The Pondering Physicist

Random Thoughts: November 2021. Can the Asch Experiment Explain Vaccine Hesitancy?

The Pondering Physicist — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:21:36 GMT

It's been a while, but what can I say? It's been a crazy few months. Life goes on. Everyone still has their opinions, their little delusions. A friend recently imparted some wisdom my way: opinions are like arseholes - everyone has one, and they all smell.

Something I've found myself coming back to for a while is why - in the face of undeniable facts (think climate change, anti-vax, anti-mask, fake news etc.) - are there groups of people that choose to reject said facts. For me, it all boils down to the following:

Our want to self-delude for peer acceptance far outweighs our want to accept the truth and act as individuals (go against the group).

Maybe this is a gross over-simplification... But, it is somewhat uncanny how much of human behaviour (especially in light of recent events) can be explained by a longing for group acceptance, or the unwillingness to go against the group. It seems that humans yearn to be part of the group, even if that means the acceptance of certain delusions. There is a famous experiment that exemplifies this called the Asch experiment.

In the experiment, the volunteer takes part in a 'vision test', as part of a group. In this test, the individuals in the group are asked to identify which of 3 drawn vertical lines are the longest (A, B or C), and call the answer out. Unknown to the subject, the rest of the group are paid actors. The test proceeds and the paid actors consistently call out the wrong answers. In most cases (around 75%), the subject conformed at least one of their answers to those given by the group, regardless if they thought the answer to be incorrect. 5% of all test subjects were always swayed by the crowd.

Could this very human behaviour explain the persistent vaccine hesitancy from certain groups around the world? Surely the situation is more complicated, but this human behaviour is so often overlooked as part of the explanation, that maybe it needs to be explicitly stated. It's no coincidence that vaccinations differ significantly between political affiliation, but not race or ethnicity.

What's the silver lining? Well, the Asch experiments found that if only one other paid actor gave correct answers always, the level of conformity dropped significantly.

Random Thoughts - April 2021

The Pondering Physicist — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 05:41:00 GMT

The truth has only one brief victory parade in between two phases in which it is first ridiculed as impossible or preposterous, and then brushed off for being trivial.
Searching for the best version of the truth is the end goal of science. Unfortunately, most people don't care for the truth.
Civilisation is self defeating. Every civilisation has thought it would last forever, and every civilisation has fallen. We are no different.
Scientists require evidence to support their conclusions. Those in power do not.
There are entirely too many people who aren't able to think critically without digressing into the realm of conspiracy.
Discovery can proceed failure. Don't be afraid to fail.
Academia is filled with selfish, egotistical (often times psychopathic) individuals. It is fueled by a toxic culture, which itself is governed by two overarching themes: 1) Career progression is weighted heavily toward publication history. 2) There exists almost no long term positions.

420 ppm... Blaze It. The Dangers of Business as Usual

The Pondering Physicist — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 13:37:54 GMT

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11th, flights were canceled, commercial shipping was thrown into disarray and markets crashed. Working from home became the norm. Friends and family were separated. And who can forget the run on toilet paper?? Jokes aside, this virus has had devastating consequences, with almost 3 million succumbing to the disease, and over 138 million infected. It's clear that COVID-19 has altered our lives - for better or worse. Nonetheless, what has been promising - maybe the silver lining in all of this - is that the effects of the resulting lock downs and economic downturn have resulted in significant reductions in CO2 emissions. Approximately 8.8% in the first half of 2020 when compared to the same period in 2019.

Yet 1 year on, and due largely to the efforts of a global vaccine drive, we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel (the battle is far from over though, as mutations and less efficacious vaccines continue to cause problems). With the New York Stock Exchange at all time highs and the vaccine rollout, talk of business as usual is as infectious as ever. The explanation is a simple one - in the West, we've become accustomed to a certain quality of life. Whether it's travelling, or having the next high tech gadget, our personal freedom in the West reigns supreme - climate change be damned.

However, despite this short respite, the reality is that the mean annual CO2 concentration during 2020 didn't decrease despite the decrease in economic output. In fact, the mean annual CO2 concentration increased - from 411.66 (in 2019) to 414.24 ppm in 2020. Furthermore, since records began in 1958/9, the CO2 concentration (mean per annum) at Mauna Loa has never decreased. I think this is a powerful statement, and deserves to be repeated: we as a species have never been able to decrease the amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. Let that sink in for a moment, since I'll come back to that point later.

