SCIENCE FAIR: A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC FILM

This will be my ninth year as a judge at the Austin Energy Regional Science Festival. I found this film shelved in the non-fiction videos at my neighborhood branch public library. It was a lot of fun to watch. However, any adventure story will draw criticism from those who truly live the facts. So, too, does the broad treatment of this 90-minute documentary fail to reveal important details. That all being as it may, National Geographic delivered a good overview of the kids, their parents, and teachers. Although generalizations must fail in the face of individual histories, the film does show how necessary factual truths about the sociology of science play out.

First of all, the kids are individuals with their own motivations. Deeper still, curiosity is a primary. Some people have more of it than others. That motivation is a door which opens from the inside. As Howard Roark told Peter Keating in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in order to get things done for other people, you have to love the doing. Whether your goal is to mitigate the Zika virus or to build a flying wing—or to ship office supplies—the process itself must echo who you are on your own terms. 

Kashfia Rahman found no visibility in her school. They had three gyms and a weight room and football team with a 0-9 record. Still, it was the coach who helped her when no other teacher would. That is all the more disturbing because she had taken 2^nd place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair the year before. I sympathized and empathized. Austin, Texas, has a major university with Nobel laureates on the faculty, but they are hung like trophy heads in a man cave because this is a town with no science museum. 

2018 South by Southwest Film Festival Award
2018 Portland International Film Award
40th News and Documentary Emmy Award
Available from National Geographic here

Moreover, two years in a row, it was an honor and a privilege for me to identify and promote an entrant in Behavioral and Social Science who had to turn to the University for help with statistics because none of her math or science teachers would make time for her. Through UT, she found graduate students who were interested in her work and who tutored her in mathematics. 

I have seen that played out often. Talented students from rural schools do good work, but are not up to fifth place standards because they had no support at school or at home. No one would or could help them with the fit and finish and polish that let a good idea shine. 

That subplot does play out in this documentary. All of the ISEF participantss were driven by their own internal engines of creation. And I see that in every entrant here at the Austin Energy Regional Science Festival. But Jericho High School had nine exhibits at ISEF because they had one teacher, Dr. Serena McCalla, dedicated to science research. On the other hand, Robbie Barrat did not place at ISEF—though he achieved much just in qualifying—and he did not get accepted to any of the colleges he applied to. His high school math teacher was less concerned with his interest in number theory than in the fact that he was not doing his homework. However, Robbie was hired by a Silicon Valley firm specifically because of his ISEF presentation on number theory.

That is another story line that was missing. Here at the Austin Energy Regional Science Festival, we have many special awards. Given out by the military, the Society of Women Engineers, and others, they are independent of the official rules and standards. 

The documentary said nothing about the process of judging. The assumption that qualified working scientists objectively rate each competitor based on their presentation of their work is wrong on three premises. 

First, the kids do not know in advance what category will give them the best visibility for an award. Sciences overlap: biology with chemistry, chemistry with physics, physics with engineering. Where do you place a project in environmental engineering that centers on an optically-based automatic data device invented by the student? You do not know what kinds of “scientists” or “engineers” will see your work. 

On that score, the kids are pushing the limits of what we know. A working scientist or engineer knows their own field, but cannot know all of the event horizons that grab the interests of thousands of young geniuses. And they are geniuses, mostly because they are young. We know that about science and how it is practiced.

Second, judging is subjective. We follow a rubric. It is not all just willy-nilly touchy-feely, but the rubric is only a guide. Winners stand out. It is obvious by inspection. You know a good, solid experiment and presentation, and you know an exceptional one. That judgement does come from work experience, especially in STEM where everyone is smart, but some few are just a little smarter, work a little harder, worry a problem a little deeper. 

The arithmetic of judging winnows the best of the best into a winner-take-all competition. In a crowded field, a project will be narrowly surpassed by others just as good. Placed in a different category, someone who does not make fifth place might easily make third, second, or even first. Moreover, judging is subjective because it is a social event. I lost arguments about the facts of behavioral science to people with better social presence. Places are awarded to exhibits that have strong advocates.

Third, the documentary gave the false impression that the canned speech is a key to success. We do not stand and listen to a child recite a memorized sound bite. As soon as the sing-song starts, we cut them off with a question. We receive their abstracts in advance. They set up their boards the night before and once they leave the hall, we walk the floor and spend long minutes with each exhibit. We read their field notes and their binders. We read their boards. We run our own database searches and do our own thinking and reflecting. And we talk it all out among ourselves and find consensus. But it starts with shutting the child up and asking them questions to see what they really know based on what they did.

