On Scale

I recently encountered this "Scale of the Universe" widget: an animation tool that places the human body in the center of a sliding scale of dimensions ranging from the very big—the estimated size of the universe—to the unimaginable small of Quantum foam and string theory. Everything in-between is visualized comparatively: pollen grains set against Ultraviolet light and the width of human hair, mountain ranges against galactic distances.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2001), fiberglass and titanium alloy foil

The schema of extreme polarities in size reminded me of the two scientific images—an image of a cell and of an exploding star—I found so striking when thinking about impossible images. In many ways science works with scales that stretch the limits of the imaginable, or by using mathematics and data as forms of abstraction to manage the quantitatively big or the inconceivably small.

But conceiving scale concretely, as a visual image, can matter a lot in social ways. The first images of the earth from space created a point of view that had not existed before the 1960s, even though they described a concept that had been comprehended for centuries—a post-Copernican universe, in which the Earth is a planet among others. But those images entered the collective social imaginary instantly and viscerally, as something quantitatively new. In an odd way, the Apollo photographs didn’t de-centre the Earth into a universe wider than we can imagine so much as re-center it for our vision. By placing the whole Earth in the center of the frame of television images beamed to one of the first global audiences, those photographs let us see the planet in an entirety new way: as an entity. Many descriptions of these images invoke a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and they have been credited with contributing to a ecological consciousness.

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light - our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.
-Ulf Merbold

The ISW mystery I: Introduction

Looks nice Roger, but what are the industrial applications?

Making science a spectator sport

A huge part of the motivation for us starting this blog, if not the main motivation was to present new research as it is being done. In other words, to present the view of new research from the very trenches where the discoveries are made. I still intend (at some point in that mythical, utopian, land called later) to write a more thorough “motivation for the blog” post; however, the main motivation for presenting new research now, rather than waiting for Brian Cox to make a documentary about it, is this: it allows everyone in society to feel involved in scientific research. The hope is that science will then go beyond being just what those guys with beards in white coats do that we, everyone else, don't understand and instead becomes something that society as a whole gets behind and becomes fascinated by and talks about excitedly during their lunch-break.

You might think this is over-ambitious (though possibly not if you're reading this blog). But, meh, I think you are wrong. The public response to scientific discoveries/announcements last year like this and this tells me that people do care and are immensely fascinated by what scientists do. If society is not talking about science at the water-cooler it is because we, the scientists, are not collectively trying hard enough to involve society in science. There are numerous hard working and successful exceptions of course. The fact that they are exceptions is the problem.

Some scientists reading this might wonder why we even want society talking about science at the water-cooler. Mightn't science become corrupted by such base chatter? Think about this again the next time you are applying for some grant money and have to bend over backwards trying to come up with possible industrial applications for your work. Especially when later that evening you could watch a sportsman get paid millions for doing what he or she chooses to do. I doubt Nike have ever asked Roger Federer to come up with potential industrial applications for his backhand. Sportsmen are paid simply because people like watching them play and think they are cool. But people also want to keep track of scientific progress and they definitely also think it is cool. This latent popularity isn't a bad thing and it isn't being utilised enough by science.

In this sense this blog, and others like it, could be described as attempts by scientists to start making science a spectator sport. Hopefully we'll get better with time.

So, with that unnecessarily long introduction out of the way, let me finally (from the perspective of both this post and the blog itself) start telling you about some of my own research...

Treason in the immune army - betrayed by your own

The previous post in this series can be found here.

So far in my series of posts, I’ve tried to give you an insight into how your immune system is organised into divisions with specific roles: B cells  produce antibodies against pathogens; killer T cells demolish infected cells; and helper T cells act as the battle strategists, determining the tactics that will be used to destroy the invaders. Alongside these high-ranking immune cells are innumerable other footsoldiers that take their orders from T cells and sometimes from the antibodies released by B cells: neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils etc.

In any army there is the odd defector, a rogue agent who changes sides or simply goes it alone, and your immune system is no different. The lowly footsoldiers mentioned above are not capable to acting without orders from higher up and so when a turncoat T or B cell starts to send out treacherous commands that you might be in trouble.  In this post, I’m going to explain the different forms of autoimmunity (when the immune system attacks the body) and allergy (when it attacks innocuous molecules). I will also explain how our understanding of the immune system is starting to allow us to treat these disorders and save or improve countless lives.

Autoimmunity and allergy – T and B cells gone bad

Autoimmune diseases affect roughly one in twenty people in the western world; allergies, far more. Their symptoms are hugely variable and range from mild rashes to fatal anaemia. All are caused by misdirection of the adaptive immune system and are driven by conspiratorial T or B cells. Luckily for you and me, immunologists have been working furiously for the last century or so to unravel the causes behind these disorders and are now starting to produce fairly effective and specific cures. As you might expect, the effect of an autoimmune response depends very heavily upon what is rebelling: antibodies fired out by a B cell, for example, will have a very different outcome to a psychotic killer T cell.

