Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine, wrote last week an article that you find at the Edge proclaiming

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete


Anderson claims that our progress in storing and analyzing large amounts of data makes the old-fashioned approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – obsolete. His argument is based on the possibility to analyze data statistically with increasing efficiency, for example online behavior: “Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

Source:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html

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THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? [6.30.08]
By Chris Anderson

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.


Introduction

According to Chris Anderson, we are at "the end of science", that is, science as we know it." The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age."

"At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."

In response to Anderson's essay, Stewart Brand notes that:

Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We'll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it's good for.

The "crossing" that Anderson has named in his essay, has been developing in science for several years and in the Edge community in particular.

For example, during the TED Conference in 2005, before, and during, the annual Edge Dinner, there were illuminating informal conversations involving Craig Venter (who pioneered the use of high volume genome sequencing using vast amounts of computational power), Danny Hillis (designer of the "Connection Machine", the massively parallel supercomputer), and Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google: new and radical DNA sequencing techniques meet computational robots meet server farms in search of a synthetic source of energy.

And in August, 2007, at the Edge event "Life: What A Concept", Venter made the following point:

I have come to think of life in much more a gene-centric view than even a genome-centric view, although it kind of oscillates. And when we talk about the transplant work, genome-centric becomes more important than gene-centric. From the first third of the Sorcerer II expedition we discovered roughly 6 million new genes that has doubled the number in the public databases when we put them in a few months ago, and in 2008 we are likely to double that entire number again. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet.

One question is, can we extrapolate back from this data set to describe the most recent common ancestor. I don't necessarily buy that there is a single ancestor. It’s counterintuitive to me. I think we may have thousands of recent common ancestors and they are not necessarily so common.

Andrian Kreye, editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote on his paper's editorial pages that the event was "a crucial moment in history. After all, it's where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced".

In the July/August Seed Salon with novelist Tom Wolfe, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga explains how the conversation began to change when neuroscience took off in the '80s and '90s:

There was a hunger for the big picture: What does it mean? How do we put it together into a story? Ultimately, everything's got to have a narrative in science, as in life.

Source:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html

Openness in Science

In a recent blog post on The Future of Science Michael Nielsen (co-organizer of our upcoming conference on Science in the 21st Century) puts forward an interesting hypothesis. The reason, he speculates, that scientists are so slow with adapting Web 2.0 tools is a "reluctance to share knowledge that could be useful to others". Since Michael's very recommendable essay is likely too long for some of you guys with an attention span around the lifetime of a charged Kaon, here is my summary: What is missing in the scientific community, he says, is a culture of openness.

I agree with him on this - without supporting the cultural change towards larger openness science will fall behind other areas of our lives that have been moving on. It is quite ironic that science, which lives from creating and discussing ideas, suffers from an inhibition of spreading and sharing these ideas.

I can see the following reasons for this:

* P1: Especially in physics, there is the prevailing myth of the lonely genius who sits under a tree and waits for the apple to drop on his head. In most instances however, this picture is very incomplete. Even the genius needs a community to work out his ideas, to discuss, and to ask - not to mention that ideas are not born in vacuum but based on the knowledge drawn from that same community.

Source: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/

Liquid Helium, a centenary

This month has seen the centenary of the first liquefaction of helium:

On July 10, 1908, a complicated apparatus working in the laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden, Holland, managed to produce 60 ml of liquid helium, at a temperature of 4.2 Kelvin, or −269°C.

Kamerlingh Onnes had been experimenting with cold gases since quite some time before, as he was trying to check the theories of his fellow countryman Johannes Diderik van der Waals on the equation of state of real gases. He had been scooped in the liquefaction of hydrogen (at 20.3 K) in 1898 by James Dewar (who, in the process, had invented the Dewar flask).

But as it turned out, the liquefaction of helium required a multi-step strategy and a big laboratory, and this was Kamerlingh Onnes' business: Using first with liquid air, then liquid hydrogen, helium could finally be cooled enough, via the Joule-Thomson effect, to condense into the liquid state. The physics laboratory in Leiden had become the "coldest place on Earth", and immediately turned to the international centre for low-temperature physics.

Three years later, in 1911, Onnes found that mercury lost its electrical resistivity when cooled to the temperature of liquid helium - this was the discovery of superconductivity.


