The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace’s second failed […]
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The world recently watched an argument unfold on X between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. It was a surreal exchange, featuring one of the richest men ever to have lived […]
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The Heisenberg uncertainty principle holds things together. Articulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg almost a century ago, it remains the foundation of the physical world. Its name suggests the rule of the vague and temporary. But the principle is quantitative. A high uncertainty about the position of, say, an electron is compensated by a low uncertainty in its momentum. The principle is vital in helping us to understand chemical bonding, which is what holds matter together.
The Trump uncertainty principle, which I hereby coin, does the opposite; it tears things apart. Having taken effect on the US president’s inauguration day back in January, it almost immediately began damaging scientific culture. Researchers can no longer be sure if their grants will be delayed or axed – or if new proposals are even in the ballpark of the potentially fundable. Work is being stalled, erased or doomed, especially in the medical and environmental sciences.
The Trump uncertainty principle, or TUP for short, is implemented in several ways. One is through new policies at funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those new policies, the administration claims, are designed to promote “science, national health, prosperity, and defense”. Despite being exactly the same as the old policies, they’ve been used to justify the cancellation of 400 grants at the NSF alone and hollow out the NSF, NIH and other key US science funding agencies.
The Trump administration has sought to terminate billions of dollars worth of grants at Harvard University alone. It wants to ban US universities from recruiting international students and has even been cancelling the visas of current students, many of whom are enrolled in the sciences. It also wants to vet what prospective students have posted on social media, despite Trump’s supposed support for free speech. Harvard is already suing the Administration over these actions.
Back in March the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education sent letters to Harvard and 59 other universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, accusing them of what it considers “discrimination and harassment”. The office threatened “potential enforcement actions if institutions do not fulfil their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act”, which “prohibits discrimination against or otherwise excluding individuals on the basis of race, color, or national origin”.
But the impact of the Trump uncertainty principle reaches far beyond these 60 institutions because it is destroying the bonding of these institutions through its impact on the labs, institutions and companies that collaborate with them. It is also badly damaging the hiring of postdocs, the ability to attract undergraduates, the retention of skilled support staff, and laboratory maintenance. Most disruptively of all, the Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to.
The Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to
Stony Brook University, where I teach, is a research incubator not on the list of 60 institutions of higher learning threatened by the Department of Education. But many of my colleagues have had their NIH, NSF or Department of Energy funding paused, left unrenewed, or suspended without explanation, and nobody could tell them whether or when it might be restored or why it was stopped in the first place.
Support for 11 graduate students at Stony Brook was terminated. Though it was later restored after months of uncertainty, nobody knows if it might happen again. I, too, had a grant stopped, though it was due to a crude error and the money started up again. Everyone in the sciences I’ve spoken to – faculty, staff and students – is affected in one way or another by the Trump uncertainty principle even if they haven’t lost funding or jobs.
It is easy to sound hyperbolic. It is possible that Trump’s draconian cuts may be reversed, that the threats won’t be implemented, that they won’t stand up in court, and that the Trump administration will actually respect the court decisions. But that’s not the point. You can’t plan ahead if you are unsure how much money you have, or even why you may be in the administration’s cross-hairs. That’s what is most destructive to US science. It’s also saddening, traumatic and unnecessary.
Maintaining any culture, including an academic research one, requires supporting an active and ongoing dynamic between past, present and future. It consists of an inherited array of resources, a set of ideas about how to go forward, and existing habits and practices about how best to move from one to the other. The Trump administration targets all three. It has slashed budgets and staff of long-standing scientific institutions and redirected future-directed scientific programmes at its whim. The Trump uncertainty principle also comes into play by damaging the existing habits and practices in the present.
In his 2016 book The Invention of Science, David Wootton – a historian at the University of York in the UK – defined scientific culture as being “innovative, combative, competitive, but at the same time obsessed with accuracy”. Science isn’t the only kind of culture, he admitted, but it’s “a practical and effective one if your goal is the acquisition of new knowledge”. It seeks to produce knowledge about the world that can withstand criticism – “bomb-proof”, as Wootton put it.
