The Pursuit of Sensational Science

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Much has been written recently about sensationalizing science, by hyping things up, exaggerating the importance or novelty of new findings and giving over-simplistic accounts of them.

Up to a point scientists themselves are responsible for this. Referring to a molecule implicated in certain behaviours as the “moral molecule” obviously invites criticism, and has done so. But referring to the Higgs boson as the “God particle” has not attracted the same criticism, for reasons that are difficult to understand.

The term “God particle” was not given by scientists. As I understand it, a distinguished scientist wrote a book entitled “The Goddam Particle” but his publishers thought the title too offensive. Of course, what the title implied was “that goddam particle is so elusive, and therefore so difficult to find”. But apparently the publishers changed the title to the God Particle, and it has stuck ever since. The God particle of course has a different sense altogether – even a religious sense. But I have not heard scientists disavowing the name, with all its sensationalist associations. Instead they seem to have reveled in it.

And just recall how the Higgs boson, or the God particle, was announced recently. A press conference was announced some weeks before, keeping all guessing as to what would be revealed at the conference. Rumours became rife and were quashed, adding to the tension and the sensationalism. Scientists seemed to revel in it.

Compare that with the announcement of the current status of junk DNA, which was not accompanied by all the fanfare. Instead, the results were published in 2-3 journals. The discovery nevertheless attracted widespread attention in the press and was on the whole well summarized for the lay public – a far better example of scientific conduct.

To an equal extent, the current scientific culture is fertile ground for  sensationalism and indeed encourages it. All scientists, especially young ones aspiring to a good appointment, yearn to publish in “high impact” journals. I recently saw an advertisement for a research position at a very distinguished university. It said that “the successful candidate will have a proven ability to publish in high impact journals”.

Notice, it said nothing about a proven ability to do good or rigorous science, but only to publish in high impact journals. And it is common knowledge that what gets published in high impact journals is very variable, and not always the best science.

And how does one publish in high impact journals?

Well, one way is to do good science. But another way is to do sensational science.

Some of these high impact journals now screen a submission before sending it out for peer review and informed opinion. I know of one journal which rejects as follows:

“This is not meant as a criticism of the quality of the data or the rigor of the science, but merely reflects our desire to publish only the most influential research.”

Read it well, for it says it all: the science may be rigorous and good but, in our opinion, it is not influential research.

In other words, we only want to publish the most sensational research.

And this is not the only journal that pre-screens articles before deciding to send them out for peer review.

I do not believe that this does science any good service.

Who, after all, decides what is influential research but future generations.

And so we come full circle:

To get a good job, you have to publish in high impact journals.

To publish in high impact journals, you have to do sensational science. 

Good science helps but is not the determining factor. It must, in the opinion of those who may not be especially versed in the subject, be influential.

And the boundary between sensational science and exaggeration is….rather thin.

Good money for bad art

This is getting better and better!

A really shabby and botched restoration of a minor work in a small church in Zaragoza, Spain, by an unknown artist (?)/ restorer (?), Cecilia Gimenez, was hailed by many as a real contribution to contemporary art, although it is only fair to add that many others laughed at it. I believe that a description of it as "an intelligent reflection of the political and social conditions of our times" is not far off the mark (lots of laughs here).

After attracting so much attention, it has of course become a celebrity - and celebrity status ultimately leads in only one direction -- money, lots of it.

And according to today's Guardian, this is exactly what is happening.

Now, after the church started to rake in the cash by charging the multitudes who came to view this bizarre restoration, which makes Jesus look like a hairy monkey, the restorer herself wants a cut of the cake. After all, at 4 euros per admission, this is not an insignificant sum. Hilarious.

See, I told you, if a curator of contemporary art had been wise and bought the work outright (when it would have presumably been sold for a song), all this money would now be flowing in a different direction.

Philip Roth, Wikipedia and Oscar Wilde

Philip Roth was understandably annoyed when he wanted to correct a mistake in the Wikipedia entry regarding his book, The Human Stain. Apparently, they did not want to publish his correction about who had inspired his book. While acknowledging that the author of a book is an authority on his or her book, they nevertheless wanted a “secondary source”. Roth addressed them in a letter to the New Yorker and they have since apparently accepted that Roth is an authority on his own book and corrected the mistake.

Of course, the delusion is to suppose that there are necessarily any “secondary sources” in Wikipedia or that there ever can be, given the nature of the enterprise. Many who write entries for it are, naturally enough, interested in the topic about which they write. But many are also interested in themselves and in projecting their own contributions. This results in self-serving and inaccurate articles. In that sense, they are not “secondary sources”, weighing the facts dispassionately or presenting different sides of an argument or different interpretations.

