Life After Death: Medium Version

The medium is the message.

Or at least the medium acts as a conduit for messages that the disincarnate (a.k.a. dead) communicate to the living.

In the first chapter of Spook, the indefatigable Mary Roach examined the evidence for reincarnation (described in my previous blog post). In the middle third of Spook, she takes on communication with the dead. But some folks might be more ‘sensitive’ to crossing the veil between the living and the dead, or so they claim. For lack of a better word for such a mediator, we call them mediums.

Roach is looking for scientific evidence for the ability of mediums to communicate with the disincarnate. (I learned the word disincarnate from her book. I think its apt, because it distinguishes ‘dead’ from ‘dead as an incommunicado doornail’.) In the early twentieth century, the favored evidence was ectoplasm. Not the gooey ghostbusters kind. More like gauze. In fact, using gauze-like materials, enabled one to easily mimic historical photographs purporting to depict ectoplasm. There is even an ectoplasm sample (of dubious origin) at Cambridge University, the august institution having acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research. The sample had a foul odor, for reasons I won’t go into, but that Roach discusses in detail. (Ectoplasm has to emanate from somewhere in the body.)

But Roach isn’t satisfied with looking through dusty archives, she is determined to experience the real thing. Under scientific conditions of course! What better place to do this then at the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona where professor Gary Schwartz takes on the famous medium Allison DuBois. I assume DuBois is famous because she is the real-life inspiration for the popular television series Medium. (Not having personally watched the popular series, I was previously unaware of this claim to fame.)

The experiment is called the Asking Questions Study. (Who comes up with these research project names anyway?) A list of 32 questions are posed to several mediums about two disincarnates. Questions include “Do you eat?”, “What type of ‘body’ do you have?”, “Is there music?”, and “Do you engage in sexual behavior?” If you’re curious about some of the answers, I recommend reading chapter 6 of Spook. Let’s get to the results. After a series of studies and controls, Schwartz reported “no evidence of anomalous information transfer” after the statistics are appropriately crunched. There are, in the lingo, dazzle-shots – where a medium seems eerily on target. But there are also many, many misses.

And yet, after all this, belief in medium efficacy still persists. Why? There’s the possibility, according to Schwartz, that “multiple disincarnates come through when a medium opens up the channels.” This is apparently called crosstalk in the lingo. Roach thinks it should be called fudge factor, and I’m inclined to agree with her. Roach has her own personal sitting with DuBois. She’s less impressed with DuBois’ ability (while Schwartz the official scientist seems open), even though she experiences the dazzle-shot moment. In any case, Roach wonders if she might be more receptive if she learned more about what transpires in the mind of the medium. And so she signs up for a three-day “Fundamentals of Mediumship” course at Arthur Findlay College in England. Here’s the paragraph where she describes her experience.

I’ve been very curious to find out how someone teaches a skill as ineffable and seemingly unteachable as spirit communication. Out tutor speaks to us for about fifteen minutes, but actual take-home instructions are thus far few. They amount more or less to this: Expand your energy. “Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.” It seems to be soething you just try to do. I try, I really do, but I have no idea where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice I’m moving my ears.

After a while, the class divides up into pairs for individual practice. Sounds like Divination class at Hogwarts. Her practice partner doesn’t seem to get anything from her aura, so it is Roach’s turn. She guesses a boat, because her partner looks like a sailor friend of hers. No connection. Then she imagines “brown green striped wallpaper and a big homey sofa” because that’s her image of what the home of a working-class Englishman might look like. No on the wallpaper but the sofa is a dazzle-shot for her partner. He’s impressed, but she’s not. In a Herminone-ish approach, Roach analyzes her own behavior; she thinks that she’s taking visual cues from her partner (something Sherlock Holmes might do) and making guesses. But there’s also a desire to ‘succeed’ in the process. Here’s her analysis.

We’re learning, but what are we learning? Our tutor never said to us: Stick with the everyday. Try to be general because there’s a better likelihood you’ll be right. But we’re picking it up anyway, or I am, at least. You want to get things right, because it’s no fun not to do so. So you find yourself gravitating toward common, nonspecific attributes, things that apply to most folks… No one is getting, say, the word “trilobite” or Jefferson Monument on a winter day, or the name Xavier P. Pennypacker. Because that would be a terrific long shot, and no one wants to set oneself up to be wrong. It’s exciting to be right. Maybe you’re psychic, you find yourself thinking, maybe you’ve made contact in spite of yourself. The little successes are their own reward.

Roach concludes from her experience that some (perhaps many) mediums are not trying to deceive, but honestly think they are engaging in paranormal communication. (There are likely other mediums who are trying to make more than a buck off you.) In addition, those who visit mediums tend to be open to suggestion, and happily eat up anything that is relevant to the dearly departed, discounting the misses. After all, there’s crosstalk, isn’t there?

But what if you’re not a medium, you’re just a regular person, you’re not thinking of the dearly departed, and you hear voices! Welcome to the phenomenon that is EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). While many of these are garbled whispers, some are clearly articulated words. Not one to miss out, Roach books herself on a tour with International Ghost Hunters Society (IGHS). Thanks to Ghostbusters and its reboot, these tours are likely to continue in popularity. The idea is to catch EVP on a recording device (tape or digital). Roach also contacts bona fide scientists who’ve looked into EVP. Electronic broadcasting could be a culprit. Roach learns that “sometimes a gap between two pieces of metal, or a piece of metal and the ground, can set up a sparking that serves to demodulate a radio signal”. For your own personal experience, “wander up to the metal fencing around the facility [Voice of America] after dark… lean in close and you may hear the [glimmering] sparks singing or talking, depending on what’s being broadcast.”

