Chimera Patterns

On why scientists sometimes don't seem to know better

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

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CHIMERA PATTERNS*

Between my naturally blank expression and the way I draw my eyebrows, strangers tend to find me fairly unapproachable. My husband, on the other hand, attracts conversations with strangers like he is the social equivalent of a magnet. So, when we were recently in a neighborhood bar and overheard a bartender making a geopolitical argument seemingly word-for-word from conservative talking points to another patron, a brief moment of are-we-next panic instantly soured my drink. This has happened to us before, a bar regular or a staff member sidling by and spinning a vastly inappropriate theory or anecdote just because they got some sort of a vibe from my partner’s warm eyes and soft smile. 

Luckily, on this night it never got past a brief discussion of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, but I couldn’t help but eavesdrop some more on the intermittent but heated political debate down the bar. It reminded me of arguing with my grandfather at the Sunday afternoon family dinner table when I was a teenager, and with my mother in law when we lived together during the COVID-19 lockdown a few years ago. I know better than to enter these arguments now  - they always end up with the older person telling me I know nothing of the world at best and calling me a coddled idealist at worst - but at some point I enjoyed the struggle. Often, I’d get argumentative from a place of righteousness, fear or personal offense then try to corral facts and my training as a person who is supposed to be good at reasoning towards coming out on top in the conflict. When I could enjoy it, it was because I believed that some best, most rational argument that could help me come out on top was always within my weepy reach. It rarely happened. Even when I wasn’t arguing with a family member but a colleague or an otherwise intellectually trained interlocutor, it would eventually all start to feel personal - and like we should both know better. 

I was thinking about the value of being argumentative and personal in this way a few nights before thar Friday night at the bar while I was watching a famous physicist moderate a panel discussion about the early universe. They were, to put it generously, all over the place. There were moments of odd self-aggrandizement, combative jokes with panelists that didn’t quite land, overt swipes at researchers who were not in the room, and many overly clunky attempts to make it seem like the panelists, all physics experts in their own right, were in conflict with each other much more than they actually seemed to be. The event was billed as a debate, and I think the debate was supposed to be about the way in which the findings of the JWST, a powerful telescope that also comes with a fair amount of political baggage, challenges contemporary theories about how old our cosmos is and what exactly was happening during its earliest infancy. I say that I think this is what the debate was supposed to be about because the moderation confused and threw me so much. I was especially disappointed as this moderator is a physicist that got famous in no small part because of their work in media and science communication and certainly had plenty of experience with this type of event. 

Though I am certainly a tough observer of any science communication event, both because I am a recovering academic scientist and work in science media, and I am often pretty fed up with discussions of space because they are so abundant across all flavors of science communication, this panel saddened me in a way I did not quite expect. Specifically, it made me remember being a teen and going to science festivals and public lectures in the hope I could sponge in knowledge emanating from local and visiting physicists. Sitting in the very nice auditorium in a great New York city museums with a very sweet plus one, I wondered whether I had actually learned anything from those events or if they were also incoherent and unnecessarily testy and I was just too young and wide-eyed to pick up on anything other than my own awe for both the people and the work. In a perverse way if this was the case, it may have laid the groundwork for having to deal with unpleasant and argumentative researchers further down the line in my physics career. 

During the questions and answers portion of the event, a few very young attendees tried to ask questions, but in every case the moderator projected their own views on them and barely offered any actual answers. I was particularly dismayed when a 10-year-old asked whether the JWST could find any Earth-like planets and the moderator immediately jumped to ‘you’re right, we destroyed this Earth so much that we ought to find a new one. Instead of a discussion about how much JWST can actually see out there 1 million miles away from us, the kid got a big serving of nihilism and avoidance. An opportunity to encourage curiosity and speak about the vision of astronomers and ingenuity of engineers that built the telescope was wasted for the sake of a dark joke, and one that offered none of the creativity and future-forward thinking that I would argue form the core of science. 

Scene from a physics conference that I attended recently

The penchant for doom, be it climate or otherwise, always strikes me as not all that dissimilar to the conspiratorial grievance politics I overheard at the bar a few days later. The two come from different political places but what they have in common is that neither offers a solution to the purported state of tragedy, just a statement about how bad it really is and how you get to be extremely upset about it. Leaning into doom and escapism is also a form of giving up, and a form of turning away from solutions that could be found through community and solidarity. Ironically, scientists are among the people who should have a lot to say about solving seemingly impossible problems through collaboration. So, I was surprised to hear someone who built a career on being a public scientist put words into a child’s mouth and play up a presumed helplessness. 