Bomb-proof knowledge is what Trump fears the most, and he is undermining it by injecting uncertainty into the culture that produces it. The administration says that the Trump uncertainty principle is grounded in the fight against financial waste, fraud and discrimination. But proof of the principle is missing.
How do you save money by ending, say, a programme aimed at diagnosing tuberculosis? Why does a study of maternal health promote discrimination? What does research into Alzheimer’s disease have to do with diversity? Has ending scientific study of climate change got anything to do with any of this?
The justifications are not credible, and their lack of credibility is a leading factor in damaging scientific culture. Quite simply, the Trump uncertainty principle is destroying the position and momentum of US science.
The post ‘The Trump uncertainty principle’ is destroying the position and momentum of US science appeared first on Physics World.
Late on Friday 18 April, the provost of Stony Brook University, where I teach, received a standard letter from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the body that funds much academic research in the US. “Termination of certain awards is necessary,” the e-mail ran, “because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities”. The e-mail mentioned “NSF Award Id 2318247”. Mine.
The termination notice, forwarded to me a few minutes later, was the same one that 400 other researchers all over the US received the same day, in which the agency, following a directive from the Trump administration, grabbed back $233m in grant money. According to the NSF website, projects terminated were “including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation”.
Losing grant money is disastrous for research and for the faculty, postdocs, graduate students and support staff who depend on that support. A friend of mine tried to console me by saying that I had earned a badge of honour for being among the 400 people who threatened the Trump Administration so much that it set out to stop their work. Still, I was baffled. Did I really deserve the axe?
My award, entitled “Social and political dynamics of lab-community relations”, was small potatoes. As the sole principal investigator, I’d hired no postdocs or grad students. I’d also finished most of the research and been given a “no-cost extension” to write it up that was due to expire in a few months. In fact, I’d spent all but $21,432 of the $263,266 of cash.
That may sound like a lot for a humanities researcher, but it barely covered a year of my salary and included indirect costs (to which my grant was subject like any other), along with travel and so on. What’s more, my project’s stated aim was to “enhance the effectiveness of national scientific facilities”, which was clearly within the NSF’s mission.
Such facilities, I had pointed out in my official proposal, are vital if the US is to fulfil its national scientific, technological, medical and educational goals. But friction between a facility and the surrounding community can hamper its work, particularly if the lab’s research is seen as threatening – for example, involving chemical, radiological or biological hazards. Some labs, in fact, have had important, yet perfectly safe, facilities permanently closed out of such fear.
“In an age of Big Science,” I argued, “understanding the dynamics of lab-community interaction is crucial to advancing national, scientific, and public interests.” What’s so contentious about that?
Maybe I had been careless. After all, Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate’s commerce committee, had claimed in February that 3400 NSF awards worth over $2 billion made during the Biden–Harris administration had promoted DEI and advanced “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda”. I wondered if I might have inadvertently used some trigger word that outed me as an enemy of the state.
I knew, for instance, that the Trump Administration had marked for deletion photos of the Enola Gay aircraft, which had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in a Defense Department database because officials had not realized that “Gay” was part of the name of the pilot’s mother. Administration officials had made similar misinterpretations in scientific proposals that included the words “biodiversity” and “transgenic”.
Had I used one of those “new bad words”? I ran a search on my proposal. Did it mention “equity”? No. “Inclusion”? Also no. The word “diversity” appeared only once, in the subtitle of an article in the bibliography about radiation fallout. “Neo-Marxist”? Again, no. Sure, I’d read Marx’s original texts during my graduate training in philosophy, but my NSF documents hadn’t tapped him or his followers as essential to my project.
Then I remembered a sentence in my proposal. “Well-established scientific findings,” I wrote, “have been rejected by activists and politicians, distorted by lurid headlines, and fuelled partisan agendas.” These lead in turn to “conspiracy theories, fake facts, science denial and charges of corruption”.
Was that it, I wondered? Had the NSF officials thought that I had meant to refer to the administration’s attacks on climate change science, vaccines, green energy and other issues? If so, that was outrageous! There was not a shred of truth to it – no truth at all!