For some reason, present day ghostbusters think that the disincarnate communicate “via the far extremes of the visual and auditory spectrums: light waves we can’t see and sound waves we can’t hear.” How inconvenient. Or perhaps convenient for purveyors of devices that can detect ultraviolet/infrared or infrasound. Bat detectors are apparently popular, and in Roach’s IGHS tour, “nearly everyone in our group has brought along an ELF [extremely low frequency] meter or an EMF (for measuring electromagnetic fields).” But could the modern ghost hunter be standing on the shoulders of scientific giants? Edison, Tesla, and the telephone duo of Bell and Watson. Roach writes that “the inventors viewed the etheric and the electric with the same set of awe-fogged eyes.” In Chapter 8 (“Can You Hear Me Now?”), Roach captures this key insight.

What you need to know is that the heyday of spiritualism – with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the ether – coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications – disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant… Viewed in this context, the one unfathomable phenomenon must have seemed no more unbelievable than the other.

Perhaps my suggestion that electromagnetic (EM) impulses might be a conduit for magic in Harry Potter’s world is not too different from present-day speculations that EM provides the conduit to the spirit world. But maybe it’s all just in our head? Sure enough, Roach proceeds to test this on herself at the Consciousness Research Lab, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. The theory is that EM impulses of a certain complexity can potentially induce hallucinations and other seemingly paranormal hankerings. After being tested, while hooked up to an EEG, Roach learns that the temporal lobes of her brain structure aren’t wired for susceptibility. At least statistically speaking. Neither is she any good at picking up infrasound at 19 Hz. Tigers, whales and elephants on the other hand do. Roach speculates that perhaps the small fraction of the population that can sense infrasound indicate a vestigial evolutionary ability to detect a crouching, hidden tiger. Interestingly, organ music is a great source of infrasound. Could this be why the presence of God can be particularly felt in churches with organs?

After all this research, there remains one nagging problem. Roach wants to know: “Is it possible that – rather than prompting hallucinations – certain EM [impulse] patterns enhance people’s ability to sense some sort of genuine paranormal impulse or entity?” There’s no good way to tease out the difference. You have an observation. You make an inference. That’s the way science proceeds. How do you distinguish between competing inferences? Possibly by setting up another experiment. But the (philosophical) observation-inference gap will always remain. And spookiness will always remain alive in the hearts and minds of the believers. Spookiness is in the eye of the beholder.

Can we test the spookiness of an out-of-body near-death-experience in the operating theater? You’ll have to read the final chapter in Mary Roach’s humorous book to find out. I’ll just say that the experimental setup is clever.

For my previous review of Roach’s book, here are Gulp and Stiff.

Life After Death: You Again Version

“You Again.”

A phrase you might utter to a persistent unwelcome presence, in the hands of writer Mary Roach, becomes the apt title for the subject of reincarnation. The book’s title is Spook, its subtitle Science Tackles the Afterlife, and the title to chapter 1, “You Again”.

Roach doesn’t just make armchair speculations about reincarnation. Yes, she’s read whatever research she can find, both academic and speculative. But most of these are second or third-hand accounts. For the first-hand experience, Roach travels all the way to India to meet one Dr. Kirti Rawat, a philosopher-scientist, who tracks down and investigates reincarnation claims. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, claims of reincarnation are more common in India than other countries, and more common in the rural areas.

Researching these cases requires being more of a police detective than the stereotypical scientist. Roach writes: “It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independent verifiable facts. Researchers contact the parents of the child and then travel to the village or town. They ask the parents to recall exactly what happened… The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life – before they’ve met any family or friends from that life. (These are rare)… Without a written record, researchers must work from [memories of family members]… This makes for wobbly evidence – not because villagers are dishonest, but because human memory is deeply fallible.”

Roach is traveling with Rawat to investigate a recent case. The newly departed and his allegedly reincarnated soul are both from poor village families, marking it as a potentially stronger case. (When a poor family claims their son or daughter is reincarnated from a rich family, this might be wishful targeting of wealth.) The first village Roach and Rawat will visit, home of the reincarnated child, is three hours outside of Delhi. The family of the deceased is several villages away from the first. But first Roach and Raway must get out of Delhi traffic. I can’t resist showcasing a paragraph of fantastic Roach prose. If you have lived in, or visited, overcrowded cities in ‘developing’ countries, she captures the situation perfectly.

“The traffic jam has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the other car won’t move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic – for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best – and then back, at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond-style swervings and brakings. It’s like living inside a video game.”

At their respective destinations, Rawat interviews family and friends. Some members of the two families have already met; word travels fast from village to village. Rawat tries his best as he interrupts his interviewees to ensure they are giving him first-hand direct experience preferably with no embellishments, but it’s a challenging task. Some family members are completely convinced that the reincarnation is a match. Others demure. But the families seem overall happy for a new connection – an excuse for a social gathering or a celebration. Is this a strong candidate case for reincarnation? I’ll leave you hanging so you can read Roach’s account in full. She also insightfully muses about why the doctrine of reincarnation is prominent in India, but not in other places. Instead I will switch gears and muse, perhaps less insightfully, on one of my research interests.