The only study guide based on this film that I found online (from the Chicago International Film Festival here) seemed to me to have been written by someone who was trying hard to make science and science fairs interesting, rather than by someone who actually finds them rewarding. 

  

Among the very many resources online is this: “How to Answer the 5 Most Common Questions from a Science Fair Judge” (from Scientific American guest blogs). 

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2017 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 

2016 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 

2015 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 

2014 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival

Enerdyne and Brain Storm in Suttons Bay

While visiting family May 17-20, I stopped in at Enerdyne to shop for an optical adapter for my telescope. They were very helpful. They found the part that I needed. I also bought two pairs of small forceps (“tweezers”) and four bar magnets.

Enerdyne sells Petoskey stones, but I did not see any out on display. So, I went next door to Brain Storm and found one there. While at Brain Storm, I bought a game, "Word A Round," for Laurel and me.

Elaine and Stu were working the store on Saturday.
Dick Cookman, formerly a science instructor
at Northwestern College, is the owner.

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BIG BANG THEORY: MORE FRIENDS THAN SEINFELD

Friends and Seinfeld were the most successful comedies on television because they appealed to wide audiences. That may seem tautological: The fact that Big Bang Theory has now surpassed them indicates a cultural shift in America. The widespread acceptance of Big Bang Theory derives not just from the writing and acting, but from a general interest and appreciation for science.

To some extent, this is a measure of pretense. More people claim to watch PBS and listen to NPR than actually do because it is expected as a sign of culture, learning, and social standing—at least among some people. The ratings for BBT are more reliable than that. It remains that very few of the millions who enjoy the humor freeze the frames to read the white boards. True fans know that the erasable boards contain physics equations that underscore passing elements of the dialog. Sometimes they frame the running narrative. The show is funny and the characters are compelling without it.

(For four seasons, the show was supported by a scientific website, Big Blog Theory written by their science advisor, UCLA’s David Saltzberg.  The final post, which footnoted “The Raiders Minimization” (Season Seven, in fact), was November 10, 2013, here. David Salzberg interviewed by NPR here.)

It raises a deeper question about the nature of comedy in particular, and fiction and literature more generally. Friends was inclusive. It had a large cast of ordinary people from several overlapping urban micro-cultures. Seinfeld was point-of-view, observational humor, with Jerry Seinfeld as our lens, even as we glanced aside to share with George, Elaine, and Kramer.

We can identify with the characters because we know them, perhaps all too well. When I first brought BBT home from the library in 2009, Laurel could not watch even the first episode. It was too embarrassing because it was too much like the people she worked with at the University of Michigan. Personally, I just thought that it was because she has so much in common with Sheldon. The fact is that even those millions who do not see themselves in the characters – as with Friends and Seinfeld – know people like them, again, as with Friends and Seinfeld. The difference between then and now can be attributed to a sociological “tech effect.”   

BBT is just one of many high-tech shows, such as the CSI franchise, N3MBERS, and Bones. Even NCIS is as much about Abbey, Duckie, and their labs, as it is about the marriages and marksmanship of Leroy Jethro Gibbs; and McGee graduated from MIT. The “tech effect” was the label given to the so-called “CSI Effect” in complaints from prosecutors that jurors were expecting sometimes ridiculous physical evidence, such as fingerprints lifted from grass. (See “The CSI Effect” earlier on this blog here  and “Junk Criminology as Pseudo-science” here.) Researchers Barak, Kim, and Shelton found that less educated jurors wanted "scientific" evidence. Educated people just trusted the prosecutor, worrisome as that is.

That nonetheless may reflect the wider “Flynn Effect” which posits that the general IQ is rising and that we are measurably smarter than we were 100 years ago. That being as it may, it is apparent to me that too many people still believe a lot of really stupid claims. It may be a slippery slope from speculation to mythology, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from Batman to Thor, from putting climate science and creation science in the same category.

A recent Pew Research poll on basic science may be disappointing because only 78% of 3278 randomly chosen Americans got 9 out of 12 right. You can take their quiz here. And read the analysis here.  However, as Wired writer Rhett Alain pointed out about a different quiz (here), these instant investigations ask not about scientific thinking but about the memorization of isolated facts. Alain was responding to a now-classic pop quiz given by Prof. Jon Miller of Michigan State University back in 2008 (see here and here ). One extension that Miller reported then was the fact that Americans tend to score slightly higher than Japanese or Europeans.

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Backyard Astronomy

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Paul Erdős was easily the most influential mathematician of the 20^th century, and arguably so for all time.  He published 1475 papers almost all in collaboration.  Mathematicians have Erdős Numbers.  Your number is 1 if you co-authored with him, 2 if you co-authored with a co-author, and so on.  Movie star Natalie Portman has an Erdős number of 7.  Danika McKellar’s 4 is lower than her Kevin Bacon number. 