Senses of Science

Four months ago I wrote a post about wonder in an attempt to sketch out the aspirational mood of this blog (or at least my sense of it). In six week increments since I’ve metaphorically returned to that mood and tried to make its implications more concrete by mapping out the actual directions that thinking about wonder and new lines of disciplinary mingling have led my own research: first, into the domain of science film, and second, into postulations about this genre within a critical category I called ‘the impossible image.’

So come December, I’ve decided to take the opportunity for reflection provided by the end of a calendar year and circle back to wonder, backlit by a sense of some things I’ve learned from this multi-directional conversation thus far. The hero of this post is an out-and-out iconoclast: the scientist and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose six-decade career was devoted to the intertwining of science and art on every level. A biologist trained in the Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée at the Sorbonne, Painlevé was an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker who penned countless texts, reviews, polemics, and manifestos; was politically active during and beyond the Second World War; and initiated a scientific film institute dedicated to supporting and disseminating science film well before the nexus of art and science was comprehended as a serious topic.

underwater bricolage: Jean Painlevé with his diving gear
"Everything is the center of the world. I'm forced to be multicentric."

Best of all, Painlevé is a humorist. His mesmerizing films and delicate photographs, chatty texts and sparking interviews give us a way to concretize a subtle quality of the aesthetics of wonder—the significance of pleasure in the strangeness and surprising beauty of the natural world. The mood of his contribution to the history of our topic seems to me perfectly encapsulated in Foucault's riff on discovery and the affects of wonder:

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

 

Bacteria being naughty

 

This is nothing more than a pre-weekend, "isn't that interesting", eye-candy, filler post. It is a video I saw about a month ago that shows flashing bacteria.

Basically it shows bacteria that spontaneously flash (hence why they're being naughty... oh nevermind). Here is an article that explains what they're doing in more depth.  When on their own, this flashing is mostly random. In fact, even when they are in small bunches they appear to flash randomly. However, when in large packs they all flash in unison.

I suppose it is somewhat aesthetically pleasing just on its own, but the thing that drew my attention was how fascinating it was that the individual bacteria behaved differently when a part of a large collection as opposed to when on their own. It appears groupthink exists even at the microscopic level of life.

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What does the sound of the Big Bang look like?

Six weeks ago I wrote a post where I tried to explain how we know that the Big Bang definitely happened. There are of course other reasons why we know the Big Bang happened, but I decided to focus on one, relatively easily explained piece of evidence, which is the existence and frequency spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Quickly summarising: The CMB is very cold radiation that permeates the entire universe. It was created when the expanding and cooling universe cooled to a point where it was cold enough for hydrogen atoms to form. Before this point, the electrons and protons in hydrogen had enough energy to be free from each other to form an opaque plasma. Once neutral hydrogen formed the universe became transparent and the CMB was formed and travelled (almost) freely forever after. We have detected and measured this CMB and its intensity as a function of its frequency (effectively, the brightness of each colour) is exactly what the Big Bang predicted. If there was no Big Bang there would be no reason to expect a CMB to exist, let alone for it to have this particular property. For more details please read my previous post and the links within.

When writing that post I had intended to say quite a bit more about the CMB and the Big Bang than I ended up having space for. It is not quite true that the mere existence (and spectrum) of the CMB is enough to conclusively determine that the Big Bang must have happened. However the existence of the CMB did build the metaphorical equivalent of a thousand big, bold and bright neon signs that all pointed aggressively towards the Big Bang being true.

When I began writing that earlier post and claimed that the CMB does conclusively prove that the Big Bang happened I had in my mind what I actually discuss in this post. This is the fact that we can see in the CMB the effects of sound waves that existed in the primordial hydrogen plasma. It is these sound waves and our measurements of them that puts the final nail in the coffin of all things not the Big Bang. They also represent what I claimed in that earlier post to be “jaw-droppingly stunning pieces of detective work”.

The glorious Planck satellite, measurer of all things CMB

Poetrees

This is something I saw on the internet that was kind of nice. It seems that the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh is haunted by a mysterious artist. The artist takes books (not library books, thankfully!), turns them into sculptures and then surreptitiously places them in the library. A more thorough story on the sculptor is here (though not the identity).

Chris Scott/flickr

The library itself named the first work, a poetree... so don't blame me for the title of the post. The image above is a movie theatre with the characters leaping out of the screen and challenging the audience (a different angle below).

Chris Scott/flickr

There are lots of other equally nice sculptures, such as the original poetree, as well as a pleasant detective mystery to go with the missing identity of the surreptitious sculpture. All can be seen at the news article, so why not go read it?

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