work and decided to get it printed he was near the end of his life, and he was supposedly only shown a printed copy brought from the printer as he lay on his deathbed (in 1543). In the printed copy of the book an anonymous foreword/preface 5 had been inserted to the effect that readers should consider the model proposed as a useful calculating system for following the paths of heavenly bodies, and not as a proposal for how the world actually was.

Despite this, the book was later added to the Roman Catholic Church's index of banned works awaiting correction. This only occurred much later – in 1616, after Galileo taught that Copernicus' system did describe the actual 'world system'. But, in the text itself Copernicus is clear that he is suggesting a model for how the world is – "to the best of my ability I have discussed the earth's revolution around the sun" – not just a scheme for calculating purposes. Indeed, he goes as far to suggest that where he uses language implying the sun moves this is only to be taken as adopting the everyday way of talking reflecting appearances (we say 'the sun rises'). For Copernicus, it was the earth, not the sun, that moved.

Sources cited:
  • Copernicus, N. (1543/1978). On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (E. Rosen, Trans.). Prometheus Books.
  • Rosen, E. (1995). Copernicus and his successors (E. Hilfstein, Ed.). The Hambledon Press.

Notes

1 I discovered from some 'internet research' (i.e., Googling) that Erna was a holocaust survivor, "[husband] Max and Erna, along with their families, were sent first to Płaszów, a slave-labor camp, and then on a death march to Auschwitz".

An article in the Jewish Standard reports how Erna's daughter undertook a charity bike ride "from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi-run death camp in the verdant Polish countryside, to the" Jewish Community Centre of Krakow (the town where her parents lived before being deported by the Nazis).

2 Newton also wrote as if the solar system was the centre of the cosmos, but of course the solar system is itself moving around the galaxy, which is moving away from most other galaxies…

3 These are not the chemical elements recognised today, of course, but were considered the elements for many centuries. Even today, people sometimes refer to the air and water as 'the elements.'

4 Traditionally, the 'heavenly spheres' were not the bodies such as planets, moons and stars but a set of eight conjectured concentric crystalline spheres that supposedly rotated around the earth carrying the distant stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, Venus and Mercury.

5 A preface is written by the author of a book. A foreword is written by someone else for the author (perhaps saying how wonderful the author and the work are). Technically then this was a foreword, BUT because it was not signed, it would appear to be a preface – something written by Copernicus himself. Perhaps the foreword did actually protect the book from being banned as, until Galileo made it a matter of very public debate, it is likely only other astronomers had actually scrutinised the long and very technical text in any detail!

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Diabolical diabetes journal awards non-specialist guest editorship (for a price)

"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes"

Keith S. Taber

Diabetes is a life-threatening condition – so one might hope that a research journal called 'Journal of Diabetes Research Reviews & Reports' would have serious academic standards
(Image by Tesa Robbins from Pixabay)
An open access journal that charges USD $ 1519 for publication (and "will not issue refunds of any kind"), that is available for subscription"Euro € 3600.00 for Single Volume, € 600.00 for Single Issue (+postage charge €100)", but which wants me to send it "$2519" because I have been awarded membership.

Dear Henderson

Thank you for your email 'Membership for Your Publications' notifying me that the Journal of Diabetes Research Reviews & Reports has awarded me 'membership' based on my research profile. That is rather incredible as my research is in science education. The most relevant publication that comes to mind is "Is 6% kidney function just as good as 8% kidney function? A case of justifying dubious medical ethics by treating epistemology as ontology" which is not peer-reviewed, but a post on my personal blog.

This does rather suggest that either

  • the Journal of Diabetes Research Reviews & Reports has a rather bizarre notion of its scope given the journal title, or
  • it has extremely low standards in terms of what it feels it might be happy to publish.
  • Or, perhaps both?

I am a little confused by your final paragraph which seems to suggest that although I have been 'awarded' various benefits (well they might have been benefits had I been a diabetes researcher) you would like me to send you $2519 (in some unspecified currency). I only ever recall being honoured with one academic award before, and that came with a sum of money. That is, when you make an academic award, you give money to the recipient, not the other way around.

So, let's be honest.

You do not know, or indeed care, if I know anything about diabetes research. (Either you have not examined my research profile to find out; or whoever was tasked with this has such limited scholarly background that they have no notion of how to identify publications about diabetes research – such, perhaps, as looking to see if the words 'diabetes' or 'diabetic' appear in any paper titles or keywords: not exactly a challenging higher level task.)

You are not making me an award.

You are trying to sell me some kind of a package of 'benefits' in relation to publishing my work in your dodgy journal. That is, the Journal of Diabetes Research Reviews & Reports is one of the many predatory journals seeking to take money from scholars without being in a position to offer a service consistent with normal standards of academic quality in return. (This has already been demonstrated by the journal identifying someone with no publications in the field as 'a potential author' for the journal based on scrutinising my 'research profile in [sic] online'. If that is the level of competence to be expected of the editorial and production side of the journal, why would any serious scholar let their work be published in it?)

That apparent lack of competence in itself does not justify spending my time responding to your invitation.

I write because I find these tactics dishonest. You deliberately set out to deceive by pretending you are offering an award based on the excellence of a scholar's research. I really do not like lying, which is antithetical to the whole academic enterprise. So, I reply to call out the lie.

If you feel that I have misrepresented the situation, and that my research profile justifies an award in the field of diabetes research, then I would be very happy to receive your explanation. Otherwise, perhaps you might wish to consider if you really are comfortable working in an unethical organisation and being complicit in lying to strangers in this way?

Best wishes

Keith

Notification of an 'award'. Benefits (once I have paid a fee) include being appointed a guest editor.

Update (5th August 2022)

I have just received a response from the journal…

"Anticipating for [my] positive response" -despite my reply to the Journal!

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Neuroadaptation gremlins on the see-saw in your brain

The brain's reward pathway is like a teeter-totter because…

Keith S. Taber

in your brain there is a teeter-totter like in a kids' playground…these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance…the gremlins hop off …But if we …accumulate so many gremlins on the pain side of our balance …we've crossed over into the disease of addiction…we are craving because …it's the gremlins jumping up and down

Dr Anna Lembke talking on 'All in the mind'
Is there a see-saw in your brain?
(Original images by Image by mohamed Hassan and OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay) 

Dr Anna Lembke, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University explained how addiction relates to dopmaine and the brain's reward pathway with an analogy of a see-saw. She was talking to Sana Qadar for an episode of the the ABC programme 'All in the Mind' called 'How dopamine drives our addictions'.

Analogies are used in teaching and in science communication to help 'make the unfamiliar familiar', to show someone that something they do not (yet) know about is actually, in some sense at least, a bit like something they are already familiar with. In an analogy, there is a mapping between some aspect(s) of the structure of the target ideas and the structure of the familiar phenomenon or idea being offered as an analogue. Such teaching analogies can be useful to the extent that someone is indeed highly familiar with the 'analogue' (and more so than with the target knowledge being communicated); that there is a helpful mapping across between the analogue and the target; and that comparison is clearly explained (making clear which features of the analogue are relevant, and how).

Read about science analogies

A fried brain

During the programme the interviewer (Qadar) uses a metaphor for how addiction influences brain chemistry:

Sana Qadar: "The problem is when we are becoming addicted to something, our brain's ability to naturally produce dopamine gets fried."

Anna Lembke: "So essentially what happens in the brain as we tip toward the compulsive cycle of overconsumption or addiction is that we start to down-regulate our own dopamine production and dopamine transmission in order to compensate for the ways that we are bombarding our brain's reward pathway with too much dopamine through ingestion of these incredibly potent and rewarding substances and behaviours."

What does Sana Qadar mean by 'fried'? Presumably not destroyed, as the subsequent interview suggests that recovery is possible (see below) – although the brain's ability to naturally produce dopamine would surely not recover from actual frying. So, perhaps, fried means disturbed, or damaged? Given the following dialogue it might mean thrown out of balance.

Perhaps Qadar was thinking of the brain as circuitry as the term is commonly applied to damaged circuits (I think the term derives from damage caused by overheating, as can happen when there is a 'short' for example, which does stop the 'fried' components functioning permanently). So, perhaps for Qadar this is a dead metaphor – a term which started as a metaphor but which, with habitual use, has come to be treated as having literal meaning – at least in relation to electrical circuits and, by analogy, brain circuitry?

A fried brain?
(Images by OpenClipart-Vectors and y Roger YI from Pixabay)

Balancing those gremlins

What I found especially interesting is the way Dr Lembke made extensive use of an analogy in her explanation, much in the way teacher might keep referring back to the same metaphor or analogy or model when introducing an abstract topic.

Sana Qadar tells listeners that "to explain how this process unfolds in the brain's reward pathway, Dr Lembke uses the analogy of a teeter-totter or seesaw":

"Because pleasure and pain are processed in the same part of the brain and work like opposite sides of the balance, it means for every pleasure there is a cost and that cost is pain.

So, if you imagine that in your brain there is a teeter-totter like in a kids' playground, that teeter-totter will tip to one side when we experience pleasure, and the opposite side when we experience pain.

But no sooner has that balance tipped to the side of pleasure, for example when I eat a piece of chocolate, then my brain will work very hard to restore a level balance or what neuroscientists call homeostasis. And it does that not just by bringing the balance level again but first by tipping it an equal and opposite amount to the to the side of pain, that is the after-effect, the come-down. I imagine that as these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again.

Now, if we wait long enough, the gremlins hop off and homeostasis is restored as we go back to our baseline tonic level of dopamine firing. But if we continue to ingest addictive substances or behaviours over very long periods of time, we essentially accumulate so many gremlins on the pain side of our balance that we are in a chronic dopamine deficit state, and that is essentially where we get when we've crossed over into the disease of addiction.

Dr Anna Lembke talking on 'All in the mind'

As part of the programme of treatment Dr Lembke has developed for those suffering from additions she often recommends a period of complete abstinence – asking her clients to abstain for at least 30 days

Because 30 days is about the minimum amount of time it takes for the brain to restore baseline dopamine firing. Another way of saying this is 30 days is about the minimum amount of time it takes for the gremlins to hop off the pain side of the balance so that homeostasis or balance can be restored.

… I think in many people it is possible with abstinence to reset the reward pathway, the brain has an enormous amount of plasticity.

Dr Anna Lembke talking on 'All in the mind'

Abstinence is obviously not easy when the person is constantly faced with relevant triggers, as

"…what happens when we are triggered is that we release a little bit of dopamine in the reward pathway. … But if we wait long enough, those gremlins will hop off the pain side of the balance, and balance is restored….we are craving because we are in a dopamine deficit state, it's the gremlins jumping up and down on the pain side of the balance. But if we can just wait a few more moments, they will get off, homeostasis will be restored and that feeling will pass."

"…It's a fine line between pleasure and pain
You've done it once you can do it again
Whatever you've done don't try to explain
It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain.."

