Year: 2016

Posting during a week’s business trip to China, with the “Great Firewall” constraints on social media and Google services – including no access to any of my email (!) or any TV media. A fascinating visit to Wuhan capital of Wuchang, the home of the original 1911 Chinese revolution and more, but I digress.

One of the web-pages cached on my phone was the one extracted below from HuffPo’s UK version Tech pages. Fusion Reactor ‘Breakthrough’ Could Finally Hold The Key To Giving Us Clean, Abundant Power (16 February 2016 by Thomas Tamblyn Technology Editor, The Huffington Post UK)

Apart from the usual media hype of the key or final piece in the science jigsaw – mediated by “could” in the title and “may” in the opening sentence …

Researchers may finally have overcome one of the biggest obstacles to making nuclear fusion live up to its dream of giving us clean, virtually limitless energy.

… the view of science as a completable jigsaw is misguided anyway, even as a mathematical model – ask Godel, but again I digress.

The “almost exact” will turn out to be significant, but for now, whilst this is a computer model, physics is at base fundamentally computational. And whilst the scale of computation here is impressive (more details – read the story) it is an established fact that repeated computation throws up unpredictable results (at higher “evolved” levels than the starting point) even if the computation is simply and repeatedly algorithmic. (See Hofstadter, see Dennett, distinctly and together.)

The distinct levels (gestalts) ARE distinct – have their own identity, properties and behaviours – and whilst related, connected, even dependent, the lower does NOT cause the higher in any reductively, predictable way. Knowing the lower tells you nothing (very little) about the higher. Small differences in either the starting point or in the algorithmic relationship will lead to entirely different outcomes, and neither can you predict how small is too small to ever circumvent the problem. (In the specific example of the two-level plasma turbulence, the turbulence is already metaphorical I suspect, compared to “normal” fluid flow, but turbulence is notoriously chaotic, unpredictable and empirically stochastic – which spookily IS related to why I’m in China.)

Science ain’t that scientific. Not all, not even all good science is that repeatable.

Entertaining review from Eugene Wolters at Critical Theory, of  Francois Dosse “Intersecting Lives” of the philosophical odd-couple  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (Hat tip to Judith Stout @judystout1)

Apart from the madness and chaotic activism from pre-1968 Paris, the lives intersect with the name-dropping list of all those you’d expect from Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and more. Less expected, for me anyway, was to see the Spinoza references as a common thread of sanity despite the lunatics having taken over the asylum.

The buzz-cloud also gives a clue to the material covered by the Critical Theory blog. Entertaining and a useful resource.

Reminded of this due to twitter exchanges with several quite different people on new nuclear power options – partly the problems dogging EDF at Hinkley, partly the stay of decommissioning (but need for replacement) at Hartlepool (also operated by EDF these days), and initially because I had some involvement some years ago with Chinergy / Tsinghua / PBMR. This is the most advanced commercial scale PBMR, an “HTR-PM” – almost complete and due for start up as soon as next year in WeiHai, RongCheng Bay, China.

PBMR is not new at demonstrator scale, shelved because no-one took it up a commercial scale previously, and paused whilst the world took a deep breath over Fukushima Daiichi. But the point is, like all AGCR’s it is passively / intrinsically safer than liquid (water / molten salt / sodium) reactors AND specifically smaller and modular, reducing many other kinds of risk, commercial and political, as well as technical, safety, sustainability and environmental. Start small, add more later with confidence, in fact, just like the first commercial installation above has 2 x ~100MW HTR-PM’s going in now with an additional 18 planned in future.)

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Notes:

AGCR = Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor – there are many different designs in various stages and scales of development around the world – including Russia. All designed as 4th Gen alternatives to the 3rd Gen PWR / EPR’s like those causing problems in European projects, including Hinkley C, right now.

PBMR = Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor – a specific AGCR variant originally South-African / German design. Key thing is pebble-bed is well proven furnace technology in other industries (where I’ve also been involved directly) and inherently safe (just switch off and allow to cool).

(Thorium is the other fashionable new option, and in fact is one of the other 4th Gen AGCR designs, so is another viable option, but just not quite as close to full commercial start-up. Not even sure if Thorium couldn’t be substituted for Uranium in an evolved PBMR design, but the point is the PBMR future is now here. Sustainability also involves having evolutionary exit ramps of course.)

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[Post Note – Why not just go with a molten-salt reactor?

Another intrinsically safe design, with emphasis on the density and energy density and consequent thermal efficiencies compared to Helium cooled AGCR’s. Not sure thermal efficiency is a big deal for nuclear if overall compactness of design and build is achievable, and not sure we want proliferation of fast breeder designs with other nuclear weapon product possibilities. Still with details to be developed & proven? Part of a future mix with international controls, but maybe not the mass option? Not yet anyway. Unprejudiced dialogue and a balanced mixed portfolio is the key need.]

