Tonight's special offering was a 20-minute, two-person opera with choir called "Saturday 29 AD", by Mark Schweizer. The characters were Pilate and his wife. He was washing his hands and trying to justify himself to his wife, while she thought he made the wrong decision, and the choir sang some atmospheric back-up.

Chuck Hastings & Jane Thessin sang the solo parts admirably and created a very engaging drama. The choir was subtle and effective. A special shout-out goes to Chuck McClurg for his rather startling and realistic hand-washing special effects.

Sometimes, of course, I select a book that turns out not to suit my taste for some reason. Generally speaking I prefer not to review a book I didn't care for because I don't see the point of a negative review about a book whose subject matter didn't really appeal to me or whose author wrote in a style that I found unsympathetic. After all, many others might find the book worthwhile or tune in to that author's particular style, and I'd much rather have a review in our booknotes collection setting out positive reason why a potential reader might choose to read a particular title.

Then there is the small but difficult category of books that I never finish reading because, for some reason or another, I find them too overwhelmingly irritating. For instance, I never finished reading Stephen Jay Gould's The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (my booknote) because his writing was so bad, and so badly edited, that I conjectured that it had been written by pod people who had taken over his body. Happily, these are rare events, but sometimes it seems important to write about them.

What to do, then, when I find an author known for his (or her) enthusiastic and entertaining advocacy and popularizing for science whose writing exhibits a notable disregard for precision about scientific facts and, furthermore, who seems to have a superficial or incorrect understanding of parts of his or her subject matter?

When I read a book that I plan to write about, I keep a folded sheet of paper inside the back cover where I make notes of interesting ideas, things to mention, and possible quotations for use in a review. I also make a note of trouble spots in the text: unclear or badly written explanations, confusion over facts of science, and such things. When I have filled the pages with errors the author has made and I'm only on page 30 of the book, I know I have trouble on my hands, and a quandary. I can easily stop reading the book, but I have to decide whether to write about it or not. Is there a useful point — beyond venting my spleen — to writing about bad science writing?

I have such a case on hand with Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible_{*, in which the (apprently) well-known science popularizer talks about the physics and possibility of such science-fiction staples as invisibility cloaks, force fields, time travel, and such topics. It's a very appealing idea, I thought, but I had to stop reading; there were simply too many errors–some serious errors–of science to continue, all before I reached page 30, less than one-tenth of my way through the book.}

Let's begin by going through some of the problems that I had in these early pages.

1. Conflating Historic Events

"Growing up, I remember my teacher one day walking up to the map of the Earth on the wall and pointing out the coastlines of South America and Africa. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, she said, that the two coastlines fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle? Some scientists, she said, speculated that perhaps they were once part of the same, vast continent. But that was silly. [...] Later that year we studied the dinosaurs. Wasn't it strange, our teacher told us, that the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of years, and then one day they all vanished? No one knew why they had all died off. Some paleontologists thought that maybe a meteor from space had killed them, but that was impossible; more in the realm of science fiction [pp. xi--xii]

The idea that the continents might once have fitted together is a very old one, evident to most anyone who ever looked at a world map. These days we have at hand the well-established theory of plate techtonics to explain how it all could have happened, and certainly did happen. In the earlier twentieth century geologists and others began thinking more seriously about the idea of continents moving, but it was experimental results in the late 1950s and early 1960s that finally overthrew "conventional wisdom" that the continents couldn't just move around. Plate techtonics was well established as scientific orthodoxy by 1965.

The Alvarez Theory, the idea that the extinction of the dinosaurs was brought about by the impact with Earth of a large body from space, was first proposed by Luis and his son Walter Alvarez following on Walter's discovery of a thin sedimentary layer of iridium that dated closely to the time when dinosaurs disappeared. That theory did not appear until 1980. For many years afterwards the idea that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs was widely thought preposterous; before that time it hadn't even been thought of. By now, of course, it's widely familiar to the general public.