Source: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/

World's First High Temperature Superconductor Power Transmission Cable

World’s first high temperature superconductor (HTS) power transmission cable system in a commercial power grid. The 138,000 volt (138 kV) system, which consists of three individual HTS power cable phases running in parallel, was energized on April 22, 2008 and is operating successfully in LIPA’s Holbrook transmission right of way. A ceremony is being held today to commemorate the completion of the first phase and kick off the second phase of the project.
“Long Island Power Authority has a strong interest in the development of superconductor technologies and is the first utility in the world to commission an HTS power transmission cable system,” said LIPA President and Chief Executive Officer Kevin Law. “We view superconductor power cables as an important option in our technology portfolio that will help us further enhance the reliability of our grid as we meet our customers’ increasing demands for electric power.”

The HTS cable system installed in LIPA’s power grid contains hair-thin, ribbon-shaped HTS wires that conduct 150 times the electricity of similar sized copper wires. This power density advantage enables transmission-voltage HTS cables to utilize far less wire and yet conduct up to five times more power – in a smaller right of way – than traditional copper-based cables. When operated at full capacity, the HTS cable system is capable of transmitting up to 574 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power 300,000 homes.


Source: http://www.azom.com/News.asp?NewsID=12710

Further reading:http://pepei.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ONART&PUBLICATION_ID=6&ARTICLE_ID=332920&C=PRODJ&dcmp=rss

New superconductors open up the periodic table

For two decades, the search for superconductors that worked at high temperatures was restricted to copper. Now a new family of high-temperature superconductors based on iron has been discovered - and materials scientists are wondering what other combinations of elements they might try. So far the quest is guided by luck as much as by judgement, so researchers are hoping the new materials will provide clues to the recipe for high-temperature superconductivity.

Superconductors can carry electric current with no resistance - a property which could transform electric power generation if it were possible to maintain at room temperature. Since 1986, the field has been dominated by ceramic copper-oxide materials (cuprates), where copper-oxygen planes carry electrons between surrounding layers of various elements. Though an operating temperature of 138K (at ambient pressure) was established in 1995, progress since then has been frustratingly slow. Most other types of superconductors only work at temperatures close to absolute zero.

Materials developed this year by Japanese and Chinese researchers, however, consisting of iron-arsenic compounds sandwiched between rare earth oxides doped to provide extra charge carriers, are superconductors up to a promising 55K, though they have yet to work at the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. 'It's superconductivity in places you've never thought of,' says David Larbalestier, a materials scientist working at Florida State University's national high magnetic field laboratory.

The first of the new compounds, LaOFeAs doped with fluorine, was reported in February 2008 by Hideo Hosono and colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology [1]. It was a superconductor at 26K, and higher if put under pressure. Subsequently, Xianhui Chen's team at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, replaced the rare earth lanthanum with samarium (SmO1-x FxFeAs) and got the critical temperature up to 43K [2]. Zhong-Xian Zhao's group at Beijing's National Laboratory for Superconductivity, China, have since shown that similar compounds with other rare earths are superconductors above 50K; the samarium material under pressure holds the current 55K record [3].

The crystal structures of materials made so far are very similar, but a good deal of tinkering with the [rare earth][oxygen][dopant][transition metal][group 5 element] formula is expected. 'You can try replacing just about every element in the formula,' says Pengcheng Dai, a physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The rare earths have varied through lanthanum, samarium, praseodymium, neodymium, cerium and gadolinium. The arsenic has been replaced with phosphorus, the iron with nickel, and even the dopant has been changed from fluorine, providing extra electrons, to strontium or oxygen vacancies, providing holes - though these experiments have not reached such high critical superconducting temperatures (Tc).


Source: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/May/30050802.asp

Superconductor electric vehicle

Sumitomo Electric has developed what is being called the world’s first automobile powered by a superconducting motor. The electric passenger sedan (a modified Toyota Crown Comfort), which is powered by a high-temperature superconducting motor cooled by liquid nitrogen, was unveiled in Osaka on June 12 and will go on display at the Hokkaido Toyako G8 Summit on June 19.

Superconductors — energy-efficient materials that can carry electrical current without resistance — are used in applications ranging from medical devices to linear motors for trains. Until now, however, they have never been used to power an automobile, says Sumitomo, who developed an ultra-powerful 365-kw superconducting motor last year.

Sumitomo’s motor uses high-temperature superconducting wires instead of the copper wire typically used in the coils in electric vehicle motors. When cooled to -200 degrees Celsius, electrical resistance and current loss are reduced to nearly zero, so the motor can operate with greater energy efficiency and torque — in other words, the motor uses less electricity to do the same amount of work. The company says the prototype vehicle can travel more than 10% farther than conventional electric vehicles running on the same type of battery.

The development comes as demand for electric vehicles grows, and as manufacturers step up efforts to improve battery and motor performance to increase the distance that vehicles can travel on a single charge.

Sumitomo intends to further improve the motor with the aim of putting a vehicle on the market in the not-too-distant future. The company is looking to develop superconductor motors for buses and trucks as well.