On 23 April – five days after the NSF termination notice – two researchers at Harvard University put together an online “Terminated NSF grant tracker”, which contained information based on what they found in the NSF database. Curious, I scrolled down to SUNY at Stony Brook and found mine: “Social and political dynamics of lab-community relations”.
I was shocked to discover that almost everything about it in the NSF database was wrong, including the abstract
I was shocked to discover that almost everything about it in the NSF database was wrong, including the abstract. The abstract given for my grant was apparently that of another NSF award, for a study that touched on DEI themes – a legitimate and useful thing to study under any normal regime, but not this one. At last, I had the reason for my grant termination: an NSF error.
The next day, 24 April, I managed to speak to the beleaguered NSF programme director, who was kind and understanding and said there’d been a mistake in the database. When I asked her if it could be fixed she said, “I don’t know”. When I asked her if the termination can be reversed, she said, “I don’t know”. I alerted Stony Brook’s grants-management office, which began to press the NSF to reverse its decision. A few hours later I learned that NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan had resigned.
I briefly wondered if Panchanathan had been fired because my grant had been bungled. No such luck; he was probably disgusted with the administration’s treatment of the agency. But while the mistake over my abstract evidently wasn’t deliberate, the malice behind my grant’s termination certainly was. Further, doesn’t one routinely double-check before taking such an unprecedented and monumental step as terminating a grant by a major scientific agency?
I then felt guilty about my anger; who was I to complain? After all, some US agencies have been shockingly incompetent lately
I then felt guilty about my anger; who was I to complain? After all, some US agencies have been shockingly incompetent lately. A man was mistakenly sent by the Department of Homeland Security to a dangerous prison in El Salvador and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get him back. The Department of Health and Human Services has downplayed the value of vaccines, fuelling a measles epidemic in Texas, while defence secretary Pete Hegseth used the Signal messaging app to release classified military secrets regarding a war in progress to a journalist.
How narcissistic of me to become livid only when personally affected by termination of an award that’s almost over anyway.
A few days later, on 28 April, Stony Brook’s provost received another e-mail about my grant from the NSF. Forwarded to me, it said: “the termination notice is retracted; NSF terminated this project in error”. Since then, the online documents at the NSF, and the information about my grant in the tracker, have thankfully been corrected.
In a few years’ time, I’ll put together another proposal to study the difference between the way that US government handles science and the needs of its citizens. I’ll certainly have a lot more material to draw on. Meanwhile, I’ll reluctantly wear my badge of honour. For I deserve it – though not, as I initially thought, because I had threatened the Trump Administration enough that they tried to halt my research.
I got it simply because I’m yet another victim of the Trump Administration’s incompetence.
The post Robert P Crease: ‘I’m yet another victim of the Trump administration’s incompetence’ appeared first on Physics World.
A quarter of a century ago, in May 2000, I published an article entitled “Why science thrives on criticism”. The article, which ran to slightly over a page in Physics World magazine, was the first in a series of columns called Critical Point. Periodicals, I said, have art and music critics as well as sports and political commentators, and book and theatre reviewers too. So why shouldn’t Physics World have a science critic?
The implication that I had a clear idea of the “critical point” for this series was not entirely accurate. As the years go by, I have found myself improvising, inspired by politics, books, scientific discoveries, readers’ thoughts, editors’ suggestions and more. If there is one common theme, it’s that science is like a workshop – or a series of loosely related workshops – as I argued in The Workshop and the World, a book that sprang from my columns.
Workshops are controlled environments, inside which researchers can stage and study special things – elementary particles, chemical reactions, plant uptakes of nutrients – that appear rarely or in a form difficult to study in the surrounding world. Science critics do not participate in the workshops themselves or even judge their activities. What they do is evaluate how workshops and worlds interact.
This can happen in three ways
First is to explain why what’s going on inside the workshops matters to outsiders. Sometimes, those activities can be relatively simple to describe, which leads to columns concerning all manner of everyday activities. I have written, for example, about the physics of coffee and breadmaking. I’ve also covered toys, tops, kaleidoscopes, glass and other things that all of us – physicists and non-physicists alike – use, value and enjoy.