From the lyrics of the song 'Pleasure and Pain' (covered by Manfred Mann's Earth Band), by Holly Knight & Michael Donald Chapman

It's a fine line between pleasure and pain

Sana Qadar suggests that certain kinds of pain can actually be good for us. From a biological perspective this is clearly so, as pain provides signals to motivate us to change our behaviour (move away from the fire, put down the very heavy object), but that is not what she is referring to. Rather, that "Dr Lembke says it has to do with the fact that pleasure and pain are processed in the same part of the brain":

Well, just like when we press on the pleasure side of the balance the gremlins hop on the pain side and ultimately shift our hedonic setpoint or our joy setpoint to the side of pain, it's also true that when we press on the pain side of the balance, so we intentionally invite psychologically or physically painful experiences into our lives, that those neuroadaptation gremlins will then hop on the pleasure side of the balance and we will start to up-regulate our own endogenous dopamine, not as the primary response to the stimulus but as the after-response

…I'm absolutely not talking about extreme forms of pain like cutting [which is] not a healthy way to get dopamine

…[For example] Michael was somebody who was addicted to cocaine and alcohol, and got into recovery and immediately experienced the dopamine deficit state, those gremlins on the pain side of the balance, he was anxious, he was irritable, and he also felt very numb, kind of an absence of emotions, which was really scary for him.

And he serendipitously discovered in early recovery that if he took a very cold shower, that created for him the same kinds of feelings, in a muted way, that he used to get from drugs, so he got into this practice of every morning taking a cold shower, and it worked great for him."

Dr Anna Lembke talking on 'All in the mind'

Gremlins, indeed?

Of course there is no see-saw in the brain, but a see-saw is a familiar everyday object that people understand can be balanced – or not. And that if more children (of similar size) load up one side than the other it will be out of balance – and it will only level up once the loads are balanced.

Strictly, there are some complications here with the analogue. If the children are at different distances from the fulcrum that will change their turning effect (so two children could balance one of similar mass according to where they are positioned). Similarly, when the moments are balanced the see-saw will not necessarily be level: as 'balance' means no overall turning effect. So, if the see-saw was already at an angle to the horizontal, loading it up in a balanced way should not shift it back to being level.

Perhaps there is something comparable in the reward system to whereabouts children sit on the see-saw – (perhaps some synapses are more sensitive to the effects of dopamine than others?), but this would be over-complicating an analogy that is intended to offer a link to a simple everyday phenomenon.

Are gremlins like children – do they come in different sizes? Perhaps it seems a little childish even to talk of such things in the brain. But there was once a strong (if discouraged these days 1) tradition of considering a homunculus, a little observer, inside the brain as if in a control room. Moreover, if the lauded physicist James Clerk Maxwell could invoke his famous demon to explain aspects of thermodynamics, we should not censure Lembke's metaphorical gremlins.

If this comparison was being used as a teaching analogy in a formal course, then we might want a more careful setting out of the positive and negative aspects of the analogy (those things that do, and do not, map across from the see-saw to the reward system). But Dr Lembke is not trying to teach her clients to pass tests about brain science, but rather give them a way of thinking about their problems that can help them plan and change behaviour – that is, a useful and straightforward model they can apply in overcoming their addictions.

An episode of the radio progrmme/podcast 'All in the mind'
To find out more

Prof. Lembke was talking about a very important topic and here I have only abstracted particular comments to illustrate her use of the analogy. For a fuller account of the topic, and in particular Prof. Lembke's clinical work to help people struggling with addiction, please refer to the full interview.

Work cited:
Note

1 The term is still use, but in a somewhat different sense:

"in neuroanatomy, the cortical homunculus represents either the motor or the sensory distribution along the cerebral cortex of the brain. The motor homunculus is a topographic representation of the body parts and its correspondents along the precentral gyrus of the frontal lobe. While the sensory homunculus is a topographic representation of the body parts along the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe."

Nguyen and Duong, 2021

So, nowadays we each have two 'little men' in our brains.

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Swipe left, swipe right, publish

A dating service for academics?

Keith S. Taber

A new service offers to match authors and journals without all that messy business of scholars having to spend time identifying and evaluating the journals in their field (Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay )

I was today invited to join a new platform that would allow an author "the opportunity to get the best Publishing Offers from different Journals"; and would also allow journal editors to "learn about new scientific results and make Publishing Offers to Authors". Having been an author and an editor my immediate response was, "well how could that work?"

Publishing offers?

I was a little intrigued by the notion of publishing 'offers'. In my experience what matters are 'publication decisions'.

You see, in the world of academic journals I am familiar with,

  • authors choose a journal to submit their manuscript to (they have to choose as journals will only consider work not already published, under consideration or submitted, elsewhere)
  • the editor decides if the manuscript seems relevant to the journal and to be, prima facie, a serious piece of scholarship. If not, it is rejected. If so, it is sent to expert reviewers for careful scrutiny and recommendations.
  • then it is accepted as is (rare in my field); accepted subject to specified changes; returned for revisions that must then be further evaluated; rejected but with a suggestion that a revised manuscript addressing specified issues might be reconsidered; or rejected.1
  • if the editor is eventually satisfied with the manuscript (perhaps after a number of rounds of revision and peer review) it is accepted for publication – this might be considered a publishing offer, but usually by this point the author is not going to decline!
  • if the process does not lead to an accepted manuscript, the author can decide her work is not worth publishing; use the feedback to strengthen the manuscript before submitting elsewhere, or simply move on to another journal and start again with the same manuscript.

Read about the process of submitting work to a research journal

Read about selecting a journal to submit your work to

Read about the peer review process used by serious research journals

Similarly, in the world of academic journals I am familiar with,

  • an editor becomes aware of a paper available for publication because the author submits it for consideration;
  • editors may sometimes offer informal feedback to authors who are not sure if their work fits the scope of the journal – but the editor certainly does not actively seek to check out manuscripts that are not being considered for that journal.

Though editors may engage in general promotion of their journal, this does not usually amount to trawling the web looking for material to make offers on.

So how does the platform work?

So, I looked at the inexsy site to see how the service managed to help authors get published without having to submit their work to journals, and how journals could fill their pages (and, these days, attract those juicy publication fees) even if authors did not fancy submitting their work to their journal.

This is what I learned.

Step 1. Put yourself out there.

(Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay)

Make a show of your wares

The process starts with the author uploading their abstract as a kind of intellectual tease. They do not upload the whole paper – indeed at this stage they do not even have to have written it.

"Researchers submit Abstracts of their manuscripts to the INEXSY platform and set their Publishing Statuses:

#1 – "Manuscript in progress" or

#2 – "Manuscript ready, looking for publisher".

https://inexsy.com

(Indeed, it seems an author could think up a number of article ideas; write the abstracts; post them; and wait t0 see which one attracts the most interest. No more of all that laborious writing of papers that no one wants to publish!)

Step 2. Wait to be approached by a potential admirer.

(Image by iqbal nuril anwar from Pixabay)

Wait to be approached

Now the author just has to wait. Journal editors with nothing better to do (i.e., editors of journals that no one seems to be sending any work to) will be going through the abstracts posted to see if they are interested in any of the work.

"All journals from the corresponding science area view the Abstract of the manuscript and determine the relevance of the future article (quick editorial decision)."

https://inexsy.com

The term 'quick editorial decision' is intriguing. This term most commonly refers to a quick decision on whether or not to publish a manuscript, but presumably all it means here is a quick editorial decision on "the relevance of the future article" to the journal.

Editors of traditional journals are used to making quick decisions on whether a manuscript falls within the scope of the journal. I have less confidence in the editors of many of the glut of open-access pay-to-publish journals that have sprung up in recent years. Many of these are predatory journals, mainly concerned with generating income and having little regard for academic standards.

In some cases supposed editors leave the editorial work to administrators who do not have a strong background in the field. Sometimes journals are happy to publish material which clearly has no relevance to the supposed topic of their journal. 2

Read about predatory journals

Step 3. Start dating

(Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay) 

Enter into a dialogue with the editor

inexst acknowledge that even the journals they attract to their platform might not immediately offer to publish an article on the basis of an author's abstract for a paper they may not have written yet.

So, the platform allows the two potential suitors to enter into a dialogue about developing a possible relationship.

 "If the text of the Abstract and supplementary materials (video, figures) are not enough for journals to make Publishing Offers to authors, then the INEXSY platform provides the [sic] Private Chat to discuss the full text of a future article."

https://inexsy.com

Step 4. Get propositioned by the suitor

(Image by bronzedigitals from Pixabay)

4. Consider moving the relationship to the next level

If after some back and forth in the virtual world, the editor likes the author's images and videos they may want to take the relationship to a new level,

 "If the potential article is interesting to journals, these journals make Publishing Offers to authors in 1 click."

https://inexsy.com

Step 5. Choose a keeper

(Image by StockSnap from Pixabay) 

5. Decide between suitors

Now the idea of a 'publishing offer' is clarified. Having had an idea for a paper, and written an abstract and perhaps posted some pics and a video talking about what you want to write, and having been approached by a range of editors not too busy to engage in some social intercourse, the author now find herself subject to a range of propositions.

  • But which suitor does she really have a connection with?
  • Which one is the best prospect for a happy future?

But this is not about good looks, tinderness, pension prospects, or reliably remembering birthdays, but which journal is more prestigious (good luck with expecting prestigious journals to register on such sites), and how quickly the competing journals promise to publish the paper, and, of course, how much will they charge you for this publication escort service.

"Authors choose the optimal offer (best publication time, IF [impact factor], OA [open access] price) and submit their manuscripts to the website of the selected journal."

https://inexsy.com

Do dating services check the details provided by member? Impact factors are useful (if not perfect) indicators of a journal's prestige. But some predatory journals shamelessly advertise inaccurate impact factors. (See, for example, 'The best way to generate an impressive impact factor is – to invent it'). Does inexsy do due diligence on behalf of authors here, or is a matter of caveat emptor?

Step 6. And ride off into the sunset together

(Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay)

Live happily ever after with a well-matched journal

So, there it is, the journal dating nightmare solved. Do not worry about reading and evaluating a range of journals to decide where to submit, just put up your work's profile and wait for those journal editors who like what they see to court you.

You do not have to be exclusive. Put the goods on public show. Play the field. See which suitors you like, and what they will offer you for exclusive rights to what you want to put out there. Only when you feel you are ready to settle down do you need to make a choice.

Publish your work where you know it will really be appreciated, based on having entered into a meaningful relationship with the editor and found your article and the journal have much in common. Demonstrate your mutual commitment by publicly exchanging vows (i.e., signing a publishing agreement or license) that means your article will find an exclusive home in that place for ever after.

(Well, actually, if you publish open access, it might seem more like an open marriage as legally you are free to republish as often as your like. However, you will likely find other potential partners will consider an already published work as 'damaged goods' and shun any approaches.)

So, now it is just the little matter of getting down to grindring out the paper.

Back to earth

(Image by Pexels from Pixabay )

Meanwhile, back in the real world

This seems too good to be true. It surely is.

No editor of a responsible journal is going to offer publication until the full manuscript has been (written! and) submitted, and has been positively evaluated by peer review. Even dodgy predatory journals usually claim to do rigorous peer review (so authors can in turn claim {and perhaps sometimes believe} that their publications are in peer reviewed journals).

This leads me to moot a typology of three types of journal editor in relation to a platform such as inexsy:

1.
Absent partners		Editors of well-established and well-regarded journals.


These are busy with the surfeit of submissions they already receive, and are not interested in these kinds of platforms.
2.
Desperate romantics		Principled editors of journals struggling to attract sufficient decent papers to publish, but who are committed to maintain academic standards.


They may well be interested in using this platform in order to attract submissions – but the offers they will make will be limited to 'yes, this topic interests us, and, if you submit this manuscript, we will send the submission to peer review'.

They will happily wait till after a proper legal ceremony before consummating the relationship.
3.
Promiscuous predators		Editors of predatory journals that are only interested in maximising the number of published papers and so the income generated.


