Science and Money: The Process

While its good to think on the large scales about science, art, spiritual endeavor and the search for the True and the Real, sometimes it's the day to day that matters. There are the scales on which metaphysics and the grand ideals of science exist and then there is the writing of your latest NASA grant. For the last week I have forsaken the former and have been living with the latter.

I have been to the mountain and have seen how laws, sausage and science funding is made. The truth is, it ain't so bad. After years of this I am still quite amazed at how well the system can works.

Science funding moves in a pretty straight forward way. You have an idea, you find out which funding agency the idea relates to best (NASA, the NSF, DOE, NIH, the alphabet soap goes on and and on). Then you figure out which program in that agency is right one to apply to (Astrophysical Data Program, Origins, AstroBiology, Living with a Star etc etc - these are NASA programs). Next you give up a couple of weeks of your life to write up a 15 page proposals with figures and equations. The proposal needs a decent narrative and a good balance of showing what your group has done and showing what you think you could get done in 3 years of funding. Then, if you are lucky, you have a talented administrative staff to help you navigate the pages and pages of government-issue forms and tables. Finally you send it in and light a candle at the alter of St. Euler who watches over grant proposals on astrophysical fluid dynamics. Then you wait and wait and wait.

It takes about a 9 months for the grants agency to get back to you. During that time a review committee gets selected and flown in from all over the country to discuss and rank the giant stack proposals the agency must deal with. The funding rate is usually somewhere between 10% (ugh) and 30% (ugh still but better). These panels are where the rubber meets the road meets the suasage making.

I have satt on a lot of these panels and for the most part I have to say they work. It is a most fascinating exercise to see the very human politics which goes into the search for eternal timeless truths. People have their biases. Some argue their case better than others. Sometimes a strong or well known personality can dominate the process. Still, in spite of all our foibles, it almost always seems that the best science gets recognized and rises to the top. I have always been impressed by this and it gives me faith that we have stumbled on something, some genuine workable means to organize the effort to understand the world.

Of course those proposals at the top don't always get funded. There simply is not enough money to fund the best ones that deserve funding (which I would estimate make up about a third of the proposals). Hopefully that will change with the new administration.

So that is how it works and if you ask me, in general it does work. I have had lots of proposals fail and enough proposals make it and overall I think the system is as fair as it can be.

But there is an important caveat here. I am writing about grants on the scale of an individual scientist or her group. When we talk large projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the International Space Station all this changes. Politics with a capitol P enters the picture in a big way. Projects on that scale, with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on the line operate in a different realm. It is at that level that one can ask how the balance between science and other, less scientific, demands are managed.

The search for truth and spending of a nations treasure - how do they overlap? How do they balance?

Foxes, Hedgehogs, Science and Knowing

So the second installment of my debate with Eliezer Yudkowsky at bloggingheads is now posted for anyone who is interested. It was great fun and I thank Eliezer for participating in the dialogue with me.There is a point I just wanted to touch on again related to the many ways we come to understand ourselves in the world. After 20 years of practicing science I remain deeply enamored of its methods and the grand beauty of its worldview. I also continue to marvel at the ways other forms of human inquiry reveal other aspects of our nature and its dilemma. From poetry to painting there are many paths to illuminating the human condition. That is why, even as an atheist, I became interested early on in the long history of human spiritual endeavor.

Isaiah Berlin once used a line from the Greek poet Archilochus to characterize different approaches to philosophy.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"

Berlin was trying to differentiate philosophies that saw the world in terms of a single defining idea (hedgehogs) and those who who drew from a wide array of experience and were suspicious of overarching approaches (foxes). I would like to line up in the fox category. William James remains my hero with his distrust of "block Universes" or block ideas.

The debate between science and the domains of spiritual endeavor is usually cast as a choice between reason and faith. As a atheist and one who is committed to empirical investigation I am not big on faith but I do reject the idea that those who are committed the integrity of scientific practice must also see reason as the only means to understanding ourselves in the broadest sense of the word. Within scientific practice it is reason and a commitment to letting the data, the world, speak for itself. But when placing science into this broader context of human being I think the other ways we create meaning must have a place at the table.

Its easy to fall for the false certainty that comes by fully embracing a single metaphysics, confusing it with all-embracing methodology, and then letting your membership in an orthodoxy lull you in a false sense of comfort that comes with easy applause lines. Far harder is the path of embracing our strange complexity while retaining a determination to think clearly and feel deeply. But in our attempts to pass through the bottleneck of the next century I am convinced we will need all the sources of wisdom we can find.