Not Khan, but one of his staff, once tweeted about the suggestion, didn’t and doesn’t actually suggest it. The “false flag” conspiracy-theory suggestion was much talked about at the time, thanks to the fact the killer was so well known to the authorities beforehand.

Sickening tragedy, and no-one is suggesting otherwise except opportunist Boris, but that’s politics.

And anyway, the guy has now resigned – the honorable thing.

One for the collection – Vive La Difference.

Excuse me, could I borrow your brain for a moment? This story about a crisis in psychology due to lack of repeatability has been doing the rounds on social media since yesterday.

For physical sciences, repeatability is an indicator scientific quality; a key part of science “senso stricto”. Life however is not a repeatable experiment, except where that life is expendable. So in life-sciences you can arrange for repeatable procedures where the individual lives can be manipulated and terminated, but a new experiment is a new life, a new individual. For more complex researches, either in the direction of multiple generations, the development of individuals and the evolution of species, or in the direction of higher functioning levels of conscious life in humans and higher animals, strict repeatability becomes a tougher proposition. Tougher to arrange for physically without indirection or intermediation, and more doubtful ethically depending on the kinds of manipulations of life and consciousness involved.

We could do the experiment, but I’d have to kill you afterwards.

Of course high quality scientific research should always strive to be as repeatable as possible, with clear boundary conditions as free as possible from extraneous, intermediating or (god-forbid) subjective effects, and failing that with clear recognition of and accounting for any such effects, so that repeatability and sensitivity to boundary conditions can be judged.

However, it is part of the scientistic turn to hold more complex and more highly evolved levels of nature to the same exclusive standards of objectivity and repeatability as pure physical science. Academic researches can still gain the “scientific” seal of approval even when they are not pure science – or at least pure science cannot be the sole arbiter of academic quality. Pure politics and rhetoric are one end of a scale remote from pure science, but scientific researches elsewhere on that scale are not necessarily “bullshit”. The “scientific” seal of approval itself does come with a fair helping of politics for funding support and the like.

Objectivity, repeatability and evidence are all fine attributes, but it’s fetish to hold all academic endeavours to account to the same standards of objectivity, repeatability and evidence.

As an engineer, I’ve always found  engineering analogies for evolution particularly engaging. One of the reasons I’m a big fan of Dan Dennett’s scaffolding, cranes and sky-hooks. In learning and in the philosophy of knowledge – epistemology – building in stages commonly uses the idea of ladders between levels – often with the idea that having reached one level, the ladder that got you there appears to now be redundant – “just” a piece of history. It can be pulled-up or kicked-away now you are safe and secure on your new level.

In fact the status of the ladders and steps that got us where we are are, are maybe better illustrated in this graphic from New Scientist:

I think the intent here was that the earlier steps were uncertain, faltering and difficult and the later structures get more solid over time. Engineering-wise counter-intuitive that the more solid stuff is higher up in the edifice? But I see a view that says the older steps and ladders – behind us in time – are falling into disrepair when they’re no longer being maintained and used for current work – and the edifice collapses.

The accompanying story is the usual “hype” – a 2016 story “bigger than Higgs and Gravitational Waves”. Bigger also, because it’s a new, even heavier, mass-causing particle beyond the standard model. I still don’t buy that the Higgs Boson or any other mass-causing particle can “have” mass, but that’s by-the-by. (The stories of the double-bump indications of the new massive “particle” have been circulating for a while.)

My real problem with the news item is seeing the completion of the standard model as “the end of a road” – something now behind us – the new stuff, any new particle, being somewhere beyond it. The further out we get, the bigger the problem with presuming our existing models are complete as well as correct. There are still enough indications of doubt and unexplained indications in both the standard particle and standard cosmological models, that no amount of confirmation of the components of our existing models should be presumed for future endeavours. Simply constructing the new from what we believe we know about the existing. Imaginative research and testing should continue to work on the scope of the existing models – with potential new directions branching off from lower down, behind us historically.

Treating them as “job done”, they will simply fall into disrepair.

Interesting Life Scientific from Jim Al Khalili interviewing George Davey-Smith today.

Refreshing scientist. In epidemiology – causes and effects of disease in populations – driven originally by the “natural, common sense” of the topic. A minefield of statistics and correlations, naturally, and the individual psychology of group effects. Refreshing not just because of the value of natural sense, but a clear understanding of epistemological effects vs presumed ontology – at root the all-too-easily-dismissed anthropic problem – as well as the recognition of distinct individual and group effects.

A keeper for further follow-up. (Must also join up with recent “Cognitive science isn’t epistemology, and moral psychology isn’t ethics.” line from Massimo Pigliucci.)

Time, time, time. So much listening and writing to be done!