They will make offers to publish before seeing the paper, because, to be honest there is not much (if anything) they would reject anyway as long as the author could pay the publication fees. Once they have your money they are off on the prowl again.

So, this may well bring some authors together with some editors who can offer advice on whether a proposed paper would be seriously considered by their journals (category 2) – but this achieves little more than would emailing the editor and asking if the proposed paper is within the scope of that journal.

If any authors find they are inundated by genuine offers to publish in any journals that are worth publishing in, I will be amazed.

Watch this space (well, the space below)

Still, as a scientist, I have to be open to changing my mind. So,

  • if you are a representative of inexsy
  • if you are an author or editor who has had positive experiences using the service

please feel free to share your experiences (and perhaps tell me I am wrong) in the comments below.

I wait with interest for the flood of responses putting me right.

Notes

1 The precise number of categories of decision, and how they are worded, vary a little between journals.

2 Consider some examples of what gets published where in the world of the dubious research journal:

"the editors of 'Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function' had no reservations about publishing a paper supposedly about 'over sexuality' which was actually an extended argument about the terrible threat to our freedoms of…IQ scores, and which seems to have been plagiarised from a source already in the public domain…. That this make no sense at all, is just as obvious as that it has absolutely nothing to do with gastrointestinal disorders and liver function!"

Can academic misconduct be justified for the greater good?
Sadly, some journal editors do not seem to care whether what they publish has any relevance to the supposed field of their journal: 'Writing for the Journal of Petroleum, Chemical Industry, Chemistry Education, Medicine, Drug Abuse, and Archaeology'

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Not special enough

Special issues of journals are not what they used to be

Keith S. Taber

If I just consider those where the deadline is TODAY, [what] I find…covers much of the field of education just in the scope of special issues closing today!

Dear Andrei

Thank you for your message.

I did receive your mail. Unlike most of the invitations I get these days I was pleasantly surprised that it did actually relate to an area where I had some expertise. As I have plenty of ongoing projects I was not seeking another one, and I have some reservations in editing for a journal which would charge authors to publish. I appreciate that publishing is not a charity, but academic publishing is in a strange place as Open-Access slowly becomes the norm, but many scholars are not automatically supported in paying publication fees. Whilst there are still many high quality, well-established, journals in Education that do not charge authors publication fees, I would not wish to be allowing my name to be used to encourage authors to submit to a journal that charges authors about £1200 to publish their work.

However, I was intrigued enough to do some due diligence by checking out your website.

I found that 'education sciences' has a rather different take on special issues than I was used to.

When I was a journal editor (incidentally for a journal sponsored by a learned society, so it does not charge authors or readers), we used to have one themed issue per year, and made a big thing of it. We also chose topics very carefully so as not to repeat or strongly overlap with previous themes.

On your website I find that special issues are not so special.

You have a vast number of calls for papers for special issues. If I just consider those where the deadline is TODAY, I find

  • Languages and Literacies in Science Education
  • Building Resilience of Children and Youth with Disabilities: New Perspectives
  • Advances in Learning and Teaching in Medical Education
  • Opportunities and Limitations of Using E-learning in School and Academic Education
  • Education Technology and Literacies: State of the Art
  • Active Methodologies and Educative Resources Mediated by Technology
  • Educational Effectiveness and Improvement – Research, Policy and Practice from the UK, the USA, China and across the World
  • Groundings for Knowledge That Informs Education, Schooling and Teacher Preparation
  • Educational Technology's Influence in Higher Education Teaching and Learning
  • Inclusion and Disability: Perspectives on Theory, Research, and Practice
  • Educational Research and Innovation in the First Global Catastrophe of the 21st Century: Committed to Education
  • Learning Space and Environment of Early Childhood Education
  • Philosophy of Education Today: Diagnostics, Prognostics, Therapeutics and Pandemics
  • Migrant Integration in Schools: Policies and Practices
  • Health Professions Education & Integrated Learning
  • Transition to Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities

That covers much of the field of education just in the scope of special issues closing today!

And then there is another large tranche with deadlines in July.

And another with deadlines in August.

And so on.

I am not suggesting there is anything inappropriate here, but these are hardly 'special' issues. They are themes that are used to encourage submissions, with individual articles published when ready (as open calls already have published papers) and then linked. But they do not comprise discrete issues of the journal. I see that quite a few of the closed special issues only included 5 papers, which surely reflects the sheer range of themes being pushed at once. (I did not immediately see any closed special issues with less than 5 articles, so I wonder if deadlines are extended to you have that minimum number of papers accepted?)

So, even if I had been tempted at this time to edit a special issue of a journal, it would have to be a special issue that was considerably more special than this.

Best wishes

Keith

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Plus ça change – balancing forces is hard work

Confusing steady states and equilibrium?

Keith S. Taber

"…I am older than I once was
And younger than I'll be
But that's not unusual
No, it isn't strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same…"

From the lyrics of 'The Boxer' (Simon and Garfunkel song) by Paul Simon

In a recent post I discussed the treatment of Newtonian forces in a book (Thomson, 2005) about the history of natural theology (a movement which sought to study the natural world as kind of religious observance – seeking to glorify God by the study of His works) and its relationship to the development of evolutionary theory.

The book was written by a prestigious scientist, who had held Professorships at both Yale in the US and at Oxford. Yet the book contained some erroneous physics – 'howlers' of the kind that are sometimes called 'schoolboy errors' (as presumably most schoolgirls would be careful not to make them?)

Read 'Even Oxbridge professors have misconceptions'

'The Watch on the Heath'

by Prof. Keith Thomson

My point is not to imply that this is a poor read – the book has much to commend it, and I certainly thought it was worth my time. I found it an informative read, and I have no reason to assume that the author's scholarship in examining the historical sources was was not of the highest level – even if his understanding of some school physics seemed questionable. I think this highlights two features of science:

  1. Science is so vast that research scientists setting out to write 'popular' science books for a general readership risk venturing into areas outside their specialist knowledge – areas where they may lack expertise 1
  2. Some common alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') are so insidious that we confidently feel we understand the science we have been taught whilst continuing to operate with intuitions at odds with the science.

Out of specialism

In relation to the first point, I previously highlighted a reference to "Einstein's relativity theory" being part of quantum physics, and later in the book I found another example of a non-physicist confusing two ideas that may seem similar to the non-specialist but which to a physicist should not be confused:

"In the 1930s, Arthur Holmes worked out the geology of the mechanism [underpinning plate tectonics] and the fact that the earth's inner heat (like that of the sun) comes from atomic fission."
p.190

Thomson, 2005: 190

The earth contains a good deal of radioactive material which, through atomic fission, heats up the earth from within. This activity has contributed to the, initially hot, earth cooling much more slowly than had once been assumed – most notably according to modelling undertaken by Thomson's namesake, Lord Kelvin.2 Kelvin did not know about nuclear fission.

But the sun is heated by a completely different kind of nuclear reaction: fusion. The immense amount of energy 'released' during this process enables stars to burn for billions of years without running out of hydrogen fuel.3

Lord Kelvin did not know about that either, leading to him suggesting

"…on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years"

Thomson, 1862

Kelvin suggested this was 'almost' but not 'absolutely' certain – a good scientist should always keep an open mind to the possibility of having missed something (take note, BBC's Nick Robinson).

We now think the sun has been 'illuminating' for about 4 600 000 000 years, almost ten times as long as Kelvin's upper limit. It may seem strange that a serious scientist should refer to the sun as 'he', but this kind of personification was once common in scientific writings.

Read about personification in science

The first atomic weapons were based on fission processes of the kind used in nuclear power stations.

Hydrogen bombs are much more devastating still, making use of fusion as occurs deep in the sun.

(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

A non-scientist may feel this conflation of fission and fusion is a minor technical detail. But it is a very significant practical distinction.

For one thing the atomic bombs that were used to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission devices. The next generation of atomic weapons, the 'hydrogen bombs' were very much more powerful – to the extent that they used a fission device as a kind of detonator to set off the main bomb! It is these weapons, fusion weapons, which mimic the processes at the centre of stars such as the sun.

…The rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in
Gives way and suddenly it's day again
The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done
Two suns in the sunset, hmph
Could be the human race is run…

From the lyrics of 'Two suns in the sunset' (Pink Floyd song) by Roger Waters

In terms of peaceful technologies, fission-based nuclear power stations, whilst not using fossil fuels, have been a major concern because of the highly radioactive waste which will remain a high health risk for many thousands of years, and because of the dangers of radiation leaks – very real risks as shown by the Three Mile Island (USA) and Windscale (England) accidents, and much more seriously at Fukushima (Japan) and, most infamously, Chernobyl (then USSR, now Ukraine). There are also serious health and human rights issues dogging the mining of uranium ore, which is, of course, a declining resource.

For decades scientists have been trying to develop, as an alternative, nuclear fusion based power generation which would be a source of much cleaner and sustainable power supplies. This has proved very challenging because the conditions under which fusion takes place are so much more extreme. Critically, no material can hold the plasma at the extreme temperatures, so it has to be magnetically suspended well away from the containment vessel 'walls'.

The tenacious nature of some misconceptions

My second point, the insidious nature of some common alternative conceptions, is a challenge for science teachers as simply giving clear, accurate presentations with good examples may not be enough to bring about change in well-established and perhaps intuitive ways of thinking, even when students study hard and think they have learnt what has been taught.

I suggested this was reflected in Prof. Thomson's text (Keith, that is, not Sir William) in his use of references to Newton's ideas about force and motion. Prof. Thomson was not as a biologist therefore seeking to avoid referring to physics, but rather actively engaging with Newton's notions of inertia and the action of forces to make his points. Yet, also, seemingly misusing Newtonian mechanics because of a flawed understanding. Likely, as with many students, Prof. Thomson's intuitive physics was so strong that although he had studied Newton's laws, and can state them, when he came to apply them his own 'common-sense' conceptions of force and motion insidiously prevailed.

The point is not that Prof. Thomson has got the physics wrong (as research suggests most people do!) but that he was confident enough in his understanding to highlight Newtonian physics in his writing and, in effect, seek to teach his readers about it.

Newton's laws

What are commonly known as 'Newton' three laws of motion' can be glossed simply as:

N1: When no force is acting, an object does not change its motion: if stationary, it remains stationary; if moving, it carries on moving at the same speed in the same direction.

Indeed, this is also true if forces are acting, but they cancel because they are balanced, i.e.,

N1': When no net (overall, resultant) force is acting, an object does not change its motion: if stationary, it remains stationary; if moving, it carries on moving at the same speed in the same direction.

N2: When a net force is acting on a body it changes its motion in a way determined by the magnitude and direction of the force. (The change in velocity takes place in the direction of the force, and at a rate depending on the magnitude of the force).

So, if the force acts along the direction of motion, then the speed will change but not direction; but if the force acts in any other direction it will lead to a change in direction.

Strictly, the law relates to the 'rate of change of momentum' but assuming the mass of the body is fixed, we can think in terms of changes of velocity. 4

N3: Forces are interactions between two bodies/objects (that attract or repel each other): the same size force acts on both. (This is sometimes unfortunately phrased as 'every action having an equal and opposite reaction') 5.

These (perhaps) seem relatively simple, but there are complications in applying them. Very simply, the first law,when applied to moving bodies does not seem to fit our experience (moving bodies often seem to come to a stop by themselves – due to forces that we do not always notice).