I must say that I frequently consult Wikipedia for this or that, and think of it as a very worthwhile enterprise, one which at the very least guides those who want to learn more. But I never accept its authority on any important matter. It is sheer folly to rely on Wikipedia in any work of scholarship. Of course, one can modify Wikipedia entries. But is it worth the time and effort, when you know that it is not necessarily reliable, and when you know that, in a work of scholarship, you can never quite rely on it?

I have alluded to this before. What the present spat between Wikipedia and Philip Roth highlights is the illusion of “secondary sources”.

Perhaps Wikipedia should adopt as its motto a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde (I read it somewhere but cannot remember where and cannot be sure that the words below are exactly what he wrote, but they are pretty close):

“If you tell the truth, sooner or later you are bound to be found out”

Titian and Clint Eastwood

The small but great National Gallery exhibition of three Titian masterpieces displayed side by side for the first time since the 18^th century was a real delight. One of the three, The Death of Acteon, has been at the National Gallery for years; the other two (Diana and Callisto and Diana and Acteon) were only recently purchased for the nation for about £95 million and will be exhibited alternately in Edinburgh and London.

Acteon is of course doomed from the moment he sees Diana (the goddess of hunting) bathing in all her naked splendour. And the curators have used the occasion to have a real naked woman bathing, whom one can only see through a keyhole. It is quite an imaginative innovation, though it must be tiring for the women (I gather there is a change of women every two hours). 

Peeping through a keyhole implies spying on something that is forbidden or at any rate not on public view. It is a fitting complement to the voluptuous and erotic masterpieces of Titian (they were in fact exhibited for men only in the king’s private apartments in the royal palace in Madrid).

The penalty for spying visually on Diana was death. And the penalty for spying on a naked woman through a keyhole is…..?

Isn’t contemporary art designed to make us think about such things, about our relation to the woman seen through the keyhole in this instance? Or about being a peeping Tom in a public place? Or about exhibitionism? Or about secret fantasies? 

This was certainly more interesting than gazing vacuously at beach pebbles and filing cabinets.

While this exhibition was on, another potential exhibit for a museum of contemporary art came to my notice, though no one has commented on it in that context, as far as I can tell.

It was Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair (it starts at about 03:33) He was addressing the chair as if President Obama had been sitting on it. But there was of course no President Obama.

What would one call it – a Surrealist creation, a Dadaist creation? Conceptual art?

This dialogue between a living actor and an absent President – who could, in the imagination, be almost anyone – is also more interesting than beach pebbles and filing cabinets. In fact, I have actually seen empty chairs in museums of contemporary art that do not arouse nearly as much interest as Clint Eastwood’s empty chair, which is a good deal more imaginative.

I suggest that it would be a good exhibit at a museum of contemporary art. It stimulates the imagination more than the current empty chairs in some art museums. Some museum should rush to buy the copyright. It has, after all, attracted more than half a million viewers in about two weeks - and hence must be the envy of many a gallery.

And those who revile Clint Eastwood’s creation must at least acknowledge that it disturbed them enough to want to revile it.

In other words, it made them think.

Which is a good deal more than can be said for many exhibits in museums of contemporary art.

New prospects in contemporary art

You just couldn’t make this up.

A new line has opened up in contemporary art…

Maybe it deserves a name, like The Power of Disfigured Art,

and a brief description, like the social relevance of the new contemporary art.

The disfigured fresco which I wrote about two days ago has now acquired an iconic status. According to reports, hundreds of visitors have been crowding into the little church to view it and express their admiration, forcing the little church to display it behind a security cordon. 

But, wisely, the little church has also set up a collection box, to swell its revenue from donations.

A petition has been signed by no less than 19,000 in less than two days, asking the authorities not to allow a group of experts to undo the “damage” that Cecilia Gimenez did to it in trying to restore it herself, which resulted in Christ looking like a monkey.

The story has gone viral on the internet. Many have tried to do similar “virtual” restorations on other iconic works of art.

The petition says that the Cecilia Gimenez’s restorative work has made of the painting “an intelligent reflection of the political and social conditions of our times” – a description that can hardly be bettered by the erudite descriptions that some in the art world attach to obscure pebbles and filing cabinets.

They see in the painting a “subtle critique of the creationist theories of the Church” and compare it in style to …wait for it… the works of Goya, Munch and Modigliani.

Well, a director of a contemporary art museum could not have asked for more.

As I said, a museum of contemporary art should acquire it now, while it is still (relatively) affordable, before it goes under the hammer at one of the world’s “prestige” auction houses (like the one which tried to sell (unsuccessfully) an empty canvas, describing it as one in which the painter “had applied the seductive idea of nothing to a canvas, [which] asks the viewer to reflect” and its creator as “the most underestimated and overlooked minimal artist in Britain …[who] didn’t get the recognition that he deserved”.

Do such descriptions differ very much from the descriptions in the petition quoted above?

The great Cecilia Gimenez has surely convulsed the art world, and may yet find herself among the celebrated artists of our time.