I hope you see my difficulty by now. The author writes that his teacher taught him that 1) some scientists speculated that continents drifted, an assertion that only makes sense prior to 1965, when Plate Techtonics was established; and 2) that some scientists though maybe an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, an idea that no one had thought of until 1980. He writes that his teacher taught him these things in the same year, even though the closest in actual time that they may have come to each other is 15 years. In other words, this makes a good story but it's highly unlikely that these two events took place in the same year.

2. Confusing Words and Ideas

This problem is more subtle. In the first chapter Kaku has a section on "force fields", a common technology of science-fiction worlds for decades. Kaku unfortunately takes the words too literally and conflates the notion of a science-fiction "force field" with some combination of the ideas of "forces" and "fields" as they are used in physics, and so he spends some time talking about the four fundamental forces of the universe (gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force) and discusses to some extent how each of these is formulated mathematically as "field theories". But one does not get "force fields" by simply combining these two concepts. He confuses the reader over these pairs of words used differently in two different realms, and then leaves the reader with the mistaken impression that "force fields" might become reality just as soon as physics catches up and discovers a new field theory for a "fifth force". None of this has anything useful to do with the concept of a "force field" as it's deployed by science-fiction authors.

3. Casual Writing Leads to Mistaken Readings

In another space I'll write about what I think should be the prime directive of any writer about science : First, Do Not Mislead. Writing about science for a popular audience is an awesome responsibility; scientifically literate readers can fend for themselves, but if the author has in mind an audience of nonspecialists, it is vital that the author take the utmost care with describing and explaining facts from science, because the nonspecialist reader can easily invent his or her own mistaken notion of how nature works when presented with sloppy, incomplete, or imprecise exposition. I expect popular science writers to

1. Get it right, and
2. Say it clearly.

Here are just some examples of statements that I felt violated the Prime Directive in Kaku's writing. First, from the section on "Magnetic Levitation":

"One common property of superconductivity is called the Meissner effect." [p. 14]

When a superconductor in a magnetic field is cooled from its normal (non-superconducting) phrase to its superconducting phrase, it "expels" the external magnetic field from it's interior, which is to say that it creates on its surface electrical currents that themselves create a magnetic field that just cancels the externally imposed field within the superconductor. This is known as the "Meissner Effect", named for Walther Meissner. This is a defining characteristic of superconductors, a property necessarily exhibited by every superconductor. I find it odd to refer to it as a "common property of superconductivity", as though it's an incidental property seen in only some, perhaps many, superconductors, but suggesting that it is not a universal property.

In a section on "Invisibility", discussing the possibility of an "invisibility cloak":

"But today the impossible may become possible. New advances in "metamaterials" are forcing a major revision of optics textbooks. [p. 17]

Actually, the manufactured metamaterials that Kaku refers to, surprising and ingenious as they are, behave according to well-understood principles, requiring no "revision", just an increase in understanding how to manufacture materials with desirable optical properties. This is misleading and a type of sensationalism that doesn't serve the cause of increasing science literacy.

Later in the section on "Invisibility", Kaku turns to a discussion of electromagnetic fields, namely, James Maxwell's great advance in physical theory in the 19th century:

"(…If he [Maxwell] had lived longer, he might have discovered that his equations allowed for distortions of space-time that would lead directly to Einstein's relativity theory. [p. 19]

Now, here is a frequent problem with those who write about science. There are, in fact, two distinct theories of Einstein commonly referred to as "relativity" : the theory of "Special Relativity", from 1905, and the theory of "General Relativity", from 1916. Special relativity is a theory of electrodynamics, basically a theory of light, which also introduced the idea of four-dimensional "space-time" and that most famous of equations, E=mc^2. General relativity is a theory of gravitation, a geometrical theory that treats gravity as deformations in space-time.

Usually the context makes clear which "relativity" the author meant. But here our only guide is that Kaku speaks of "distortions of space-time". In special relativity travel at high velocities bring about time dilations and length contractions ("Lorentz Transformations"), i.e., distortions of space-time. In general relativity, gravitational effects are produced by the distortions of space-time caused by mass.

