What’s the News: Researchers have developed the fastest yet self-healing polymer: The new class of materials dubbed “metallo-supramolecular polymers” heal after only one minute under UV light even when they’re repeatedly cut. This could eventually lead to self-repairing floor varnishes, automotive paints, and other applications. University of Illinois at Urbana researchers Nancy Sottos and Jeffrey Moore say these these healable polymers “offer an alternative to the damage-and-discard cycle” that is rampant in our consumer society, and could pave the way for products “that have much greater lifespans than currently available materials.” (You can see the process below in a press video from Case-Western Reserve University.)

How the Heck:

Unlike most polymers, which are composed of long molecular chains, metallo-supramolecular polymers are made of “short chains that are glued together with metal ions.”
Scratches break up the polymer chains of metallo-supramolecular polymers. By shining intense UV light on and near the scratch, the metal ions heat to over 220°C in 30 seconds, depolymerizing the material.
While still depolymerized, the unglued particles act like a liquid and flow together again, smoothing out scratches in the process.
And when the intense UV light is removed, the metal quickly cools, and the now-smooth surface solidifies ...

It’s quite the irony. In his contrarian report entitled “Climate Shift”–a report Joe Romm and Robert Brulle have seriously challenged–Matthew Nisbet claims that falsely “balanced” coverage of climate change is no longer a problem. Huh. Then in chapter 4 of the report, Nisbet goes on to provide falsely “balanced” coverage of an issue I happen to know a lot about:

During the Bush administration, many scientists mobilized in response to what they perceived as attempts by the administration to control the public statements of government scientists and to interfere with the conclusions of government reports. This debate received heavy attention at science-related blogs, from science journalists and via several top-selling books.

Here Nisbet is referring to me–although not by name. But note the language: “many scientists mobilized in response to what they perceived as attempts by the administration to control the public statements….” Actually, all these things were extensively documented (see below). There is no “perceived”; these are facts. Why is Nisbet applying phony balance to them?

Nisbet then proceeds to discuss the alleged biases of scientists in classic balance-as-bias fashion:

Among AAAS members who had heard of the claims, ideology was strongly associated with evaluations of the allegations. On this matter, 57 percent of conservative AAAS members said the claims were true, compared with 87 percent of moderates and 97 percent of liberals. Those answering true were also asked whether the Bush administration engaged in greater levels of political interference than past administrations, with 68 percent of conservatives answering in the affirmative, compared with 88 percent of moderates and 96 percent of liberals.

Again, Nisbet seems highly uninterested in the truth of these allegations. That perceptions as to their veracity varies by politics isn’t surprising–far more surprising is that nearly 70 percent of conservative scientists thought the Bush administration set a new record for interferences with science. Go conservative scientists! After Kerry Emanuel’s recent showing before Congress, you guys are my heroes.

In any case, the allegations were true, and were proved to be true, repeatedly and in a multitude of ways. That includes journalistic investigations, by several great reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post. It includes multiple surveys of agency scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of all, it includes several official agency Inspector General reports (links are to NASA and DOI)–none cited or mentioned by Nisbet. These aren’t “claims.”

Nisbet continues:

The difference in awareness and perception of political interference is likely reinforced by diverging patterns and attention to science-related blogs, outlets where the Bush allegations were frequently discussed and lamented. Among strong liberal members of AAAS, a combined 50 percent say they read science blogs often or occasionally, compared with 37 percent of conservative members.

These allegations weren’t confined to blogs. They were all over the national, mainstream media; some even predated the birth of science blogging as we now know it. They were covered repeatedly in the Washington Post and the New York Times over the entirety of the Bush administration. Sometimes these were cover stories; sometimes the allegations appeared in editorials and columns. They were also all over scientific publications like Science and Nature, and frequently editorialized about in these venues. This is “likely” a primary place where scientists as a group would have learned about them. Indeed, Nisbet is studying members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, which every member receives, regardless of political views.

Another place scientists would have learned about the allegations is from…conversations with fellow scientists, who experienced these things firsthand, some of whom even became whistleblowers–like NOAA’s Tom Knutson, who even had the courage to testify before Congress about what had happened to him. “There have been instances where my ability to communicate with the national media has been hindered or interfered with….” But of course, that’s just his opinion, right?