Source: http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/06/superconductor-electric-vehicle/

Research Suggests Novel Superconductor Is In a Powerful

Superconductivity has perplexed, astounded and inspired scientists ever since it was discovered in 1911. Now, in the latest of a century of surprises, researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University have discovered unusual properties in a novel superconducting material that point to an entirely new kind of superconductor.

Frank Hunte, a postdoctoral associate at the lab's Applied Superconductivity Center (ASC), working with David Larbalestier, Alex Gurevich and Jan Jaroszynski, and colleagues in David Mandrus' group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, discovered surprising magnetic properties in the new superconductors that suggest they may have very powerful applications -- from improved MRI machines and research magnets to a new generation of superconducting electric motors, generators and power transmission lines. The research also adds to the long list of mysteries surrounding superconductivity, providing evidence that the new materials, which scientists are calling "doped rare earth iron oxyarsenides," develop superconductivity in quite a new way, as detailed in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Nature.

Though research on this substance is very much in its early stages, scientists are talking excitedly of "promise" and "potential."

"What one would like is a greater selection of superconductors, operating at higher temperatures, being cheaper, possibly being more capable of being made into round wires," said Larbalestier, director of the ASC. "Iron and arsenic, both inherently cheap materials, are key constituents of this totally new class of superconductors. We're just fascinated. It's superconductivity in places you never thought of."

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news131200517.html

Two-Dimensional High-Temperature Superconductor

Scientists at Brookhaven Lab have discovered a state of two-dimensional (2D) fluctuating superconductivity in a high-temperature superconductor with a particular arrangement of electrical charges known as "stripes."

The finding was uncovered during studies of directional dependence in the material's electron-transport and magnetic properties. In the 2D plane, the material acts as a superconductor - conducts electricity with no resistance - at a significantly higher temperature than in the 3D state.

"The results provide many insights into the interplay between the stripe order and superconductivity, which may shed light on the mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity," said Brookhaven physicist Qiang Li.


Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080313204503.htm

Where's the glue?

Scientists find a surprise when they look for what binds in superconductivity

For more than 20 years since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, scientists have been debating the underlying physical mechanism for this exotic phenomenon, which has the potential to revolutionize the electrical power distribution network.

They've argued at length over the origin of what some have imagined to be a microscopic "glue" that binds the electrons into pairs so they glide effortlessly, overcoming their normal repulsion in typical metals. Is it magnetism or vibrations in the lattice structure of the material or something else"

Now, provocative results yielded by two years of experiments carried out at Princeton University have a group of scientists saying that high-temperature superconductivity does not hinge on a magical glue binding electrons together. The secret to superconductivity, they say, may rest instead on the ability of electrons to take advantage of their natural repulsion in a complex situation.

Reporting in the April 11 issue of the journal Science, the team has uncovered an unexpected connection between the behavior of electrons when they pair up -- a key requirement for superconductivity -- and when the electrons are repelling one another at temperatures far above the critical temperature at which a material superconducts. Their experiments have shown that electrons exhibit a characteristic behavior when repelling each other that, strangely enough, signals their special talent for pairing and flowing without resistance when these complex materials are cooled to low temperatures.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/pu-wtg040708.php

New superconductors present new mysteries, possibilities

Johns Hopkins University researchers and colleagues in China have unlocked some of the secrets of newly discovered iron-based high-temperature superconductors, research that could result in the design of better superconductors for use in industry, medicine, transportation and energy generation.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, the team, led by Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, offers insights into why the characteristics of a new family of iron-based superconductors reveal the need for fresh theoretical models which could, they say, pave the way for the development of superconductors that can operate at room temperature.

“It appears to us that the new iron-based superconductors disclose a new physics, contain new mysteries and may start us along an uncharted pathway to room temperature superconductivity,” said Chien, who teamed up on the research with Tingyong Chen and Zlatko Tesanovic, both of Johns Hopkins, and X.H. Chen and R.H. Liu of the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, China.

Source: http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2909

Further reading:

(a) http://www.physorg.com/news131813340.html

(b) http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/124618/

(c) http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/18/1436224&from=rss

New blog on Cultural advantage

New blog on Cultural advantage

There is new blog dedicated to Cultural Advantage issues:

http://culturaladvantage.blogspot.com

Feel free to send your comments to fsmarandache@yahoo.com, or to vxianto@gmail.com

Welcome to this new blogspot!

Best wishes,
vxianto@gmail.com

Japan's New Green Car

Detroit will have to work hard to catch Japanese automakers in the race to produce hybrids, electric cars, cleaner diesels, and fuel-cell vehicles.