Carelessness here has caused a confusion that can't be untangled and therefore does nothing to enlighten the nonspecialist reader who may not distinguish the two "relativity" theories so easily to begin with.

4. Errors of Physical Fact

These were the most troubling errors that confronted me in reading the first sections of Kaku's book. Troubling because it betrays the trust between the nonspecialist reader and the authoritative voice of the author to make statement of physical fact, or to give descriptions of physical systems, that are imprecise or simply incorrect. I find it even more troubling when the author is a physicist who should be expected to get it right.

Back to the pages of discussion about Maxwell's Theory of Electrodynamics, the author writes:

Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school [p. 18].

While it is certainly true that every physicist and engineer had to sweat over the equations in graduate school–probably even using the same, nearly universally taught textbook–the italicized phrase (my italics) would raise any student's eyebrows. Whether the equations are "fierce-looking" or not is a matter of taste (I think they're rather elegantly simple myself), there are in fact only four equations, two for the electric field and two for the magnetic field.

I nearly dropped the book when I read this — I couldn't imagine how any physicist could have come to refer to "eight" equations. Now, while it's true that the electric and magnetic fields are written in modified form when they occur in materials, rather than vacuum, the equations stay the same. That there are two each for the electric and magnetic fields is fundamentally characteristic of the entire field theory.

Slightly further on, Kaku offers this analysis of the property of optical transparency in materials:

Maxwell's theory of light and the atomic theory give simple explanations for optics and invisibility. In a solid, the atoms are tightly packed, while in a liquid or gas the molecules are spaced much farther apart. Most solids are opaque because light rays cannot pass through the dense matrix of atoms in a solid, which act like a brick wall. Many liquids and gases, by contrast, are transparent because light can pass more readily between the large spaces between their atoms, a space that is larger than the wavelength of visible light. For example, water, alcohol, ammonia, acetone, hydrogen peroxide, gasoline, and so forth are all transparent, as are gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and so on.

There are some important exceptions to this rule. Many crystals are both solid and transparent. But the atoms of a crystal are arranged in a precise lattice structure, stacked in regular rows, with regular spacing between them. Hence there are many pathways that a light beam may take through a crystalline lattice. Therefore, although a crystal is as tightly packed as any solid, light can still work its way through the crystal.
Under certain circumstances, a solid object may become transparent if the atoms are arranged randomly [as in a glass]. [pp. 25--26]

It's at this point that I threw up my metaphorical hands in despair and stopped reading the book. This "explanation" of transparency is so totally wrong I hardly know where to begin.

Light, namely, propagating electromagnetic waves, only interact with matter via the electromagnetic field (with a notable exception in General Relativity that doesn't impinge on this discussion); in other words, light waves are sensitive to electrical charges, electrical currents, and magnetic fields. They sense the electrical charge of the electron "cloud" around an atomic nucleus; they might sense the positive charge of protons in a nucleus if they can get close enough for it to have an effect. Electromagnetic waves–light waves or photons, pick your favorite representation–do not interact with the mass of matter itself. Whether atoms are heavy or not heavy makes no difference, the light doesn't sense the mass. Hold that thought.

Now, while it is true that the atoms in a liquid or solid are much closer together than they are in a gas, the atoms are still so physically small and so distantly separated relative to their physical sizes–not to mention that the components of an atom are vastly tinier than the "size" of the atom itself–that most of matter, whether solid, liquid, or gas, is still empty space. Even in a crystal or a glass this is true. Physically, the mass of atoms occupies exceedingly little of the space of the object they make up. By "exceedingly little" I mean this: the volume of the atomic nucleus is only about 1/1,000,000,000,000^th the approximate volume of the atom itself.