Reading about reincarnation, life and death, inevitably made me think about chemistry and origin-of-life research. Let’s start with the basics. A chemical reaction involves molecules transforming into other molecules by breaking and making chemical bonds. The fate of all chemical reactions, according to thermodynamics, is the equilibrium state. At some point, if you wait long enough, the reaction will reach dynamic equilibrium. The rate of the forward reaction is equal to the rate of the reverse reaction. The system is at its lowest free energy possible. This is death by equilibrium. Chemists are very good at predicting the future – at least in a closed thermodynamic system.

Life, however, involves keeping the system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium. A constant influx of energy is required, which is why chemical evolution requires increasingly superior energy transduction. Life does involve a kind of stability, but it is dynamic, and not thermodynamic. Around ten years ago, the scientist Addy Pross coined the phrase ‘dynamic kinetic stability’ to describe this phenomena. I’ve read most of his papers on this topic, but somehow missed his HuffPost article. For the chemist, here’s an article in C&E News reviewing a Pross book. (I haven’t read the book, since I’ve read the primary literature articles.) For chemists, predicting the future is much more difficult in these systems. Figuring out the past is as much of a challenge. An outstanding question in the origin-of-life is how a collection of molecules can reach a state of dynamic kinetic stability where previously there was none.

A metabolic cycle is a good example of dynamic kinetic stability. You’ve seen such a cycle if you’ve had a high school biology class, most likely the Krebs/TCA Cycle (shown above from Wikipedia). In the cycle, molecules are transformed into other molecules, but the original molecules are eventually reincarnated as the cycle turns. There is always some persisting concentration of any one substance at any one time, but the persistence is dynamic, rather than static. Substances persist not because they are thermodynamically stable, but because ‘new’ molecules are constantly reincarnated from other molecules. A Maxwell Demon observer trying to keep track of who, where, what, is likely to mutter under his breath. “You Again.”

What happens after Reincarnation the chapter? I zipped through the first four chapters this weekend, so here are the other highlights so far. In her previous book Stiff, Roach broached the experiments of one Dr. Duncan Macdougall attempting to weigh the soul as life departs from the body. (I highlighted this aspect when I reviewed Stiff.) In Spook, she follows this rabbit-hole wider and deeper. The protagonist, or perhaps antagonist, is one Dr. Gerry Nahum, at the time a professor at the medical school in Duke University. Nahum had been unsuccessfully trying to get funding for a detector-system much more sophisticated than Macdougall’s crude attempts. It’s an attempt to construct a thermodynamic closed system, with any changes in energy measured by a sophisticated array of electromagnetic (EM) energy detectors. (Detecting magic anyone?) A change in energy means a change in mass, according to Einstein’s E = mc². If the soul and consciousness contains information, Nahum has quantified the energy at 3 x 10^-21 Joules per bit. We don’t know how many bits of information the soul might have, but if it’s a large enough number, then it’s possible a detector could register the energy change.

Roach, playing devil’s advocate, asks Nahum “what if the soul – the residual energy/information that doesn’t register on our EM detectors – doesn’t go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out?” Nahum disagrees. “Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere.” As Nahum pontificates and then asks “Where does it go?” Roach stays silent, but the thoughts in her head are hilarious.

“We sit quietly for a minute, allowing the guest [Roach] to absorb this rather dense helping of quantum theory. In a corner of the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickers and goes out. Applying the First Law of Thermodynamics, we know that elsewhere in the universe, an unattractive though cost-efficient glow has just appeared.”

After her visit with Nahum though, Roach continues her investigative persistence. I truly admire her gumption! She checks in with another Stanford scientist who thinks that even if some blip of energy was measured, “Decay heat is not ordered information… energy that was your personality may indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality.” That’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in case you, dear reader, were keeping count. (My students who are reading this, I hope these statements sound familiar!)

Roach goes back to Nahum with this idea via e-mail, reminding him: “… in replying to me, pretend you’re talking to seventh grader.” But somehow the scientist in Nahum can’t seem to do this. He must not have read Houston, We Have a Narrative. Roach writes: “His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine.”

And yet, Roach, who certainly had not read Houston when Spook was written, has already imbibed all the lessons of engaging narrative. Regardless of whether or not you are a scientist, she makes thermodynamics understandable to the reader, not to mention all the other weird science-y stuff of afterlife research. I’m looking forward to chapter 5 of Spook. Ectoplasm is up next!

And, But, Then: The Science of Story

Three simple words are all you need to tell a good story. And science needs good storytellers. Why? We want to tell you all the minutiae that we lose the forest for the tiny stomata of the leaves.

Scientist-turned-moviemaker-and-author Randy Olson is preaching his solution. The ABT template has three simple words: And, But, Then. These words undergird Olson’s new book, Houston, We Have a Narrative. After an early career as a marine biology professor in New Hampshire, Olson quit his job and moved cross-country to Los Angeles, home of the famed USC film school, and Hollywood, of course! Why did he do this? You’ll have to read his book to find out.