We can look at the historical change in CO2 concentration from the previous year since records began. Starting at 1959, Figure 1 plots the change in the mean annual CO2 concentration from the previous year i.e., the change from one year (say 1965) to the very next (1966). I've fitted here a linear line to the data (taking into account uncertainty in the CO2 measurement), and it shows very clearly that not only has the CO2 concentration never decreased, but that it is increasing.

Figure 1: Looking at the change in CO2 concentration (ppm) from the previous year since 1959. Here I have fit a simple linear line (bounded by uncertainty, dash-dotted lines) to the data showing the year-upon-year change of CO2 is increasing. Data taken from the Mauna Loa station.

Extrapolating the curve to the year 2050, and summating the year upon year increases yields a value of approximately 87 ppm being added to the total CO2 concentration (this is a very simple model, in reality the increase may not be linear, but serves as a decent fit to the data thus far - and may not be too far off from actual numbers). It took us 60 years to add 100 ppm of CO2 (~316 ppm in 1959 to ~414 ppm in 2020), and if business as usual continues for the next 30 years, we are poised to do the same in half the time. This would take the Earth up to a CO2 concentration of at least 501 ppm (ignoring the effect of tipping points, which would increase this value). Figure 2 shows a historical graph of the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere. The last time the concentration of CO2 was > 400 ppm was in the Miocene, around 10 - 20 million years ago.

Figure 2: Historical CO2 concentration. The last time the Earth had a concentration >400 ppm was around 10 - 20 million years ago in the Miocene period. Graph taken from here.

Why is this important? Well, CO2 concentration correlates with temperature over the last 800,000 years. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (a far more effective greenhouse gas, which has increased >750% since pre-industrial levels) follow the Earth's temperature change as far as the ice core data can tell us. The science of the greenhouse effect is well understood - relatively simple chemistry and physics. (Milankovitch cycles can affect climate, but we are actually in a period of cooling now - clearly not in agreement with observations which show warming. Even so, it is a gross oversimplification to attribute all warming or cooling to this effect, see: NASA1 and NASA2). Figure 3 shows the historical temperature changes (with respect to the 1960 - 1990 mean temperature) versus time on a geological timescale. What is striking about Figure 3, is that is possesses many of the same features as Figure 2 - i.e., changes in CO2 seem to coincide with temperature changes - as expected. If business as usual continues to 2050 (>500 ppm CO2), geological data suggests we are heading for a temperature > 2 °C (above 1960 - 1990 levels, which is already higher than pre-industrial baselines!!!!).

Figure 3: Historical Temperature Changes versus the 1960-1990 Average Temperature. Source: Glen Fergus, 2014.

As a direct result of our emissions, 17 of the 18 hottest days since records began in 1850, have all occurred after the year 2000. The literature is clear: a severely warmed climate (> 2 °C) would result in catastrophe. In order to prevent this potential catastrophe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used 'Representative Concentration Pathway' (RCP) models from the literature in order to guide climate policy. The models, which were also published in the Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, described the amount of radiative forcing by the year 2100 that one would expect given the amount of CO2 equivalent emissions. For example, in RCP8.5, we'd expect a radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100, leading to a mean temperature increase of 3.7 °C. The models are shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4: Annual green house gas (GHG) emissions in gigatonne of CO2 equivalent per year for each RCP scenario. The 'baseline' scenario is one in which nothing is done to constrain emissions, and lies in between RCP6.0 and RCP8.5. Taken from the AR5 Synthesis Report, 2014.

A recent report in the journal PNAS has found that our historical emissions match very closely (1% difference) with RCP8.5 - much closer than any other RCP scenario. A business as usual or business as intended outcome falls between RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. Even if RCP4.5 seems more likely, RCP4.5 assumes the active removal of CO2, and the decline of CO2 emissions by 2045. It is yet to be proven whether we can achieve this, technologically or otherwise. Heck, we are already at a CO2 equivalent concentration of over 500 ppm! Furthermore, these models do not take into account tipping points and positive feedback loops (see: clathrate gun hypothesis), which are almost certain to pose further problems for decreasing the total greenhouse gas emissions as we reach higher emissions.

Although brief, the coronavirus related shutdowns were successful in curbing CO2 emissions. A drop of approximately 8% is just over what is needed to curb complete climate catastrophe. But we need to decrease emissions 8 percent per year, every year, for 10 years!! Not just a few months of the year. The sheer enormity of this task is difficult to fathom, and will require cooperation on a global scale. It's disheartening when the climate scientists and climate aware have already started moving to cooler areas, you start to wonder if it's all just an exercise akin to pissing in the wind.

I'd like to say I'm hopeful, but I'm also no stranger to history.