I hope it's becoming clear by this point that how close the atoms are together has relatively little bearing on how much "space" in matter is taken up by substantial parts of the atoms. The simple deduction, then, is that material objects are not more transparent or less transparent because the atoms are closer or further apart such that they "block" the light. The light does not run into the atoms and get blocked by their physical size. They are in no sense like a "brick wall" in any way that I can imagine makes sense.

The transparency of any given substance is determined by the not-so-simple interaction between light waves of particular frequencies (or "colors") and the electric fields (predominantly) created in the substance by the particular configuration of its atoms. Gases do tend to be relatively transparent because the wide separation of their atoms creates a weakly interacting electric field. Nevertheless, some gasses do have colors because their atoms absorb certain wavelengths of light preferentially, through light waves being absorbed and/or emitted by the atomic electrons. Crystals have complicated and varied optical properties — transparency, opacity, colors in gemstones, birefringence, polarization rotations, etc. — depending sensitively on the periodically varying electric field inside the crystal that is produced by the regular (crystalline) placement of the atoms; but do keep your mind on the electric field inside the crystal, not the atoms "blocking" the light. There are also materials that are mostly opaque to visible light but that can be transparent in wavelengths of light that our eyes do not detect. The optical properties of materials is a rich field with lots of interesting effects and phenomena; get a taste for it, if you like, by looking up "transparency" in Wikipedia.

Looking up "transparency" is apparently something that author Kaku didn't bother to do when he should have. His explanation of the phenomenon I find so confused and misleading that I feel his writing does a serious disservice to the nonspecialist who reads his book hoping for understanding from a scientist who knows what he's talking about. This is why I stopped reading the book at this point, and why I have chosen to write about it.

One or two of the objections I noted earlier on amount to very little. I frequently find one or two little errors in any book I read, but it's usually just something to note with some amusement and then move on; rarely does a misstatement or error like that cause me serious concern, and I rarely comment on them in my review of a book. A whole string of them, page after page, however, convinces me that the author is a sloppy writer or has a very superficial knowledge of the subject at hand. When the writer is a working scientist writing about science, I am totally confounded. As for these bigger errors I've just discussed — they are inexplicable. It is the author's responsibility to realize the limits of his or her knowledge or understanding and find ways to avoid or correct problems in his or her writing.

These are the reasons why I simply cannot recommend this book to a general reader. That the book seems to have reached some level of popularity disturbs me : such poorly conceived and executed writing about science undermines the efforts of the many excellent writers about science — scientists, historians, journalists, and others — writing with more care and accuracy about their subject.
———-
^* Michio Kaku, Physics of the impossible : a scientific exploration into the world of phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel. New York : Doubleday, 2008. xxi + 329 pages.

How can we tell that it's really not a principled position? Let's see how easily it's dispensed with.

In the early part of this century (i.e., the 21st), many states' voters were suckered by fear-mongering Republicans into voting in favor of referenda and constitutional amendments meant to prohibit marriage equality for same-sex couples. How were such plebiscites on restricting citizens' rights justified? State's rights, of course.

As the argument went, marriage was a concept traditionally and best left to the states to decide–definitely not a federal issue. The states, and the people in the states, should have the power to decide this vitally important issue for themselves without federal meddling. The states, it was said, were the laboratory for experiments in social change, the rightful place for such "radical" ideas to be tested.

At least, this was the "principled" stand for the last decade or more when it seemed a given that Republicans could convince the electorate to restrict the rights of their gay and lesbian citizens in this way.

However, increasing familiarity with the idea of marriage equality for same-sex couples has seen increasing support across the country for marriage equality, to the point that the majority opinion is turning in favor of it. This means, of course, that arguing in favor of "state's rights" and letting each state decide this issue for itself — in the traditional and principled fashion — seems no longer the guaranteed bulwark against progress in civil rights that it was and the "principled" rhetoric has to change if a successful course to delaying this basic civil right to gay and lesbian people is to continue.

The bellwether? Rick Santorum, the principled conservative's conservative. Here he is speaking recently of the vital importance of the principle of state's rights, and the states as essential laboratories for social change:

"We can't have 50 different marriage laws in this country," [Santorum] said. "You have to have one marriage law."

