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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Culturally an academic

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 9, 2012

I listened to Samuel Hansen’s interview with local-boy-made-good Neil deGrasse Tyson (that’s an in joke for those who have listened, so you’d better go and listen, right?).

They speak about mathematics in astrophysics (“math in astrophysic”?), space exploration & research, outreach and more.

In talking mathematics, Dr Tyson covers an unplanned impact of mathematics and also offers this gem:

You visit China you want to speak Chinese so you can communicate with the culture. If you want to talk to the Universe you have to know mathematics.

Perhaps the most interesting part of their conversation, to me, is the discussion of outreach and helping children develop and grow their natural enthusiasm and curiosity into a career in science. Dr Tyson also engagingly makes the case for fundamental research and investment in science research in economic terms, including the role of scientists in communicating their work to the public.

The interview was a really interesting and engaging eighteen minutes of audio. I am grateful that Dr Tyson and others are willing to give a little time to this sort of activity, and once again grateful that Samuel somehow manages to eke out a living, for the moment, while producing this sort of content. If you have it in your power to somehow help him to keep doing this, please do so (possibilities range from offering him somewhere to sleep in LA later this month to offering Samuel a job which makes the most of his talents).

One part of the interview that really resonated with me was when Samuel asked about Dr Tyson moving away from more traditional academic work towards what I would call outreach – writing books and broadcasting – and administration – directing the Hayden Planetarium – while still calling himself an academic. In his answer Dr Tyson describes himself as “culturally an academic”.

People often ask what I do and its quite hard for some people to understand because I’m not easily pigeonholed. This was brought home this week when I gave my history of cryptography lecture at Salford and my host presented the awkward question, “how should I introduce you?”

Technically I have an administrator employment contract and part of my job is administering funding and collecting and collating reports, yet I see my primary interest as teaching mathematics at university and my work as doing or developing research into improving that teaching. Although I am not an academic in the sense of doing mathematical research and being employed on an academic contract, my research is into teaching and I engage in academic-like activities like teaching, outreach, attending conferences and active membership of professional bodies and learned societies. I see my future as being a mathematics lecturer whose research is into improving his teaching. I like the notation of seeing myself as “culturally an academic”.

Experimental checking

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2011

Yesterday I mentioned the importance of experimentally checking mathematical results in a piece over at Second Rate Minds. You may know that Second Rate Minds is the writing exercise blog on which Samuel Hansen and I take turns writing and editing each others pieces while we enjoy playing with different styles. This time I decided to try to find a press release in the morning and have it written up into a piece within the day (the transatlantic time difference and working hours of my editor notwithstanding). From my experience covering mathematics in the news on the Math/Maths Podcast, I am aware that time and again we see the same story almost word-for-word on different websites, all sourced from the same press release. I didn’t just want to repeat the press release, but tried to give it my own spin. The result I found confirmed an assumption behind diffusion and I wrote of the importance of work that relates the assumptions behind computations to the scenario being modelled.

Also this week, I arrived home from the IMA East Midlands Branch talk and wrote an account of this over on the IMA Blog “IMA Maths Blogger”. In this talk Prof Chris Linton at Loughborough gave an engaging account of the discovery of Neptune, which was found following a mathematical prediction based on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. At the end, Chris also mentioned a prediction of an extra planet, Vulcan, used to attempt to explain a discrepancy in the orbit of Mercury. In fact Mercury’s orbit was different from the predictions made by Newton’s Laws because of a limitation of those laws in describing physical reality and one of the first tests of Einstein’s relativity was that it predicted the orbit of Mercury correctly. Given the recent Nobel Prize awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae“, observations that led to the theory of dark energy, Chris left us with the thought: is dark energy a Neptune situation (something out there we can’t yet see) or a Vulcan situation (a limitation of current theory)?

This morning I listened to an interview with Brian Schmidt on the Pod Delusion in which he described the process of discovering the unexpected result. Attempting to check whether data on supernovae showed the universe expanding at a constant rate or slowing down, Schmidt explained they found something altogether more unexpected:

That data showed, jeez, the universe wasn’t slowing down at all, it was speeding up. And so that was a real crazy thing to be confronted with. It didn’t make a lot of sense. It seemed just impossible so that was a pretty scary time when we first saw that result … Initially you just start looking for problems and checking and rechecking everything but after a while you’ve done everything you can and nothing’s obviously wrong so we opened it up to the team and said ‘okay guys, we’ve got this crazy result. Any test you want to us to do we’ll test. We think we’ve tested them all at this point but anything you want to do’. And the group came up with all sorts of things to think about so we went through and worked more but at some point it slowly sunk in that the universal acceleration that we were seeing just wasn’t going to go away. So it took a few months but we did everything we can several times, had several people do it, and everyone just got the same answer.

Imagine my surprise later on today when I heard the same story again, this time from Marcus du Sautoy on his BBC documentary on the recent ‘faster than light’ neutrino discovery. Talking about research which appears to show neutrinos travelling fractionally faster than the speed of light, Marcus said:

Under our current understanding of the universe, this just isn’t possible. The researchers themselves were pretty shocked by the results. They spent many months looking for mistakes. They brought in outside experts. They pored over the figures hundreds of times, searching for an error … but they couldn’t find any mistakes, so they decided to publish.

Of course, the first result has led to major developments in astrophysics over the last decade, while the later remains to be verified. Still, when you hear about teams rushing to be the first to publish some result, and when people seemed so quick to dismiss the neutrino result, it’s quite striking to hear how long the original researchers spent privately checking their results.

I think this checking of observations against theory – confirming a theory, rejecting one or finding its limits – and the process behind doing so is interesting and points to the importance of relating your theory back to the real world context it is modelling. You might justify the theory or you might not. Either way, who knows, you may discover something remarkable.