This story may, just, be a wake-up call in the art world!

But I rather doubt it.

New item for a contemporary art museum

An interesting story hit the headlines this week - the attempt by a Spanish pensioner to restore a 19th century Spanish fresco depicting Christ.

The result was a disaster and, according to one newspaper, made Christ look like a monkey. Another commentator thought that he looked like he has just come out of a stag party.

The fresco is apparently not very valuable in money terms. That must be an opinion about its financial status before the disfigurment was revealed.

It has now become a great celebrity.

What to do with it? Leave it as it is or try to restore it again?

Well, I have an idea.

Take it as it now is to a museum of contemporary art and exhibit it along with all those filing cabinets, beach pebbles, etc, whose aim, we are patronisingly told, is to make us think about our relationship to the work of art exhibited.

What better to make one think in these terms than this disfigured fresco?

What is more, given its new celebrity, it is probably worth a lot more than many of the filing cabinets and beach pebbles exhibited at some art galleries.

If I were the director of one of these art galleries, I would snap up this "restored" fresco at once! It would probably be more effective in fulfilling the mission of (as some custodians of art think) of making us think, it will draw large crowds (rather larger than the ones who come to see new filing cabinets in the art gallery) and it will increase the financial status of the gallery.

Well, how about it?

Passionate love and marriage

Myriam Tinti, an Italian acquaintance and a jurist, has communicated this interesting idea to me:

It is well recognized in the world literature of love, from Plato onwards, that there is such a thing as the “madness of love”. Neurobiological studies show that, when we look at the picture of someone with whom we are passionately in love, there is activation in certain specific parts of the brain but there is, as well, a de-activation of significant parts of the cerebral cortex. Among the areas which are de-activated are ones which have been associated with judgment.

If we accept that those who are passionately in love tend to be far less judgmental about their lovers – and there is little reason to doubt this – and if we accept further that this lapse in judgment is not general but specifically concerns the lover, then we have to accept that it is in general useless to argue with one who is passionately in love that “they have taken leave of their senses” even though they may seem otherwise quite sane and normal; it is useless to ask them to re-consider their relationship or renounce it. It is useless to try to reason with them that the union they propose is with the “wrong person” or that it runs counter to their culture, or economic or social status. Such arguments will make little difference to them.

This creates a problem. A cortical de-activation leading to a lapse of judgment may lead one to do things that they might later much regret, and if the lapse of judgment is specific to their romantic and passionate liaison, it might lead them to propose a permanent union in the form of marriage, even when (to others), such a course of action appears to be fraught with potential difficulties and possibly doomed. [In film, the transition – quite sudden – from passionate love to hate is well captured in Ingmar Bergman’s film, Summer with Monika]. What Miriam Tinti was suggesting is that one should consider the possibility of discouraging formally people who are passionately in love from getting married. Marriage is a big step and, at least in theory, a life-long commitment. It is a decision that must be reached with a good judgment, when one is in full possession of all one’s faculties. But if the judgmental system is de-activated, then a good judgment is not possible. Nor is it possible to convince people who are passionately in love that what they are embarking upon is a folly. Hence a “cooling off” period may be highly desirable.

The French use the term mariage de raison to characterize a marriage that has been agreed upon in full possession of one’s judgment; implied in this is the supposition that the decision to marry has not been reached during a lapse of judgment, and has not been reached when in a state of passionate love, which would constitute a mariage d’amour.

As I understand it from Myriam, the Catholic Church, which does not accept divorce, will nevertheless consider the lack of a discretion of judgment as a reason for annulling a marriage, if it can be proven that the marriage was entered into when one or the other had lost their judgment.

The relevant passage from the Codex Juris Canonici [Code of Canon Law] (Can. 1095, n. 2) reads as follows:

 “The following are incapable of contracting marriage:

1° …

2° those who suffer from a grave lack of discretion of judgment concerning the essential matrimonial rights and obligations to be mutually given and accepted

Given that something like 50% of marriages in the Western world end in divorce and that many of the remaining marriages are sustained only for economic or social reasons, the issue of whether people who have lost their judgment because they are passionately in love should be formally asked to defer their marriage is worth considering. And passionate love is one of the conditions in which people appear to lose their judgment with respect to their lovers.

There are of course major problems as to practicalities, especially regarding how proof can be obtained. Tests would constitute a serious invasion of privacy (though it is interesting to note that a form of invasion of privacy was practiced in some countries, and still is in some states of the United States – the requirement for a blood test before a marriage license was issued, to ensure that neither party was suffering from a disease that could be passed on to the children – principally syphilis). Much less intrusive would be a good form of education – starting with sexual lessons at schools – that during passionate love, judgment is at serious risk of being suspended and that to enter into a marriage contract in that state carries with it serious potential problems.

At any rate, this is an interesting idea, which merits consideration.