Erdős’s work was beyond prolific. He knew how to offer motivating challenges to people working at all levels of mathematics from his academic peers to children.  In that, Paul Erdős was responsible for hundreds of proven insights that extended the frontiers of number theory. 

The fact that Erdős’s life (1913-1996) intersected so many others allowed Paul Hoffman’s biography  to explore the domain and range of the history of mathematics.  The Greeks, Fibonacci, and pi are here along with Hardy, Ramanujan, and  transfinite numbers, as well a bit of graph theory, and “what’s behind door number two?”

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman (Hyperion, 1998) explains most of the mathematics with integers.  After all, God created the integers and we built the rest – or so it was claimed by Leopold Kronecker (1821-1893) and echoed by Stephen Hawking.  As a result, many of these puzzles could be explained to a child in third through ninth grade.  The fact is, though, that few would be.  The stampede for standardized testing in K-12 education forces teachers to focus on the examinations to the detriment of the true understanding that comes from the artful competence of leisure and play.

Consider Ramsey theory.  Among the pursuits of Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930) was the question of the smallest possible "universe" that contains some element.  How many ordinary people would you have to fetch at random in order to be guaranteed one of each sex (not gender)?  Three, right?  If you want to plan a party, what is the smallest number of guests that guarantees that three of them must know each other?  Six; no proof is offered, so it must be hard.  (The opposite problem that no three of them will know each other is the same problem, again stated without proof.)  If you wrote out the first so-many integers in any order you wanted, how many would you need to guarantee a run of eleven in a row ascending (or descending)? 101, but 100 might work for special cases. To find a string of length n+1, you must have a universe of n^2 + 1.  Anyone in a first-term computer programming class could write a "Ramsey generator." 

Reading the book while commuting to work on the city busses, I misread one of the problems and worked a different one entirely.  It so happens that any odd positive integer raised to any integer power can always be expressed as the sum of two consecutive integers:  9^2 = 81; 81= 40+41.  7^5 = 16807 = 8403+8404. 

Suggestive as isolated cases may be, in mathematics, we need proof, and the more general the proof, better.  Best of all is a simple proof.  And a proof must reveal not merely that something is true, but why it must be true.  As abstract as mathematics is, when you work with integers these necessary truths became necessary factual truths because party guests and anything else we count are sensible evidentiary empirical objects.

So, one morning, I started with 2n+1, the common form of an odd number.  (2n+1)^2 = 4n^2 + 4n + 1.  That can be written as (2n^2 + 2n) + (2n^2 + 2n + 1), clearly some number and the next higher.  The next night, I did the same for cubes.  The following day, I had to open up a math book to see how to write out the expansion for any power n, an algebraic statement for Pascal’s Triangle.  I was pretty sure that I could complete the proof.  Then I realized that if an odd number can be expressed as 2n+1, that 2n is always some integer that admits to the existence of n and the next number would be one more than that.  More to the point, no matter what power (2n+1) is raised to, the last term of the polynomial will be 1.  You always will be able to find half the number and the integer next to it.  (I called it "Proving Gershon's Theorem" after the Sidney Harris cartoon: "You can't call it Gershon's Equation if everyone has known it for centuries.")

Then I tried it with negative integers.  They only work with odd powers.  And I can prove why.  It is child’s play, really.  But few people ever approach mathematics that way. Paul Erdős did.  In fact, he exhibited neoteny, never having any intimate relationships, being cared for by his mother into his sixties, being unwilling to cook for himself or otherwise look after the simplest daily tasks.  Instead, he was in constant motion, traveling to visit colleagues, imposing on their hospitality, in return for which, he gave them the impetus to publish over 1400 significant new ideas in mathematics.

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Observable Genius

After finishing it, I started James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman again.  Gleick is a genius.

His personal website is called Around Dot Com (link here).  It offers the usual front page insights, a biography, and reviews of his books.

James Gleick in 1992

I do not read much fiction. Last winter, I read Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.  Last month, I read Redshirts by John Scalzi. But in the same time, I went through a dozen non-fiction books, mostly about science, and entered quotations and observations into a notebook. The first read of Genius was so compelling that my marginalia was limited to straight lines noting text.  I had not much to add.  The work was thorough, complete, correct (afik), engaging, honest, and direct. I really appreciated the bibliographies, both the general list and the inventory of Feynman's own academic publications.

James Gleick today (from his website).

