No, really.

Hedwig “Hedy” Kiesler is best known for a long career as an actress in Hollywood’s Golden Age, going by the stage name Hedy Lamarr, and having appeared alongside the likes of Clark Gable and Judy Garland in films throughout the 1940s. At the time she was marketed as the “world’s most beautiful woman” by her talent scout. As far as I’m concerned, being an actor in Hollywood’s Golden Age counts as having an interesting life, but for Lamarr, it counts among the less interesting parts of her career.

Her background merits a brief mention before I get to the science. She was born to a Jewish family in Austria in 1914, but raised Catholic. At 19 years old she married a wealthy Austrian arms merchant, Friedrich Mandl, who was also an ardent fascist. She would later describe him as being very controlling, and it’s likely she was being generous with that description, given that she engineered an escape to Paris in 1937 to be free of him. From Paris, she moved on to Hollywood, where she began her aforementioned film career.

She had been interested in science since she was a child, and her interest grew when she was married to Mandl, who would take her to business meetings, which often involved military science. At the height of her acting career, during the war, she tinkered with a few inventions. She followed through on one of them, which ended up being important in the history of radio technology. Her invention was called Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) technology.

Technically she wasn’t the first to come up with the idea, but (as far as I can tell) it was her version of it which ended up in US Navy ships and submarines. That didn’t happen until the 1960s, however (after the patent expired). Despite patenting the invention in 1942, the Navy was a bit slow to respond. It was of vital importance to their ships by the Cuban Missile Crisis, though. An updated version of this technology exists in several civilian applications to this day, including GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.

What the technology actually does is provide a way to transmit radio signals without fear of deliberate jamming by enemy forces. Lamarr had radio-controlled torpedoes in mind when she worked on it. Had her ideas been implemented during the war, it would’ve been well, pretty useful, I suppose.

So, radio waves are sinusoids, or sine waves:

They are oscillating excitations in electromagnetic fields, which radio transmitters can generate, and receivers can detect. Signals can be encoded in these oscillations in clever ways I won’t get into here. These oscillations/sine waves have a frequency associated with them. which is just how many oscillations happen per second. This is measured in Hertz (Hz). BBC Radio 1, for example, transmits at a frequency of about 98 MHz, or 98 million oscillations per second. All radio signals are transmitted and received at a certain frequency (technically in a small range of frequencies). This is the number you dial your radio to to receive a signal. (98 FM in the BBC case. FM is a description of how the information is encoded in the radio signal.)

The “frequency-hopping” part of the name of Lamarr’s invention comes from the fact that the radio transmitter (pseudo-)randomises which frequency it transmits its signal at, in a way pre-determined such that the target always knows which frequency to receive signals from. So, many times a second, the frequency you’re transmitting at will change. This is useful because if you’re transmitting at a certain frequency, that signal can be jammed by someone else with a strong radio transmitter transmitting at that frequency. You could overcome this by just blasting the same signal louder, or over a larger range, but both of these are expensive to do.

What FHSS means, as far as potential jammers are concerned, is that you are transmitting over a very wide range of frequencies. This means if someone wants to jam the signal, but doesn’t know the sequence of frequencies the source and target have agreed on, then they need to jam a very large range of frequencies in order to stop the signal. You, however only need to transmit over one frequency at a given time.

She didn’t contribute much to the scientific community, but what she did contribute was forgotten for a long time. It was only in the 1980s that her achievements were recognised, and in 1997 she received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, along with her co-inventor George Antheil. She died three years later.

I suppose I should end with some sort of “don’t judge a book by its cover” spiel. Yes, she was amazingly beautiful, and yes, clearly she was a talented intellectual, so all of those lessons apply. She’s not even the only actress I know of with a scientific side: Natalie Portman isn’t just Queen of Naboo, she’s a published author in a Neurology journal. (Erdős number of 5!) But the more interesting side of Hedy Lamarr’s story, for me, is how she escaped a clearly abusive relationship, not to mention impending Nazi occupation, and built a better life for herself. And that life happened to include science, technology, and invention, alongside stardom.

If you’ll indulge me a little introspection…

The word “Blog” comes from “Web Log”. Blogs are meant to be a form of diary. But I haven’t been doing much logging of my life on this blog. I’ve mostly been talking about things that interest me. The reason for that is I’m usually quite a private person. With that said, I think I’ll take the opportunity afforded by the new year to push myself out of my comfort zone for one post: a look back on 2015. So, y’know, this will get pretty personal.

2015 was, overall, not the best year for me. For the most part it was hovering around alright, and for one week it bumped up to excellent, but the low points really drag the rest of it down.