So, maybe not so principled after all. I guess a strong, central government is the new Republican ideal.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of those Republican canards about why and how we can't have marriage equality, I'm sure you're aware of the big kerfuffle about mere [activist] judges deciding that same-sex couples can get married–somehow it's socialism!–or state legislatures suddenly not representing the people if they vote in favor of marriage equality–let the people vote! Because, in addition to thinking that "the people" are the best mob to take rights away gay and lesbian people, "the people" are known to Republicans always to be right. Let the people vote!

"Just because public opinion says something doesn't mean it's right," he said in the NBC interview. "I'm sure there were times in areas of this country when people said blacks were less than human."

Except when they're not, I guess. Who can tell? The principled conservative's conservative can!

And that closing remark in which he feigns never to have known a time when there might be some people in some area of the country who thought black people were less than human. What's that disingenuousness about? I'm sure he could even find some of those people today without trying too hard. I wonder if he's asked the people who come to his rallies?

[Quotations are from Bob Egelko, "Santorum backs nullifying existing gay marriages", 3 March 2012.]

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. . . . [quoted]

The worst, of course, are those in category #2, those who don't know but care very much (TWDKBCVM).

In recent times misplaced, or misguided, anxieties over the use of split infinitives seems to have given way to a new leading concern for TWDKBCVM, namely, the dreaded (to them) passive verb construction. Wannabe "sticklers" that they are, they seem convinced that passives are sneaking into English usage and undermining its foundations with the same pernicious–but unspecifiable–undermining effect as (some believe) same-sex marriage has on so-called "traditional" marriage).

The biggest irritation, since we are talking about TWDKBCVM here, is less that they care so very much than that they know so very little; remarkably many people happily call out others on their use of the passive without having the least idea what a "passive" actually is. They want to protect the virtue and purity of the English language with a vigor and irrelevance that used to be ascribed to the French Academy, yet they can't recognize a passive construction even if it bit them in their gerund. But perhaps I state the problem backwards; the biggest problem with TWDKBCVM is that they seem to see "passives" positively everywhere they aren't. The irritation lies in the glee with which they rush to point out the phantom passives.

I had my own run-in recently with a young woman (of, perhaps, high-school age), a fresh recruit to the passive police. She had occasion to read a story I had recently completed and, in the excerpt we considered, she identified an embarrassing profusion of "passives" and suggested that I might invigorate my writing by using more "active" constructions. Happily, and perhaps with an over abundance of schadenfreude, I pointed out to her that none of the instances she voiced concern about were actually passive constructions, but merely instances of past progressive tenses. She seemed alerted to these suspect verb forms by the presence of "was", but I pointed out that when one was writing (<-- not passive!) in the past tense, "was" frequently appeared even in active constructions. Well, perhaps they weren't passives, she grudgingly agreed, but maybe I'd like to have a look at them anyway. I suspect that she had fallen under the influence of a well-meaning but misinformed teacher who taught that spotting an instance of "was" would probably indicate a lurking and dreaded passive.

As a brief aside, I'll mention that I'm quite happy to have people read my stories critically, especially if the story is new and about to go public, but I do wish that more of them would concentrate on critiquing my characterization, my plot, my symbols, or my prosody, rather than trying to discover a typo or an unnecessary comma or a phantom passive.

I'm not even going to attempt to say what a "passive" is because it takes some care to pin it down with precision. Fortunately, Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has done it ("The passive in English"). It takes some careful reading, but you'll read it if you car–or need to defend yourself from TWDKBCVM.

