Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Science Lesson
Ran into this article the other day.
So, here's the science lesson for the common person -- science, like anything, runs on money. Physcial Review Letters. a peer reviewed journal, published Torquato's paper, but the article I originally cited is on a nanotechnology industry web site, and claims stuff that is not really evident in the abstract to the paper. So what's up? Torquato is using the industry press to try and gather investment. "I have an idea -- looks good in modelling -- Don't you want to throw a bunch of money my way to see if it really works? - We could get rich!" Now, I found the original citation on Fark. And that, dear reader is how science information gets stretched and exageratted and completely out of control. Imagine it was about something people really cared about, say global warming, and imagine what happens. Think about that the next time you are reading about the end of the planet from global warming.
Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another.Translation -- these guys claim to be able to build molecular particles like you build a house. It's never worked that way before, so this would be a big deal. I went looking for the actual paper. They want $23.00 to look at it, so I settled for the abstract.
We devise an inverse statistical-mechanical methodology to find optimized interaction potentials that lead spontaneously to a target many-particle configuration.Now we're getting somewhere -- "Statistical mechanics" is a branch of science wherein one tries to translate things that happen on the quantum level into things that happen on the level we interact with everday, and it's notoriously black magic like. It works only in highly defined, and generally unreproducable in actuality kinds of conditions. Which leads me to this article. Herein, four physicists try to explain the current state of quantum science. One of them says
Despite its stunning success in describing a wide range of phenomena in the micro-world, quantum mechanics remains a source of puzzlement. The trouble stems from meshing the quantum to the classical world of familiar experience.In other words, Torquato and friends are making one incredible claim. I have no doubt it works in the computer, but that's the only place they claim to have tried it. The lab is a whole different world.
So, here's the science lesson for the common person -- science, like anything, runs on money. Physcial Review Letters. a peer reviewed journal, published Torquato's paper, but the article I originally cited is on a nanotechnology industry web site, and claims stuff that is not really evident in the abstract to the paper. So what's up? Torquato is using the industry press to try and gather investment. "I have an idea -- looks good in modelling -- Don't you want to throw a bunch of money my way to see if it really works? - We could get rich!" Now, I found the original citation on Fark. And that, dear reader is how science information gets stretched and exageratted and completely out of control. Imagine it was about something people really cared about, say global warming, and imagine what happens. Think about that the next time you are reading about the end of the planet from global warming.
