#there are multiple and highly contradictory hypothesis

[weirdsociology]

if i have learned anything from activism and politics, both of which i've been involved in since i was a literal child, it's that if you think you know The One True Way to Win against authoritarianism, you're doing more harm than good.

electoral politics are critical. so is direct action. so is pushing on institutions from the inside. so is building alternative networks. so is harm reduction.

if we know a single thing from history and sociology, it's that we do not know what will break a rising tide of fascism. if you are proclaiming that you do, incontrovertibly, know, and that everyone should be putting their effort into [x], you are making a gamble that you cannot afford to lose. none of us can.

here's how you knock over over a wall that looks strong from the outside: every pair of hands must find a spot to push.

we know the wall can fall.

we don't know how.

i'm seeing a lot of blame and frustrated-but-smug "don't expect me to participate in fighting fascism this time because america can't vote correctly so they deserve what they get" takes on my dash right now. but here's the thing: the political climate in america is what it is, and we're reaping a harvest of ignorance and hate that has been fifty years or more in the making. a democratic presidency would have been a delay of that harvest, harm reduction on a vast scale - not a solution.

all this moment does it accelerate the need to find the cracks and weaknesses in authoritarianism, to slow its progress, pull as many people out as we can, and to use every tactic at our disposal. and spitting on the person next to you, who is also pushing, accomplishes nothing. neither does withdrawing your labor. all it does is ensure more people - including you - suffer more, in ways that could have been avoided.

you may not like the person next to you. you may think they're pushing at the wrong spot. you may very well be right.

don't take your hands off the wall.

[bartramcat]

Some Odd Thoughts on CSI 06x03

It's an unfortunate aspect of my existence that the best way for me to resolve an issue in a piece of fiction (or even an evolutionary theory) is to write about it. Also, unfortunately, I used to be a much better writer. I think I have spent too much time on Twitter the last several years and have lost my ability to sustain coherent thought. So here I go again rambling incoherently about my obsession de l'annee, i.e. CSI/GSR. As per usual, it will probably be all over the map. Oh well.

I have no idea why, but I was thinking about the scene in Bite Me as I was driving home the other day. It's a rather weird scene in that it almost comes across as Grissom intentionally trying to hurt Sara. Until we remember it's Grissom. 

The thing about this love story is that we, as viewers, were given entree in medias res, but, unlike a true epic, nobody backfilled in the blanks, so, instead, we have to watch the episodes before the revelation of their affair and try to piece together how different scenes fit into the tale. 

Then there is the Gumdrops problem. If the affair was to have been revealed 2 episodes after Bite Me, then it's pretty safe to conjecture that Grissom probably was projecting his own fears and insecurities about their relationship into the scene. GSR is nothing if not a treatise on the insecurities of love.

Grissom seems to have 2 contradictory responses to the fact that a married couple has separate bedrooms. His first reaction is almost mystification. Why be married and sleep separately? Sara provides some mundane explanations. Then he jumps to the fact that they may well have been suffocating each other, and he couldn't breathe, an hypothesis that seems to both stun and hurt Sara. Then she finds the sexual lubricant, confirming that sex was indeed occurring, despite the separate bedrooms. She asserts that sleeping in the same bed is not a requirement for either sex or romance. Grissom studies her thoughtfully for a moment and then beats a hasty retreat to see the doctor, a statement which at first Sara doesn't seem to comprehend.

I believe that Grissom always wanted to marry Sara, perhaps from the moment he first saw her, although I suspect he was painfully aware of how young she was when he first met her. (When I watch the first 2 seasons, she seems so young, and that was supposed to be a couple of years after he met her.) It's one of the things that makes me question the probability of his having sex with her in SF. I do not think a typical man would have had compunctions, but Grissom is not a typical man. (As much as everything pointed to the possibility of their making love in the time gap in Nesting Dolls, I think Grissom would have seen it as "taking advantage" of Sara's need for comfort.) Initially, he may have viewed her interest in him as no more than an eager student trying to impress a renowned entomologist, and her seeming attraction to him as no more than a short-term crush. In Grissom's worldview, how could the most wonderful girl he had ever met be as attracted to him as he was to her? Even if Sara offered sex, would he have accepted her invitation? I'm not sure. (Of course, the other side of that same coin is that he was so knocked over by his attraction to Sara that he went with it.)