The second law relates an applied force to a process of change, but it is very easy to instead think of the applied force directly leading to an outcome. That is people often equate the change in direction with the final direction. The change occurs in the direction of the force: that does not mean the final direction is the direction of the force.

The third law is commonly misapplied by assuming that if 'forces come in pairs' these will be balanced and cancel out. But they cannot cancel out because they are acting on the two bodies. (If your friend hits you in the eye after one too many pedantic complaints about her science writing you cannot avoid a black eye simply by hitting her back just as hard!)

A N3 force 'pair' does not balance out!

Often objects are in equilibrium because the forces acting on them are balanced. But they are never in equilibrium just because a force on them is also acting on another body! An apple hangs from a tree because the branch pulls it up the same amount as its weight pulls it down: these are two separate forces, each of which is also acting on the other body involved (the branch, and the earth, respectively).

Read about learning difficulties and Newton's third law

Thomson's 'Newtonian Physics'

In the previous posting I noted that Prof. Thomson had written

  • "Any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together."
  • "the concept of 'a balance of forces' keeping the moon circling the earth and the earth in orbit around the sun…
  • "a Newtonian balance of forces… rocks: gradually worn down by erosion, washed into the seas, accumulating as sediments, raised up as new dry land, only to be eroded again"

The first two statements are simply wrong according to conventional physics. Curved paths are often the result of a single force acting. The earth and moon orbit because they are both the subject of unbalanced forces.

Those two statements are contrary to N1 and N2.

The third statement seemed to suggest that a balance of forces was somehow considered to bring about changes. The suggestion appeared to be that a cycle of changes might be due to a balance of forces. But I acknowledged that "this reference to Hutton's ideas seems to preview a more detailed treatment of the new geology in a later chapter in the book (that I have not yet reached), so perhaps as I read on I will find a clearer explanation of what is meant by these changes being based on a theory of balance of forces".

Now I have finished the book, I wanted to address this.

A sort of balance

Prof. Thomson discusses developing ideas in geology about how the surface of the earth came to have its observed form. Today we are familiar with modern ideas about the structure of the earth, and continental drift, and most people have seen this represented in various ways.

Image by Venita Oberholster from Pixabay
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Original images by by Michel Müller from Pixabay

However, it was once widely assumed that the earth's surface was fairly static , but had been shaped by violent events in the distant past – a view sometimes called 'catastrophism'. One much referenced catastrophe was the flood associated with the biblical character Noah (of Ark fame) that was sometimes considered to have been world-wide deluge. (Those who considered this were aware that this required a source of water beyond normal rainfall – such as perhaps vast reservoirs of water escaping from underground).

The idea that the earth was continually changing, and that forces that acted continuously over vast periods of time could slowly (much too slowly for us to notice) lead to the formation of, for example, mountain ranges seemed less feasible.

Yet we now understand how the tectonic plates float on a more fluid layer of material and how these plates slowly collide or separate with the formation of new crust where they move apart. Vast forces are at work and change is constant, but there are cyclic processes such that ultimately nothing much changes.

Well, nothing much changes on a broad perspective. Locally of course, changes may be substantial: land may become submerged, or islands appear from the sea; mountains or great valleys may appear – albeit very, very slowly. But crust that is subsumed in one place will be balanced by crust formed elsewhere. And – just as walking from one side of a small boat to another will lead to one side rising out of the water, whilst the opposite side sinks deeper into the water – as land is raised in one place it will sink elsewhere.

This is the kind of model that scientists started to develop, and which Prof. Thomson discusses.

"[Dr John Woodward (1665-1728) produced] "an ingenious theory, parts of it quite modern, parts simply seventeenth century sophistry within a Newtonian metaphor. Woodward's earth, post deluge, is stable, but not in fact unchanging. This is possible because it is in a sort of balance – a dynamic balance between opposing forces."

Thomson, 2005: 156

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

James Hutton (1726 – 1797) was one of the champions of this 'uniformitarianism',

"Hutton's earth is in a constant state of flux due to processes acting over millions of years as mountains are eroded by rain and frost. In turn, the steady raising up of mountains, balances their steady reduction through erosion.

…for Hutton the evidence of the rocks demonstrated a cyclic history powered by Newtonian steady-state dynamics: the more it changed, the more it stayed the same."
p.181

Thomson, 2005: 181

The more it changed, the more it stayed the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This, of course, is an idiom that has found resonance with many commentators on the social, as well as the physical, world,

"…A change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war
…
There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are effaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight…"

From the lyrics of 'Won't get fooled again' (The Who song), by Pete Townsend

Steady states

So, there are vast forces acting, but the net effect is a planet which stays substantially the same over long periods of time. Which might be considered analogous to a body which is subject to very large forces, but in such a configuration that they cancel.

Where Prof. Thomson is in danger of misleading his reader is in confusing a static equilibrium and a macroscopic overall steady state that is the result of many compensating disturbances. This is an important difference when we consider energy and not just the forces acting.

A steady state can be maintained by nothing happening, or by several things happening which effectively compensate.

If we consider a very heavy mass sitting on a very study table, then the mass has a large weight, but does not fall because the table exerts a balancing upward reaction force. Although large forces are acting, nothing happens. In physics terms, no work is done. 6

Now consider a sealed cylinder, perfectly insulted and shielded from its surroundings, containing some water, air and too much salt to fully dissolve. It would reach a stead state where the

  • the mass of undissolved salt is constant
  • the height of the solution in the tube is constant

On a macroscopic level, nothing then happens – it is all pretty boring (especially as if the cylinder was perfectly insulated we would not be able to monitor it anyway!)

Actually, all the time,

  1. salt is dissolving
  2. salt is precipitating
  3. gases from the air are dissolving in the solution
  4. gases are leaving the solution
  5. water is evaporating into the air
  6. water vapour is condensing

But the rates of 1 and 2 are the same; the rates of 3 and 4 are the same; and the rates of 5 and 6 are the same. In terms of molecules and ions, there is a lot of activity – but in overall terms, nothing changes: we have a steady state, due to the dynamic equilibria between dissolving and precipitating; between dissolving and degassing; and between evaporation and condensation.

This activity is possible because of the inherent energy of the particles. In the various interactions between these particles a molecule is slowed here, an ion is released from electrical bonds – and so. But no energy transfer takes place to or from the system, it is only constantly redistributed among the ensemble of particles. No work is done.

Cycling is hard work

But macroscopic stable states maintained by cyclic processes are not like that. A key difference is that in the geological cycles there are significant frictional effects. In our sealed cylinder, the processes will continue indefinitely as the energy of the system is constant. In the geological systems, change is only maintained because there is source of power – the sun drives the water cycle, radioactive decay in effect drives the rock cycle.

Work is done in forming new crust under the sea between two plates. More work is done pushing one plate beneath another at a plate boundary. It does not matter if the compensating changes were produced by identical magnitude forces pushing in opposite directions – these are not balanced forces in the sense of cancelling out (they act on different masses of material) – if they had been, nothing would have happened.

You cannot move tectonic plates around without doing a great deal of work – just as you cannot cycle effortlessly by using a circular track that brings you back to where you started, even though when cycling in one direction the ground was pushing you one way, and on the way back the ground was pushing you in the opposite direction! (Your tyres pushed on the track, and as Newton's third law suggests, it pushed back on the tyres in the opposite direction – but those equal forces did not cancel as they were acting on different things: or you would not have moved.)

Perhaps Prof. Thomson understands this, but his language is certainly likely to mislead readers:

"Hooke realised that there was a balance of forces: while the geological strata were being formed and mountains were raised up, at the same time the land was constantly being eroded…"

Thomson, 2005: 179

No, there was not a balance of forces.

It could be that Prof. Thomson's use of the phrase 'balance of forces' is only intended as a metaphor or an analogy. 7 However, he also repeats errors he had made earlier in the book

  • "the concept of 'a balance of forces' keeping the moon circling the earth and the earth in orbit around the sun"
  • "any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together"

which suggests a genuine confusion about how forces act.

One of these mistakes is that planetary orbits (which require a net {unbalanced} force), are due to 'opposing forces',

"…Paley's tortured dancing on the heads of all these metaphysical pins is pre-shadowing of modern ecological thinking and a metaphysical extension of Hooke and Newton's explanation of planetary orbits in terms of opposing forces, or Woodward's theory of matter, or Hutton's geology – it is the living world as a dynamic system of force and counterforce, of checks and balances."
p.242

Thomson, 2005: 242 (my emphasis)

The other was that a single force cannot lead to a curved path,

"…the philosophical concept of reduction, namely that any complex system can be reduced to the operation of simple causes. Thus the parabolic trajectory of a projectile is the product of two straight-line forces acting on each other [sic];…"
p.264

Thomson, 2005: 264 (my emphasis)

Forces are interactions between bodies, they are abstractions and do not act on each other. The parabolic path is due to a single constant force acting on a body that is already moving (but not in the direction of the applied force). It can be seen as the result of the combination of a force (acting according to N2) and the body's existing inertia (i.e., N1). Prof. Thomson seems to be thinking of the motion itself as corresponding to a force, where Newton suggested that it is only a change of motion that corresponds to a force.

However, whilst Prof. Thomson is wrong, he is in good company – as one of the most common alternative conceptions reported is assuming that a moving body must be subject to a force. Which, as I pointed out last time, is not so daft as in everyday experience cars and boats and planes only keep on moving as long as their propulsion systems function (to balance resistive forces); and footballs and cricket balls and javelins that do not have a source of motive power (to overcome resistive forces) soon fall to earth. So, these are understandable and, in one sense, very forgiveable slips. It is just unfortunate they appear in an otherwise informative book about science.

Sources cited:
  • Thomson, K. (2005). The Watch on the Heath: Science and religion before Darwin. HarperCollins.
  • Thomson, W. (1862). On the Age of the Sun's Heat. Macmillan's Magazine, 5, 388-393.
  • Thorn, C. E., & Welford, M. R. (1994). The Equilibrium Concept in Geomorphology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(4), 666-696. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564149
Notes

1 Although there are plenty of 'academic' books in many fields of scholarship (usually highly focused so the author is writing about their specialist work), the natural sciences tend to be communicated and debated in research journals. Most books written by scientists tend to be for a more general audience – and publishers expect popular science books to appeal to a wide readership, so these books are likely to have a much broader scope than academic monographs.

2 When he was ennobled, William Thomson chose to be called Baron Kelvin – after his local river, the river Kelvin. So the SI unit of temperature is named, indirectly, after a Scottish River.

Kelvin's reputation was such that when he modelled the cooling earth and suggested the planet was less that a 100 000 000 years old, this caused considerable concerns given that geologists were suggesting that much longer had been needed for it to have reached its present state.

3 For a brief discussion regarding energy changes during processes of this kind, see 'How much damage can eight neutrons do?'

4 The rate of change of momentum is proportional to the magnitude of the applied force and takes place in the direction of the applied force.

As momentum is mv, and as mass is usually assumed fixed (if the motion is well below light speeds) 'the rate of change of momentum' is the mass times the rate of change of the velocity – or ma. (F=ma.)

The key point about direction is that it is not that the body moves in the direction of the force, but the change of momentum (so change of velocity) is in the direction or the force.

As the body's momentum is a vector, and the change in momentum is a vector, the new momentum is the vector sum of these two vectors: new momentum = old momentum + change in momentum.

The object's new direction after being deflected by a force is in the direction of the new momentum

5 When there is force between two bodies (let's call them A, B) the force acting on body B is the same size as the force acting on body A, but is anti-parallel in direction.