The claim about blogs, then, is just…strange. The bigger point is that without any evaluation of the substance of what happened, Nisbet nevertheless seems confident enough to claim that scientists’ partisanship and liberal biases led them to believe…the truth. A truth that even most conservative scientists accepted, apparently. That’s the real revelation in the data–nearly, but not quite, obscured by false balance.

Last month, scientists using the GOCE spacecraft released a model of the Earth’s geoid: essentially, a shape telling you which way is down. If the Earth were a perfectly smooth sphere of constant density throughout, gravity would pull you straight down to the center (perpendicular to the surface). But if a dense hill were nearby, the gravity of that hill would change the direction of the force of gravity. The geoid maps that, and is very useful to understand things like ocean currents and such.

The resulting geoid resembles a bizarre, lumpy Earth. It was pretty neat, but now Nathanial Burton-Bradford has made it better: he took the data and made 3D anaglyphs!

This one shows the view over North and South America. It doesn’t look like much to the eye, but if you have red/green or red/blue 3D glasses, the 3D jumps right out at you. He has lots more of these from various angles over the Earth’s geoid model, and man are they weird. There’s something truly odd about seeing the Earth this way.

He has lots of other 3D images he’s made ...

Every academic who attends conferences knows that the best parts are not the formal presentations, but the informal interactions in between. Roughly speaking, the perfect conference would consist of about 10% talks and 90% coffee breaks; an explanation for why the ratio is reversed for almost every real conference is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yesterday’s talks here in Avignon constituted a great overview of issues in cosmological structure formation. But my favorite part was the conversation at our table at the conference banquet, fueled by a pretty darn good Côtes du Rhône. After a long day of hardcore data-driven science, our attention wandered to deep issues about fundamental physics: is the entire history of the universe determined by the exact physical state at any one moment in time?

The answer, by the way, is “yes.” At least I think so. This certainly would be the case is classical Newtonian physics, and it’s also the case in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is how we got onto the topic. In MWI, the entirety of dynamics is encapsulated in the Schrodinger equation, a first-order differential equation that uniquely determines the quantum state in the past and future from the state at the present time. If you believe that wave functions really collapse, determinism is obviously lost; prediction is necessarily probabilistic, and retrodiction is effectively impossible.

But there was a contingent of physicists at our table who were willing to believe in MWI, but nevertheless didn’t believe that the laws of microscopic quantum mechanics were sufficient to describe the evolution of the universe. They were taking an anti-reductionist line: complex systems like people and proteins and planets couldn’t be described simply by the Standard Model of particle physics applied to a large number of particles, but instead called for some sort of autonomous description appropriate at macroscopic scales.

No one denies that in practice we can never describe human beings as collections of electrons, protons, and neutrons obeying the Schrodinger equation. But many of us think that this is clearly an issue of practice vs. principle; the ability of our finite minds to collect the relevant data and solve the relevant equations shouldn’t be taken as evidence that the universe isn’t fully capable of doing so.

Yet, that is what they were arguing — that there was no useful sense in which something as complicated as a person could, even in principle, be described as a collection of elementary particles obeying the laws of microscopic physics. This is an extremely dramatic ontological claim, and I have almost no doubt whatsoever that it’s incorrect — but I have to admit that I can’t put my objections into a compact and persuasive form. I’m trying to rise above responding with a blank stare and “you can’t be serious.”

So, that’s a shortcoming on my part, and I need to clean up my act. Why shouldn’t we expect truly new laws of behavior at different scales? (Note: not just that we can’t derive the higher-level laws from the lower-level ones, but that the higher-level laws aren’t even necessarily consistent with the lower-level ones.) My best argument is simply that: (1) that’s an incredibly complicated and inelegant way to run a universe, and (2) there’s absolutely no evidence for it. (Either argument separately wouldn’t be that persuasive, but together they carry some weight.) Of course it’s difficult to describe people using Schrodinger’s equation, but that’s not evidence that our behavior is actually incompatible with a reductionist description. To believe otherwise you have to believe that somewhere along the progression from particles to atoms to molecules to proteins to cells to organisms, physical systems begin to violate the microscopic laws of physics. At what point is that supposed to happen? And what evidence is there supposed to be?

But I don’t think my incredulity will suffice to sway the opinion of anyone who is otherwise inclined, so I have to polish up the justification for my side of the argument. My banquet table was full of particle physicists and cosmologists — pretty much the most sympathetic audience for reductionism one can possibly imagine. If I can’t convince them, there’s not much hope for the rest of the world.