Without wanting to go into too much detail, the bad stuff started when I got rejected from the three PhD programmes I applied to. Now, the advice I had been given was to apply to as many places as possible (incidentally, I give you this advice: apply to as many places as possible), but I only applied to three, and paid big time for it. I didn’t even get interviews at any of them. The reason I had only applied to three was because my main plan for the next academic year was to win an election at my student union and become a sabbatical officer.

By the time the union’s election results were being announced in March, I had been rejected from everywhere, so when I saw that I had lost that election, too, and hence had nothing at all planned for after I graduated, well… I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it the worst day of my life. I know I should feel privileged that something as (on a big-picture scale) small as not having any plans for graduating is the worst thing that ever happened to me – no family deaths, no illnesses, no poverty… but the big picture is hard to look at from in the middle of it. It’s not a pleasant memory to recall, so I’ll move on.

Right after that election, I had to start worrying about my viva and thesis for my master’s project. It took me a bit longer than ‘right away’ to get over that result and those rejections, though, and both the viva and thesis suffered for it. They still stand as two of the worst marks of my degree, and I can’t help but feel the fallout from that ‘worst day’ had something to do with that. There was also relationship trouble plaguing me around this time, but I am definitely not getting into that here.

Then it was exam studying time. Only five exams stood between me and the end of my degree, but I wasn’t prepared for any of them. Studying proved more difficult than usual. I struggled to get out of bed on a lot of days. If I had had ten exams, like I did the year before, I probably would have bombed all of them. Only help from my parents and personal tutor got me through that period, and there was a non-zero amount of crying, but the hard work did pay off. Most of the exams went about as well as they could have, and I ended up securing much higher marks than anticipated.

And that was the worst of it. From there everything got a lot better. I got a great summer job teaching in a summer school. It was work I really enjoyed and engaged with, so I was very happy for the time I was there. I met some cool people, taught some great kids, honed my physics knowledge, and got a taste of the teaching life. During that time I also applied to, and was accepted to, a PhD at UCL, which is where I am now.

But the real highlight of the year was my trip in the summer to California. I don’t think it’s an understatement to call it the best week of my life. I spent 7 days with other physics students from Imperial touring California, seeing various physics places of interest like SLAC, NIF, UC Berkeley, JPL, Mount Wilson Observatory, not to mention tourist things like Alcatraz, a hike through Yosemite, road trips, Universal Studios, Pride in San Francisco, and more. But really, the trip wouldn’t have been the same without the people I went with. I had so much fun with them, it was unreal. It was also whilst I was on the trip (standing outside the National Ignition Facility, no less) that I got my results and found out I’d got a First for my degree, meaning all that bullshit earlier in the year had paid off. Well, some of it had paid off. Some of it was just bullshit. That’s life.

And then I started my PhD, which has also been a great experience. I’ve met loads of cool new people. Some of them I do the science with in a research group. Some of them I do kung-fu with. Some of them I just drink with. They’re all great people.

It’s been a year of highs and lows, and it’s certainly been an interesting year. I’d say more of the year was good than bad, it’s just a shame that the bad stuff had to taint the rest of the year. I’m optimistic for this year, though. This year will be the first year since 2007 that I haven’t had some sort of important exams (GCSE, A-Levels, undergraduate exams) to stress over throughout the year. (Instead I get to stress over my brother doing his GCSEs!) That’s the nice bit of the whole “9 to 5 desk job” thing (which my PhD more or less is for now) — there’s no homework or revising, just work! So as long as I can keep up with that, it should be fine(!)

Happy new year, everyone!

What has ol’ Saint Tom left under your tree today?

Hello all, I made a maths-themed Christmas post (or is it a Christmas-themed maths post?) on my maths Tumblr (yes I have a maths Tumblr), concerning a serious, mathematical analysis of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Check it out!

Anyway, merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

This week, I wrote an article for Pi Media, UCL’s student magazine, about the “Six Degrees of Separation” phenomenon. Check it out here!

See you next week!

Passion, dedication and a love of nature are all great qualities a scientist should have, but they’re certainly not the only ones. Let’s examine a bit further the famous catchphrase: gotta catch ’em all!

As I said last week, the objective of the game is to register every species of Pokémon in the Pokédex. But there’s an important unstated assumption there: it assumes that all there is to know about a particular species can be obtained from one member of the population, or, as a biologist would put it, a sample size of one! In the real world, this is obviously a ridiculous assertion. Every species in the world has a massive amount of variability — one sample can never be enough to represent the full spectrum of intraspecific diversity.

Amazingly, this is true of Pokémon species too! There’s a few reasons I can think of for this, so let’s go into detail about them.