The force between the earth and the sun acts on both (not shown to scale)

6 This is an ideal case.

A real table would not be perfectly rigid. A real table would initially distort ever so slightly with the area under the mass being ever so slightly compressed, and the weight dropping to an ever so slightly lower level. The very slight lowering of the weight does a tiny amount of work compressing the table surface.

Then, nothing more happens, and no more work is done.

7 Thorn and Welford (1994) have referred to "the fuzzy and frequently erroneous use of the term…equilibrium in geomorphology" (p.861), and how an 1876 introduction of the "concept of dynamic equilibrium resembles the balance-of-forces equilibrium that appears in dynamics, but by analogy rather than formal derivation" (p.862).

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Even Oxbridge professors have misconceptions

Being a science professor is no assurance of understanding Newton's mechanics

Keith S. Taber

…this author had just written that
all matter is in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force
but did not seem to appreciate that
any matter acted upon by an external force will not be in uniform motion

I started a new book today. 'The Watch on the Heath. Science and Religion before Darwin' had been on my pile of books to read for a while (as one can acquire interesting titles faster than find time to actually read them).

'The Watch on the Heath'

by Prof. Keith Thomson

The title is a reference to the analogy adopted at the start of William Paley's classic book on natural theology. Paley (1802) argued that if one was out walking across a heath and a foot struck an object on the ground, one would make very different assumptions if the object transpired to be a stone or a pocket watch. The stone would pass without much thought – there was no great mystery about how it came to be on the heath. But a pocket watch is an intricate mechanism composed of a multitude of especially shaped and arranged pieces fashioned from different materials. A reasonable person could not think it was an arbitrary and accidentally collated object – rather it clearly had a purpose, and so had a creator – a watchmaker.

 
Paley developed a detailed argument based on the analogy that organisms are like intricate mechanisms that offer obvious evidence of having been designed (Images by  Thomas Wolter and  Gerd Altmann  from Pixabay)

Paley used this as an analogy for the complexity of the living world. Analogies are often used by teachers and science communicators as a means of making the unfamiliar familiar – a way of suggesting something that is being introduced is actually like something the audience already knows about and feels comfortable with.

Read about analogies in science

Paley was doing something a little different – his readers would already know about both watches and living things, and he was developing the analogy to make an argument about the nature of living things as being designed. (Living things would be familiar, but Paley wanted to invite his reader to think about them in a way they might find unfamiliar.) According to this argument, organisms were so complex that, by analogy with a watch, it followed they also were created for a purpose, and by a creator.

Even today, Paley's book is an impressive read. It is 'one long argument' (as Darwin said of his 'Origin of Species') that collates a massive amount of evidence about the seeming design of human anatomy and the living world. Paley was not a scientist in the modern sense, and he was not even a naturalist who collected natural history specimens. He was a priest and philosopher / theologian who clearly thought that publishing his argument was important enough to require him to engage in such extensive scholarship that in places the volume gives the impression of being a medical textbook.

Paley's work was influential and widely read, but when Darwin (1859) presented his own long argument for evolution by natural selection there began to be a coherent alternative explanation for all that intricate complexity. By the mid-twentieth century a neo-Darwinian synthesis (incorporating work initiated by Mendel, developments in statistics, and the advent of molecular biology) made it possible to offer a feasible account that did not need a watch-maker who carefully made his or her creatures directly from a pre-designed pattern. Richard Dawkins perverted Paley's analogy in calling one of his books 'The Blind Watchmaker' reflecting the idea that evolution is little more than the operation of 'blind' chance.

Arguably, Darwin's work did nothing to undermine the possibility of a great cosmic architect and master craft-person having designed the intricacies of the biota – but only showed the subtlety required of such a creator by giving insight into the natural mechanisms set up to slowly bring about the productions. (The real challenge of Darwin's work was that it overturned the idea that there was any absolute distinction between humans and the rest of life on earth – if humans are uniquely in the image of God then how does that work in relation to the gradual transition from pre-human ancestors to the first humans?)

Read 'Intergenerational couplings in the family. A thought experiment about ancestry'

Arguably Darwin said nothing to undermine the omnipotence of God, only the arrogance of one branch of the bush of life (i.e., ours) to want to remake that God in their image. Anyway, there are of course today a range of positions taken on all this, but this was the context for my reading some questionable statements about Newtonian mechanics.

Read about science and religion

Quantum quibbling

My reading went well till I got to p.27. Then I was perturbed. It started with a couple of quibbles. The first was a reference to

"…the modern world of quantum physics, where Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty reign."

Thomson, 2005: 27

"Er, no" I thought. Relativity and quantum theory are not only quite distinct theories, but, famously, the challenge of finding a way to make these two areas of physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, consistent is seen as a major challenge. The theories of relativity seem to work really well on the large scale and quantum theory works really well on the smallest scales, but they do not seem to fit together. "Einstein's relativity" is not (yet, at least) found within the "world of quantum physics".

Still, this was perhaps just a rhetorical flourish.

The Newtonian principle of inertia

But later in the same paragraph I read about how,

"Newton…showed that all matter is in uniform motion (constant velocity, including a velocity of zero) unless acted upon by an external force…Newton showed that an object will remain still or continue to move at a constant speed in the same direction unless some external force changes things."

Thomson, 2005: 27

This is known as Newton's first law of motion (or the principle of inertia). Now, being pedantic, I thought that surely Newton did not show this.

It is fair to say, I suggest, that Newton suggested this, proposed it, mooted it; perhaps claimed it was the case; perhaps showed it was part of a self-consistent description – but I am not sure he demonstrated it was so.

Misunderstanding Newton's first law

This is perhaps being picky and, of itself, hardly worth posting about, but this provides important background for what I read a little later (indeed, still in the same paragraph):

"Single forces always act in straight lines, not circles. Any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together."

Thomson, 2005: 27

No!

The first part of this is fair enough – a force acts between two bodies (say the earth and the sun) and is considered to act along a 'line of action' (such as the line between the centres of mass of the earth and the sun). In the Newtonian world-view, the gravitational force between the earth and sun acts on both bodies along that line of action. 1

However, the second sentence ("any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together") is completely wrong.

These two sentences are juxtaposed as though there is a logical link: "Single forces always act in straight lines, not circles. [So therefore] any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together." This only follows if we assume that an object must always be moving in the direction of a force acting on it. But Newton's second law tells us that acceleration (and so the change in velocity) occurs in the direction of the force.

This is confusing the sense of a change with its outcome – a bit like thinking that a 10 m rise in sea level will lead to the sea being 10 m deep, or that if someone 'puts on 20 kilos' they will weigh 200 N. A 'swing to Labour' in an election does not assure Labour of a victory unless the parties were initially on par.

The error here is like assuming that any debit from a bank account must send it overdrawn:
taking £10 from a bank account means there will be £10 less in the account,
but not necessary that the balance becomes -£10!

Changing direction is effortless (if there is an external force acting)

Whenever a single force acts on a moving object where the line of action does not coincide with the object's direction of travel then the object will change direction. (That is, a single force will only not lead to a change of direction in the very special case where the force aligns with or directly against to the direction of travel.) So, electrons in a cathode ray tube can be shown to follow a curved path when a (single) magnetic force is applied, and an arrow shot from a castle battlement horizontally will curve down to the grounds because of the (single) effect of gravitational force. (There are frictional forces acting as well, but they only modify the precise shape of that curve which would still be found if the castle was on a planet with no atmosphere – as long as the archer could hold her breath long enough to get the arrow away.)

The lyrics of a popular song declare "arc of a diver – effortlessly". 2 But diving into a pool is only effortless (once you have pushed off) because the diver is pulled into an arc by their gravitational attraction with the earth – so even if you dive at an angle above the horizontal, a single force is enough to change your direction and bring you down.

"Arc of a diver – effortlessly"

© Pelle Cass. This image is used with kind permission of the artist.

(This amazing artwork is by the photographer Pelle Cass. This is one of a series ('Crowded Fields') that can be viewed at https://pellecass.com/crowded-fields.)

So, there is a mistake in the science here. Either the author has simply made a slip (which can happen to anyone) or he is operating with an alternative conception inconsistent with Newton's laws. The same can presumably be said about any editor or copy editor who checked the manuscript for the publisher.

Read about alternative conceptions

Misunderstanding force and motion

That might not be so unlikely – as force and motion might be considered the prototype case of a science topic where there are common alternative conceptions. I have seen estimates of 80%+ of people having alternative conceptions inconsistent with basic Newtonian physics. After all, in everyday life, you give something a pull or a push, and it usually moves a bit, but then always come to a stop. In our ordinary experience stones, footballs, cricket balls, javelins, paper planes, darts – or anything else we might push or pull – fail to move in a straight line at a constant speed for the rest of eternity.

That does not mean Newton was wrong, but his ideas were revolutionary because he was able to abstract to situations where the usual resistive forces that are not immediately obvious (friction, air resistance, viscosity) might be absent. That is, ideal scenarios that probably never actually occur. (Thus my questioning above whether Newton really 'showed' rather than postulated these principles.)

So, it is not surprising an author might hold a common alternative conception ('misconception') that is widely shared: but the author had written that

  • all matter is in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force

yet did not seem to appreciate the corollary that

  • any matter acted upon by an external force will not be in uniform motion

So, it seems someone can happily quote Newton's laws of motion but still find them so counter-intuitive that they do not apply them in their thinking. Again, this reflects research which has shown that graduates who have studied physics and done well in the examinations can still show alternative conceptions when asked questions outside the formal classroom setting. It is as if they learn the formalism for the exams, but never really believe it (as, after all, real life constantly shows us otherwise).

So, this is all understandable, but it seems unfortunate in a science book that is seeking to explain the science to readers. At this point I decided to remind myself who had written the book.

We all have alternative conceptions

Keith Thomson is a retired academic, an Emeritus Fellow at Kellog College Oxford, having had an impressive career including having been a Professor of Biology at Yale University and later Director of the Oxford University Museum and Professor of Natural History. So, here we have a highly successful academic scientist (not just a lecturer in some obscure university somewhere – a professor at both Yale and Oxford), albeit with expertise in the life sciences, who seems to misunderstand the basic laws of physics that Newton postulated back in 1687.

Prof. Thomson seems to have flaws in his knowledge in this area, yet is confident enough of his own understanding to expose his thinking in writing a science book. This, again, is what we often find in science teaching – students who hold alternative conceptions may think they understand what they have been taught even though their thinking is not consistent with the scientific accounts. (This is probably true of all of us to some degree. I am sure there must be areas of science where I am confident in my understanding, but where that confidence is misplaced. I likely have misconceptions in topics areas where Prof. Thomson has great expertise.)

A balance of forces?

This could have been just a careless slip (of the kind which once made often looks just right when we reread our work multiple times – I know this can happen). But, over the page, I read:

"…in addition to the technical importance of Newton's mathematics, the concept of 'a balance of forces' keeping the moon circling the earth and the earth in orbit around the sun, quickly became a valuable metaphor…"

Thomson, 2005: 27

Again – No!

If there is 'balance of forces' then the forces effectively cancel, and there is no net force. So, as "all matter is in uniform motion (constant velocity, including a velocity of zero) unless acted upon by an external force", a body subject to a balance of forces continues in "uniform motion (constant velocity…)" – that is, it continues in a straight line at a constant speed. It does not circle (or move in an ellipse). 3

Again, this seems to be an area where people commonly misunderstand Newton's principles, and operate with alternative conceptions. Learners often think that Newton's third law (sometimes phrased in terms of 'equal and opposite forces') implies there will always be balanced forces!