Olson would be the first to say that there’s nothing sacred about the three words. But they capture the essence of how to tell a good story. And allows you to set up the story with the necessary scaffolding facts. But is the pivot that introduces tension to the story. Therefore moves the story forward to its next step, or to its conclusion. Olson provides plenty of good examples, both historical and modern-day practical. (James Watson’s The Double Helix and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address are two.) But Olson also provides two templates for bad narrative. The AAA template (And, And, And) is boring, and we scientists do it all the time as we tell you fact after fact after fact. The DHY template (Despite, However, Why) just creates confusion. Since I had trouble remembering what DHY stood for, I’ve recast it as BBB: But #1, But #2, But #3, and the buts are disconnected.

With the help of Hollywood, Olson outlines a theoretical framework to classify different approaches to narrative. This is McKee’s Triangle, and it has three categories: Archplot, Miniplot and Antiplot. The classic Archplot is the tried-and-true approach to connect to the largest audience – the masses. Olson lists five key elements of Archplot movies.

·      Linear Timeline

·      Causality – things happen for logical reasons, not randomly.

·      Single Protagonist (or one main character that the audience follows)

·      Active Protagonist (the main character actually does stuff)

·      Closed Ending (story is resolved)

According to Olson, Miniplot movies “typically play in art houses, are cherished by movie critics, and often win Academy awards… These types of films garner critical praise but tend to play to smaller audiences.” Antiplot, on the other hand, rebel against “all the constraints of structure and tradition… not caring much about the outcome or how many people the y connect with. Of the examples Olson provides, I had only watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As a scientist who has experience with environmental concerns, Olson takes the time to analyze two different movies: The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth. One does a hatchet job with the science but connects to its viewers, the other just threw fact after fact after fact at the audience, and was both alarmist and boring, if that were possible. Olson appreciates the challenge of science communication involving a complicated topic, that doesn’t lend itself well to Archplot. Global warming has (1) no clear sequence to build a linear timeline, (2) no one simple cause, (3) no single or active protagonist, (4) no closed ending. Not to mention, people keep confusing the difference between weather and climate.

Given the challenge that scientists have in communicating their research to the public, what can be done? No, the one-day science communication workshop is not enough, it might even be problematic, according to Olson who has run many a one-day workshop. Learning narrative intuition takes time and work. Like building up muscle. I have to be honest that just thinking of the challenge makes me feel lazier and less willing to do the work. But thanks to Olson’s book, while working on a research paper yesterday, I rewrote the abstract to follow the ABT template. I was happy with the end-result, but it took a lot more time than I would usually spend crafting the narrative. The problem is that I hardly spend time crafting at all.

Two years ago, I actually heard about ABT from Randy Olson himself. He visited my institution and gave a fantastic seminar about the importance of science communication, and how we should take up the challenge. I think it made me work a bit more on my blog posts, at least for a short period while the inspiration lasted. Then I got lazy, and my writing has gotten sloppier. I’d like to tell you that this post was crafted and recrafted to follow the ABT template, but I’d be lying. “Houston, we have a problem” – it’s laziness. Present tense. Hollywood made the tense change when Tom Hanks delivers the iconic line. Apparently, the original spoken words were “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

I close this post with another reason that we scientists struggle with narrative. Quoting Olson on Hollywood’s changing the text in Apollo 13. “But this sort of text manipulation worries scientists. They want people to know how things are in the real world, and they dream of simply being able to ‘see it, say it’. They want to tell you the truth, exactly as they see it, without having to rearrange anything, because the rearranging process can be dangerous. Rearranging things comes with risks – at the mildest just getting it wrong, at worst deceiving people.”

But we scientists so easily forget, that in writing our papers we are editing the scientific story of our discovery, streamlining it for the journal we hope to publish in, and often eschewing communication to the general public. We need to do better.

Fine-Tuned Grades

A common speculation in physics, armchair or otherwise, is that our universe is fine-tuned. The proposal of a fine-tuned universe hinges on the argument that a tiny change in the fundamental ‘constants’ of physics will lead to a very different universe, one devoid of life or complex molecular structure.

The fine-tuned argument often invokes the anthropic principle; but while the two concepts overlap but are not identical. The anthropic principle has two forms, neither of which I find useful from a scientist point of view. The weak anthropic principle (Brandon Carter), in my opinion, is obvious. “Only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be beings capable of observing and reflecting on the matter.” The strong anthropic principle (John Barrow and Frank Tipler) avers that the universe compels the formation of intelligent life to muse upon it. I don’t think this is testable scientifically, and it remains in the philosophical realm.

Let me try to answer something simpler. Do I fine-tune grades in my classes? Do I design my exams with this fine-tuning in mind, consciously or unconsciously? That’s what I’ve been pondering this week as I’ve been grading final exams. I have some external data and some internal musings in my head, so let’s see where it leads.

Teaching at a liberal arts college with small class sizes means there could be significant variations in student grades depending on the ‘sample’ of students I get in any particular class. I decided to analyze General Chemistry I and II, because I teach these classes most years. The “Regular” sections are typically 40 students and the “Honors” sections are typically 20 students. Some years I teach a smaller 20-student section of GChem1 in the fall semester, where incoming first-year students have often indicated an “Interest” in chemistry or biochemistry, i.e., these students are science or chemistry-inclined, but not in the honors program.