Such, it seems, is the way of the fox.

Climate, Science and Growing Up as a Species

One of the doyens of climate science visited our campus last week and he said something that I can't shake. Steven Schneider has been one of the world leaders in articulating the results of the global study of climate. I met him first as a young man 23 years ago, long before, the greenhouse effect was a household word. He knows of what he speaks.
In his talk Schneider raised an issue, which rarely gets attention in the media or in academic discussions. As a science, the study of climate represents something new, something different and that change matters because it says a lot about what we are up against and how far we have come.

The study of climate not a laboratory science with neat, tidy boundaries between apparatus and subject. It’s not a pure theoretical science where mathematical models can be expected to embrace entire systems and provide single sharp answers that match single sharp data points to within a percent or less. Instead it’s a systems science where many interlocking parts fit together through complicated nonlinear interactions. Atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere are all complicated enough on their own but together they form a "co-evolutionary" complex that simply does not yield up its secrets in the same way as, say, sulfur ion in a magnetic field does.

Systems science relies on massive multi-variate datasets and equally massive computer simulations. The large sets of coupled linear partial differential equations that govern these systems are inherently chaotic. That means they and the real systems they describe will be sensitive to small changes in how things bump against each other. In a nutshell, the systems represent complexity on a grand scale. Our ability to study such a large and complex system is new and is still developing.

The truth of this bare fact has not really been absorbed by either the scientific or popular culture. While the kind of systems science climate study represents is a beautiful and intellectually exciting thing to behold, its specific link to very specific decisions we need to make about our future is troubling.

If people keep thinking of climate study as a science in the old way they will expect an answer – a single result either proving or disproving the whole shebang. This expectation is exactly the reason why so called “climate skeptics” can publish a single paper focusing on a single aspect of the problem and get major media attention for “proving” climate change wrong. What Schneider was arguing for was a view in which the different communities of study (atmospheric chemistry, glaciers, ocean circulation etc.) form a dialogue in which consensus can be reached on what we think we know and how well we think we know it. Only then can risks associated with different potential outcomes can be assessed. From this view the urgency of acting on the science already “in the bag” can much more readily appreciated.

The really cool and really important point for me here is that our worldview is changing in our encounter with climate change. It is a different kind of science that demands a different approach to the world. Taken as a whole it’s all about growing up as a species and our tools growing with us.

The Expressible and Inexpressible and the Boundries Between

What do we expect from Science? What do we expect from the other ways we seek to understand our individual and collective experience: art, poetry and the domains of endeavor people think of as "spiritual"?

Once in a commentary on the poet Mary Oliver I found the following definition

"Poetry is what takes us to the boundaries between the expressible and the inexpressible"

Its been years since I read that but it has always stayed with me. It articulates a sense that there are aspects of human being, aspects of our experience, that can be deeply felt but not codified into a statement whose truth-value can be parsed and then evaluated discursively. This can seem like a weird thing for someone who has spent a life-time in science to say. As I kid I was attracted to science specifically because it promised an absolute knowledge of an absolute (I was a platonist early on it seems). But as got older this seemed more like an idealism (no pun indented) that a true description of the situation.

I am, of course, still in love with science and but now I think it offers us a more local kind of certainty embedded in a global question that it beautifully exposes. The world is out there and it pushes back. Of that there is no doubt. But in the totality of human experience how many ways are there to know to its shape and form?

How do we embrace the irreducibility of of our own experience conditioned by our personal narratives, with the sense that there are constants guiding that experience. Science reveals a world of exquisite order and subtle patterns that can be articulated with precision. How we respond to that order is about reason and our other myriad faculties.

I would argue that in our response such "revelation" we are taken to the boundaries of what can be expressed in language (mathematics included) and what eludes expression. The question is this: how to acknowledge such a boundary while staying close to world which shows itself to us. In the comments to the last post the metaphore of a gyroscope was offered. That can be quite useful. There is a great quote from the Buddhist tradition which could also be said of science: "The purpose of any practice is to not fool yourself".

That is the work.

Beyond the Poles: Not a Christian Nation

Here is a link to a very nice article about the idea that the US is not a christian nation. While I have tried to argue that we must move beyond the traditional Creationism vs Evolution debate in thinking about Science and Religion, part of transcendence will require speaking forcefully to those who indulge intolerance and fan its fire.

The challenge those of faith will face (and many have already risen to) is to find a meaningful pluralism that acknowledges other paths as well as the beauty and power of science.