Read about learning difficulties and Newton's third law

The reason the moon orbits the earth, and the reason the earth orbits the sun, in the Newtonian world-view is because in each case the orbiting body is subject to a single force which is NOT balanced by any countering force. As the object is "acted upon by an external force" (which is not balanced by any other force) it does not move "in uniform motion" but constantly changes direction – along its curved orbit. According to Newton's law of motion, one thing we can always know about a body with changing motion (such as one orbiting another body) is that the forces on it are not balanced.

But once circular motion was assumed as being the 'natural' state of affairs for heavenly bodies, and I know from my own teaching experience that students who understand Newtonian principle in the context of linear motion can still struggle to apply this to circular motion. 4

Two conceptions of orbital motion (one canonical, the other a misconception commonly offered by students). From Taber, K. S., & Brock, R. (2018). A study to explore the potential of designing teaching activities to scaffold learning: understanding circular motion.

I even developed a scaffolding tool to help students make this transition, by helping them work through an example in very simple steps, but which on testing had modest effect – that is, it seemed to considerably help some students apply Newton's laws to orbital motion, but could not bridge that transition for others (Taber & Brock, 2018). I concluded even more basic step-wise support must be needed by many learners. Circular motion being linked to a net (unbalanced) centripetal force seems to be very counter-intuitive to many people.

To balance or not to balance

The suggestion that a balance of forces leads to change occurs again a little later in the book, in reference to James Hutton's geology,

"…Hutton supported his new ideas both with solid empirical evidence and an underlying theory based on a Newtonian balance of forces. He saw a pattern in the history of the rocks: gradually worn down by erosion, washed into the seas, accumulating as sediments, raised up as new dry land, only to be eroded again."

Thomson, 2005: 39

A balance of forces would not lead to rocks being "gradually worn down by erosion, washed into the seas, accumulating as sediments, raised up as new dry land, only to be eroded again". Indeed if all the relevant forces were balanced there would be no erosion, washing, sedimentation, or raising.

Erosion, washing, sedimentation, raising up ALL require an imbalance of forces, that is, a net force to bring about a change. 5

Reading on…

This is not going to stop me persevering with reading the book*, but one can begin to lose confidence in a text in situations such as these. If you know the author is wrong on some points that you already know about, how can you be confident of their accounts of other topics that you are hoping to learn about?

Still, Prof. Thomson seems to be wrong about something that the majority of people tend to get wrong, often even after having studied the topic – so, perhaps this says more about the hold of common intuitive conceptions of motion than the quality of Prof. Thomson's scholarship. Just like many physics learners – he has learnt Newton's laws, but just does not seem to find them credible.

Sources cited:
  • Darwin, C. (1859). The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. John Murray.
  • Dawkins, R. (1988). The Blind Watchmaker. Penguin Books.
  • Paley, W. (1802/2006). Natural Theology: Or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (M. D. Eddy & D. Knight, Eds.). Oxford University Press.
  • Rosen, E. (1965/1995) Copernicus on the phases and the light of the planets, in Rosen, E. (1995). Copernicus and his successors (E. Hilfstein, Ed.). The Hambledon Press.
  • Taber, K. S., & Brock, R. (2018). A study to explore the potential of designing teaching activities to scaffold learning: understanding circular motion. In M. Abend (Ed.), Effective Teaching and Learning: Perspectives, strategies and implementation (pp. 45-85). New York: Nova Science Publishers. [Read the author's manuscript version]
  • Thomson, K. (2005). The Watch on the Heath: Science and religion before Darwin. HarperCollins.
  • Watts, M. and Taber, K. S. (1996) An explanatory gestalt of essence: students' conceptions of the 'natural' in physical phenomena, International Journal of Science Education, 18 (8), pp.939-954.
Notes

1 Though not in the world-view offered by general relativity where the mass of the sun distorts space-time enough for the earth to orbit.

2 The title track from Steve Winwood's 1980 solo album 'Arc of a Diver'

3 We have known since Kepler that the planets orbit the sun following ellipses (to a first order of approximation*), not perfect circles – but this does not change the fundamental point here: moving in an ellipse involves continuous changes of velocity. (* i.e., ignoring the perturbations due to the {much smaller} forces between the orbiting bodies.**)

[Added, 20220711]: these perturbations are very small compared with the main sun-planet interactions, but they can still be significant in other ways:

"…the single most spectacular achievement in the long history of computational astronomy, namely, the discovery of the planet Neptune through the perturbations which it produced in the motion of Uranus."

Rosen, 1965/1995, p.81

4 What is judged as 'natural' is often considered by people as not needing any further explanation (Watts and Taber, 1996).

5 This reference to Hutton's ideas seems to preview a more detailed treatment of the new geology in a later chapter in the book (that I have not yet reached), so perhaps as I read on I will find a clearer explanation of what is meant by these changes being based on a theory of balance of forces.* Still, the impression given in the extract quoted is that, as with orbits, a balance of forces brings about change.

* Addendum: I have now read on, see: 'Plus ça change – balancing forces is hard work'

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Counting both the bright and the very dim

What is 1% of a very large, unknown, number?

Keith S. Taber

1, skip 99; 2, skip 99; 3, skip 99; 4,… skip 99, 1 000 000 000!
(Image by FelixMittermeier from Pixabay)

How can we count the number of stars in the galaxy?

On the BBC radio programme 'More or Less' it was mooted that there might be one hundred billion (100 000 000 000) stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy (and that this might be a considerable underestimate).

The estimate was suggested by Prof. Catherine Heymans who is
the Astronomer Royal for Scotland and Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh.

Programme presenter Tim Harford was tackling a question sent in by a young listener (who is very almost four years of age) about whether there are more bees in the world than stars in the galaxy? (Spoiler alert: Prof. Catherine Heymans confessed to knowing less about bees than stars.)

An episode of 'More or Less' asks: Are there more bees in the world or stars in the galaxy?

Hatford asked how the 100 billion stars figure was arrived at:

"have we counted them, or got a computer to count them, or is it more a case of, well, you take a photograph of a section of sky and you sort of say well the rest is probably a bit like that?"

The last suggestion here is of course the basis for many surveys. As long as there is good reason to think a sample is representative of the wider population it is drawn from we can collect data from the sample and make inferences about the population at large.

Read about sampling a population

So, if we counted all the detectable stars in a typical 1% of the sky and then multiplied the count by 100 we would get an approximation to the total number of detectable stars in the whole sky. That would be a reasonable method to find approximately how many stars there are in the galaxy, as long as we thought all the detected stars were in our galaxy and that all the stars in our galaxy were detectable.

Prof. Heymans replied

"So, we have the European Space Agency Gaia mission up at the moment, it was launched in 2013, and that's currently mapping out 1% of all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, creating a three dimensional map. So, that's looking at 1 billion of the stars, and then to get an idea of how many others are there we look at how bright all the stars are, and we use our sort of models of how different types of stars live [sic] in our Milky Way galaxy to give us that estimate of how many stars are there."

Prof. Catherine Heymans interviewed on 'More or Less'

A tautology?

This seemed to beg a question: how can we know we are mapping 1% of stars, before we know how many stars there are?

This has the appearance of a tautology – a circular argument.

Read about tautology

To count the number of stars in the galaxy,
  • (i) count 1% of them, and then
  • (ii) multiply by 100.

So,

  • If we assume there are one hundred billion, then we need to
  • count one billion, and then
  • multiply by 100 to give…
  • one hundred billion.

Clearly that did not seem right. I am fairly sure that was not what Prof. Haymans meant. As this was a radio programme, the interview was presumably edited to fit within the limited time allocated for this item, so a listener can never be sure that a question and (apparently immediately direct) response that makes the edit fully reflects the original conversation.

Counting the bright ones

According to the website of the Gaia mission, "Gaia will achieve its goals by repeatedly measuring the positions of all objects down to magnitude 20 (about 400 000 times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye)." Hartman's suggestion that "you take a photograph of a section of sky and you sort of say well the rest is probably a bit like that?" seems very reasonable, until you realise that even with a powerful telescope sent outside of the earth's atmosphere, many of the stars in the galaxy may simply not be detectable. So, what we see cannot be considered to be fully representative of what is out there.

It is not then that the scientists have deliberately sampled 1%, but rather they are investigating EVERY star with an apparent brightness above a certain critical cut off. Whether a star makes the cut, depends on such factors as how bright it is (in absolute terms – which we might imagine we would measure from a standard distance 1) and how close it is, as well as whether the line of sight involves the starlight passing through interstellar dust that absorbs some (or all) of the radiation.

Of course, these are all strictly, largely, unknowns. Astrophysics relies a good on boot-strapping, where our best, but still developing, understanding of one feature is used to build models of other features. In such circumstances, observational tests of predictions from theory are often as much testing the underlying foundations upon which a model used to generate a prediction is built as that specific focal model itself. Knowledge moves on incrementally as adjustments are made to different aspects of interacting models.

Observations are theory-dependent

So, this is, in a sense, a circular process, but it is a virtuous circle rather than just a tautology as there are opportunities for correcting and improving the theoretical framework.

In a sense, what I have described here is true of science more generally, and so when an experiment fails to produce a result predicted by a new theory, it is generally possible to seek to 'save' the theory by suggesting the problem was (if not a human error) not in the actual theory being tested, but in some other part of the more extended theoretical network – such as the theory underpinning the apparatus used to collect data or the the theory behind the analysis used to treat data.

In most mature fields, however, these more foundational features are generally considered to be sound and unlikely to need modifying – so, a scientist who explains that their experiment did not produce the expected answer because electron microscopes or mass spectrometers or Fourier transform analyses do not work they way everyone has for decades thought they did would need to offer a very persuasive case.

However, compared to many other fields, astrophysics has much less direct access to the phenomena it studies (which are often vast in terms of absolute size, distance and duration), and largely relies on observing without being able to manipulate the phenomena, so understandably faces special challenges.

Why we need a theoretical model to finish the count

Researchers can use our best current theories to build a picture of how what we see relates to what is 'out there' given our best interpretations of existing observations. This is why the modelling that Prof. Heymans refers to is so important. Our current best theories tell us that the absolute brightness of stars (which is a key factor in deciding whether they will be detected in a sky survey) depends on their mass, and the stage of their 'evolution'.2

So, completing the count needs a model which allows data for detectable stars to be extrapolated, bearing in mind our best current understanding about the variations in frequencies of different kinds (age, size) of star, how stellar 'densities' vary in different regions of a spiral galaxy like ours, the distribution of dust clouds, and so forth.

…keep in mind we are off-centre, and then allow for the thinning out near the edges, remember there might be a supermassive black hole blocking our view through the centre, take into account dust, acknowledge dwarf stars tend to be missed, take into account that the most massive stars will have long ceased shining, then take away the number you first thought of, and add a bit for luck… (Image by WikiImages from Pixabay)

I have taken the liberty of offering an edited exchange

Hartford: "have we counted [the hundred billion stars], or got a computer to count them, or is it more a case of, well, you take a photograph of a section of sky and you sort of say well the rest is probably a bit like that?"

Heymans "So, we have the European Space Agency Gaia mission up at the moment, it was launched in 2013, and that's currently mapping out…all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy [that are at least magnitude 20 in brightness], creating a three dimensional map. So, that's looking at 1 billion of the [brightest] stars [as seen from our solar system], and then to get an idea of how many others are there we look at how bright all the stars are, and we use our models of how different types of stars [change over time 2] in our Milky Way galaxy to give us that estimate of how many stars are there."

