OLOGIES AND ACIES

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 260 /09 March 2016 13:42

I imagine many readers are well old enough to remember BT's 1988 TV advert starring Maureen Lipman, where she comforted her grandson for his bad exam results by pointing out that he'd passed an "ology" (even if it was just sociology). I've never obtained an ology myself, only an "istry" or two, but  in any case I'm actually rather more interested in "acies": literacy, numeracy and a couple of others that have no acy name.

Not a day goes by without me being thankful for receiving an excellent scientific education. A couple of decades ago I'd have thought twice before admitting that, but no longer because pop science has become a hugely important part of popular culture, from TED talks to sci-fi movies, via miles and bookshelf miles of explanatory books on cosmology, neuroscience, genetics, mathematics, particle physics, even a few ologies. Being a nerd is now a badge of honour. But my thankfulness has little to do with any of that, and more to do with the way basic numeracy, plus a knowledge of statistics ("riskacy"?) and energetics ("ergacy"?) help me understand everything that life throws at me, from everyday accidents and illnesses, through politics to my entire philosophical outlook.

Take for example relationships with doctors. As an aging male I'm on the receiving end of a variety of government-sponsored preventive medicine initiatives, aimed at reducing the incidence of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and other disorders. After an annual battery of tests I'm encouraged to consider taking a variety of drugs, but before agreeing I ask my GP to show me the test results on his PC screen, both as annual historical graphs and raw figures compared to recommended ranges. When shown my thyroid hormone level marginally out of range, I can argue about experimental error and standard deviations, and win since my doctor's no statistician. This process has lead me take lisinopril for my blood pressure, but refuse statins for my marginal cholesterol and ditto for thyroxin.

Numeracy, particularly concerning percentages and rates of change (ie. calculus) is becoming essential to an understanding of just about everything. If some website tells you that eating hot dogs increases your risk of stomach cancer by 20%, you need to be able to ask from what base-rate: 0.000103 rising to 0.000124 doesn't  sound nearly so scary. Western citizens face a risk of death from terrorism way below that from being in a car crash, but those risks *feel* very different subjectively. We accept driving risk more readily than dying from an inexplicable act of violence, our politicians know this and so over-react to terrorism and under-react to road safety. But the "acy" that's most poorly distributed of all concerns energetics.

Perhaps a minority of scientists, and almost no lay people, understand the laws of thermodynamics in theory, let alone have an intuitive grasp that could be usefully applied to everyday life. Thanks to the pop science boom, everyone knows Einstein's formula E = MC², but that's only marginally relevant to everyday life since we don't ride nuclear-powered cars or busses, and our bodies run on chemical rather than nuclear reactions. Hence the confusion among would-be dieters over counting calories: does water have any calories?, do carrots have more than celery?

Some variables that really do matter for an energetic understanding of life are energy density and the rate at which energy gets converted from one form to another. You could place a bowl of porridge on the table alongside a piece of dynamite that contains the same number of calories. Dynamite has around 300 times the energy density of porridge so it will be a small piece. More important though, the calories in the porridge (as starches, sugars, protein) get converted to muscular effort and heat rather slowly by your digestive system, while a detonator turns the dynamite's calories into light, heat and sound very quickly indeed. But grind wheat or oats to a fine-enough powder, mix with air as a dust cloud, and deadly industrial explosions can occur.

Energy density calculations affect the mobile device business greatly, both when seeking new battery technologies and considering the safety of existing ones like lithium-ion (just ask Boeing). As for transport, fossil fuels and climate change, they're equally crucial. Electric cars like Tesla are just about do-able now, but electric airliners aren't and may never be, because the energy density of batteries compared to hydrocarbons is nowhere near enough. And when people fantasise online about the possibility of transporting the human race to colonise Mars, energetics is seldom properly discussed. We all ultimately live off energy (and negative entropy) that we receive from sunlight, but Mars is much further away. Try working out the energetics of "terraforming" before you book a ticket...