In general, I think it often surprises everyone when scientists behave in harmful ways or argue in poor faith, or overly combatively. This is because we tend to conflate being a scientist with being smart and then conflate being smart with knowing what is right, whatever right means to you. We probably owe some of  this to the Age of Enlightenment and an elevation of a kind of rationality and empiricism that was, at that time, fueled by colonialism, whiteness and a stringent kind of patriarchy. These are rigid belief systems that do not turn to compassion or kindness when put under stress, but rather double down on scarcity mindsets and oppression. Science as a discipline has long benefited from these systems in terms of both funding for its people and the help with establishing the authority of scientific institutions within these systems. It is not a coincidence that science is often represented as the domain of calm, rational, strong people, which are qualities that have long been ascribed to affluent white men. At the beginning of that panel event, the moderator instructed the audience to think of what they were about to see as their eavesdropping on experts talking amongst themselves at a conference in a way that is usually inaccessible to any regular person. I grimaced at my companion, who is also a scientist, protesting how right from the jump the scientists on the stage were demarcated as better-than elites that exist in their own separate world of reason.

At the beginning of March, I actually visited a version of that world by attending a large physics conference. Those six days of milling about amongst thousands of physicists for up to ten hours at a time reminded me how misguided it can be to fetishize the figure of the scientist as anything other than a person whose job it is to do science. In hurriedly shuffling from talk to talk, finding rare seats in overcrowded lecture halls, meeting with researchers one-on-one and catching up with acquaintances and past colleagues, I had a chance to repeatedly witness that you can find many different personality types within the world of science. Certainly there is some sameness in how researchers conduct and communicate their work, and the way many science spaces are still optimized for white, straight, cisgendered men enforces the mores of that sameness. But it can be disappointing to try and generalize the more optimistic-leaning personality traits. 

For instance, you may reasonably assume that all practicing scientists value rational arguments and arguing from evidence that they have carefully examined. Many will subscribe to that in theory, but in practice many are also not strangers to political arguments full of biased reasoning or hold odd or even harmful views completely divorced from facts. Conferences nowadays inadvertently offer some clear visuals of this - the people who are wearing masks and have chosen to add pronouns to their badges clearly differ in their views and in their processing of evidence when it comes to pandemics and gender. 

The reasons why scientists may not know better more often, or more uniformly, when it comes to heated social issues or even polemics in fields of science that they did not train is convoluted. Some blame rests with what one has to do to become a successful career scientist in academia today. Specifically, each young researcher has to carve out an extremely niche niche in order to justify being funded by governmental and other agencies as an undeniable, and rare, expert in that niche. This makes it more difficult to learn about the content of others’ research projects and the differences in methods that are being used within them. 

Being a professor at an academic institution - a coveted position due to essentially infinitely lasting job security through tenure - also leaves very little room for any education or self-reflection that is not immediately useful for the currently hot research project. Younger professors are especially burdened with myriad administrative and other tasks that take up the time and energy they could otherwise spend on engaging with the world in a less focused and more citizen-like way. When I was in graduate school, students commonly conceited that we should not be surprised by some of our brilliant professors also being bad mentors or bad teachers when they had never been trained for those tasks or given time and incentive to do so, or to at least critically reflect on their practices.

And then there’s the issue of lionizing the idea of science itself, starting with how abstractly it is presented to us early on in school. From how the scientific method is taught as a rigid, unfailing, and painfully simple series of steps in early science classes and all the way to the highest levels of education, the sometimes unspoken, but very often vocally reinforced assertion is that science is by default objective and that it is the one and only way we have of using reason that will always get us to the absolute, unvarnished truth. Scientists and teachers sweep issues about funding, conditions of labor and personal animus under the rug and claim that science that is done correctly will uncover a perfect truth that applies to everyone regardless of their own microcosm. The belief in being able to separate science as a pure and noble pursuit from the messy people who carry it out also tends to be strong, and this puts scientists at risk of both overestimating the value of their reasoning outside of their area of expertise and of underestimating the limitation of the methods that they use in their work. 

This is, I would argue, how you end up with world class scientists who cling on to sexist values (there being fewer women in fields like physics could be taken as an empirical clue about a deeper truth about gender), buy into quasi-scientific narratives of trans and gay panics, or enact other harmful stereotypes like racial profiling or dismissals of mental illness. It is also why it is not uncommon to meet scientists that will unapologetically champion opinions and practices that are at best divisive and at worst toxic, but in the name of “just being rational.” I have certainly encountered a type of, often male, physicist who thinks there is virtue in being contrarian or combative as long as you can eventually tie it all back to reasoning that they say is scientific and therefore objective. Unfortunately, the ways in which data and other evidence are collected in the real world are so broad and so messy that it is often possible to find some empirical-like basis for a bad faith argument that then seems to be transmuted into truth by the virtue of exactly something like a flawed take on the scientific method. 