No more tautology. But some very clever and challenging science.

(And are there more bees in the world or stars in the galaxy? The programme is available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00187wq.)

Note:

1 This issue of what we mean by the brightness of a star also arose in a recent post: Baking fresh electrons for the science doughnut

2 Stars are not alive, but it is common to talk about their 'life-cycles' and 'births' and 'deaths' as stars can change considerably (in brightness, colour, size) as the nuclear reactions at their core change over time once the hydrogen has all been reacted in fusion reactions.

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COVID is like photosynthesis because…

An analogy based on a science concept

Keith S. Taber

Photosynthesis illuminating a plant?
(Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)

Analogies, metaphors and similes are used in communication to help make the unfamiliar familiar by suggesting that some novel idea or phenomena being introduced is in some ways like something the reader/listener is already familiar with. Analogies, metaphors and similes are commonly used in science teaching, and also in science writing and journalism.

An analogy maps out similarities in structure between two phenomena or concepts. This example, from a radio programme, compared the COVID pandemic with photosynthesis.

Read about science analogies

Photosynthesis and the pandemic

Professor Will Davies of Goldsmiths, University of London suggested that:

"So, what we were particularly aiming to do, was to understand the collision between a range of different political economic factors of a pre-2020 world, and how they were sort of reassembled and deployed to cope with something which was without question unprecedented.

We used this metaphor of photosynthesis because if you think about photosynthesis in relation to plants, the sun both lights things up but at the same time it feeds them and helps them to grow, and I think one of the things the pandemic has done for social scientists is to serve both as a kind of illumination of things that previously maybe critical political economists and heterodox scholars were pointing to but now became very visible to the mainstream media and to mainstream politics. But at the same time it also accentuated and deepened some of those tendencies such as our reliance on various digital platforms, certain gender dynamics of work in the household, these sort of things that became acute and undeniable and potentially politicised over the course of 20230, 2021."

Prof. Will Davies, talking on 'Thinking Allowed' 1
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screenshot-2022-06-12-at-21.47.47.png
Will Davies, Professor in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London was talking to sociologist Prof. Laurie Taylor who presents the BBC programme 'Thinking Aloud' as part of an episode called 'Covid and change'

A scientific idea used as analogue

Prof. Davies refers to using "this metaphor of photosynthesis". However he goes on to suggest how the two things he is comparing are structurally similar – the pandemic has shone a light on social issues at the same time as providing the conditions for them to become more extreme, akin to how light both illuminates plants and changes them. A metaphor is an implicit comparison where the reader/listener is left to interpret the comparison, but a metaphor or simile that is explicitly developed to explain the comparison can become an analogy.

Read about science metaphors

Often science concepts are introduced by analogy to more familiar everyday ideas, objects or events. Here, however, a scientific concept, photosynthesis is used as the analogue – the source used to explain something novel. Prof. Davies assumes listeners will be familiar enough with this science concept for it to helpful in introducing his research.

Mischaracterising photosynthesis?

A science teacher might not like the notion that the sun feeds plants – indeed if a student suggested this in a science class it would likely be judged as an alternative conception. In photosynthesis, carbon dioxide (from the atmosphere) and water (usually absorbed from the soil) provide the starting materials, and the glucose that is produced (along with oxygen) enables other processes – such as growth which relies on other substances also being absorbed from the soil. (So-called 'plant foods', which would be better characterised as plant nutritional supplements, contain sources of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). Light is necessary for photosynthesis, but the sunlight is not best considered 'food'.

One might also argue that Prof. Davies has misidentified the source for his analogy, and perhaps he should rather have suggested sunlight as the source metaphor for his comparison as sunlight both illuminates plants and enables them to grow. Photosynthesis takes place inside chloroplasts within a plant's tissues, and does not illuminate the plant. However, Prof. Davies' expertise is in political economy, not natural science, and it was good to see a social scientist looking to use a scientific idea to explain his research.

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Baking fresh electrons for the science doughnut

Faster-than-light electrons race from a sitting start and are baked to give off light brighter than millions of suns that can be used to image tiny massage balls: A case of science communication

Keith S. Taber

(The pedantic science teacher)

Ockham's razor

Ockham's razor (also known as Occam's razor) is a principle that is sometimes applied as a heuristic in science, suggesting that explanations should not be unnecessarily complicated. Faced with a straightforward explanation, and an alternative convoluted explanation, then all other things being equal we should prefer the former – not simply accept it, but to treat is as the preferred hypothesis to test out first.

Ockham's Razor is also an ABC radio show offering "a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science". The show used to offer recorded essays (akin to the format of BBC's A Point of View), but now tends to record short live talks.

I've just listened to an episode called The 'science donut' – in fact I listened several time as I thought it was fascinating – as in a few minutes there was much to attend to.

The 'Science Donut': a recent episode of Ockham's Razor

I approached the episode as someone with an interest in science, of course, but also as an educator with an ear to the ways in which we communicate science in teaching. Teachers do not simply present sequences of information about science, but engage pedagogy (i.e., strategies and techniques to support learning). Other science communicators (whether journalists, or scientists themselves directly addressing the public) use many of the same techniques. Teaching conceptual material (such as science principles, theories, models…) can be seen as making the unfamiliar familiar, and the constructivist perspective on how learning occurs suggests this is supported by showing the learner how that which is currently still unfamiliar, is in some way like something familiar, something they already have some knowledge/experience of.

Science communicators may not be trained as teachers, so may sometimes be using these techniques in a less considered or even less deliberate manner. That is, people use analogy, metaphor, simile, and so forth, as a normal part of everyday talk to such an extent that these tropes may be generated automatically, in effect, implicitly. When we are regularly talking about an area of expertise we almost do not have to think through what we are going to say. 1

Science communicators also often have much less information about their audience than teachers: a radio programme/podcast, for example, can be accessed by people of a wide range of background knowledge and levels of formal qualifications.

One thing teachers often learn to do very early in their careers is to slow down the rate of introducing new information, and focus instead on a limited number of key points they most want to get across. Sometimes science in the media is very dense in the frequency of information presented or the background knowledge being drawn upon. (See, for example, 'Genes on steroids? The high density of science communication'.)

A beamline scientist

Dr Emily Finch, who gave this particular radio talk, is a beamline scientist at the Australian Synchrotron. Her talk began by recalling how her family visited the Synchrotron facility on an open day, and how she later went on to work there.

She then gave an outline of the functioning of the synchrotron and some examples of its applications. Along the way there were analogies, metaphors, anthropomorphism, and dubiously fast electrons.

The creation of the god particle

To introduce the work of the particle accelerator, Dr Finch reminded her audience of the research to detect the Higgs boson.

"Do you remember about 10 years ago scientists were trying to make the Higgs boson particle? I see some nods. They sometimes call it the God particle and they had a theory it existed, but they had not been able to prove it yet. So, they decided to smash together two beams of protons to try to make it using the CERN large hadron collider in Switzerland…You might remember that they did make a Higgs boson particle".

This is a very brief summary of a major research project that involved hundreds of scientists and engineers from a great many countries working over years. But this abbreviation is understandable as this was not Dr Finch's focus, but rather an attempt to link her actual focus, the Australian Synchrotron, to something most people will already know something about.

However, aspects of this summary account may have potential to encourage the development of, or reinforce an existing, common alternative conception shared by many learners. This is regarding the status of theories.

In science, theories are 'consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world', yet students often understand theories to be nothing more than just ideas, hunches, guesses – conjectures at best (Taber, Billingsley, Riga & Newdick, 2015). In a very naive take on the nature of science, a scientist comes up with an idea ('theory') which is tested, and is either 'proved' or rejected.

This simplistic take is wrong in two regards – something does not become an established scientific theory until it is supported by a good deal of evidence; and scientific ideas are not simply proved or disproved by testing, but rather become better supported or less credible in the light of the interpretation of data. Strictly scientific ideas are never finally proved to become certain knowledge, but rather remain as theories. 2

In everyday discourse, people will say 'I have a theory' to mean no more that 'I have a suggestion'.

A pedantic scientist or science teacher might be temped to respond:

"no you don't, not yet,"

This is sometimes not the impression given by media accounts – presumably because headlines such as 'research leads to scientist becoming slightly more confident in theory' do not have the same impact as 'cure found', 'discovery made, or 'theory proved'.

Read about scientific certainty in the media

The message that could be taken away here is that scientists had the idea that Higgs boson existed, but they had not been able to prove it till they were able to make one. But the CERN scientists did not have a Higgs boson to show the press, only the data from highly engineered detectors, analysed through highly complex modelling. Yet that analysis suggested they had recorded signals that closely matched what they expected to see when a short lived Higgs decayed allowing them to conclude that it was very likely one had been formed in the experiment. The theory motivating their experiment was strongly supported – but not 'proved' in an absolute sense.

The doughnut

Dr Finch explained that

"we do have one of these particle accelerators here in Australia, and it's called the Australian Synchrotron, or as it is affectionately known the science donut

…our synchrotron is a little different from the large hadron collider in a couple of main ways. So, first, we just have the one beam instead of two. And second, our beam is made of electrons instead of protons. You remember electrons, right, they are those tiny little negatively charged particles and they sit in the shells around the atom, the centre of the atom."

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor

One expects that members of the audience would be able to respond to this description and (due to previous exposure to such representations) picture images of atoms with electrons in shells. 'Shells' is of course a kind of metaphor here, even if one which with continual use has become a so-called 'dead metaphor'. Metaphor is a common technique used by teachers and other communicators to help make the unfamiliar familiar. In some simplistic models of atomic structure, electrons are considered to be arranged in shells (the K shell, the L shell, etc.), and a simple notation for electronic configuration based on these shells is still often used (e.g., Na as 2.8.1).

Read about science metaphors

However, this common way of talking about shells has the potential to mislead learners. Students can, and sometimes do, develop the alternative conception that atoms have actual physical shells of some kind, into which the electrons are located. The shells scientists refer to are abstractions, but may be misinterpreted as material entities, as actual shells. The use of anthropomorphic language, that is that the electrons "sit in the shells", whilst helping to make the abstract ideas familiar and so perhaps comfortable, can reinforce this. After all, it is difficult to sit in empty space without support.

The subatomic grand prix?

Dr Finch offers her audience an analogy for the synchrotron: the electrons "are zipping around. I like to think of it kind of like a racetrack." Analogy is another common technique used by teachers and other communicators to help make the unfamiliar familiar.

Read about science analogies

Dr Finch refers to the popularity of the Australian Formula 1 (F1) Grand Prix that takes place in Melbourne, and points out

"Now what these race enthusiasts don't know is that just a bit further out of the city we have a race track that is operating six days a week that is arguably far more impressive.

That's right, it is the science donut. The difference is that instead of having F1s doing about 300 km an hour, we have electrons zipping around at the speed of light. That's about 300 thousand km per second.

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor

There is an interesting slippage – perhaps a deliberate rhetoric flourish – from the synchrotron being "kind of like a racetrack" (a simile) to being "a race track" (a metaphor). Although racing electrons lacks a key attraction of an F1 race (different drivers of various nationalities driving different cars built by competing teams presented in different livery – whereas who cares which of myriad indistinguishable electrons would win a race?) that does not undermine the impact of the mental imagery encouraged by this analogy.

