10/17/2002
Follow-ups on Peers and Pluto
Based on recent columns, you might think me obsessed with the brain. I''ve written about damage to the left brain and savant syndrome and about rats and monkeys controlling robots with their brains. Now I''m concerned about my own brain. Two weeks ago, I described my experience involving my wife-to-be reading me data to plot for my Ph.D. thesis calculations and how I mixed up the x and y axes. My wife thought that column was one of my most interesting, undoubtedly influenced by the fact that she played a key role in it. After posting the column, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it was she who got the numbers mixed up and was reading me data from the wrong columns. It took my feeble brain over half a century to come up with this obvious possibility. I was amazed at how well my wife took my suggestion that she might have been at fault!
In that same column, I could have questioned the status of J. Hendrik Sch n''s brain when he allegedly falsified data in his work at Bell Labs. Paul Ginsparg had no such qualms in an interview with William Speed Weed published in last Sunday''s New York Times Magazine section. Regarding Sch n''s actions, Ginsparg suggested "There had to be a screw loose." Ginsparg''s opinion was that "…years ago this never would have happened at Bell Labs." I was pleased to see that his opinion was in line with my own and that he also shared my skepticism and/or shock with Sch n''s claim that he didn''t have a notebook or his original raw data. Ginsparg also thought Sch n''s co-authors should be embarrassed and be shown no sympathy, citing the fact that he himself checked every equation in any paper he authored.
Following up further on that column, I noted that I hadn''t seen anything about patents in connection with Sch n''s work. Last week, however, Lucent reported that it has pulled 6 patents on that work. For the record, I can report that none of my 7 patents at Bell labs were ever pulled.
Oh, you wonder who is this fellow Ginsparg? I asked myself the same question. To find the answer I had to supplement the Times article with a visit to the Cornell University Web site. Ginsparg is a professor of physics and computer and information science at Cornell. The Times interview appears to have been prompted by the fact that, within 24 hours of the investigative committee''s finding of misconduct at Bell Labs, Ginsparg was informed that he had won a MacArthur award. A MacArthur award, often termed a "genius award", is a big deal. Ginsparg receives the tidy sum of $500,000 over the next five years, no strings attached. Appropriately, string theory is one of the fields in which Ginsparg, a theoretical physicist, has made significant contributions. However, it seems that the MacArthur award was for something quite different that he created 11 years ago while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Peer review was the theme of the column on my x-y axis mistake and Sch n''s misconduct. But Ginsparg''s MacArthur-winning creation is the very antithesis of the peer review system. What he created was arXiv.org, a system for online distribution of scientific papers prior to publication. There''s no peer review. You submit your paper and, after a check to make sure the subject matter is not out of line, it''s there online for anyone to look at. Ginsparg worked on setting up this system in his spare time using surplus equipment at Los Alamos. The arXiv system is currently limited to certain fields of physics, mathematics, computing and other selected areas. The X in arXiv approximates the Greek letter chi; hence "archive".
I admit to not having heard of arXiv before reading the Times interview so I logged on. Whoa! It''s impressive. There were papers entered the previous day and the subject matter was over my head in most cases. The online site now contains over 200,000 papers and is receiving more at roughly 3,000 papers a month! Employing higher mathematics, I calculate that''s about a hundred papers a day!
Now I understand the reason for the MacArthur award, which is meant to stimulate innovation. Think of the implications of Ginsparg''s arXiv. Instead of waiting many months (6 months to a year was not unusual when I was at Bell Labs) for your paper to appear in a journal or a proceedings volume, it appears online instantaneously after you e-mail it to arXiv and it passes the topic scrutiny. There''s also the matter of cost. It takes thousands of dollars to distribute an article in a conventional journal but only $1 to $5 to distribute the same paper on arXiv. With Ginsparg''s move to Cornell last year, the National Science Foundation and the Cornell University Library now support the site.
You might think that this publishing of papers without peer review would make it more likely that scientific misconduct would spread. Ginsparg''s reply is that because the audience is so vast online and the speed of communication so fast, questionable results are quickly put to the test. He feels that Sch n might have been saved from himself had his papers been distributed in arXiv.
Just for the record, while Sch n''s claims of molecular transistors have been deemed unreliable, it doesn''t mean that work towards such devices is dead. Indeed, there are now claims to have done Sch n one better by making switches involving single atoms! You can''t get much smaller than that. Let''s hope that work is reproducible.
While we''re following up on past columns, a topic we treated quite a while ago was the status of the "planet" Pluto. I put the term planet in quotation marks because in recent years there has been a controversy as to whether Pluto should even be called a planet. Indeed, Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has demoted Pluto in the museum''s exhibits. Now comes another discovery that really puts Pluto''s status in doubt.
You may have learned about this discovery in the October 6 New York Times or other news media. A new spherical object, half the size of Pluto, has been found orbiting the sun some 4 billion miles out in space. This new object was given the curious name of Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-o-ar). Unlike Pluto, it has a circular orbit around the sun and also orbits more closely to the plane in which most planets orbit. Not only is Pluto''s orbit tilted substantially to that plane but it is also elliptical and at times Pluto swing in closer to the sun than the planet Neptune. With the discovery of Quaoar, it seems that Tyson''s demotion of Pluto should gather support in the International Astronomical Union, which has been reluctant to downgrade that object.
I visited the Museum''s Web site and found that I could listen and watch Tyson answer various questions. He pointed out one very pertinent point. He says that if Pluto were put closer to the sun, say into Earth''s orbit, it would develop a tail. Tyson asks, "What kind of a planet is that?" He suggests making Pluto King of the Comets! I''m convinced. Pluto is dead - long live the King!
I was intrigued by the fact that Quaoar is making the headlines today even though it was actually discovered much earlier. Well, not exactly discovered. What happened is that Mike Brown and his colleague Chad Trujillo found the object in June of this year using a 1.2-meter telescope on Mount Palomar. On such a relatively small telescope, Quaoar is just a point of light but, when they looked back at old plates, there was Quaoar in photos ranging back to 1982. This year, when the Hubble telescope was pointed at Quaoar, it showed up as a disk and its diameter could be measured. Quaoar is 1,280 kilometers in diameter, about half the diameter of Pluto and about a third the diameter of our Moon. Now astronomers will not be surprised to find other objects, maybe even bigger than Pluto out there in the far reaches of our solar system.
Following up on past columns was very rewarding for me. Checking furhter on the Bell Labs affair, I visited the Lucent Web site and found that I could listen to a conference call with analysts last when Lucent announced further cuts in work force. Until then I hadn''t realized my computer was capable of getting audio from the Net. This led to my listening and watching the aforementioned Tyson bit on Pluto. Even better, I found that I could log onto the Prairie Home Companion Web site and listen to old broadcasts of Garrison Keillor dating back to 1996. It''s been a bone of contention in our house for years. My wife wants to go out to dinner on Saturday evenings and claims I''m in a grumpy mood because I''m missing Keillor''s stories of Lake Wobegone. Now I can do both.
Allen F. Bortrum
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