Since General Motors (GM) first showed its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid (BusinessWeek.com, 1/7/07) concept car at the North American International Auto Show in January 2007, the industry hype has been unrelenting.

Any lingering concerns over the cost and reliability of lithium-ion batteries, a technology not yet used in any mass-production hybrid car but which will help power the Volt, are outweighed by the excitement that GM will finally have a vehicle capable of rivaling Toyota's (TM) Prius hybrid as the green car champion.

Yet when the Volt arrives in November 2010, assuming GM meets its challenging deadline, can the U.S. automaker make up for lost time in the race with Japan's automakers to produce cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars? Even if the Volt is as impressive as GM hopes, a slew of recent announcements by Japan's automakers suggest closing the gap will be tough.


A Lot More Hybrids to Come

From now through 2010 and beyond, they are pushing ahead with plans for hybrids, electric cars, cleaner diesels, and even, further down the road, fuel-cell vehicles (see "Japan's Green Drive"). The days when auto executives mocked the Prius as a loss-making fad seem long past. "Without focusing on measures to address global warming and energy issues, there can be no future for our auto business," Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota's president, said at an environmental forum in Tokyo on June 11.

To meet its targets, Toyota will roll out several new models. Next year, Toyota is expected to add two new cars that it will sell only as hybrids, one badged as a Toyota, the other a Lexus. A new version of the Prius, which promises to be lighter and more fuel-efficient than the current generation, should also appear in 2009, and a plug-in version, which like the Volt will use lithium-ion batteries, is due to arrive a year later. By 2010, Toyota is also believed to be planning two more dedicated hybrid models, including a new hybrid minivan.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2008/gb2008071_763199.htm

Japan's Green Drive

With General Motors' (GM) Volt plug-in hybrid car set for a late 2010 debut, Japan's automakers are wasting no time ramping up production of attractive, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient autos.

In the next couple of years, Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC), Nissan (NSANY), and other rivals will bring to market a host of new models, including conventional hybrids, plug-ins, clean diesels, and electric vehicles. Fuel-cell vehicles may be further off, but that doesn't mean they'll be out of the headlines. This month, Honda began small-scale production of its innovative (but expensive) FCX Clarity, to much acclaim.

Picking a winner is nearly impossible today, but with oil touching $140 a barrel, expect more new environmentally friendly autos--not to mention more hype--to be added to lineups in the months ahead.

Source: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0702_japan_green_cars/index.htm

Chevy's Volt Has the Juice

But safety, cost, and reliability factors still need to be ironed out before GM can bring its plug-in hybrid to market

It wasn't too long ago that General Motors' (GM) top executives sniffed at the notion of building hybrids. They were too expensive to be made profitably. Consumers wouldn't pay for fuel economy until gasoline prices stood well over $3 a gallon. And hydrogen-powered cars would make hybrids a short-lived option early in the next decade.

Today those GM execs are looking shortsighted. After the price of gas soared in early 2006, the company was caught unprepared as hybrids and other vehicles that emphasized fuel economy suddenly became hot commodities.

As a result, in addition to crashing a dozen GM gasoline hybrid models through the design process so that they can reach the market in the next several years, the company is now pushing plug-in hybrids. Plug-ins offer better fuel economy than today's hybrids because larger batteries store more energy and one can drive in pure electric mode longer. The most impressive one—the Chevrolet Volt concept being unveiled on Jan. 7 at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit—can run purely on electric power and can get a minimum 50 mpg over the long haul.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/jan2007/bw20070108_195447.htm

LEAN, GREEN AND NOT MEAN

LEAN, GREEN AND NOT MEAN
Jun 26th 2008


The United States may drop a tariff on Brazilian ethanol. But the
industry is still the victim of much misplaced criticism

America's thirst for ethanol is set to grow in line with targets in
last year's Energy Independence and Security Act. Brazil would like to
sell more to Europe and Japan too. Yet just when it seems poised to
reduce the world's dependence on oil, its largely sugar-based ethanol
industry stands accused of being less wonderful than it looks.
Some media reports allege ill-treatment of farm workers. More
prosaically, some American officials question how much ethanol Brazil
can supply.

Take this last point first. Demand for ethanol is growing fast in
Brazil because 90% of new cars have flex-fuel engines that can run on
any mixture of petrol and ethanol. Even so, ethanol remains cheap. This
is because producers have invested in expanding capacity (see chart),
partly because they hope for export markets, but mainly because they
reckon they must sell at a 30% discount to petrol to keep the custom of
Brazilians. The price of petrol has not risen for three years because
the government has opted to hold it down.

Source: http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11632886