A question I ponder every once in a while: Grissom tells us sex for him is pointless without love. Does that apply only to him, or does he also need to feel his partner loves him for the experience to have meaning? To give him joy, not despair? I don't know the answer to that. One thing is clear: he is not a casual sex kind of guy. He may have had a couple of relationships, including Julia Holden, he tried to make work, but when he couldn't love them, he drifted away from them. The ultimate oxymoron about Grissom is that the man who does his best not to feel is the true romantic: sex and love are inexorably intertwined in his psyche. 

So now back to what I think might have been going on in the scene. I believe that they have been lovers in some sort of undefined relationship for over 6 months. Despite the fact that I think each of them is in it for the long haul, neither believes it will last forever. All along, Grissom has probably subconsciously wanted to propose, but both their work situation and his fear of rejection prohibit the possibility. If he asked, and she said no, that would in effect ruin what was. It's highly possible he was thinking about asking Sara to move in with him, which would be like a marriage without an official commitment. So he's confronted by this married couple who do not share a bed, and it kind of contradicts his expectations of sharing his life with Sara. At first, he cannot comprehend the why of separate bedrooms. (If he was married to/living with the love of his life, he damned well would be sleeping in the same bed with her.)

The more he compares the marriage in front of him to the hypothetical marriage/living with Sara, the more his own doubts creep in. What if they end up like this? What if they suffocate each other? As far as we know, Grissom hasn't cohabitated with anyone since leaving home. Probably pretty daunting a proposition. As per usual, his heart and head are in conflict. Then Sara finds the lubricant. The couple was having sex after all (or so they assume at that point). So she reminds him you can have sex and romance without necessarily sleeping in the same bed. More than likely, that is exactly where they are; they are having sex and whatever passes for their version of romance at each other's apartments, but they are not sleeping in the same bed. (Instead of candlelit dinners, they probably seduce each other over some weird combination of Shakespeare Sonnets, crossword puzzles, and forensic textbooks.)

I know a lot of people think they were fighting around the time of this scene. I'm not one of them. I think it's probably more a matter of Grissom being Grissom and saying things without context, because of his own internal conflict. He creates analogs with victims/suspects often enough that it's easy for me to see him self-identify with the husband, who might also be the primary suspect. Grissom knows what he wants: a " beautiful life" with Sara, but so many things could go wrong. I actually think they don't fight, and I think that's one of their problems. They both internalize their hurt and anxiety instead of letting it out.

At the moment Sara reminds him that sharing a bed is not a prerequisite for sex and romance, I think he realizes that the marriage between these two strangers has nothing to do with his relationship with Sara. He studies her for a moment and beats a hasty retreat. Does he realize she may have thought he was saying she was suffocating him? The look on her face says she does. Does he know he may have hurt her?

Of course, this being GSR, there is no follow up. We really don't see them interact again in this episode, although we do get Catherine's comment to Sara about lovers and coworkers never working out, which also may serve as a kind of sidelong foreshadowing. My guess is that with Gumdrops on the horizon that the whole Bite Me scene was supposed to make everyone go "What the hell was that about?" 

I have read at least 3 different versions of the Gumdrops scenes. What is not debated is that they have sex in the hotel room, and it is implied that their affair is not new. Personally, I would never believe in a million years that these two would ever have sex for the first time in a hotel room while working a crime scene. In no universe can I see either one of them making an overt sexual advance to the other under those circumstances unless sex was already an established component of their relationship. 

FWIW I have always read their relationship as very physical on multiple levels. I remember reading a review in which the reviewer did nothing but complain about the fact that these "two sexless characters" were being sold as a love story. (I think it was the LA Times, but I could be wrong.) You see, the fact that neither character is a "typical" TV romantic icon is, I think, what makes it more compelling, more real, and, yes, more romantic. Even the most socially inept among us can find someone to love and be loved in return.