Academia and Science During the COVID19 Global Pandemic

The Pondering Physicist — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 12:20:36 GMT

I've thought about creating a blog website for a really long time. It got started around 2012 - 2013 when I was still in the middle of my undergraduate studies in science and engineering. I had stumbled upon a blog called 'Apes in Elysium', and the writing style was excellent. A resonating excerpt, which I was able to hang on to after the blog eventually disappeared, appears below:

Ultimately, life is a joke. It's absurd. But in a good way. You'll be dead one day, and the only things you've ultimately evolved to do are Fuck and Shit and Piss and Eat in the service of passing on nucleic acids. No matter what happens, no matter what you do, learn, or believe, death will wipe the slate clean, and all of this will be nullified in the crushing emptiness of the ineluctable void. The afterlife is a delusion. You will not be punished for eating pork or masturbating or thinking impure thoughts or conjugating genitals with someone who isn't under a state-sanctioned, church-approved contract with you. The Universe doesn't give a shit what you do with your day. When you're laying in a coffin you will have no consciousness of anything you have achieved or left behind, including your children and the possessions you have accumulated. And you will be forgotten sooner than you think. Your children move on and focus on their lives and struggles; they die, their children grow up, and they die; the wheel of life and death doesn’t stop for anyone. Somewhere a clock is ticking...

Of course, life often gets in the way, and it's taken me until 2020 to create this website, no doubt a result of my recently acquired COVID19 'free-time' or more aptly, pandemic induced joblessness. Since then, I have completed my PhD in condensed matter physics and learned a lot about the process of conducting research in academia. A lot of it isn't what I expected, in the sense that I was outright disappointed (and on several occasions, enraged) with the entire experience. But having been finally accepted by my scientific peers into the physics PhD fraternity and having closed that chapter, I've sought to initiate a new beginning of sorts into the world of science.

There is so much that we don't understand about the world around us. I began to really understand this when I began my PhD research. It seemed that where ever I cared to look, I saw something that either no one else had seen or done, or that no one else could explain. The feeling of discovery is certainly addictive, and what probably keeps PhDs moving into postdocs to some extent (they sure don't do it for the money). Nonetheless, my own transition from PhD to postdoc has been hampered by the COVID19 virus that is currently ravaging most of the world. Academia is tough; academia during a pandemic - doubly so. Which is really bad news for academia, which has been an international effort for quite some time. In fact, one can look back at Lord Kelvin's Jubilee (https://www.nature.com/articles/054173e0), recorded in 1896 by A. Gray:

The University of Glasgow is honoured by the presence to-day of many distinguished visitors from foreign countries, from America, from India, from Australia, and from all parts of the United Kingdom. Names of men renowned for their scientific work in distant countries have been added to our list of honorary graduates...

I have had addresses also from my old Japanese students of Glasgow University, now professors in the University of Tokio, or occupying posts in the Civil Service and Engineering Service of Japan, for which I thank them heartily. I wish particularly also to thank my Baltimore coefficients for their address. They have been useful to myself in my own keen endeavour unsuccessful, I must say-nevertheless keen-to know some- thing about the true dynamics of light and ether and crystals.

One even more notable (at least to the public) scientist, Charles Darwin, who completed his work "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, was only able to do so by travelling the world. So even as far back as the 1800's, science and international travel have been intimately intertwined. In academia, PhD students have been 'traded' between professors, and this is observable in the Noble Laureate record, in which many physicists who won the prize, were supervised by others who had won the prize, or at least, were in communication with other notable scientists (see, for example, the fantastic procrastination website https://academictree.org/physics/tree.php?pid=757519).

The continued inability to travel and attend workshops, conferences or leave on sabbatical is sure to have a significant short term effect on academia. In addition, local lock-downs and quarantine measures have decreased the number of scientists able to even conduct work in laboratories, with many institutions running something akin to a 'skeleton crew'. The other side to this mess is that a lot of funding at the universities in the Western world was generated by swathes of international students (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7372729/ , https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-00821-4 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_science_and_technology).

It is difficult right now to understand how quickly international travel will become easy again, or when lock-downs and quarantine measures will by lifted. As an 'early career researcher', it is worrying to graduate into such a destitute and uncertain job market. I am hopeful that the situation will change for the better in the next year, but until then, many will just have to wait it out.

Hello World!

The Pondering Physicist — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:14:34 GMT

The first post of this blog. I have thought somewhat about what should go here, and I've come to the conclusion that I will document whatever I find interesting, and more than not, this will be science or engineering related. At the very least, I want this blog to function as a learning resource for myself and others. So enjoy!