This can be understood as an analogy rather than just a simile or metaphor as Dr Finch maps out the comparison:

target conceptanalogue
a synchotrona racetrack
operates six days a week[Many in the audience would have known that the Melbourne Grand Prix takes place on a 'street circuit' that is only set up for racing one weekend each year.]
racing electronsracing 'F1s' (i.e., Grand Prix cars)
at the speed of light at about 300 km an hour
An analogy between the Australian Synchrotron and the Melbourne Grand Prix circuit

So, here is an attempt to show how science has something just like the popular race track, but perhaps even more impressive – generating speeds orders of magnitude greater than even Lewis Hamilton could drive.

They seem to like their F1 comparisons at the Australian Synchrotron. I found another ABC programme ('The Science Show') where Nobel Laureate "Brian Schmidt explains, the synchrotron is not being used to its best capability",

"the analogy here is that we invested in a $200 million Ferrari and decided that we wouldn't take it out of first gear and do anything other than drive it around the block. So it seems a little bit of a waste"

Brian Schmidt (Professor of Astronomy, and Vice Chancellor, at Australian National University)
A Ferrari being taken for a spin around the block in Melbourne (Image by Lee Chandler from Pixabay )

How fast?

But did Dr Finch suggest there that the electrons were travelling at the speed of light? Surely not? Was that a slip of the tongue?

"So, we bake our electrons fresh in-house using an electron gun. So, this works like an old cathode ray tube that we used to have in old TVs. So, we have this bit of tungsten metal and we heat it up and when it gets red hot it shoots out electrons into a vacuum. We then speed up the electrons, and once they leave the electron gun they are already travelling at about half the speed of light. We then speed them up even more, and after twelve metres, they are already going at the speed of light….

And it is at this speed that we shoot them off into a big ring called the booster ring, where we boost their energy. Once their energy is high enough we shoot them out again into another outer ring called the storage ring."

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor

So, no, the claim is that the electrons are accelerated to the speed of light within twelve metres, and then have their energy boosted even more.

But this is contrary to current physics. According to the currently accepted theories, and specifically the special theory of relativity, only entities which have zero rest mass, such as photons, can move at the speed of light.

Electrons have a tiny mass by everyday standards (about 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 g), but they are still 'massive' particles (i.e., particles with mass) and it would take infinite energy to accelerate a single tiny electron to the speed of light. So, given our current best understanding, this claim cannot be right.

I looked to see what was reported on the website of the synchrotron itself.

The electron beam travels just under the speed of light – about 299,792 kilometres a second.

https://www.ansto.gov.au/research/facilities/australian-synchrotron/overview

Strictly the electrons do not travel at the speed of light but very nearly the speed of light.

The speed of light in a vacuum is believed to be 299 792 458 ms-1 (to the nearest metre per second), but often in science we are working to limited precision, so this may be rounded to 2.998 ms-1 for many purposes. Indeed, sometimes 3 x 108 ms-1 is good enough for so-called 'back of the envelope' calculations. So, in a sense, Dr Finch was making a similar approximation.

But this is one approximation that a science teacher might want to avoid, as electrons travelling at the speed of light may be approximately correct, but is also thought to be physically impossible. That is, although the difference in magnitude between

  • (i) the maximum electron speeds achieved in the synchrotron, and
  • (ii) the speed of light,

might be a tiny proportional difference – conceptually the distinction is massive in terms of modern physics. (I imagine Dr Finch is aware of all this, but perhaps her background in geology does not make this seem as important as it might appear to a physics teacher.)

Dr Finch does not explicitly say that the electrons ever go faster than the speed of light (unlike the defence lawyer in a murder trial who claimed nervous impulses travel faster than the speed of light) but I wonder how typical school age learners would interpret "they are already going at the speed of light….And it is at this speed that we shoot them off into a big ring called the booster ring, where we boost their energy". I assume that refers to maintaining their high speeds to compensate for energy transfers from the beam: but only because I think Dr Finch cannot mean accelerating them beyond the speed of light. 3

The big doughnut

After the reference to how "we bake our electrons fresh in-house", Dr Finch explains

And so it is these two rings, these inner and outer rings, that give the synchrotron its nick name, the science donut. Just like two rings of delicious baked electron goodness…

So, just to give you an idea of scale here, this outer ring, the storage ring, is about forty one metres across, so it's a big donut."

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor
A big doughnut? The Australian Synchrotron (Source Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation)

So, there is something of an extended metaphor here. The doughnut is so-called because of its shape, but this doughnut (a bakery product) is used to 'bake' electrons.

If audience members were to actively reflect on and seek to analyse this metaphor then they might notice an incongruity, perhaps a mixed metaphor, as the synchrotron seems to shift from being that which is baked (a doughnut) to that doing the baking (baking the electrons). Perhaps the electrons are the dough, but, if so, they need to go into the oven.

But, of course, humans implicitly process language in real time, and poetic language tends to be understood intuitively without needing reflection. So, a trope such as this may 'work' to get across the flavour (sorry) of an idea, even if under close analysis (by our pedantic science teacher again) the metaphor appears only half-baked.

Perverting the electrons

Dr Finch continued

"Now the electrons like to travel in straight lines, so to get them to go round the rings we have to bend them using magnets. So, we defect the electrons around the corners [sic] using electromagnetic fields from the magnets, and once we do this the electrons give off a light, called synchrotron light…

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor

Now electrons are not sentient and do not have preferences in the way that someone might prefer to go on a family trip to the local synchrotron rather than a Formula 1 race. Electrons do not like to go in straight lines. They fit with Newton's first law – the law of inertia. An electron that is moving ('travelling') will move ('travel') in a straight line unless there is net force to pervert it. 4

If we describe this as electrons 'liking' to travel in straight lines it would be just as true to say electrons 'like' to travel at a constant speed. Language that assigns human feelings and motives and thoughts to inanimate objects is described as anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism is a common way of making the unfamiliar familiar, and it is often used in relation to molecules, electrons, atoms and so forth. Sadly, when learners pick up this kind of language, they do not always appreciate that it is just meant metaphorically!

Read about anthropomorphism

The brilliant light

Dr Finch tells her audience that

"This synchrotron light is brighter than a million suns, and we capture it using special equipment that comes off that storage ring.

And this equipment will focus and tune and shape that beam of synchrotron light so we can shoot it at samples like a LASER."

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor

Whether the radiation is 'captured' is a moot point, as it no longer exists once it has been detected. But what caught my attention here was the claim that the synchrotron radiation was brighter than a million suns. Not because I necessarily thought this bold claim was 'wrong', but rather I did not understand what it meant.

The statement seems sensible at first hearing, and clearly it means qualitatively that the radiation is very intense. But what did the quantitative comparison actually mean? I turned again to the synchrotron webpage. I did not find an answer there, but on the site of a UK accelerator I found

"These fast-moving electrons produce very bright light, called synchrotron light. This very intense light, predominantly in the X-ray region, is millions of times brighter than light produced from conventional sources and 10 billion times brighter than the sun."

https://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home/About/FAQs/About-Synchrotrons.html#

Sunlight spreads out and its intensity drops according to an inverse square law. Move twice as far away from a sun, and the radiation intensity drops to a quarter of what it was when you were closer. Move to ten times as far away from the sun than before, and the intensity is 1% of what it was up close.

The synchrotron 'light' is being shaped into a beam "like a LASER". A LASER produces a highly collimated beam – that is, the light does not (significantly) spread out. This is why football hooligans choose LASER pointers rather than conventional torches to intimidate players from a safe distance in the crowd.

Comparing light with like

This is why I do not understand how the comparison works, as the brightness of a sun depends how close you are too it – a point previously discussed here in relation to NASA's Parker solar probe (NASA puts its hand in the oven). If I look out at the night sky on a clear moonlight night then surely I am exposed to light from more "than a million suns" but most of them are so far away I cannot even make them out. Indeed there are faint 'nebulae' I can hardly perceive that are actually galaxies shining with the brightness of billions of suns. 5 If that is the comparison, then I am not especially impressed by something being "brighter than a million suns".

How bright is the sun? it depends which planet you are observing from. (Images by AD_Images and Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

We are told not to look directly at the sun as it can damage our eyes. But a hypothetical resident of Neptune or Uranus could presumably safely stare at the sun (just as we can safely stare at much brighter stars than our sun because they are so far away). So we need to ask :"brighter than a million suns", as observed from how far away?

How bright is the sun? That depends on viewing conditions
(Image by UteHeineSch from Pixabay)

Even if referring to our Sun as seen from the earth, the brightness varies according to its apparent altitude in the sky. So, "brighter than a million suns" needs to be specified further – as perhaps "more than a million times brighter than the sun as seen at midday from the equator on a cloudless day"? Of course, again, only the pedantic science teacher is thinking about this: everyone knows well enough what being brighter than a million suns implies. It is pretty intense radiation.

Applying the technology

Dr Finch went on to discuss a couple of applications of the synchrotron. One related to identifying pigments in art masterpieces. The other was quite timely in that it related to investigating the infectious agent in COVID.

"Now by now you have probably seen an image of the COVID virus – it looks like a ball with some spikes on it. Actually it kind of looks like those massage balls that your physio makes you buy when you turn thirty and need to to ease all your physical ailments that you suddenly have."

Dr Emily Finch talking on Ockham's Razor
Coronavirus particles and massage balls…or is it…
(Images by Ulrike Leone and Daniel Roberts from Pixabay)

Again there is an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar. These microscopic virus particles are a bit like something familiar from everyday life. Such comparisons are useful where the everyday object is already familiar.

By now I've seen plenty of images of the coronavirus responsible for COVID, although I do not have a physiotherapist (perhaps this is a cultural difference – Australians being so sporty?) So, I found myself using this comparison in reverse – imagining that the "massage balls that your physio makes you buy" must be like larger versions of coronavirus particles. Having looked up what these massage balls (a.k.a. hedgehog balls it seems) look like, I can appreciate the similarity. Whether the manufacturers of massage balls will appreciate their products being compared to enormous coronavirus particles is, perhaps, another matter.

Work cited:
  • Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students' thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just 'an idea someone has'. The Curriculum Journal, 1-34. doi: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1043926
Notes:

1 At least, depending how we understand 'thinking'. Clearly there are cognitive processes at work even when we continue a conversation 'on auto pilot' (to employ a metaphor) whilst consciously focusing on something else. Only a tiny amount of our cognitive processing (thinking?) occurs within conscousness where we reflect and deliberate (i.e., explicit thinking?) We might label the rest as 'implicit thinking', but this processing varies greatly in its closeness to deliberation – and some aspects (for example, word recognition when listening to speech; identifying the face of someone we see) might seem to not deserve the label 'thinking'?

2 Of course the evidence for some ideas becomes so overwhelming that in principle we treat some theories as certain knowledge, but in principle they remain provisional knowledge. And the history of science tells us that sometimes even the most well-established ideas (e.g., Newtonian physics as an absolutely precise description of dynamics; mass and energy as distinct and discrete) may need revision in time.

3 Since I began drafting this article, the webpage for the podcast has been updated with a correction: "in this talk Dr Finch says electrons in the synchrotron are accelerated to the speed of light. They actually go just under that speed – 99.99998% of it to be exact."

4 Perversion in the sense of the distortion of an original course

5 The term nebulae is today reserved for clouds of dust and gas seen in the night sky in different parts of our galaxy. Nebulae are less distinct than stars. Many of what were originally identified as nebulae are now considered to be other galaxies immense distances away from our own.

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