More from the same conference, one of physics’ largest

People who are adjacent to scientists fall victim to this too. Working in science journalism, I have at times witnessed my colleagues hold certain issues to incredibly high standards for data collection and demand copious studies before trying to report on them due to personal bias masquerading as desire for scientific rigor. Because of who I am, I can not not see this in how rarely science-centric publications handle issues like gender affirming care, often citing the lack of quality data - with the idea of quality up to anyone’s interpretation. The COVID-19 pandemic is another salient example. Here, both scientists and the people in power who swore to “follow the science” did not manage to uncover one shared and true truth, and not just shared between the right and the left, but within those groups as well.

These are thorny issues to wade through in a world where the discipline of science really is maligned, attacked and unfairly discredited by powerful political movements that are only slated to gain more power going forward. It would be so much easier to stand up to misinformation and misrepresentations of how science is done and taught if one could be confident in there being more good faith and more solidarity between actual scientists. Yet, calls for unrealistic and quite often harmful notions of purity, objectivity and meritocracy within science are sometimes shared by science-skeptical conservatives and liberals that are supposedly only trying to embrace science. 

I often think of all the older colleagues and instructors I have encountered during my physics training who insisted that it somehow degrades the quality of your scientific work if you talk about how your identity affects how you do that work. I wonder if they’d agree with conservative activists that want to have more control over what is taught in science classes and make them more “about just science.” Would they find common ground in yelling about identity politics and overly “woke” science. Would they feel a kinship in demanding that how who people are shapes what conclusion their studies find be completely ignored? Certainly, this would help them all feel like the world is simpler and simpler in a way that makes it possible for their arguments to be unambiguously correct. 

As is often the case, to oppose oppression and totalitarian thinking, we need to invest in nuanced, complex views, and also a good amount of self-reflection and discomfort. That sort of investment is in stark contrast with values that whiteness, malesness and colonialism imbued in science over the decades. This is a potent reminder that all work of building a better world is related, and that using science for good requires making science itself better by not taking its mores and methods as being beyond criticism. 

Yet, whenever I have a chance to speak about my experiences within science and the career path that never fully separated me from it, often to young people or scientists in training, I still recoil a little at the sound of my voice bringing up anything but how much good science can do. The norms that were taught to me in the past sit heavy in my body when I bring up social issues or labor conditions, and even as I am writing this I worry that I am throwing so many genuinely good scientists under the bus. Though I worry that some bits of embarrassment may just be impossible to fully banish, I am trying to unlearn and relearn as much as I can. I like to think that there is something scientific to that instinct to not leave even the heavy emotional stones unturned too.

Mid-March, I got to do some public speaking that felt like a more rare privilege than sitting on panels and round tables. I got to return to the high school where I used to teach and speak to some of my former, and many new to me students. It was emotional to see young people that I remembered as shy freshmen suddenly be on their way to college and more calm and mature than I could ever imagine. I was absolutely floored by a few of them sharing that they were considering studying physics because of classes we had once shared. “I wrote my college essay about this one queer physics teacher who once told me I could do physics too,” a former student said and for the briefest of moments I felt like maybe my life is actually on the right track. 

What struck me the most, though, was going through my old slides and realizing just how much time I used to take to introduce myself to the students at the beginning of each semester. I would start with where I was born and what they may know Croatia for, and end with what my favorite records were at the time and pictures of me holding cakes. Back then I would tell students, and sometimes other teachers, that I was doing this to build trust and to humanize myself in the students’ eyes, something that I believed would make impending conflicts easier to resolve. Now, I hope they took away something else: the idea that I was a messy human just like them, and that a little bit of questioning of how I think and why that is almost always benefitted us all.

Best,

Karmela 

*Chimera patterns are a phenomenon in quantum physics where the same system, like a fluid made from ultracold atoms, can have regions where its properties are coherent i.e., they are unified and consistent, but also regions where the same properties are incoherent.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

Technically this is not a piece of writing, but I had a ton of fun making an episode of New Scientist’s CultureLab podcast about the animated show Scavengers Reign. I really liked this show and now that I have had a chance to think through it with two scientists for this episode, I might like it even more. We talked about alien worlds, bio-inspired tech, interconnectedness, field work, and how a bunch of animated characters made it through a spaceship crash, and I hope the conversation was rich enough for people to enjoy it even if they haven’t seen the series. 

I also got to report on the most accurate clock yet (it would take 40 billion years for it to lose a second) and the first detection of a particle similar to a key ingredient for the ever elusive theory of quantum gravity.