1. IVs, Natures

The ‘stats’ of an individual Pokémon (a measure of how good it is at battling) is a surprisingly complicated game mechanic. Every species has a fixed ‘base stats’ distribution — certain Pokémon species are intrinsically stronger than others. But there’s a few ways the stat distribution of an individual can vary — basically, it’s possible for two Pokémon of the same species to have radically different strength.

One of these ways is via ‘IVs’: Individual Values. The IVs of a Pokémon are six immutable numbers, one for each stat, which are randomly assigned to the Pokémon when you first encounter it. These IVs add a small boost to the ‘mon’s base stat total, and they’re, well, individual. There’s over 88 million possible combinations of IVs, so the odds of two individuals of the same species having the same IVs are almost zero. For this reason, IVs are often called the ‘DNA’ of a Pokémon. (Let’s not get into the artificial selection by players which can drive two Pokémon to have the same IVs…)

A related concept is a Pokémon’s ‘Nature’ — an adjective like ‘Hardy’, ‘Naughty’, ‘Impish’ is assigned to it when it’s first encountered, and it alters the base stats the Pokémon has by virtue of being from a specific species. Again, the ‘Nature’ of a Pokémon is part of its DNA, in a sense.

So, if it’s possible, like in real life, for individuals within a species to show variability. This is a deliberate design choice — the creators wanted you to feel attachment to the Pokémon you catch, by making them as unique as possible. They wanted you to be able to think “this is my Pikachu”, not just a Pikachu.

So, clearly catching one of each species isn’t enough to fully understand all Pokémon! But these are ‘behind the scenes’ effects. Let’s jump in to some striking, visible differences.

2.   Moves, Abilities

Every species of Pokémon has a certain selection of ‘moves’ it’s possible for it to know, and every individual Pokémon has a selection of up to four of those moves it does know. ‘Moves’ are attacks like Tackle, Tail Whip, Flamethrower, Poisonpowder, Focus Energy, Fly, which have some in-battle (or even out-of-battle) effect. So again, two individuals of the same species could have a totally different moveset. The Pokédex doesn’t register this. If you want to know everything there is to know about a species, surely knowing what moves it can and can’t learn would be one of those things? This, apparently, isn’t part of your job as a Pokédex completionist!

Similarly, every species of Pokémon has a certain ‘ability’ — some extra power it has, like Levitate (making it immune to Ground-type attacks) or Blaze (strengthening Fire-type attacks). Some species can have a range of different abilities, so catching one member of a species doesn’t fully determine every possible ability its species could have.

3.   Shinies

Every species of Pokémon has a “shiny” form — an alternate colouration that is otherwise identical (in terms of stats, moves, abilities, etc). Think of it like albinism. Shinies have something of a mythical status among Pokémon fans. Every wild Pokémon you encounter has a 1 in 4096 chance of being shiny. That may seem low, but until the most recent game generation it was only half that — 1 in 8192! Seeing a shiny is an incredibly rare experience. In my decade and a half of playing Pokémon games, I’ve only encountered three in the wild. That’s right — they’re so rare I can remember every one I’ve seen (a Zubat, a Sandshrew, a Woobat, if you’re wondering). As such, Shinies are a status symbol among Pokéfans, and they amplify the collectibility of Pokémon exponentially.

Interestingly, unlike with IVs, natures, moves, and abilities, the Pokédex will record every shiny you see as distinct from the regular colouration, so it is possible to consider a Pokédex “incomplete” until it’s seen all of the 721 shiny forms in existence, even though the game doesn’t acknowledge this.  Needless to say, outside of hacking the games, no one has ever done this. Your ‘dex will still be ‘complete’ (and you’ll get the certificate from the last post) without having seen any shinies. But in principle, does “catching them all” extend to catching every shiny? We’re just getting started…

3.   Aesthetic forms

Besides shinies, many, many Pokémon have variant designs. Again, these are only aesthetic changes, and it’s still functionally the same Pokémon. The differences can be almost impossible to spot, or they can look very different. A lot of the differences are due to sexual dimorphism — just like in real animals, many Pokémon look very different depending on their sex. And yes, every different-looking variant has its own shiny version, too!

Again, the Pokédex will register every variant of a Pokémon seen, and again, it’s possible to ‘get away with’ only seeing one sex of each Pokémon for the purposes of ‘dex completion… so do you need to catch one of each sex of every sex-varying Pokémon? Imagine if a biologist called it a day after studying a female mallard without bothering to examine the male. If they can’t quit halfway through, why can’t you?

Some examples of differences:

4.   Forms, Mega Evolutions

Finally, we come to different forms and Megas. Some Pokémon have different forms which are so different, they may as well be different species. Their base stats change, their types may change, even their shape may become radically different! For all intents and purposes they are different, and the Pokédex will register every form of a specific species you encounter… but, again, you don’t need to see every different form of a species to count it as being ‘caught’.