The x-axis in the graph represents relative time in each category, but the years are not necessarily consecutive. Otherwise the lines would jump between categories; I might teach a Regular section one year, an Honors section the next year, and then another Regular section the following year. Hence, I’ve chosen to group the data by category. I’ve omitted a couple of data points – one where my spreadsheet was empty (I must have deleted the data by mistake some years ago), and another where I structured the grade distribution in the class very differently because of a final project. I’ve also included both the mean and median average scores.

On the first day of class, I tell my students that I grade on an absolute scale, i.e., there is no curve in the class. (I also explain why so the class learns something about sample size and the normal distribution.) This means everyone could get an A, a possible but unlikely scenario. Everyone could fail, a possible but very, very unlikely scenario. I band my grades in 15% increments and my plus/minus increments are in the top and bottom 3% of each band. On average 85% of the class grade is based on exams, and the final exam is typically a third of the overall course grade.

The Regular GChem1 mean is close to the C+/B- borderline, with the median in the B- range. When I teach the smaller class of science-inclined students, both mean and median are mostly in the low B range. Regular GChem2 has mean and median scores close to or in the C+ range. The material in GChem2 is more challenging than GChem1. Some students who do well in GChem1 coast on prior knowledge if they’ve had a good high school chemistry class, but then run into difficulty in GChem2. I don’t have as many data points for the Honors sections, but they are typically in the mid-to-high B range with GChem1 slightly higher than GChem2. The exams in the “Interest” group do not differ in difficulty compared to the “Regular”. The exams in the “Honors” group are only slightly longer with marginally higher expectations, but overall not too different.

There are some ups and downs in the average grades, but my broad brush says they are by and large consistent. Early in my teaching career, I might rescale the grade on a particular exam, but these were minor adjustments and happened rarely. No rescaling was needed in recent years. In my first year, I asked my department chair what the averages were and was told that C+/B- was typical in General Chemistry. That likely provided a reference point for my exams in the early years, and then it was just fine-tuning to the present day. Nowadays, I can pretty much sit down and write an exam from scratch in a couple of hours and it will likely yield an average grade close to the average in each category. I still keep up the practice of taking my own exams (usually a day or two after writing them so my memory buffer has cleared) and occasionally fine-tune it further depending on how long the exam took me and how much I had to write. (I write up the Answer Key in full when I take the exam; this key is provided to students when I hand back their graded exams.)

What do my data tell me? Somehow over the years, I have subconsciously imbibed an internal standard to exam-writing that seems to work well on average providing a consistent distribution in student grades, at least for the larger Regular sections.

Is the universe designed by an intelligent being? There are philosophical or theological arguments for and against, but I don’t think it can be proved scientifically either way because we honestly don’t know how or what to measure. (Yes, I’ve read many of the claims and counterclaims closely.) Are my exams designed by an intelligent being? Me, I’d like to think so. But there’s an intuition to the way I write exams, now that I’ve had many years of experience, rather than the consciously carefully calibrated scientist-ideal. In the early years, I fussed a lot over details and took a lot longer. Now it seems fine-tuned in a way, but not analytically. Could my intuition be translated into a computer A.I. that generates and grades exams? If so, would it be intelligent? Will it fine-tune through machine-learning? I don’t know, but I hope I’m not replaced anytime soon.

The 19th Century American Potioneer

I’ve started exploring the history of potions, by that I mean using the search terms pharmacy, druggist, apothecary coupled with history to find articles of interest. As an introductory article, I very much enjoyed Gregory Higby’s Chemistry and the American 19th Century Pharmacist (citation: Bull. Hist. Chem. 2003, 28, 9-17).

Higby focuses on the American drugstore. He lists its four roots: “the traditional apothecary’s shop; doctor’s shops – where physicians prescribed and dispensed; the general store; and the wholesale druggist.” Prior to the 19^th century, physicians dispensed medication formulated by themselves or their own apprentices. The doctor and pharmacist was often one and the same; and in the early 19^th century apothecary, potioneers often had a “room in the back” to make their elixirs and potions.

As the industry grew, the selling of pharmaceutical ‘preparations’ became separated from the actual activity of (chemical) preparation. You could buy your elixirs from the general store, where the storekeeper had no expertise (unlike the apothecary). Lack of regulation meant that you might be sold useless snake oil, or worse, something inadvertently poisonous. Adulteration of drugs with other substances was a huge problem – either through insufficient purification of the efficacious compound, or worse, the active adding of other cheap substances to increase bulk. This unfortunately still happens today. Where there’s money to be made, the con-artists will gather.

According to Higby, “the American Journal of Pharmacy was filled with articles long and short on detecting drug adulterations and sophistications. Pharmacists proudly portrayed themselves as the most reliable monitors on drug quality. The problem came to a head during the Mexican War, when newspapers reported a high number of deaths among soldiers from disease rather than combat. Army physicians blamed poor quality drugs. Congress quickly passed the Drug Importation Act of 1848 after lobbying by the young American Medical Association.”

The problem is that the drug inspectors needed to know what the standards should be. Hence, pharmacy colleges across the country banded together to establish such standards; a byproduct of those meetings was forming the American Pharmaceutical Association, composed primarily of apothecaries and druggists in those early days. Over the years, colleges of pharmacy evolved to prioritize actual chemistry labwork over prior apprenticeship in a drugstore, thanks to the dogged efforts of Albert B. Prescott, an analytical chemist, physician and professor.