I’ve completed very rough drafts of about four and a half chapters of my book. It has been some of the most enjoyable and most nerve-wracking writing that I have ever done.

READING

A fellow physics writer Dan Garisto wrote a stunning investigative piece about abuses of power and scientific fraud at the lab of a now infamous materials researcher. I was familiar with the broad outlines of this story, as are many journalists and scientists who have interacted with almost any piece of research into superconductors, or materials that conduct electricity perfectly, in recent years, but the details that are uncovered here really underline so many systemic issues within academic science today.

I have also been trying to keep up with some of the ongoing COVID-19 coverage on The Sick Times, a publication that my friend and data reporter extraordinaire Betsy Ladyzhets co-founded, and this piece about mask blocs taught me a lot about community organizing and governmental failures alike.

I am still reading Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway and it is still both very dense and remarkably interesting. I suspect Barad’s writing will accompany me on train rides, and rattle in the back of my mind, for many more months to come.

For a chapter in my book, I am reading papers about quantum theory from the 50s and 70s and curiously noticing how little, but also how much, about the physics paper style has changed since. I am always absolutely mind-blown when I try to make sense of how some incredibly rich ideas have been around for half a century and we still find them interesting and fruitful. 

WATCHING

I quite liked Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai, an animated series about a cross-dressing female warrior on a self-destructive path of revenge in historical Japan. Almost everything about this show is a trope, but executed so well that it barely matters that you may have seen it before. The show’s protagonist, Mizu, is both unreasonably strong and resilient and unlikeable but in a classic action hero way that only makes her more cool. Though the show is animated, some of its action sequences made me think of some of the best fights in the John Wick franchise, and Blue Eye Samurai did also manage to catch me off guard with occasional obscenities that a lesser show would have sugar-coated more. The ending of the series was something of a letdown, but I would still recommend it, especially if you’re not squeamish about sword fights.

Because my partner was recently gifted a copy of Werner Herzog’s latest book, we were inspired to watch his 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo. There is something so operatic and literary about this film that it is impossible to take it at face value and not treat it as a parable, and yet it is also an extremely visceral piece of movie-making, especially when you learn that some of the indigenous people working on the film sustained injuries or even died during its more physically harrowing parts. In fact the experience of the movie is really troubled and complicated by this fact as it seems like within the film’s plot Herzog is aware of colonial and racial power dynamics at play, and yet his own production of the piece can be seen as exploitative. In many ways, Fitzcarraldo is stunning, and in many others it is a marker of a different time and a very different, at times almost certainly worse, sensibility.

LISTENING

I’ve been utterly consumed with Waxahatchee’s newly released record Tiger’s Blood. This is a piece of folksy, country-adjacent story-telling that feels deliberate in its emotionality yet not artificial or overly managed. The band, or really Katie Crutchfield, has roots in punk and some of that rawness comes through in all of her records, but this one in particular feels so finely tuned to sit between the pain and love of all femme country icons, a kind of calm and sharp poetry of folk, and that punk-ish tendency to not self-censor and cater to artificial notions of decorum. Every time I have listened to it, something new about how clever, and how imbued with feeling it is, has stood out to me.

Otherwise, I have been on a big New Wave kick, working through the discography of the Talking Heads, Siouxsie and the Banshees and whatever else Spotify’s algorithms want to throw at me. 

EATING

I made two notable cakes recently, one for a colleague that was about to move abroad and one for a dear friend who hosted the most relaxing birthday party I have ever attended. The birthday party was partly breakfast-themed so I threw together a citrus upside-down cake that was a really great addition to my friend’s impressive spread of tofu scramble, breakfast hash and waffles topped with vegan whipped cream. For my colleague I wanted some bright yet comforting flavors that nod at the New York institution that is cheesecake so I made soft layers of vanilla cake, sandwiched them around some homemade strawberry jelly and coated the whole thing in a lemony, zesty, cream-cheese-adjacent icing. My attempt to decorate this cake after the mathematical oddity that is the Einstein tile did not go well, but the cake received positive reviews anyway.

My best friend hosted an Italian-themed dinner party for four so I made a few calzones from scratch for the first time. I learned some lessons about the dough and shaping so I expect I’ll make better ones in the future, but for a first attempt they were not bad at all. I filled them with homemade tofu ‘ricotta’ and either a mix of caramelized onions and bell peppers or a very garlic-forward, lemon-spiked spinach sauté, and those flavors absolutely still shined bright when I had leftovers for lunch the next day.

Finally, an old colleague took me to dinner at Bunna Cafe in Bushwick and though I have eaten their incredible Ethiopian food before, I cannot overstate how delightful it was to have it again.