heywood on 17/1/2012 at 04:44

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Giving to churches != funding creationism

And Papy, if the term "cloaking" didn't have sci-fi connotations then I don't think you would be calling this junk science. 99% of science is grinding out mundane experiments to improve experimental technique and gather data. Just because an experiment doesn't produce a ground breaking result doesn't mean it's junk science. The value of this experiment will be determined by the amount of future work that builds on it.

DDL on 17/1/2012 at 10:58

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Thing is, it's actually a fairly novel, ground-breaking discovery, from what I can gather: the use of 'split' time-lenses to separate a beam of light into two separable wavefronts, to actually separate those wavefronts and thus create a temporary 'deadzone' in the beam, and then to rejoin them at the other end making the entire beam appear to be continuous and unaltered to an observer at the destination...was apparently one of those things that seemed "theoretically possible", but technically unfeasible.
The fact that it's actually doable with modern technology is (apparently) worthy of a nature paper. Mind you, nature does tend to publish a lot of fairly quirky papers, and not just in physics. They often like publishing stuff that either lets them put a pretty picture on the cover, or some dramatic text that draws in readers.

Of course, with physics you don't usually get to generate pretty pictures (as opposed to say, chemists and diffraction patterns, or biologists and fluffy animals, or life scientists and umpteen thousand different configurations of fluorescently-labelled cells), so presumably they tend to use buzzwords instead. "Time hole" is both technically accurate in this instance, while also sounding hilariously sci-fi. Ditto for "temporal cloaking".

Subsequently, the reporting subsequently favours the buzzwords over the actual bulk of the science, and over time the process of chinese whispers tends to produce ludicrously unrealistic soundbites which (when compared to the original paper) lead to disillusionment and cynicism. And accusations of "borderline fraud", apparently.


Now in this particular case, like papy says, you could achieve the same result by just diverting the beam around an obstacle ("spacial cloaking"), but I'm pretty sure that "oh, well: we already have ways of doing that" has never been a good reason for abandoning scientific research. A huge part of scientific and technological progress is about finding new ways of doing things we are already able to do. Often these are 'better' ways (be it cheaper, more accurate, whatever), sometimes they're worse, sometimes they're just 'different'. -In this physics example, for instance, a photonic computer using temporal cloaking would probably be more compact and have fewer moving parts than one using spacial cloaking.
Of course, one employing both would be better still: no matter how you slice it, having access to a larger knowledge base is always a good thing.

This is not to say that the way science funds are allocated is ideal, far from it: good scientists who discover interesting (but unpublishable) things will lose out, while bad scientists in the right place will tend to win out. To be a successful research leader you generally need to be great at politics and publicity. It helps if you are also good at science, but this is not actually a requirement (after all, you have postdocs for that). There is a HUGE emphasis on papers, to the extent that a science CV might as well simply be "name, publication list". If you're good enough (but simply unlucky) you can survive with fewer papers, but the drive is always to publish, publish, publish. This inevitably also means that research tends to focus not on what it most interesting, or most beneficial, or most novel, but what is most publishable. If you're successful enough you can get to a point where your group is churning out enough 'safe' papers to guarantee funding, allowing you to spend some time on riskier (but actually interesting) research. And sometimes this can really pay off. Sometimes.

But mostly it's about the papers.

It's not, I'd be the first to admit, a good system, but it DOES sort of work, and at this point a seachange in methodology is very unlikely, even if someone could produce a better way of doing things, simply because the people who are in the position to award funds have come up through the system: it favours those who play the game, not those who are keen for change.

Thankfully, it's getting better: the new public library of sciences journal series (pLOS one, two etc) are more amenable to, for instance, publishing negative data, so you can do a whole series of experiments and prove that X totally doesn't interact with Y (or whatever) and now get a paper out of it, rather than simply have wasted a year on data nobody will publish (with the corrollary that probably, several groups have done exactly the same experiments, and reached the same conclusions, and also not been able to publish them). Hopefully the next few years will produce a more balanced view of individual researcher outputs, and also avoid a lot of unsuccessful attempts at wheel reinventing.


So there's that.

One could also go into detail about exactly how funding varies from subject to subject (and indeed, what those funds are spent on: physics tends to require gigantic one-off expenditures on huge pieces of kit which can then be used for an absolute shitload of experiments, whereas bioscience tends to have relatively few high-value expenditures -a cell sorter is expensive, but not 'physics-level expensive'- but gets through a shitload of consumables), and indeed what the respective fields are likely to produce in terms of discoveries, because there's a huge gulf in the public perception of science (by subject) and the actual research being done (by subject) so just arguing in favour of "science" over "junk" is sufficiently vague as to be nonsensical.

So, coming back to this actual paper, I'll admit: I'm not a physicist, so I can't speak for how this is actually perceived in the physics field, but then, equally I don't feel sufficiently educated in this particular scientific field to be confident dismissing it out of hand. To blithely disregard scientific research as 'junk' generally requires either incredibly in-depth knowledge of the field in question, or total blind frothing ignorance of it.

(plus, they got it in nature, so I'm ever so slightly jealous)

EDIT: also, Sg3: there's probably not actually all that much money in evolution-related research...it's kinda taken as proved, and thus there isn't a lot of point in proving it further. :-/