Now, while Pullum has the dais and we're talking about this violent allergy TWDKBCVM have even to placebo "passives", one naturally wonders at the source of such an aversion. I'm readily convinced by this article of Pullum's ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"; see also "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18") that a great deal of the blame goes to that precious little book known to its friends as "Strunk & White", i.e., those author's Elements of Style. Why, in Pullum's phrase, this obnoxious book came to have "the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates" is unclear. Perhaps it's due to the uncritical assessment of said students' teachers, often TWDKBCVM, who sold it to their students because–why?–it's so much easier to point to a simple reference that can be easily purchased and read in one sitting than it is to teach something? But then, that esteem would probably not grow so much if it weren't that many of those selfsame college graduates were also TWDKBCVM and desperate for an authoritarian voice to back them up, not on actual facts, but for their control-queen attitudes in trying to stomp out bad "grammar", even when they're woefully wrong.

Perhaps the answer is as simple as the observation, documented by Pullum, that Strunk & White were themselves TWDKBCVM rather than actual authorities on what a "passive" really is or why it might be bad. Regardless, I've known for some time that I have a fierce aversion to any icon of popular culture whose esteem vastly outweighs what it deserves.

Say, while we're on the subject of "grammar", what's the deal, apparently recently, with calling absolutely everything that has to do with constructing clear, written English "grammar"? The other day I saw a cartoon that made a deal out of "bad grammar", but used that to describe some grammar, some punctuation, and some confusion over homonyms, which I take to be diction. I mean, here we have all these amusing categories for the anal-retentive who really want to learn lots of semi-obscure nomenclature (although I try to convince my fellow writers that knowing some of it, so they can talk about their craft, is really vital to being an actual writer). Arnold Zwicky mentions the phenomenon ("Grammar shit"), but happily eases us back into amusing topics for conversation by mentioning Paisley designs and paramecia.

1. "Sandwich Thoughts" — For several years this small essay has persisted in my top five. It's merely some ruminations about big sandwiches and Subway sandwich shops changing the style of cutting their sandwich bread from what was known as the "U-gouge" to a "hinge cut". I favored the former, by the way, as do most people who've weighed in on the matter. I think that most people who arrive at this page do so by asking search engines for information on the question of whether all Subway sandwich meats are turkey based, a point I mention in the piece. The rather obvious answer is that some of it is, largely the cold-cut type meats, but things like chicken breast, roast beef, and tuna fish are quite evidently not. Sliced turkey breast is, naturally.
2. "The Matthew EFfect" — A posting in which I tried to track down the origin of the phrase "The plural of anecdote is [not] data". I only got so far with the question but turned up some interesting things, including the fact that there is dispute even about whether the original aphorism had the "not" in it. Judging by the number of people who read this page, there are quite a number of people who care very much about this question. For the reason behind the name of the essay, look in the final footnote.
3. "Beard of the Week XVIII: Bulgarian Wedding Bells" — About the wedding of pop celebrity Azis, "Bulgaria's famed Roma transvestite", marriage equality, and the discomfort that some gay mean feel about drag queens.
4. "Stephen Hawking Erroneously Found Dead in 'Death Panel' Marketing" — A short piece about the very odd kerfuffle during the recent health-care-bill debate (i.e., "Obamacare"), when the peculiar, misdirected notion of "death panels" were invented and marketed by Sarah Palin and her Republican cohorts, in which an editorial explaining "how government-run-healthcare 'death panels' wold imperil your grandmother's life, used as the centerpiece of it argument that famed physicist Stephen Hawking, whose life is challenged with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) would be dead today if he had to live under the UK's socialized healthcare system". Unfortunately, what they got wrong is that 1) Hawking is, actually, British and 2) is still very much alive, thanks to 3) the British National Health Care system.
5. "When Celsius = Fahrenheit" — Finally, a blog posting with equations! As I explain at the beginning of the piece, quite a few people seemed to arrive at my blog by asking the google this question, something I found odd because I never had actually written regarding the question at all, but apparently I used enough of the words in a combination that made the google think I was relevant. So, since googling is destiny, I decided to write the piece that all these searchers were looking for and explain how to discover the single temperature at which the Celsius and Farenheit temperature scales refer to the same temperature with the same number. By all means, if you don't already know the answer have a go at figuring it out before you look.