Sometimes I draw out more general points about why those activities are important. Early on, I invited readers to nominate their most beautiful experiments in physics. (Spoiler alert: the clear winner was the double-slit experiment with electrons.) I later did something similar about the cultural impact of equations – inviting readers to pick their favourites and reporting on their results (second spoiler alert: Maxwell’s equations came top). I also covered readers’ most-loved literature about laboratories.
Physicists often engage in activities that might seem inconsequential to them yet are an intrinsic part of the practice of physics
When viewing science as workshops, a second role is to explain why what’s outside the workshops matters to insiders. That’s because physicists often engage in activities that might seem inconsequential to them – they’re “just what the rest the world does” – yet are an intrinsic part of the practice of physics. I’ve covered, for example, physicists taking out patents, creating logos, designing lab architecture, taking holidays, organizing dedications, going on retirement and writing memorials for the deceased.
Such activities I term “black elephants”. That’s because they’re a cross between things physicists don’t want to talk about (“elephants in the room”) and things that force them to renounce cherished notions (just as “black swans” disprove that “all swans are white”).
A third role of a science critic is to explain what matters that takes place both inside and outside the workshop. I’m thinking of things like competition, leadership, trust, surprise, workplace training courses, cancel culture and even jokes and funny tales. Interpretations of the meaning of quantum mechanics, such as “QBism”, which I covered both in 2019 and 2022, are an ongoing interest. That’s because they’re relevant both to the structure of physics and to philosophy as they disrupt notions of realism, objectivity, temporality and the scientific method.
The term “critic” may suggest someone with a congenitally negative outlook, but that’s wrong. My friend Fred Cohn, a respected opera critic, told me that, in a conversation after a concert, he criticized the performance of the singer Luciano Pavarotti. His remark provoked a woman to shout angrily at him: “Could you do better?” Of course not! It’s the critic’s role to evaluate performances of an activity, not to perform the activity oneself.
Having said that, sometimes a critic must be critical to be honest. In particular, I hate it when scientists try to delegitimize the experience of non-scientists by saying, for example, that “time does not exist”. Or when they pretend they don’t see rainbows but wavelengths of light or that they don’t see sunrises or the plane of a Foucault pendulum move but the Earth spinning. Comments like that turn non-scientists off science by making it seem elitist and other-worldly. It’s what I call “scientific gaslighting”.
Most of all, I hate it when scientists pontificate that philosophy is foolish or worthless, especially when it’s the likes of Steven Pinker, who ought to know better. Writing in Nature (518 300), I once criticized the great theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, who I counted as a friend, for taking a complex and multivalent text, plucking out a single line, and misreading it as if the line were from a physics text.
The text in question was Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates expresses his disappointment with his fellow philosopher Anaxagoras for giving descriptions of heavenly bodies “in purely physical terms, without regard to what is best”. Weinberg claimed this statement meant that Socrates “was not very interested in natural science”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
At that moment in the Phaedo, Socrates is recounting his intellectual autobiography. He has just come to the point where, as a youth, he was entranced by materialism and was eager to hear Anaxagoras’s opposing position. When Anaxagoras promised to describe the heavens both mechanically and as the product of a wise and divine mind but could do only the former, Socrates says he was disappointed.
Weinberg’s jibe ignores the context. Socrates is describing how he had once embraced Anaxagoras’s view of a universe ruled by a divine mind but later rejected that view. As an adult, Socrates learned to test hypotheses and other claims through putting them to the test, just as modern-day scientists do. Weinberg was misrepresenting Socrates by describing a position that he later abandoned.
Ultimately, the “critical point” of my columns over the last 25 years has been to provoke curiosity and excitement about what philosophers, historians and sociologists do for science. I’ve also wanted to raise awareness that these fields are not just fripperies but essential if we are to fully understand and protect scientific activity.
As I have explained several times – especially in the wake of the US shutting its High Flux Beam Reactor and National Tritium Labeling Facility – scientists need to understand and relate to the surrounding world with the insight of humanities scholars. Because if they don’t, they are in danger of losing their workshops altogether.
The post Robert P Crease lifts the lid on 25 years as a ‘science critic’ appeared first on Physics World.
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