One thread I found interesting in Higby’s article was the evolution of the drugstore itself. By the late 19^th century, “more profitable goods such as tobacco and candy” took center-stage, and the “shift of pharmacy practice to the back of the shop gave the soda fountain front and center position. Ironically, it was the pharmacist’s practical chemistry expertise that allowed him to make up flavorings and to handle temperamental carbonated water generators.” Food chemists, here we come! It was pharmacists that invented Dr. Pepper, Coca Cola, and root beer! There was a downside, though. “Unfortunately, the public soon came to see pharmacists more as sellers of chocolate sodas than health care professionals.”

Many 21^st century students in my General Chemistry courses come to college thinking they want to go to medical school. Rarely, do I meet a first-year student considering pharmacy school, at least here in the U.S.; in other countries, you apply to undergraduate pharmacy programs directly. (Personal story: I was accepted into the pharmacy program at several U.K. schools through the UCCA process, but ended up going to a liberal arts college in the U.S. instead. At the point of entering college, I did not know that chemistry would become my main interest.) A number of my students have gone to pharmacy school after completing their undergraduate degree; for many of them, the work-life-time balance of being a pharmacist seemed more attractive than being a physician.

Today’s pharmacist is not involved in the making of drugs and potions. At least for regulated drugs, the synthetic work is done by chemists (in research and development) or by robots for larger-scale production. The closest modern-day equivalent of the 19^th century druggist would be the small-scale manufacture of illegal drugs, sometimes for personal use, and sometimes to make money on the side – think Walter White of Breaking Bad in his early days before he breaks badder. He could have chosen Prescott as his moniker to honor the pharmacist, but being bad-ass, he chose Heisenberg!

Where might today’s students experience the art of the 19^th century pharmacist? In the organic chemistry and analytical chemistry lab courses! I haven’t taught either of those, since I’m a theorist and my colleagues would prefer me not too much meddle with chemicals. (I do teach the first-year general chemistry labs.) Instead, I get to show students how to derive the Heisenberg relations in quantum mechanics and dose their minds with the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physical chemistry. You can see the unseen, predict the future, and tame the chaos. It’s a superior mind trip than taking drugs.

P.S. For ways I am like or not like Walter White, click here.

Science: Parable of the Brickyard

Science is like a brickyard.

How so? If you’re a biochemist, you might be thinking about BioBricks. But that is not what Bernard Forscher’s 1963 letter in Science is about. “Chaos in the Brickyard” is a cautionary tale of how the enterprise of science can veer off-course, missing the forest for the trees – or perhaps the branches, twigs or leaves.

That was 55 years ago. Forscher’s dystopian predictions have come to pass, possibly exceeding anything he might have imagined. Like an Aesop fable, the one-page letter is structured as a parable. You will experience the full impact reading it in its entirety, but to whet your appetite, I will just quote the first sentence or two of each paragraph.

Once upon a time, among the activities and occupations of man there was an activity called scientific research and the performers of this activity were called scientists. In reality, however, these men were builders who constructed edifices, called explanations or laws, by assembling bricks, called facts…

It came to pass that builders realized that they were sorely hampered in their efforts by delays in obtaining bricks. Thus there arose a new skilled trade known as brickmaking, called junior scientists…

And then it came to pass that a misunderstanding spread among the brickmakers… [They] became obsessed with the making of bricks… the ranks of the brickmakers were swelled by augmented training programs and intensive recruitment…

And so it happened that the land became flooded with bricks. It became necessary to organize more and more storage places, called journals, and more and more elaborate systems of bookkeeping to record the inventory… the size and shape [of bricks] was now dictated by changing trends in fashion…

The letter concludes that the builders, those who construct edifices, are “almost” destroyed. The reasons are sad, and seemingly inevitable. Here’s the last sentence of the concluding paragraph.

And saddest of all, sometimes no effort was made even to maintain the distinction between a pile of bricks and a true edifice.

Forscher would agree that bricks are crucial to the edifice, and that the making of bricks is an important task. But there might be something rotten in the core of the guild of builders. Is it that the reward system for how one advances in the guild has been skewed? Is it because the quantitative exercise of counting bricks seems ‘easier’ than a qualitative evaluation of… for lack of a better word, quality? We scientists know how to get at tricky measurements – find an appropriate proxy. But after multiple uses of the proxy, it morphs into its own unit of measurement and establishes itself as a rubric – the acid test, to use an analogy from chemistry.

Assessment, previously qualitative and less data-driven, has now morphed into its own science of building. The builders are fewer, while brickmaking is on the rise. A new exalted activity has arisen. Brickmeasuring. It feeds on data from piles of bricks. I can only speak knowledgeably of higher education, as my entire career thus far is in this realm, but there is more chaos in the brickyard than ever before.

Energy Levels: A Game Idea

A couple of Fridays ago, one of the students in my creativity cluster, proposed the idea of a boardgame as an educational tool to learn about energy levels and atomic spectroscopy. This made me hunt around to see if anyone had made such a game. The closest I came was “Orbital Battleship” from a 2016 article in the Journal of Chemical Education. It borrows the mechanics of classic Battleship, but with opponents (presumably students learning chemistry) fill out electron configurations of an atom and try to guess their opponent’s atom by calling out orbital names – checking if they are occupied or empty. I didn’t find it very appealing after reading the rules because, while it might be fun the first couple of games, I predict that interest will wane very quickly.