Some Pokémon can change between their different forms under certain conditions, some can only be first encountered as one form which never changes. Mega Evolution is a specific type of temporary form change introduced in the newest games. Again, Mega Evolutions are registered in the Pokédex, but you don’t need to see them all to have ‘caught’ them all. Here’s some examples of form changes:

Wrapping up, how many Pokémon are there? Last week I said 721, and showed a picture of all of them… but that picture didn’t show any form variants. If you count variants as being different Pokémon, well, the shinies alone double the number of ‘mons! By my estimate, adding up just all the shinies, aesthetic variants, forms and megas, there are about 2,000 Pokémon! Gotta catch ’em all?

So does it make you a bad scientist to only catch 721 of them? I say no. When the game tells you you’ve completed the Pokédex, I don’t think it’s implying everything there is to know about Pokémon is now known, it’s just saying your job is complete. But science is never complete. There’s always new things to be discovered about the natural world. You’re not a bad scientist for not being able to discover all of it — you’re only human! You just need to know your limits, and try to overcome them!

Don’t ever stop catching them all.

Ok hear me out on this one. It sounds crazy but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while…

I love Pokémon, but if you don’t know what it is… Pokémon is a multimedia franchise centred around a series of video games created by Game Freak, and published by Nintendo. In the (main) games, you play as a child or teenager who lives in a world where people live alongside fantastical creatures called Pokémon. These creatures mostly resemble real world animals and things, and wild ones can be ‘captured’, tamed, and trained to battle each other for sport.

There are two main aims to the game. The first is to become the Pokémon League Champion — effectively the world champion at the sport of Pokémon battling. That’s the less interesting of the two aims. The other aim is encapsulated in the famous slogan of the franchise — you gotta catch ’em all! What does this mean? It means you have to collect a specimen from every Pokémon species in the world… all 721 of them!!

As an aside, yes, it is ‘basically like cockfighting’, but I want to stress that the games do go out of their way to emphasise the love and friendship between humans and Pokémon, and how the Pokémon do choose to fight alongside you, and how you’re encouraged to see your Pokémon as partners and friends. A key theme is living in harmony with nature. It’s a very positive, animal-loving message overall.

So, the reason you gotta catch ’em all is that at the start of each game a Pokémon professor gives you a Pokédex — a device which can analyse every Pokémon you catch to tell you information about it. but it’s given to you devoid of data — it has no information about any Pokémon in it. You are then instructed to complete this Pokédex, i.e. you must use it to scan every Pokémon in the world once. Your task is to create a complete encyclopaedia of every species of these mysterious creatures.

What is the purpose of this task? The game hammers the point home quite thoroughly — nothing more than the pursuit of knowledge! Various characters in every game say things like “there’s still so much we don’t know about Pokémon”, and “the power of science is staggering!”… Every game’s professor is explicitly stated to be researching some different aspect of how Pokémon work, from breeding, to evolution, to their habitats, to their origins.

These professors are all naturalists, working in labs, studying specimens, (presumably) publishing research. One professor even starts the game in some tall grass doing field work. As you progress you can ask the professor to evaluate your Pokédex, and if you do they’ll give you advice on other places to look, and other things you can do to find more Pokémon. You effectively play as their unpaid intern, doing a PhD’s worth of work in categorising every single one of the hundreds of species of Pokémon! Err… your payment is adventure?

Anyway, looking back, it’s great how a love of science and naturalism is instilled in the player as they play the game. Why explore that dark cave, or that deep ocean, or dense woods, or icy mountain? Simply for the joy of discovery. Who knows what rare new specimen could be lurking in that hidden alcove? It fosters a wonderful sense of exploration, and this is deliberate. Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon, was an avid bug collector as a child. Here’s what he had to say about bugs when discussing his inspiration for Pokémon:

They fascinated me. For one thing, they kind of moved funny. They were odd. Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found. If I put my hand in the river, I would get a crayfish. If there was a stick over a hole, it would create an air bubble and I’d find insects there. I usually took them home. As I gathered more and more, I’d learn about them, like how some would feed on one another. So I stopped bringing them home. But I liked coming up with new ideas. Like how to catch beetles. In Japan, a lot of kids like to go out and catch beetles by putting honey on a piece of tree bark. My idea was to put a stone under a tree, because they slept during the day and like sleeping under stones. So in the morning I’d go pick up the stone and find them. Tiny discoveries like that made me excited.

It’s hard to come away from a Pokémon game and not want to become a naturalist, to not get enthused by taxonomy and the life sciences. It just makes it all seem so idyllic and exciting. All you need to do to know everything about a species is to throw a Poké Ball at it!