While the vast majority of the world doesn't possess the intellectual capacity these two do, that same intellectuality is often a large part of their stupidity in love. They overthink, overanalyze everything. And, to a large degree, I think that is what Grissom is doing in this scene. 

[blanchard-ymaeley]

Erotic Target Location Errors: An Underappreciated Paraphilic Dimension

diving into some of Anne Lawrence’s literature on paraphilias and already raising my eyebrows

In the early 1990s, Blanchard (1991; Freund & Blanchard, 1993) suggested the existence of yet another significant dimension of paraphilic sexuality: erotic target location errors (ETLEs), which involve the erroneous location of preferred erotic targets in the environment. Blanchard (1991) proposed that some persons with paraphilias erroneously direct their erotic interest toward peripheral or inessential parts of their preferred erotic targets (e.g., the clothing, hair, or feet of a target), which manifests as fetishism. Other persons with paraphilias erroneously locate their preferred targets in their own bodies, rather than in another person: They either desire to impersonate their preferred targets or desire to turn their bodies into facsimiles of those targets. ETLEs of the latter type manifest as transvestic fetishism, as one paraphilic variety of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism, and as lesser known analogues of these two conditions

at some point i’ll need to look at the 1993 paper and double-check that she’s properly summarizing the idea but placing these two separate sexual phenomena (unusual attraction towards “peripheral” or “inessential parts of their preferred erotic targets” as well as “desire to impersonate their preferred targets”) into the same category seems wrongheaded

or more specifically i’m not sure about classifying a desire to physically be a woman (it’s normal to be attracted to a woman but abnormal to locate that attraction internally) in the same way that we classify having a foot fetish or a panty fetish because...

there’s at least a logical association between women’s underwear and wanting to have sex with a woman. hair and feet are at least body parts that are attached to a sexual partner. something like this could easily be explained by a process adjacent to conditioning (women tend to have long hair, now long hair is hot) or imprinting (early sexual experience involved seeing a woman in her underwear). whereas it’s not nearly as clear how fantasizing about being a girl could arise from real-life observations or experiences. it seems like the kind of thing that would have a totally different mechanism.

is this privileging the hypothesis? do i have zero reason to favor conditioning/imprinting over the ETLE theory? in my defense conditioning is a fairly well-supported psychological phenomenon and i know that there is at least psychological phenomena analogous to imprinting even if i haven’t read research on it. for example, trauma exists as a way in which a single intense experience can continue to affect a person throughout their life.

moving on. anne lawrence responds to objections that the terminology of “error” contains an unwarranted moralizing element:

The ETLE concept assumes—correctly, I believe—that a person’s erotic orientation nearly always involves an identifiable type of preferred erotic target, known or inferred, that is external to the self and that generally involves either other people or entities that are similar to people (e.g., animals). The ETLE concept further assumes that, as a result of some putative mental dysfunction, a person can metaphorically ‘‘miss’’ his known or inferred erotic target, mistakenly directing his erotic interest toward an inessential or peripheral part of the target, or toward creating a facsimile of the target in his own person. Consequently, the word error reflects an objective assessment, not a subjective or moralistic one.

i swear i’m gonna get triggered here, maybe i’m totally misguided but this seems like an incredibly obtuse thing to say.

grant the existence of sexual orientation as a real mechanism (sure, i generally assume it is a thing) and grant also that on average a person’s sexual orientation mechanism will tend to gravitate towards a person of a particular sex/gender

the idea of an erotic target location error still assumes that sexual orientation has some kind of purpose that we as researchers/sexologists/clinical psychologists supposed to endorse, and that when a person’s sexual orientation deviates from that purpose it is in some sense mistaken instead of a natural result of our highly adaptive psychosexual machinery that sometimes does unusual things because humans vary from one another and are subject to a variety of environmental influences.

there are multiple ways of framing unusual sexualities and unusual sexual fixations, and the idea that it is in some incorrect for a heterosexual man to get turned on by panties is a normative claim we make by choosing to value vanilla heterosexuality over a heterosexuality that includes panty fetishism. by using the term error you are still assuming that one outcome is better than the other, and that contains an element of moralization.

“i’m not moralizing! heterosexual attraction and desire to have sex with females, without fixations on unusual body parts or peripheral objects, is simply the objectively correct outcome of this person’s innate sexual orientation.”

at this rate i won’t make it to the third page, holy shit.

all right, now for some jumbled thoughts and points about paraphilias and fetishes more generally.

These paraphilic sexual interests compete with, and occasionally completely overshadow, sexual interest in adult female sexual partners (Blanchard, 1992).

not to self: double-check this. i think some of survey anon’s data failed to replicate this effect, or i otherwise heard about contradictory research somewhere

i’m getting the sense that even in this paper it is acknowledged that sexual fetishes are poorly understood and there’s a lot of conjecture about it but not any hard data to back up a single theory.

there’s also another possible citation here for me to investigate in backing up my idea about a person’s sexuality being mirrored by pre-adolescence emotional urges:

McConaghy (1993) observed that for many fetishists, strong pleasurable feelings toward the fetish object develop in childhood, with these feelings ‘‘becoming sexually arousing at puberty’’ (p. 320).

maybe i should be breaking out these citation summaries into separate posts in which i review the actual cited paper. there’s a lot of literature review here on sexual fetishes.

the mentioned “roughly 2% to 3%” rates of crossdressing in the general male population seems to be contradicted by a chart which goes as high as 6%, maybe even 11% depending on how these numbers are interpreted

controversy around weight of gender identity vs sexuality in a person’s cross-dressing behavior is acknowledged here:

Some transvestites, some MtF transsexuals, and many psychoanalytic theorists who have studied these individuals (e.g., Arlow, 1986; Kaplan, 1991; Ovesey & Person, 1976; Person & Ovesey, 1974a, 1974b, 1978, 1983) believe that disturbances of gender identity are the primary driving force behind the paraphilias that involve erotic target identity inversions, and perhaps most paraphilias. This implies that the associated erotic desires and behaviors develop secondarily, as an outgrowth of the primary disturbance of gender identity. In other words, ‘‘gender [identity] precedes sexuality in development and organizes sexuality, not the reverse’’ (Person & Ovesey, 1983, p. 221)

god this is way too long, i’m going to have be more succinct from here on out.

some interesting arguments:

This argument [in favor of sexual motivation for transitioning] can be seen as a logical extension of the idea that transvestites cross-dress primarily because they are sexually aroused by the idea of wearing women’s clothing and impersonating women and want to actualize their fantasies by cross-dressing.

as i understand, if i accept that straight men who engage in sexualized crossdressing are on a spectrum with transgender lesbians that have experienced arousal associated with wearing their preferred clothes or with fantasies of being a woman, i must then argue (if i'm going to be consistent) that both the crossdressing of straight men and the transition of trans lesbians are primarily motivated by something other than sexuality, at least if i am to reject the idea of queer transgender women as sexually motivated in their transitions.

this may be the case. counterpoint: there could still be a distinction between transvestic fetishists who describe their crossdressing as sexually motivated and those that describe it as a way to express their feminine side. someone who sexual motivation endorses a sexual motivation as their reason for crossdressing is potentially less likely to want to commit to a gender transition. even blanchardians seem to acknowledge that there is a strong emotional component to so-called agp transition, so perhaps this would be an acceptable counter-argument.

still, it's sort of speculative. more research might be neated to see if this distinction holds up.

Because anatomic autogynephilia is conceptualized as a paraphilia and is thought to underlie nonhomosexual MtF transsexualism, one would expect to find an elevated prevalence of co-occurring paraphilias, in addition to other varieties of autogynephilia, among nonhomosexual MtF transsexuals. This expectation appears to be the case [...]

hmm, another decent point in favor of the typology is that it does a good job explaining why queer transgender women tend to have unusual kinks, an assertion that i'll accept here based on my available anecdotal evidence but will have to re-examine at a later date.

if transitioning because of a kink is a typical thing, we'd expect that having lots of kinks (because paraphilias tend to cluster) would be something that would typically happen to transgender women. so if i am to push the argument that there is an underlying psychological drive that sometimes manifests in a sexual way, then that leaves open the question of why that drive tends to occur side-by-side with a variety of sexual fetishes.

yeah, i think at that point i would either be forced to propose alternative explanations than agp (a general obsessiveness factor that leads to unusual fixations which can then become kinks? some kind of other neurological thing that causes both gender dysphoria and kinks? defensive mechanisms that do the same thing? what about unexpressed psychological distress, does that result in unusual sexualities?) or attack the notion that so-called agp transsexuals are kinkier than the mean.

actually, i’m still thinking about this. am i falling into a correlation/causation trap here?

possible explanations of transness correlating with kinkiness:

kinkiness causes transness (blanchardian theory; general factor of kinkiness leads to autogynephilia leads to transition)

transness causes kinkiness (here i’d try to make some argument about how gender dysphoria leads to difficulty with sexual expression in general, which in turn could manifest as having a variety of unusual kinks)

lastly, a third factor could lead to both. maybe there is a specific neurotype cluster that is susceptible both to developing unusual kinks and to developing gender dysphoria

all of these do sound fairly plausible to me, but perhaps tailcalled will have some arguments about why the first one is more plausible than the other two.

[dorcasrempel]

How plants protect themselves from sun damage

For plants, sunlight can be a double-edged sword. They need it to drive photosynthesis, the process that allows them to store solar energy as sugar molecules, but too much sun can dehydrate and damage their leaves.

A primary strategy that plants use to protect themselves from this kind of photodamage is to dissipate the extra light as heat. However, there has been much debate over the past several decades over how plants actually achieve this.

“During photosynthesis, light-harvesting complexes play two seemingly contradictory roles. They absorb energy to drive water-splitting and photosynthesis, but at the same time, when there’s too much energy, they have to also be able to get rid of it,” says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

In a new study, Schlau-Cohen and colleagues at MIT, the University of Pavia, and the University of Verona directly observed, for the first time, one of the possible mechanisms that have been proposed for how plants dissipate energy. The researchers used a highly sensitive type of spectroscopy to determine that excess energy is transferred from chlorophyll, the pigment that gives leaves their green color, to other pigments called carotenoids, which can then release the energy as heat.

“This is the first direct observation of chlorophyll-to-carotenoid energy transfer in the light-harvesting complex of green plants,” says Schlau-Cohen, who is the senior author of the study. “That’s the simplest proposal, but no one’s been able to find this photophysical pathway until now.”

MIT graduate student Minjung Son is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications. Other authors are Samuel Gordon ’18, Alberta Pinnola of the University of Pavia, in Italy, and Roberto Bassi of the University of Verona.

Excess energy

When sunlight strikes a plant, specialized proteins known as light-harvesting complexes absorb light energy in the form of photons, with the help of pigments such as chlorophyll. These photons drive the production of sugar molecules, which store the energy for later use.

Much previous research has shown that plants are able to quickly adapt to changes in sunlight intensity. In very sunny conditions, they convert only about 30 percent of the available sunlight into sugar, while the rest is released as heat. If this excess energy is allowed to remain in the plant cells, it creates harmful molecules called free radicals that can damage proteins and other important cellular molecules.

“Plants can respond to fast changes in solar intensity by getting rid of extra energy, but what that photophysical pathway is has been debated for decades,” Schlau-Cohen says.

The simplest hypothesis for how plants get rid of these extra photons is that once the light-harvesting complex absorbs them, chlorophylls pass them to nearby molecules called carotenoids. Carotenoids, which include lycopene and beta-carotene, are very good at getting rid of excess energy through rapid vibration. They are also skillful scavengers of free radicals, which helps to prevent damage to cells.

A similar type of energy transfer has been observed in bacterial proteins that are related to chlorophyll, but until now, it had not been seen in plants. One reason why it has been hard to observe this phenomenon is that it occurs on a very fast time scale (femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second). Another obstacle is that the energy transfer spans a broad range of energy levels. Until recently, existing methods for observing this process could only measure a small swath of the spectrum of visible light.

In 2017, Schlau-Cohen’s lab developed a modification to a femtosecond spectroscopic technique that allows them to look at a broader range of energy levels, spanning red to blue light. This meant that they could monitor energy transfer between chlorophylls, which absorb red light, and carotenoids, which absorb blue and green light.

In this study, the researchers used this technique to show that photons move from an excited state, which is spread over multiple chlorophyll molecules within a light-harvesting complex, to nearby carotenoid molecules within the complex.

“By broadening the spectral bandwidth, we could look at the connection between the blue and the red ranges, allowing us to map out the changes in energy level. You can see energy moving from one excited state to another,” Schlau-Cohen says.

Once the carotenoids accept the excess energy, they release most of it as heat, preventing light-induced damage to the cells.

Boosting crop yields

The researchers performed their experiments in two different environments — one in which the proteins were in a detergent solution, and one in which they were embedded in a special type of self-assembling membrane called a nanodisc. They found that the energy transfer occurred more rapidly in the nanodisc, suggesting that environmental conditions affect the rate of energy dissipation.

It remains a mystery exactly how excess sunlight triggers this mechanism within plant cells. Schlau-Cohen’s lab is now exploring whether the organization of chlorophylls and carotenoids within the chloroplast membrane play a role in activating the photoprotection system.

A better understanding of plants’ natural photoprotection system could help scientists develop new ways to improve crop yields, Schlau-Cohen says. A 2016 paper from University of Illinois researchers showed that by overproducing all of the proteins involved in photoprotection, crop yields could be boosted by 15 to 20 percent. That paper also suggested that production could be further increased to a theoretical maximum of about 30 percent.

“If we understand the mechanism, instead of just upregulating everything and getting 15 to  20 percent, we could really optimize the system and get to that theoretical maximum of 30 percent,” Schlau-Cohen says.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

How plants protect themselves from sun damage syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[carlinlabs]

Discourse as a Fluid Medium

      As an aspiring up-and-coming materials expert, I’ve immersed myself in the popular science and cutting edge publications being generated from research in materials science and additive manufacturing. As a queer, genderless Millennial, I’ve had little choice but to be involved in the conversations about emergent practices of my generation and how they relate to the global social climate. Older generations and clickbait journalists continue to forecast how today’s young adults are shaping global economies and everyday life, but predicting the future of science usually involves only predicting new technology, without an examination of the culture of scientists and engineers who determine the direction of progress. In this work, I will use the case study of liquid crystal materials, as detailed in David Dunmur and Tim Sluckin’s book, Soap, Science, & Flat-Screen TVs: A history of liquid crystals, to answer these questions: How did sociopolitical issues of past generations influence discourse in materials science? And, how will current issues of similar flavors, combined with the new communication norms of young professionals, influence the future of materials science dialogue?

      The materials science and engineering minor at Northeastern University, housed under chemical engineering, involves “the design, processing, and optimization of engineering materials,” including focus areas like “electronic materials and processing for device applications; strength, wear, and corrosion-resistant coatings; molecular-level design of thin films and nanostructures; polymers and biomedical applications; and steels, concretes, and spacebased structures.” Despite its extensive reach, materials science is a relatively small community within engineering. Dr. Marilyn Minus, who advises the minor, estimates enrollment at 10 – 20 students each year, largely in chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students majoring in materials science and engineering amount to 268 out of 5,742 engineering students in 2017, or 4.7%. Although materials are commonly associated with mechanical engineering today, much of the field was initially formed by physicists and chemists, who, predating advanced equipment, made hypotheses about the microscopic composition of matter based on observed bulk behaviors under different conditions.

      Back in 1888, observations were all that were available to German botanist Friedrich Reinitzer when a carrot-derived cholesterol displayed two melting points, changing reversibly from a solid to a cloudy liquid and then to a clear liquid at distinct temperatures, accompanied by flashes of color. Studies of this compound were delegated to physicist Otto Lehmann, who had invented new microscopes with temperature controls and optical filters. Lehmann’s examination of the cloudy liquid phase showed strange patterns of polarization, or the plane within which light waves oscillate as they travel. Controlling the planar orientation of light waves had only been observed in solid crystals; thus, Lehmann named the materials Flüssige Kristalle (liquid crystals). During the following two decades, many skeptics, disliking the contradictory word choice, challenged Lehmann’s work itself, the most vocal opponent being Gustav Tammann. Tammann’s credibility came from his prestigious post at the German university Göttingen, comparable to Oxford or Cambridge. He specialized in thermodynamics of mixtures and was convinced that Lehmann’s materials were actually multiple liquids mixed together, publishing his theories in an article entitled, “On the so-called liquid crystals” in 1900. Much of the discourse surrounding this topic happened within the highly regarded journal Annalen der Physik.

     The ensuing debate involved heavy sarcasm and attribution of each other’s results to careless lab practices. Tammann even challenged Lehmann’s associate, Rudolf Schenk, from the audience after a conference presentation in 1905, talking for so long that Schenk had no time to respond before the session ended. Following this event were personal letters between Lehmann and Tammann concerning damage to Lehmann’s reputation. These exchanges, including the technical articles, didn’t hold back on petty rhetoric. In fact, a main point of contention was the rhetoric itself: naming the materials. Scientists would write responses to others’ articles, but refuse to use the same terminology. Other words arose, including flowing crystals, crystalline liquids, and anisotropic fluids. One chemist, Daniel Vorländer, writes as late as 1930, “If anybody beginning to work in this field wants to introduce new terms – please, with pleasure, go ahead.” Later research demonstrated that “liquid crystal” is not the most correct, but was predominant at the time and happened to remain that way, regardless of the emotional intensity employed to oppose it.

Figure 1: “Coloured pictures of liquid crystal droplets [under a polarizing microscope]. Reproduced from Lehmann’s 1904 book.”

     Although the earliest work happened mostly in Germany, international tensions played a role in the development of this niche field. The Austrian Empire was expanding, and nations were forming the alliances that eventually built up to World War I. As a result of intense nationalism, and to some extent limited means of communication, the vast majority of work cited in Schenk’s 1905 liquid crystal book was in German. However, those who looked past political and language obstacles often made greater strides because of it. One of two Italian contributors to the book, Alessandro Amerio questioned whether the liquids were “crystalline” or just “anisotropic”, meaning that the properties were different depending on the direction the molecules were pointing. Most voices in the terminology debate had grouped crystallinity and anisotropy together; Amerio’s hypothesis, which we now know to be correct, may have been enabled by translating other works from German to Italian, requiring extra attention to lexicon. In another instance, Lehmann found appreciation for his discoveries outside his homeland through fluency in French. A Berlin newspaper in 1909 describes the scene:

A German professor, Otto Lehmann from Karlsruhe, spoke about his discovery of liquid and apparently living crystals. He spoke to a completely French audience, at the invitation of a French scientific society, in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne. These lecture halls had only recently been the site of a nationalist rally against a professor whose offence had been to accompany of a number of students on a study trip to Germany. The lecture was a great success.

Lehmann’s well-rounded education helped to ameliorate some nationalism in academia and to expand the liquid crystal discourse community. In his and Amerio’s cases, science was advanced by diversity in communication, as made possible by the interdisciplinary skill sets of individuals.

     However, multicultural collaboration and acceptance aren’t intrinsic to the field. We’ve seen instances of personal conflict affecting communication in technical settings, and larger biases are no exception, at times modifying or outright inhibiting the patterns of discourse. After World War I, scientists throughout Europe were not as sympathetic with one another, many having been affected by the war in very personal ways. The British Sir William Bragg, famous for crystallography and X-ray diffraction, had in 1920 refused to attend a ceremony in Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize because of the prospect of German guests. Later, in 1934, Swedish physicist Carl Wilhelm Oseen “switched from German to French as a protest against the rise of Nazism in Germany.” Independent of any ethical matters regarding their motives, the aversion to foreigners during this period resulted in less openness in the dialogue around liquid crystal science. Perhaps these same patterns will emerge again under similar circumstances.

     The face of today’s technical workforce appears largely distinct from those distinguished researchers of last century. In my own experience, Millennial culture is characterized by less difference in formality between casual and professional settings; embrace of globalization and, increasingly, diversity; a wider breadth of technological literacy; and increased political involvement, often in progressive movements. One value underlying these new behavior norms is interconnectedness. A wider range of knowledge and more availability of information form a positive feedback loop – reciprocity between people and technology. This is already evident in the proliferation of free podcasts, online courses, and citizen science initiatives. Even while postsecondary education costs rise, barriers to entering and contributing to science are becoming less relevant because the necessary information is more accessible. So we’ll see a continuation of these trends like lower formality, more flexible structure, and fewer things considered “prerequisite” or common knowledge. Even peer-reviewed journals are affected; many, like ACS Nano, include supplementary information online in unconventional formats, like videos showing the operation of a new device. In the future, writers will likely use this flexibility to add more extra explanation and make their content comprehensible to a broader audience. Materials scientists need people to care about their work for it to be implemented, and this especially applies to global problems like climate change, renewable energy, and infectious diseases.

     Millennials’ approaches to sociopolitical issues are complementary to those of globalization in the contemporary scene, and these will also leave their mark on communication methods within materials science. Cross-cultural exchange will continue in the face of xenophobia, as enabled by internet-based services and the normalization of diversity initiatives. Concepts such as Spotify’s “I’m With The Banned” project, which brought together artists from the US and six countries targeted by the recent travel ban to collaborate on new music in Toronto, will be echoed by young scientists who see little reason not to reach across borders, similar to Lehmann’s French lecture at the Sorbonne.

     We’ve seen that the 20th century liquid crystal researchers also included prejudice in their discourse. How will our disdain for current power structures, based on recent anti-authoritarian sentiment, manifest itself when the target of skepticism is sometimes our own government? It may involve less willingness to work for national laboratories, military agencies, and defense companies. Academic language will change too; when exploring potential applications of new findings, writers may be less inclined to suggest weaponry or intelligence-gathering devices. For instance, progressive-thinking inventors of a new subterranean mapping sensor material might pitch it for finding sources of clean water or geothermal power, rather than illegal immigration tunnels. The future discourse will likely isolate itself from causes that the community doesn’t support, although, as we’ve seen in the records, not from controversy.

     Materials scientists have a long history of subjective, emotionally charged rhetoric, as demonstrated in the case study of liquid crystal research. To some extent, these writing tendencies have been intertwined with sociopolitical events during each author’s era. In any case, their styles in contributing to discourse reflected their personalities in a way that contrasts with the prevalent idea of a scientist being a detached observer. Modern shifts, from more flexibility in formality and content structure to inclusiveness and reframed political priorities, are now taking on the roles that in previous centuries were driven by nationalist sentiments within Europe. We can expect these Millennial attitudes and communication styles to influence the future of the materials science community with a comparable magnitude.

Citations

      Dunmur, D., & Sluckin, T. J. (2011). Soap, science, and flat-screen TVs: a history of liquid crystals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      Enrollment Statistics: MIT Office of the Registrar. (2016, October 07). Retrieved September 13, 2017, from http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/yrpts/index.html

      Lenker, M. L. (2017, July 06). Spotify Launches 'I'm With the Banned' Musical Movement. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from http://ew.com/music/2017/07/06/spotify-im-with-the-banned-musical-movement/

      Materials Science and Engineering Minor. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from http://www.che.neu.edu/degrees/materials-science-and-engineering-minor

      Minus, M., PhD. (2017, September 21). Materials science major size [E-mail to the author].