After the meeting, my mind was still buzzing with the idea so I quickly sketched together the basic idea of a game. Here’s my photo proof of my original idea – I am hoping it will get developed further. I think it’s better than my previous back-of-the-envelope design that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, although I did make some progress with the atom cards over winter break.

My yet untitled energy levels game uses a modular board of narrow strips, each with varyingly spaced energy levels. Players need to get from a start to an end point by playing color cards. The colors represent the number of levels traversed, and they can be played as absorption or emission to move up and down the modular ‘maze’. Inability to play a card leads to a step back via infra-red decay. There are also special ultraviolet cards that allow a larger jump in energy levels than usual. I presented my idea to the group the following week. They liked the game and suggested ideas to refine the rules. One student asked what the goal of the game would be. I hadn’t thought about the theme yet, but off the top of my head I suggested ‘electron nirvana’. The electron finds its destination outside of the influence of the atom. I suppose it could go the other way, i.e., the electron from afar finds its true place in its quantum atomic universe.

This past Friday, which was our last meeting of the semester (since we’re moving into finals week), my student who had first suggested the idea, presented a prototype with strips of cardboard and paper cards, illustrated with colors! We didn’t actually play through a game but talked about what the next prototype should like as we refined it. An eraser substituted as a player piece (the electron eraser, I suppose). In the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of that first prototype. Argh!

I think this game idea has actual promise, and I now feel motivated to work on it as summer approaches. My students are looking forward to some playtesting. We talked about game balance, timing, card distribution, etc., and it made me realize that I was being creative in two areas where I have a fair bit of knowledge: chemistry and gaming! Hopefully we’ll have an updated prototype sometime in the summer.

P.S. An unrelated blog post about managing energy levels.

P.P.S. Electrons magically apparate when they traverse energy levels. So says Bohr.

P.P.P.S. Could Orbital Azkaban be a game? Hmm... I'll have to think about it.

Qualitative Formative Assessment

This week I read a thirty-year old article by D. Royce Sadler on formative assessment, with a focus on qualitative and multiple-criteria approaches. These are situations where simple standard rubrics are found severely wanting and “warp teaching and assessment”. Creativity and complex learning outcomes, with less well-defined criteria, are among those situations. They are not just limited to qualitative judgments in the fine arts and humanities, but also in “science and mathematics, where students are required to devise experiments, formulate hypotheses or explanations, carry out open-ended field or laboratory investigations, or engage in creative problem solving.” (Citation and abstract are shown below, accessible from JSTOR.)

Sadler defines a qualitative judgment as where the assessor is “both the source and the instrument for the appraisal”. The assessment therefore cannot be reduced to a formula or a rubric that could easily be used to check-off criteria. Unfortunately, the push for measurable or quantitative assessment either ignores these complexities or an unsatisfactory proxy is chosen. We the faculty, subject-matter experts in tertiary education, aim to guide our students into depth and complexity in our fields; and we should push back strongly against the tide that focuses on things that can be counted easily.

There are five characteristics where qualitative judgments apply according to Sadler: (1) when multi-dimensional criteria are required and their inter-relationships are important, (2) when criteria are fuzzy and continuous, (3) when the criteria pool is large and comprises both manifest and latent criteria, (4) when there isn’t a single objective independent measurable standard for comparison, and (5) “the final decision is never made by counting things, making physical measurements, or compounding numbers and looking at the sheer magnitude of the result.” In fact, our simple rubrics are often an attempt to do #5, and Sadler warns specifically against this.

Two things that Sadler then discusses in detail are what may constitute effective feedback from instructor to student (or expert to novice), and how students might practically benefit from the feedback – essentially, learning how to learn, as self-monitoring approaches are honed by the student. I recommend reading the article in detail because Sadler does an excellent job setting up the conceptual framework for his ideas and provides good examples to illustrate the theory. Instead, I want to briefly mention three ancillary things that jumped out at me from the article.

First, it can be useful to think of the community of subject-matter-experts as members of a guild. Members of the guild instinctively recognize quality broadly in our fields, even if it be in different shades. If asked to articulate the criteria that define quality, we might have partial and differing lists from one another (I mentioned above that criteria can be manifest or latent), but we might not be able to agree easily on a simple explicit rubric or checklist to assess that quality. In the guild system, the “novice is, by definition, unable to invoke the implicit criteria for making refined judgments about quality. Knowledge of the criteria is ‘caught’ through experience, not defined… [through] a prolonged engagement… shared with and under the tutelage of a person who is already something of a connoisseur.” This is why many of us scientists at liberal arts colleges consider the undergraduate research experience to be crucial for a high-quality education of our majors, and many of us embrace a guild-tutelage model in our research labs.

Second, I was struck by Sadler’s claim that “some teachers feel threatened by the idea that students should engage openly and cooperatively in making evaluative judgments”. He provides several plausible reasons for this: loss of control, undermining expertise authority, and others. In the sciences, especially at the undergraduate course level, we still gravitate towards the “one right answer”. In Fall 2016, I experimented with take-home exams in my first semester general chemistry course. It had its pros and cons. Reading Sadler’s article made me think of adding a student self-evaluative piece to the take-home exam. After taking the exam individually (closed-book and with time constraints), students must evaluate their own performance, by going through the exam again but may do so collaboratively or looking up resources. I think I’ve come up with a workable scheme to try next semester with a new group of students.