But does it teach you to be a good scientist? Maybe. It depends on what qualities a good scientist has. If passion, love of knowledge and exploration, dedication, an appreciation of nature’s beauty, and a bit of a completionist streak make a good scientist, then the Pokémon player is an ideal one! Or perhaps not… I’ll discuss the flip side of the ‘Pokémon player as scientist’ idea next week!

The first in my Women in Science series has to be Emmy Noether, described by Einstein himself as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began”. She’s easily one of my favourite physicists of all time, even though she only has one major contribution to physics: Noether’s Theorem.

Of course, when Einstein produced that quote, the higher education of women had not been around for very long, so it’s not a very crowded competition for “most significant creative mathematical genius”. I’m also not qualified to judge how good most of her work is, since it exists well outside my area of expertise, in abstract, pure maths. Noether’s Theorem, however, deserves explaining in detail, along with a brief discussion of her life and times.

Born in 1882 in the German town of Erlangen, her father, Max, was also a mathematician. This proved to be invaluable in getting her career started, as she was able to work as an academic under her father’s name, thereby avoiding restrictions on women holding academic positions. She received her PhD in 1907 and worked thereafter in academia until her death, but wouldn’t be paid for her academic work until 1923. 

She faced constant institutional sexism in every institution she worked at for decades. When two of the great mathematicians of their day, David Hilbert and Felix Klein (of the Hilbert Hotel and Klein Bottle respectively), tried to recruit her to teach at the University of Göttingen in 1915, they faced opposition from other faculty members. Hilbert, an interesting character in and of himself, responded with a quote I rather enjoy, “I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent [lecturer]. After all, we are a university, not a bath house.” Again, when at Göttingen, she lectured under Hilbert’s name.

Noether did research at Göttingen until 1933. This was, of course, the year that Hitler became Chancellor, and Noether was (you guessed it) Jewish. The expulsion of Jewish academics from university positions was among the first of Hitler’s antisemitic policies to be enacted in Germany. She was by no means the only one affected by this — a decent fraction of the Manhattan Project was staffed by German Jewish exiles. Noether was noted by many of her colleagues for being particularly courageous at this time, and for providing comfort for them. Like many of her colleagues, she moved to America. Specifically, she accepted a post at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. It was her last position — she died in 1935. She was 53.

That’s her story. I want to talk a bit about her Theorem, because it is truly remarkable. It came out of the study of General Relativity, but applies to all theoretical physics. The reason it’s so revered is because it provides a deep, profound connection between two of the most important concepts in physics — conservation laws and symmetries.

A conservation law is a law of physics which states that, for a given system, something is conserved. Energy is the most famous example — it can be neither created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. If one system loses energy, that must mean another system has gained the equivalent amount. There are, of course, many other conservation laws. Momentum is one, angular momentum is another, as are more exotic ones like charge, lepton number, parity, and more.

Conservation laws are loved by physicists because they impose constraints on what physical systems can do, making them easier to predict. Particle physics, for example, uses conservation of momentum to tell how many particles are involved in a given interaction. This is how the neutrino was discovered: they noticed certain decays weren’t conserving momentum, and so concluded that an undetected particle was carrying some away. You can use conservation of energy to do this:

Neil deGrasse Tyson didn’t flinch because he knew energy would be conserved — the pendulum couldn’t swing further than his nose because it didn’t have enough energy to do so, and had no way to gain it.

Symmetries are another concept beloved by physicists. We love to study symmetric systems because they’re a lot easier to study! If a system looks exactly the same after you transform it in some way, then if you can describe it in one state, you can also describe it in the transformed state equally well. For a concrete example: if I tell you that a ball is perfectly symmetric, and that one square inch on it is green, then the rest of it must be green, too, otherwise it wouldn’t be perfectly symmetric! For many non-symmetric systems, we often describe them as being symmetric, plus a correction term for any asymmetry. Asymmetries are aberrations we need to handle delicately, most of the time.

The green ball is an example of rotational symmetry. If you rotate that ball through any angle, about any axis, it will look the same. There are other symmetries associated with other transformations. The laws of physics are the same at any point in space (we assume), so you can move your experiment anywhere in space and not be able to tell — this is translational symmetry. The same applies to time — we assume physics has been and will be the same at all points in time, giving us time translational symmetry. Symmetries are also of great use to particle physicists, who use symmetry considerations to derive theoretical results. The mathematical study of symmetries is called group theory, and the theoretical underpinning of particle physics is built on that.

Now we finally get to Noether’s Theorem. According to the theorem, every conservation law is associated with a symmetry, and vice versa. It’s a theorem, meaning it’s derived from mathematical results, and is provably true. The mathematics is very involved, but essentially, if there is a system you can transform without changing it, it must have an associated conserved quantity. The best example is energy, which is associated with time invariance. If a system doesn’t change over time, then its energy must be conserved. At a fundamental level, the reason for conservation of energy is time invariance, under Noether’s Theorem.

