Science and the media: 4 - 10 September

In this week’s review, Steven T. Corneliussen, who monitors several publications for the American Institute of Physics, looked at a letter in Nature about plagiarism in China, a letter in Nature from Nobel laureate Burt Richter about laboratory management, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss about the origin of the universe, how three newspapers engaged Stephen Hawking’s new book, a commentary in Science by Chinese researchers about Chinese research funding, and a report in the Washington Post about the financial plight of European science.

Chinese journal finds 31% of submissions plagiarized

In a letter in the 9 September issue of Nature, Yuehong Zhang begins, “Since October 2008, we have detected unoriginal material in a staggering 31% of papers submitted to the Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE (692 of 2233 submissions).” The letter briefly describes methods used to measure the problem as well as measures taken against it. The author says, “We are . . . campaigning for authors, researchers and editors to be on the alert for plagiarism and to work against cultural misunderstandings. In ancient China, for example, students were typically encouraged to copy the words of their masters.”

Burt Richter: lab directors as team managers, not autocrats

To what extent do physicists—in fact, to what extent should physicists—share power with people from other professions in the running of large, complex projects and laboratories? In a letter in the 9 September issue of Nature, Nobel laureate Burt Richter draws on his past as director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to dispute treatment of that question in a 19 August column by Colin Macilwain, who began reporting for Nature in 1993.

Macilwain had asserted that “Richter was of the generation that learned directly from the unfettered clique that built the atomic bomb"—that is, from “veterans of the Manhattan Project [who] had taken physics out of the university lab and into the big world of politics and quid pro quos,” and who later “bequeathed the culture that scientists could do it all for themselves.”

The columnist also asserted that an “axiom of this culture is that major projects should be led by top scientists, with little input from engineers or, heaven forbid, managers from business or industry.” He added, “This is perhaps unsurprising, given the low esteem in which most scientists hold non-scientific training.”

The bulk of Macilwain’s column went on to discuss the need to find or nurture “truly inspirational leaders to enthuse staff, charm civil servants and politicians, and provide a face to the outside world,” given that there is “a shortage of men or women who can combine the charisma of ‘old-school’ scientific leaders with the bureaucratic skills demanded today.”

In particular, he observed that the “leadership question has been highlighted this year by the shambles at ITER, the international fusion project,” which recently replaced its director. At the end, Macilwain came back to "[o]ld bears such as Richter and Carlo Rubbia , the formidable but temperamental director of CERN from 1989 to 1993"—both of whom, Macilwain conjectured, “might have struggled to cope with the constraints of today’s management environment.”

Richter’s letter responds that it is simply “wrong” to say that the Manhattan Project left scientists “with the belief that they could run their own projects by themselves.” He writes:

Maybe this exchange will inspire discussion about the views and methods of other past directors—for example, the Manhattan Project veteran who so famously and energetically led the building of Fermilab four decades ago, Robert Wilson.

Lawrence M. Krauss on Stephen Hawking’s new book

Whatever may need to be said about the treatment of climate science in the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion pages, those pages often engage science generally. The 8 September edition includes the op-ed “Our Spontaneous Universe ,” in which the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, engaging the new Stephen Hawking book, says, “I have never quite understood the conviction . . . that creation requires a creator.” His brief essay explains what he calls the “remarkable, testable arguments that provide firmer empirical evidence of the possibility that our universe arose from nothing.”

I won’t attempt to summarize the complexity that Krauss has already distilled, except to say that he starts with Einstein, moves through dark energy and counterintuitive ideas about the universe’s possible “exotic geometries,” and ends up with the statement that data “coming in from our revolutionary new tools promise to turn much of what is now metaphysics into physics.” He adds: “Whether God survives is anyone’s guess.” Krauss’s newest book, A Universe From Nothing, comes out next year.

Three national newspapers engage new Hawking book

In three different ways in recent days, three national newspapers have engaged The Grand Design, the new book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

On 4 September, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy excerpt under the headline “Why God Did Not Create the Universe: There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required.” Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt: “Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.”

On 5 September, the Washington Post ran a review by the George Mason University physicist and science writer James Trefil, who is himself about to publish an “illustrated tour of the multiverse,” as the Post puts it. Trefil’s review begins by bringing up Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , in which a computer, when asked “to provide the ultimate answer to ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything,’” renders the famous answer “42.” Trefil continues:

Trefil enthuses, “I’ve waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation.”

On 7 September, in a laundry-list article atop the front page of the Arts section headlined “Beach Reads Finished, It’s Time for the Big Books,” the New York Times mentions the book this way:

Chinese officials argue that China’s research culture needs change

Given China’s growing research enterprise , it’s probably important to note a commentary in the 3 September issue of Science. Under the headline “China’s Research Culture,” coauthors Yigong Shi of Tsinghua University and Yi Rao of Peking University caution that although funding has been growing at a rate of more than 20% per year, the “reality” is that “rampant problems in research funding—some attributable to the system and others cultural—are slowing down China’s potential pace of innovation.”

They charge that to “obtain major grants in China, it is an open secret that doing good research is not as important as schmoozing with powerful bureaucrats and their favorite experts.” The authors describe a general awareness of the problem, but also a general resignation to it. The result, they say, is that a “significant proportion of researchers in China spend too much time on building connections and not enough time attending seminars, discussing science, doing research, or training students.” They conclude:

Major budget trouble for European science, especially physics

On the 7 September front page, below the fold, the Washington Post reports : “In Europe, science collides with the bottom line.” Though that headline cites “science,” the article mainly addresses budget threats to European physics.

With fiscal austerity causing European governments to cut “everything from aid for single mothers to once-sacred state jobs,” the Post reports, “some countries are now balking at the mega-price tags of lofty regional cooperation projects such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN),” which “is planning to mothball” the Large Hadron Collider and eight other particle accelerators for a year beginning in 2012. The idea, reportedly, is to “avoid the need to eliminate them and [to] give scientists time to review mountains of data collected this year and next.”

Also under threat, the article says, are a powerful European telescope in Chile “that could discern atmospheres on incredibly distant planets,” the Diamond Light Source and the Isis neutron source in the UK, the European Space Agency, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France (where, the article stops to note, “researchers used x-ray fluorescence to illuminate the genius of Leonardo da Vinci’s brush strokes and to study the skulls of ancient hominids”).

The article notes what it calls a “sharp contrast to the United States, where government spending—including on science and technology—continues to steam ahead despite the record US deficit.” Here’s the final paragraph: