The Best Australian Science Writing 2018

By John Pickrell

This popular yearly anthology gives a snapshot of the very best science writing Australia has to offer, including everything from the most esoteric philosophical questions about ourselves and the universe, through to practical questions about the environment in which we live. Now in its eighth year, The Best Australian Science Writing 2018 draws on the knowledge and insight of Australia's brightest authors, journalists, and scientists to challenge perceptions of the world we think we know. This year's selection includes the best of Australia's science writing talent: Jo Chandler, Andrew Leigh, Michael Slezak, Elizabeth Finkel, Bianca Nogrady, Ashley Hay, Joel Werner, Margaret Wertheim, and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244341

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Introduction: ‘Look up at the stars and not down at your feet’

John Pickrell

Some years ago the late physicist Stephen Hawking is reported to have said: ‘My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.’ One of the most recognisable scientists of the modern age, Hawking was not shy of making grand statements. Presumably this declaration was intended to refer to his work on cosmology, but it also rather nicely sums up the purpose of our scientific quest for knowledge in its entirety.

In March 2018, at around the same time I was reading through several hundred of the possible submissions for this anthology, the sad news exploded across Twitter and then the news media that Hawking’s life had ended. It was one of the biggest science stories during the year or so – from early 2017 to March 2018 – that this edition of The Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) covers.

Hawking was an iconic figure to millions, not only because of his scientific discoveries related to cosmology and black holes, but also because his voice synthesiser and paralysis due to motor neurone disease made him an unmistakable figure. His great genius, trapped in a broken body, was the embodiment of fortitude through adversity. Hawking was also a powerful and effective science communicator – one whose 1988 popular science book A Brief History of Time sold more than 10 million copies.

It seems only appropriate, therefore, that another of the biggest science stories of the year was related to cosmology. It had been the collision of two black holes that led to the detection of gravitational waves by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US in 2016. That thrilling find was complemented in August 2017 by the detection of gravitational waves emitted by the collision of two neutron stars.

That cosmological discovery – chosen by the editors of Science magazine as the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year – is depicted to surprising, elegant and delightful effect by poet Alicia Sometimes in ‘Kilonova’. Sometimes’ poem is one of three featured in this year’s anthology – the largest number of poems yet included in an edition of the BASW. Indeed, the number submitted for consideration this time around suggests our poets continue to be drawn to the scientific issues and mysteries of our time.

Physics and mathematics are a significant theme in the 33 pieces that make up this book, in contrast to editions of the previous few years, which had more of a focus on the environment, no doubt fittingly in the wake of the unprecedented disaster that unfolded on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in both 2016 and 2017.

Quantum physics was a focus of science coverage over the past year, one that saw University of New South Wales quantum computing pioneer Michelle Simmons named as the 2018 Australian of the Year. The first female scientist to be awarded this honour – and in fact only the second scientist ever named Australian of the Year, following stem cell researcher Alan Mackay-Sim in 2017 – could hardly have been a more apt choice to provide the foreword of this year’s anthology.

Richard Guilliatt’s deftly crafted profile of Simmons from The Weekend Australian Magazine offers a window into the life and research of this tenacious director of Australia’s Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, now among the world’s most celebrated scientists. Michael Lucy delves further into the physics of the technology and its fascinating applications in his Cosmos magazine feature on the quantum internet, while James Mitchell Crow comes at Simmons’ research from a slightly different angle in his New Scientist piece, ‘The anything factory’, which looks to a future where we can build wonder materials from scratch atom by atom, a bit like a Star Trek replicator.

Quantum theory’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ which makes these advances in computing and communications possible – and indeed the prediction of the eventual discovery of gravitational waves – have their roots in Albert Einstein’s work of the 1920s and ’30s, the history of which is recounted in Monash University mathematician Robyn Arianrhod’s narrative feature, ‘The origins of entanglement’.

Also touching on Einstein, Margaret Wertheim makes one of the most effective attempts I’ve read of simply explaining the maths, mind-bending concepts and reality-warping implications of multiple dimensions and string theory in her Aeon essay, ‘Radical dimensions’.

Both mathematics and the rise to rightful prominence of very talented women scientists are topics covered by University of Sydney mathematician Nalini Joshi in her poignant recollections of the late Iranian-American academic Maryam Mirzakhani. In 2014 Mirzakhani became the first woman in history to win the Fields Medal, the most celebrated prize in mathematics. Sadly, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the year prior to winning the award and passed away in July 2017.

Aside from the pieces on Simmons and Mirzakhani, the contribution of women scientists – often overlooked historically – is also covered by novelist Melissa Ashley. She looks back over the life of Elizabeth Gould, wife of 19th-century ornithologist and bird artist John Gould, who painted many of the illustrations credited to him, but was rarely recognised for the work.

The #MeToo movement was another watershed moment of the year encompassed by this edition of the BASW, and the mistreatment of female scientists by their male colleagues is a topic brought into disturbing modern-day focus in Belinda Smith’s important piece for the ABC on the extent of sexual harassment in the scientific workplace, why so few report it, and what happens to those who do.

Reporting the nitty-gritty of science from within the labs and offices of prominent academics is one angle of science coverage – but to add descriptive colour and a touch of majesty to our writing as science journalists, nothing beats getting out into the field in some of Australia’s spectacular natural environments. Some of the following pieces provide wonderful descriptions of place and discoveries made in surprising settings.

Another story heavily reported by the media during the year was US President Donald Trump’s announcement in June 2017 that his country would be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the landmark agreement made by world leaders in December 2015 to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That was unquestionably bad news for the Great Barrier Reef, still reeling from two years of marine heatwaves. In her powerful poem ‘Spectre’, PS Cottier takes stock of what we’ve lost of this ecological wonder now bleached ‘whiter than a ghost’s teeth’.

While we continue to feel the aftershocks of that cataclysm, two other pieces in this anthology draw our gaze southwards to Australia’s giant kelp forests, which span a region covering 71 000 square kilometres from Tasmania in the east to Kalbarri in the west. Here other, less-well-known marine ecosystems are getting pummelled by human overexploitation of the environment. James Bradley tells of the Great Southern Reef, while Jess Cockerill combs the beaches of Tasmania with a traditional owner and ecologist to pay her respects to an ecosystem long gone in her enlightening essay ‘Hauntology on country’.

Other articles look at unfolding man-made ecological disasters and the steps clever scientists are taking to mitigate the damage. Rick Shine of the University of Sydney takes us on a winding path of scientific discovery in the field and reveals an innovative solution to combatting Australia’s invasive cane toad scourge in an excerpt from his book Cane Toad Wars, while James Cook University ecologist Penny van Oosterzee reveals the terrible scale of the effect that fences, roads and other barriers are having on mass migrations of wildlife in Africa in her surprising New Scientist feature, ‘Wildlife interrupted’.

Ben Walter’s evocative Meanjin essay ‘Speak for the trees: Hope and hopelessness mingle in the singed Tarkine’ pulls the reader deep into the singed forests of Tasmania’s Tarkine, subsumed a few years ago by unprecedented bushfires linked to climate change. Other short pieces with a biological bent by Ashley Hay, Fiona McMillan and Peter Dockrill look at virgin births, mysterious ecosystems hidden in plain sight and implausible ocean voyages – while the deliberate destruction of priceless and historically significant botanical museum specimens by overzealous Australian customs officers is a tale followed to its origins in Paris in a fascinating piece of detective work by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Nick O’Malley.

In recent years, cannabis has been decriminalised in an increasing number of the world’s regions and interest in its uses for treating ailments and diseases has exploded. Yet, as former Cosmos editor-in-chief Elizabeth Finkel discovers in one of the medical and health-related pieces in the year’s anthology, there is plenty of bad science behind current treatments involving cannabis. Liam Mannix learns about other kinds of plants – genetically modified ones – being turned into cheap biofactories to produce medicines such as painkillers and cancer drugs. An extraordinary new cancer treatment that may have cured Australia’s former chief scientist Ian Chubb is the topic of Michael Slezak’s piece for The Guardian.

Also in the health sphere, Jo Chandler heads to Nigeria to report from the frontlines of the last battle against polio in her compelling long-read for Undark magazine, ‘Amid fear and guns, polio finds a refuge’. Jane McCredie looks at the terrible history of medical interventions aimed at ‘curing’ homosexuality in a year that saw a ‘profoundly misconceived’ non-binding postal survey eventually pave the way for Australian marriage equality. Member of parliament, economist and author Andrew Leigh disappears down the rabbit hole in an excerpt from his book Randomistas, which looks at the fascinating effects of sham surgeries and the birth of random trials, while the ABC’s Carl Smith probes remarkable advances in bionic eyes and other artificial body parts.

Rounding off the third of the delightful poetry selections in this year’s anthology is a brilliant series of five poems from the Journal of the American Medical Association written by medical doctor and professor of rheumatology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Ian Wicks. Each focusses on one of our five senses: smell, sight, taste, hearing and touch.

Other pieces are also wonderfully whimsical, such as Rod Taylor’s answering of the hypothetical question: ‘What would happen if you dropped a rock through the centre of the Earth?’ in his Canberra Times column, ‘The hole truth?’; Bianca Nogrady’s colourful consideration of how historic volcanoes may have led to climate change and war in ancient Egypt; Phil Dooley’s brief and entertaining missive on the little-known physics of doing the laundry; and Joel Werner and Jonathan Webb’s entirely unexpected tale of how studying the behaviour of shoals of fish helped the Australian netball team reach new heights of success.

Michelle Star’s witty and engaging piece ‘Big Bang: The science of sex in space’ has humorous overtones, but progresses into an investigation of how procreation and propagation of humankind might be possible in space if we were to ever heed Hawking’s advice, that humans are unlikely to survive ‘without escaping beyond our fragile planet’ and colonising other worlds. ‘With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious,’ he said in 2017.

This edition of the BASW concludes with Tim Dean’s philosophical musings about alien life and whether we really are alone in the universe, a question with which astronomers, cosmologists and physicists such as Hawking have long grappled.

If you’ve picked up this book and read this far, you probably already enjoy a sense of quiet wonder and reverential awe for the countless tiny miracles of biology, physics, medicine and astronomy that make up the world that surrounds us, but as Hawking once beseeched humanity in one of his more reflective moments: ‘Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.’

The origins of entanglement

Robyn Arianrhod

It all began in October 1927, at the Fifth Solvay Congress in Brussels. It was Louis de Broglie’s first congress, and he had been ‘full of pleasure and curiosity’ at the prospect of meeting Albert Einstein, his teenage idol. Now 35, de Broglie happily reported: ‘I was particularly struck by his mild and thoughtful expression, by his general kindness, by his simplicity, and by his friendliness.’

Back in 1905, Einstein had helped pioneer quantum theory with his revolutionary discovery that light has the characteristics of both a wave and a particle. Niels Bohr later explained this as ‘complementarity’: depending on how you observe light, you will see either wave or particle behaviour. As for de Broglie, he had taken Einstein’s idea into even stranger territory in his 1924 PhD thesis: if light waves could behave like particles, then perhaps particles of matter could also behave like waves! After all, Einstein had shown that energy and matter were interchangeable, via E = mc².

Einstein was the first to publicly support de Broglie’s bold hypothesis. By 1926, Erwin Schrödinger had developed a mathematical formula to describe such ‘matter waves’, which he pictured as some kind of rippling sea of smeared-out particles. But Max Born showed that Schrödinger’s waves are, in effect, ‘waves of probability’. They encode the statistical likelihood that a particle will show up at a given place and time based on the behaviour of many such particles in repeated experiments. When the particle is observed, something strange appears to happen. The wave-function ‘collapses’ to a single point, allowing us to see the particle at a particular position.

Born’s probability wave also fitted neatly with Werner Heisenberg’s recently proposed ‘uncertainty principle’. Heisenberg had concluded that in the quantum world it is not possible to obtain exact information about both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. He imagined the very act of measuring a quantum particle’s position, say by shining a light on it, gave it a jolt that changed its momentum, so the two could never be precisely measured at once.

When the world’s leading physicists gathered in Brussels in 1927, this was the strange state of quantum physics.

The official photograph of the participants shows 28 besuited, sober-looking men, and one equally serious woman, Marie Curie. But fellow physicist Paul Ehrenfest’s private photo of intellectual adversaries Bohr and Einstein captures the spirit of the conference: Bohr looks intensely thoughtful, hand on his chin, while Einstein is leaning back looking relaxed and dreamy.

This gentle, contemplative picture belies the depth of the famous clash between these two intellectual titans – a clash that hinged on the extraordinary concept of quantum entanglement.

* * * * *

At the congress, Bohr presented his view of quantum mechanics for the first time. Dubbed the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, in honour of Bohr’s home city, it combined his own idea of particle–wave complementarity with Born’s probability waves and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Most of the attendees readily accepted this view, but Einstein was perturbed. It was one thing for groups of particles to be ruled by chance; indeed, Einstein had explained the jittery motion of pollen in apparently still water (dubbed ‘Brownian motion’) by invoking the random group behaviour of water molecules. Individual molecules, though, would still be ruled by Isaac Newton’s laws of motion; their exact movements could in principle be calculated.

By contrast, the Copenhagen theory held that sub-atomic particles were ruled by chance.

Einstein began his attack in the time-honoured tradition of reductio ad absurdum – arguing that the logical extension of quantum theory would lead to an absurd outcome.

After several sleepless nights, Bohr found a flaw in Einstein’s logic. Einstein did not retreat: he was sure he could convince Bohr of the absurdity of this strange new theory. Their debate flowed over into the Sixth Solvay Congress in 1930, and on until Einstein felt he finally had the pieces in place to checkmate Bohr at the seventh congress in 1933. Two weeks before that, however, Nazi persecution forced Einstein to flee to the United States. The planned checkmate would have to wait.

When it came, it was deceptively simple. In 1935 at Princeton, Einstein and two collaborators, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published what became known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, or EPR for short. Podolsky wrote up the thought experiment in a mathematical form, but let me illustrate it with jellybeans.

Suppose you have a red and a green jellybean in a box. The box seals off the jellybeans from all others: technically speaking, the pair form an ‘isolated system’, and they are ‘entangled’ in the sense that the colour of one jellybean gives information about the other. You can see this by asking a friend to close her eyes and pick a jellybean at random. If she picks red, you know the remaining sweet is green.

This is key to EPR: by knowing the colour of your friend’s jellybean, you can know the colour of your own without ‘disturbing’ it by looking at it. But in trying to bypass the supposed observer effect in this way, EPR had also inadvertently uncovered the strange idea of ‘entanglement’. The term was coined by Schrödinger after he read the EPR paper.

So now apply this technique to two electrons. Instead of a colour, each one has an intrinsic property called ‘spin’. Imagine something like the spin axis of a gyroscope. If two electrons are prepared together in the lab so that they have zero total spin, then the principle of conservation of angular momentum means that if one of the electrons has its spin axis up, the other electron’s axis must be down. The electrons are entangled, just as the jellybeans were.

With jellybeans, the colour of your friend’s chosen sweet is fixed, whether or not she actually observes it. With electrons, by contrast, until your friend makes her observation, quantum theory simply says there is a 50 per cent chance its spin is up, and 50 per cent it is down.

The EPR attempt to strike at the heart of quantum theory now goes like this. Perhaps the spin of your friend’s electron was in fact determined when she picked it out. However, like a watermark that can’t be detected until a special light is shone on it, the spin state is only revealed when she looks at it. Quantum spin then involves a ‘hidden variable’, yet to be described by quantum theory. Alternatively, if quantum mechanics is correct and complete, then the theory defies common sense – because as soon as your friend checks the spin of her electron, your electron appears to respond instantly, because if hers is ‘up’ then yours will be ‘down’.

This is because the correlation between the two spins was built into the experiment when the electrons were first entangled, just as putting the two jellybeans in a box ensures the colour of your jellybean will be ‘opposite’ that of your friend’s. The implications are profound. Even if your friend moved to the other side of the galaxy, your electron would ‘know’ that it must manifest the opposite spin in the instant she makes her observation.

Of course, instant action violated Einstein’s theory of relativity: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Hence Einstein dubbed this absurd proposition ‘spooky action at a distance’.

But there was more. Spin is not the only property your friend could have chosen to observe. What EPR showed, then, is that the physical nature of your electron seems to have no identity of its own. Rather, it depends on how your friend chooses to observe her electron. As Einstein put it: ‘Do you really believe the Moon is there only when you look at it?’ The EPR paper concluded: ‘No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this.’ Ergo, the authors believed, quantum theory had some serious problems.

* * * * *

Bohr was stumped by EPR. He ditched the idea that the act of measurement jolted the state of the particle. (Indeed, later experiments would show that uncertainty is not solely the result of an interfering observer; it is an inherent characteristic of particles.)

But he did not abandon the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics. Instead of trying to wrestle with the real world implications, he concluded that we can only speak of what we observe – at the beginning of the experiment and the end when your friend’s electron is definitely ‘up’, say. We cannot speak about what happens in between.

Einstein and Bohr continued to debate the issue for the rest of their lives. What they really disagreed about was the nature of reality. Bohr believed that nature was fundamentally random. Einstein did not. ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ he declared.

Nevertheless, Einstein knew that quantum theory accurately described the results of real as opposed to thought experiments. So most physicists considered that Bohr had won. They focussed on applying quantum theory, and questions about the EPR paradox and entanglement became a niche interest.

In 1950, Chien-Shiung Wu and Irving Shaknov found oddly linked behaviour in pairs of photons. They didn’t know it at the time but it was the first real-world observation of quantum entanglement.

Later, David Bohm realised Wu and Shaknov’s discovery was an opportunity to take entanglement out of the realm of thought experiments and into the lab. Following Bohm, in 1964 John Bell translated the two EPR alternatives into a mathematical relationship that could be tested. But it was left to other experimenters – most famously Alain Aspect in 1981 – to carry out the tests.

Einstein’s hopes of finding hidden variables that would take the uncertainty out of quantum theory were dashed. There seemed no escaping the bizarre consequences of EPR and the reality of entanglement.

But does this also mean ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real? Entanglement in electrons has been demonstrated at distances of a kilometre or two. But so far that’s too short a distance to know if faster-than-light interactions between them were involved. Things may soon become clearer: in January 2018 Chinese scientists announced the successful transmission of entangled photons from an orbiting satellite over distances of more than 1200 kilometres.

On the other hand, some physicists have recently taken up Einstein’s side of the argument. For instance, in 2016 Bengt Nordén, of Chalmers University in Sweden, published a paper entitled, ‘Quantum entanglement: facts and fiction – how wrong was Einstein after all?’ Against Bohr’s better judgement, such physicists are once again asking about the meaning of reality, and wondering what is causing the weird phenomenon of entanglement.

Some even suggest that something like a ‘wormhole’ – a tunnel in spacetime between two widely separated black holes, a consequence of general relativity theory first deduced by Einstein and Rosen – may be the mechanism underlying entanglement. The mythical faster-than-light tachyon is another possible contender.

But nearly everyone agrees that whatever is going on between entangled particles, experimenters can only communicate their observations of entangled particles at light speed or less.

Entanglement is no longer a philosophical curio: not only are physicists using it to encrypt information and relying on it to underpin the design of tomorrow’s quantum computers, they are once again grappling with the hard questions about the nature of reality that entanglement raises.

Ninety years after the Fifth Solvay Congress, Einstein’s thought experiments continue to drive science onwards.

The entangled web

Star of the sub-atomic

Kilonova

Alicia Sometimes

We are detectives

We eavesdrop

Billions of years ago

two neutron stars

circle each other

desperate and breathless

finishing their last

pressing conversation

Remnants of once intense lives

cascade into a final spiral

until they embrace

smashing platinum

and gold into existence

a violent coalescence

outshining at least 100 billion stars

their collided mass

propagating gravitational waves

across the fabric of space

at light speed

gamma rays detected

only a moment after

We were watching

We were listening

We saw them encompass

each other completely

with their final words

rippling right through us

Spectre

The five senses

Big Bang: The science of sex in space

The search for alien life

‘Would you burn the Mona Lisa if it was sent?’: Our horror bureaucratic bungle

Nick O’Malley

Marc Jeanson is young for his role as director of the world’s largest and oldest herbarium, the Jardin des Plantes at France’s Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and he doesn’t look as