I read both of the soft Feynman autobiographies and The Character of Physical Law and I have both the Easy and Not-So-Easy Pieces.  I often recommend and cite "Cargo Cult Science."  I was granted a literary award for a biography of Newton's tenure as warden and master of the Royal Mint.  Based on that research, I placed perhaps a dozen reviews of Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter.  And I am not shy.  But I had nothing to add to Gleick's work.  You know when you are standing next to someone a head taller than you.

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Genius

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those which are there.” – Richard Feynman

James Gleick’s biography begins by correcting some of the myths about Feynman.  Feynman created some of them himself, of course.  Overall, the book is yet another tribute.  Gleick fills in the narrative that Feynman left out of the two popularizations of his life, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? 

Underlying and beyond the stories Gleick explains the physics, as best as can be done, in colloquial English.  Motivated, I browsed the stacks at the Austin Public Library and checked out Quantum Field Theory Demystified by David McMahon and Understanding Quantum Mechanics by Roland Omnès.  Both were approximately the kind of book a physics major would read over the summer before the sophomore year.  Though I renewed the check-out, after five weeks, I still did not get much, but gleaned what I could.  Relevant here is the fact that just as the Pythagorean Theorem can be shown synthetically and analytically, the truths in quantum mechanics can be expressed with three different methods: wave equations, statistical equations, and Feynman path integrals.  Gleick devotes considerable effort to explaining Feynman’s work, given that the intended audience is people who like physics, but really do not understand it. 

Feynman’s influence on the wider culture can be measured by the Austin Public Library’s catalog of 30 entries (granted that several are both books and talking books). (Alphabetical ignoring leading articles: The Meaning of It All under M.)

• The Beat of A Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by Jagdish Mehra
• The Best Mind since Einstein DVD 530.092 F435B
• Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of A Curious Character
• The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman
• Feynman (Graphic Novel - 2011) by Jim Ottaviani
• Feynman Lectures on Physics: Vol. 1, Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat
• Feynman Lectures on Physics: Vol. 2, Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter
• Feynman Lectures on Physics: Vol. 3, Quantum Mechanics
• Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets around the Sun by David L. Goodstein
• The Feynman Processor: Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution by G. J. Milburn
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
• The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of A Citizen Scientist by Richard P. Feynman
• No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman
• Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Collected Letters of Richard P. Feynman
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
• QED : the Strange Theory of Light and Matter  by Richard P. Feynman
• QED: A Play by Peter Parnell
• Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence Maxwell Krauss
• Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science CD 530.092 F435K
• Richard Feynman: A Life in Science by John R. Gribbin
• A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life by Leonard Mlodinow
• Six Easy Pieces: CD 530 FE
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics, Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
• Six Not-so-easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-time by Richard P. Feynman
• "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (CD 530.092 F435F) (All copies in use)
• "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of A Curious Character (All copies in use)
• Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey by Ralph Leighton
• What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of A Curious Character

 The Character of Physical Law came from a series of lectures for a general audience at Cornell.  But if you read the narrative in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, you hear the same tone of voice.  His graduation address on “Cargo Cult Science” is another example of subtle ideas presented unequivocally for a general audience. Videos of Feynman are on YouTube. 

In Feynman’s Lost Lecture Feynman says that he wanted to show his class how Newton derived his proof of Kepler’s Laws.  He could not do it.  Feynman could not work out for himself, independently, the geometry that Newton knew.  Calculus makes everything so much easier – and so much more mathematics has been discovered – that we no longer learn geometry in such depth. 

Wikipedia provides the best explanation of the Unit Circle.  No trigonometry book today presents the expanse and detail that I learned 50 years ago.  Of course high school mathematics has been dumbed down by the Soviet agriculture model of education.  More to the point, perhaps, today’s crafts workers no longer compute slopes in 32nds of an inch. With calculators and computers we have other things to do with our time.

But Feynman did not.  He thought long and hard about physics, filling notebooks with ideas that should have been published.  Some were.  Other physicists made some of the same discoveries.  It was inevitable.  After constructing an animated narrative about Feynman, Gleick pauses to wonder about genius.  Other Nobel laureate physicists identified Feynman as special.  What does that mean?  What is genius?  Ultimately, Gleick has no answer, though he does offer answers (plural). 

The word genius as we understand it comes from the Enlightenment. Prior to that, a genius was only a jin or jinni, that is, a spirit; and it usually represented the Spirit of the People. (We know this, also, from old numismatic catalogs.)  Only through the latter 1700s as romanticism evolved did the word apply to the spirit of an individual.  Also, of course, at this time, that spirit was ineffable, not to be reduced to causal explanation.  Later, genius was associated, compared, and contrasted with madness.  Today, we have no objective measure of mere intelligence.   So, all we can say of genius is that you know it when you see it, the same test that differentiates pornography from art.

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