Similarly, conservation of momentum is associated with translational invariance. If you can take a system and move it anywhere without it changing, then momentum must be conserved. (This makes sense if you think about the opposite — when moving a system does change it, it must mean something’s in the way in its new position. Whatever that is, it’ll affect the system in some way, changing its momentum.) Also, conservation of angular momentum associates with rotational invariance. Those are the simplest examples, but there are countless others.

Noether’s theorem allows you to describe conservation laws, but it also allows you to derive new ones. Just observe any symmetries a system has, and then give a name to whatever the conserved quantity associated with it is. Once you know that quantity is conserved, you can use it as an experimental tool to make powerful predictions about the system’s properties. Similarly, if you see a quantity not being conserved, that gives you information about asymmetries inherent in the system.

As I hope you can see, we like conservation laws, and we like symmetries, so to have a fundamental connection between them, as outlined in Noether’s Theorem, is quite amazing. It’s also a really powerful theoretical tool that can be used to derive all sorts of amazing results. It’s easily one of the most important theorems in theoretical physics, as it’s one of those rare results that applies to all areas of physics. I’ve even heard it compared to Pythagoras’ Theorem in terms of importance. Noether was an unparalleled genius, and I hope an appreciation of the beauty and elegance of her most famous theorem can help you appreciate that.

Science is a man’s world. Sadly, the historical forces which keep women out of the sciences still exist today. The clearest example of this is at Imperial College, where I did my undergraduate degree. Students there speak in hushed tones of The Ratio, that infamous spectre that haunts college life. The Ratio states that for every woman at the college, there are two men. The reason for this is that Imperial College is solely for science, engineering and medicine, and these are all male-dominated fields.

Within departments the stories are different. Medicine, for example, has an encouraging near-parity of genders, and a couple of life sciences courses have a slight imbalance in favour of women. Physics, however, sits glumly down at four men for every woman, roughly speaking, and computing roughly averages a dismal nine in most years. And that’s just the students.Throughout my degree I only had one female lecturer (out of over 40), for example. I don’t want to single Imperial out entirely. It’s exceptional only because it’s only a science, engineering, and medicine university. In the equivalent departments across the country and world, the story is the same.

I don’t believe for a second that this is all because women intrinsically ‘like science’ less than men. Frankly the kind of people who do believe that are not worth engaging with. More needs to be done at every level, from nurseries to committees appointing new professors, to equalise The Ratio at every university in the world. It’s a daunting task, but a vital one. The actual reason women are not choosing science, and why women are not reaching the highest levels of scientific careers as much as men are, has to be explained at a cultural and societal level. When expressed like this, it’s a clear problem that needs to be solved.

For some reason we still live in a world where calling oneself a feminist is seen as controversial by some. I don’t want to wildly speculate on psychology too much, but from my perspective it seems as though the reason men (and it is mostly men) choose to reject the word and all that it implies is because it would mean forcing them to accept that where they are in life isn’t solely the result of their skill and effort, but is also partly due to privileges they were born with that they have no control over. “Check your privilege” is a clichéd term these days, but it exists for a reason.

No one wants to hear that simply by existing where they are they are unwittingly contributing to a system that (for example) discourages women from being scientists, and denies them the success they deserve in the sciences. However, there is a lot of truth to that idea. It sucks, but it’s the world we live in, and denying it doesn’t help anyone, not even the denier in the long term. Heck, even me writing this blog post is a symptom of the problem — I’m using my privileges as a man in science to assert my position on the issue, instead of promoting an equivalent female voice. This is why I care strongly about these causes, and why we need to work towards a more egalitarian scientific community. Or, to put it bluntly, this is why we need to “smash the patriarchy”.

One of the ways we can help achieve these goals is by acknowledging the historical contribution women have made to the sciences. True, for historical reasons, the overwhelming majority of scientists have been men, and the overwhelming majority of significant scientific discoveries have been made by men, but there are many, many women who have made amazing contributions over the centuries. Many of these women have been obscured in some ways, or overshadowed by male colleagues. A few have even been denied Nobel Prizes. With all this in mind, I’m going to make a semi-regular effort to document here some stories from women in science throughout the centuries, and maybe even from some contemporary ones! I hope you enjoy it!

Last week I talked about science communication. As promised, this week I’m making a list of the various web-based science communication outlets I’m subscribed to.