Third, Sadler argues that continuous cumulative assessment for grades may actually subvert or hinder the benefits of formative assessment. Let me explain. In most U.S. college introductory science classes, the bulk of the grade comes from midterm exams (2-4 throughout the term) and a final exam; there might be some homework or quiz grades throughout the semester too. The student’s final grade comes from summing up all these mini-grades. I grew up in a different country with a different educational system, where the final (nation-wide) exam was the end-all. Nothing counted but the final performance. Both systems have their pros and cons, but perhaps there is a way of maximizing the pros and minimizing the cons in a hybrid system. I have some ideas of how this might work, but I think I will float them to some students I’ve had in the past, and see what they think.

If formative assessment interests you, the appropriate bible is Dylan Wiliam’s book. In my opinion, it’s one of the best books out there on this subject. I highly, highly recommend it. The figure below is taken from Greg Ashman’s blog (also recommended) and his book Ouroboros – the sampler chapter on Rubrics is available.

Life After Death: Stiff Version

If anyone can tackle the subject of the myriad things that happen to cadavers with humor and grace, it has to be Mary Roach. Her book Stiff, published back in 2003, is subtitled The Curious Life of Human Cadavers. I only recently discovered Roach’s blend of writing in mid-March when I read Gulp. Based on just that one book, Roach shot up to my top five favorite authors. Since Gulp was her most recent book, I decided to go back to her first book. Stiff does not disappoint. Her humor and daring is exquisitely balanced with the most interesting facts and research you’ve never heard.

I learned about surgeons practicing cosmetic surgery on heads, and how respectfully they (the heads) are treated, and the protectiveness of the chief decapitator. There’s more decapitation if you want to learn about experiments involving head transplants. Early anatomists partnered with body snatchers, and even William Harvey (discoverer of the human blood circulation system) performed dissection on his own father and sister. Some physicians even dug up corpses themselves. Cannibalism, cremation, and composting are more fascinating and complex than I knew. Yes, composting dead bodies is a thing. At least in Sweden. And the argument is environmental. Wouldn’t you prefer an ecological funeral? Or you could donate your body to science – it might help the army test weaponry or car manufacturers test crash damage, among many other uses.

My favorite chapter, though, is titled How to Know if you’re Dead. It turns out there was quite a bit of controversy as to whether the inactivity of the heart or the brain should be used to define when someone is dead. In the U.S., it’s brain death. Amazingly, this legal definition only started in 1967, first in Kansas. And at least in 2016, there was still significant variability in individual institutional policies. I suppose it makes sense that the heart was used as the measure for a long time, since brain activity was more difficult to measure.

That being said, before an effective stethoscope was invented, it was sometimes hard to tell – especially if someone had a very faint pulse. Thus, the fears of being buried alive. I actually learned in a seminar that the last line of Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will (which is famous for endowing the Nobel prizes) reads: “Finally, it is my express wish that following my death my veins shall be opened and when this is done and competent Doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated in a so-called crematorium.”

Besides the heart/brain controversy, Roach also tackles the question of where the soul is located. I learned that while the ancient Egyptians favored the heart, the Babylonians favored the liver. On the other hand, “the Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotion to the liver and intellect to the heart. These guys clearly marched to the beat of a freethinking drummer, for they assigned a further portion of the soul (cunning) to the stomach.” Descartes picked the pineal gland and an Alexandrian anatomist named Strato picked “behind the eyebrows”. Edison apparently thought that there existed “smaller-than-microscope entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality.” Midichlorians, anyone?

The movie 21 Grams takes its title from the premise that the body loses 21 grams of weight upon death – as the soul departs the body. Roach discusses the early experiments of one Dr. Duncan Macdougall who installed a special bed in his office connected to a sensitive weight balance. He was quite the experimenter. After observing a loss of three-quarters of an ounce, the good doctor tried to rule out in scientific fashion other sources – evaporation of moisture, bowel or bladder movement, residual air in the lungs, etc. He then apparently tested these on dogs (it is speculated that he poisoned them) and found no weight change. His conclusion: Dogs have no soul while humans do. The scientific community at present thinks the early experiments were flawed, and that there is no evidence for the “21 grams theory”.

In the same chapter, Roach discusses the curious “phenomenon of heart transplant patients’ claiming to experience memories belonging to their donors”. They’re strange. Very strange. You’ll have to read Roach’s book if anything I’ve said so far sounds interesting. And I’ve only discussed snippets from one out of twelve chapters. Stiff is a breezy read and very engaging. I highly recommend it. Let me close this post with a quote from the author Burkhard Bilger praising the book.

“Mary Roach is the funniest science writer in the country. If that sounds like faint praise – or even an oxymoron – there’s proof to the contrary on almost any page of this book. Stiff tells us where the bodies are, what they’re up to, and the astonishing tales they have to tell. Best of all it manages, somehow, to find humor in cadavers without robbing them of their dignity. Long live the dead.”

Appropriately, I'm looking forward to reading Spook next. Science tackles the afterlife, apparently.