A mass of incandescent gas

Chad Orzel reports that Gregg Easterbrook's weird, fervent antipathy to modern physics and cosmology has been leaking into his football columns. His distortions about antimatter and cosmology are dumb enough, but the NFL.com screed against particle physics that Kip Dyer linked to (scroll way down past the cheerleader) is a dangerous kind of wrong:

Comes now a nutty new frontier in subsidized physics research of dubious value. The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council of the United Kingdom is proposing to spend at least 21 million British pounds to build a "neutrino factory". Neutrinos are subatomic ghost particles once thought to have no mass, and now believed to carry extremely tiny amounts of mass under some circumstances. Already, hundreds of millions of dollars of tax funds have been invested by several nations, including the United States, in building elaborate underground detectors that search for neutrinos coming from the Sun -- research that employs physicists, but has zero practical value to taxpayers. Now the United Kingdom may trigger a race to manufacture neutrinos for the purpose of study. Is there any chance of practical value from such work? Almost none. This sort of nutty research should only be done with private funds.

He's fairly skillful at portraying neutrino physics as a pointless recreation akin to counting angels on pinheads. The "coming from the Sun" part ought to clue you in on what the flaw is here. The Sun, if you're unfamiliar with it (if you live in New England this is understandable), is a large, shiny object in the sky that is fairly important to human life. Astrophysicists think they understand the basic operation of the Sun pretty well; there is a "standard solar model" that describes, among other things, the nuclear reactions going on in its interior.

One of the tests of this model was to look for solar neutrinos, which are produced in those nuclear reactions and come right out of the center of the Sun. But for many years, there was a discrepancy between the number of neutrinos detected in these experiments and the predictions of the models: only a third as many were seen as were expected. This was the "solar neutrino problem". There was some worry that there was something wrong with the standard solar model.

The resolution came not from astrophysics but from the physics of neutrinos. There are three types of neutrinos (corresponding to the three generations of leptons and "quarks", as Easterbrook scare-quotes them—another discovery of pointless nutty particle physics). The early experiments only detected one type, the electron neutrino. This is the same type that is supposed to be produced in the center of the Sun. But, as physicists theorized and experiments have apparently now detected, the tiny masses of these particles are of such a nature as to allow them to change type. They oscillate between the three types in transit, so that the sample of neutrinos detected on Earth is actually a mixture of the three types, hence the two-thirds shortfall in electron neutrinos. The discovery of neutrino mass provides confirmation that the standard solar model is more or less right.

So understanding the physics of neutrinos is crucial to checking models of the Sun. And models of the Sun are, in turn, important for such things as figuring out the long-term contributions of various forcings to the Earth's climate, which helps scientists reason from historical records to figure out such things as how much environmental damage our own actions do.

Easterbrook seems to have a childish model of science in which anything that doesn't lead directly to a technological product is wasted effort. But everything is connected.

Astroturf is made of people

A couple of remarks on the environmental-science-and-politics front (note, as usual, that I am not an environmental scientist, but I like to think I've spent a lot of time observing the scientific community and its interactions with the rest of the world):


1. Apparently the line that "everyone thought there was going to be an ice age in the Seventies; these climate people, you can't believe anything they say" is still going around (RealClimate ran an article debunking it a while back).

Aside from it being fairly irrelevant anyway (even if it were true, it's on the order of "First scientists say the Sun goes around the Earth, then Earth goes around the Sun! Which is it? MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!!!") the striking thing about it is that I personally remember it not being true, and surely people who are older than I am can concur. There might have been some fretting about ice ages in popular media, but people did know and worry about CO₂-induced global warming back then; this isn't some recent fad. The general circulation models weren't there yet, but you could get the order of magnitude of the effect from basic back-of-the-envelope calculations. (I like that the article from which George Will pulled his damning quote about glaciation had a sentence completely destroying his contention in the previous paragraph. If anyone needed further proof that Will is the King of Hacks, this is it.)

But what I just remembered is that there's evidence even from pop culture: I'm pretty sure that global warming is part of the background of the movie Soylent Green.



2. Is Rachel Carson responsible for more deaths than Hitler? You might not be surprised to hear that the answer is "no". However, I've been hearing this nonsense going around in Real Life, so I suppose I should mention that Tim Lambert has been having a lovely time ripping the Environmentalists Killed Millions By Banning DDT story to pieces. I feel slightly embarrassed, because this is one that I actually thought might have a grain of truth to it the first time I encountered it. Not really, though, for reasons Lambert explains.

One of his commenters expressed bafflement that anti-environmentalists would be so obsessed with DDT in the first place, given its marginal utility for the purposes for which the Tech Central Station crowd have been advocating it. What's going on here is actually a common pattern among scientific cranks, which in its normal manifestation I call Experimentum Crucis Syndrome. It's the idea that an entire discipline rests on a single historical claim, which, once destroyed, will kick the supports out from under the whole thing. For anti-relativity cranks, it's the Michelson-Morley experiment: you'll see people writing long, tangled screeds about problems with Michelson-Morley as if that were the only thing convincing any modern scientist of the reality of special relativity. Here, it's Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which provided much early inspiration for the environmental movement. Silent Spring was famous for helping get DDT banned for many uses. Refute the DDT thesis, so the thinking goes, and all of environmentalism collapses like the horde of zombies when you decapitate the Head Zombie.