1. Numberphile, Sixty Symbols, Periodic Videos, etc. The three listed here are by far my favourite. They’re listed together because they’re all part of the herculean efforts of one man, the hard-as-nails Brady Haran. Brady is a video journalist with no formal training as a scientist. In these channels, and others, he interviews scientists to try to get them to explain tricky concepts from their fields. Numberphile is for maths, and has explanations of everything from the Riemann Hypothesis to Klein Bottles. Sixty Symbols is physics, Periodic Videos is chemistry (geddit?) etc. etc.

What I love about Brady’s videos is his skill as an interviewer. Whenever the scientist is explaining something I know about, I’m always amazed by how Brady always seems to ask exactly the right question to prompt the interviewee to explain the concept in the most clear way possible. When it’s about something I don’t know about, Brady’s question is usually exactly what I was wondering about this weird new thing. He has an inquisitive mind, but no formal scientific training, making him the ideal person to drag scientists out of their offices into the limelight. If there’s one (set of) channel(s) you check out from this blog post, make it Brady’s.

2. Veritasium is run by Derek Muller, a physics graduate who also has a PhD in physics education. Derek has a knack for pedagogy, and along with general videos explaining physics concepts in clear ways, he has two other cool tricks up his sleeve: firstly, he uses vox pops to see what the average person on the street believes about whatever he’s trying to explain. By highlighting the inaccurate preconceived notions we all have about things, he can dislodge them from our brains more easily, and replace them with the right ideas. Secondly, Derek often sets up puzzle videos, where he waits a week to reveal the answers. Interactivity is always better for making difficult concepts stick in the brain, and I’ll admit to having been stumped by more than one of them.

3. Crash Course is not entirely science-oriented, but deserves a mention nonetheless. Created by the famous Vlog Brothers, John and Hank Green, Crash Course is a collection of short lecture series about a wide range of topics, from World History to Astronomy to Economics to Chemistry. The target audience is high school classrooms, and is meant to be only a brief introduction to the topics they cover, but I can’t stress enough how much I’ve learned from these courses. The World History one, for example, totally changed the way I looked at a lot of historical events, and at the subject as a whole. Definitely worth a watch.

4. SciShow. Created by Vlog Brother The Younger (Hank Green) and company, SciShow is a mix of science news in the vein of IFLS, and science explanation like Veritasium, along with other science goodies. The news aspect is what I like most about it — the news is well-curated and excellently reported. SciShow is the place to go for regular, quality science news.

5. Vi Hart is an exceptionally talented thing-explainer, focusing and specialising in maths. Her unique style and clear, layman-friendly explanations make for entertaining videos, that sometimes even become genuinely moving and heartfelt. Maths is a thing many people express love for, but it’s also a thing few people have a talent for conveying their love for to others. Vi Hart is one of the few who can do that, and she does it well. Sadly she seems to not be making videos as frequently these days, but her back-catalogue is definitely worth a look anyway.

6. io9 (pron. eye-oh-nine) is the first full website I’ll mention here. It’s an interesting case because it features science news and science explainers, but interspersed with news of a more science-fictional nature. io9 is primarily a news & reviews site for ‘genre’ fiction — anything from books to movies to TV shows to comics and beyond, but when it was first created by Gawker Media (a frankly unfortunate relationship, given the site’s sleazy journalism history), its creator, Annalee Newitz, was insistent that the site feature science content alongside the science fiction. The tagline of the website is “we come from the future”, and it fits. By combining real and fictional science news, one is left with a pleasant taste of the future, today. A lot of the science explainers are of more quirky, out-of-the-ordinary topics, too, giving the site a unique style and voice.

7. Rationally Speaking is a podcast from New York City Skeptics. The podcast covers science, and also other areas such as philosophy, skepticism, religion, and rationalism. The host, Julia Galef, regularly interviews experts in interesting and diverse fields on topics such as “Science drives moral progress” and “Most human behavior is signalling”. Be sure to check out the archive, too, as the show used to have two hosts, and some episodes just featured the two of them talking about topics like stoicism, pseudoscience, and the Turing Test.

8. IFLScience is here for completeness. I’ve sung the praises of this particular site enough already. Go check it out!

Other notable YouTube mentions include: Smarter Every Day, Minute Physics/Minute Earth, CGP Grey, Vsauce, Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell), and Zogg from Betelgeuse. All of these channels have various quirks, merits, interests, and ‘schticks’, and they all merit your time if you’re a science enthusiast. One final thing I’ll mention is that many of the creators of the channels I’ve mentioned are really close friends in real life, having met at VidCon a few years ago. They live all over the world, but often meet up and do crossovers. One notable one was when the creators of the Numberphile, CGP Grey, Minute Physics, Smarter Every Day and Veritasium channels did a panel event together called Random Acts of Intelligence. I mention all this because it means that following these people means following a really lovely community of science enthusiasts. And the more of them you follow, the better the experience!

As I mentioned before, science communication is A Big Thing these days. I’m incredibly pleased by this. There’s so many benefits to it, and only a few downsides. They’re all worth talking about, though. Let’s dig in.

I’d say science communication (in the UK at least) has never been in a bad shape, at least for as long as I can remember. Popular science books have been a popular genre for a long time, and there’s always been a decent number of TV shows and such which bring science to non-scientists. Think of how long The Sky At Night has been running, for example. Not to mention, the New Scientist magazine has been publishing in the UK for almost 60 years. If you wanted to find out what scientists were doing all day, there have always been a few ways to do so. Most importantly, though, science has always been a respected field. I think it’s fair to say that the public and the government have always considered scientists worthy of their attention, and as valid sources of knowledge in their fields (even if the government rarely acts on the recommendations of scientists).

As with so many things, however, the internet has changed everything. One of the internet’s defining features is how it allows anyone to access any kind of ‘content’ they want (‘content’ is a bit of a dirty word on the internet these days) on-demand. This creates a massive variety of new niches for ‘content’ that would never have existed before. Now, if you want to find out what scientists do all day, there’s a problem of information overload. There’s almost too many places to find out! There’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to science news and information online.

There’s more to it than that, though. There’s been a cultural shift in the way we perceive scientists and science. No greater summary of this exists than the Facebook page I Fucking Love Science. Started by Elise Andrew, a biology undergrad student in 2012, the explosively popular page (over 20 million ‘likes’ and counting) created a full-time job for her as a science communicator. The page is now backed by a website, and continues to post science news and cool science facts and images on a regular basis.

The success of the page is clearly down to the quality of the content featured on it, in part, but in my opinion a large part of the success is down to the name. The name taps into the zeitgeist surrounding science extremely effectively. Science, as the primary driving force behind so much of the modern world, is being recognised by the general public for how amazing it really is. Places like IFLS are tapping into that awe, and provide readers with a glimpse into the everyday life of people in the lab.

There’s other examples of this trend, too. Think of how many Hollywood films have scientists and engineers as their protagonists. The most popular superhero right now arguably is Iron Man, who, yes, gets his ‘powers’ from his industrial prowess and business skills (i.e. his money), but also from his genius-level scientific intellect. Both Avengers films feature long scenes of Tony Stark just geeking out about science stuff with his buddy Bruce Banner (who, as The Incredible Hulk, also gets superpowers from science). How many kids are going to grow up wanting to be inventors just like their hero Tony Stark?

On top of the social media popularity of science education, YouTube has proven to be a phenomenal source of quality science content. At last count, I’m subscribed to over 15 channels whose primary content is for science education purposes. These channels are mostly not about science news (and therefore fill a slightly different niche to IFLS), and usually feature entry-level introductions to abstract, complicated scientific concepts. Part 2 will be a long list of these videos, and other science communication sources I love.

All of these things make me very optimistic for the future of science. Hopefully, with more and more people getting interested in science, we’ll be able to break down the barriers currently keeping large numbers of people from seeing science as a worthy career choice. I’m especially hopeful that things like the visibility of people like Elise Andrews will greatly increase the number of women who choose to take up science. Sadly, science is still a very male-dominated field, but recently I’ve seen some promising proto-steps to fixing that, and this is all part of it.

As optimistic as I am about how much science content is out there for enthusiasts, there are a few nagging concerns I have. As great as it is that people are being kept up-to-date on what happens in labs, the actual reporting of this leaves a lot to be desired. For decades, tabloid papers have claimed every week that scientists (or ‘boffins’ as they’re usually called) have found that x causes cancer, but y cures it, despite only the most tenuous of correlations.

This problem has not gone away in the digital era. If anything it’s become worse. The real story is always something like ‘x has been found to correlate positively with a specific cancer given very specific conditions, and the effect is very weak; more study is needed’. Almost all science news outlets are still guilty of reporting this as the headline-grabbing ‘x causes cancer’. Frankly, I’m getting tired of this shit. It’s just not good enough any more. I’m hesitant to single out a single culprit because it’s so ubiquitous.

Presenting science as a long series of definitive proof after definitive proof of various phenomena and causative links is such a frustratingly warped view of how science actually works that I’m hesitant to even call it science. It harms everyone, including scientists. It creates the impression that only studies with positive results are worthwhile and publication-worthy, which contributes to the shameful publication bias problems endemic to many fields. It contributes to the ‘p-hacking‘ problem by suggesting that getting p<0.05 is synonymous with true, as that’s what leads to press reporting. It’s a nasty feedback loop that needs to be broken.

I don’t want to end on a downer like that, so I’ll restate that in general I’m very optimistic about the future of science and science communication. Getting scientists out of the proverbial ivory tower can only be a good thing, and I hope to play a small part in doing that.