LSU art and science professors discussed uncertainty in their fields during a webinar Feb. 24 in the first of a four-part series organized by LSU’s Center for Collaborative Knowledge.
The four-part series will involve LSU faculty members from a wide range of disciplines discussing how uncertainty affects their work and their field. LSU history professor Suzanne Marchand hosted the panel and is one of the founding members of the CCK. She said the organization’s purpose is to inspire interdisciplinary research, teaching and conversation on LSU’s campus.
Part one of the series involved a world famous jazz and classical pianist, a path-breaking researcher in psychology and a professor of chemistry, inventor and guest editor for a science journal titled “Chaos.”
Making Music and the Art of Painting Yourself Out of a Corner
Music professor Willis Delony spoke about how musicians often “paint themselves into a corner” while performing, dealing with uncertainty along the way.
“Uncertainty is something musicians deal with, perhaps subconsciously,” Delony said. “Whatever level of musical expression is involved deals with some degree of uncertainty.”
Musicians who have good musical vocabulary are better equipped to deal with uncertainty while performing. If they mess up, they are able to “adjust for the moment,” as Delony described it.
Delony gave examples of this as he played jazz and classical pieces, demonstrating his ability to turn a mistake into something beautiful without the audience noticing.
“I made the wrong note more right,” Delony said. “It’s not what I meant to play, but I’m going to fake it until I make it. But if I didn’t have any vocabulary to fall back on, I would have not been able to manage that particular situation.”
Delony is a world famous pianist with a performing career of over 40 years. He has appeared as a piano soloist, guest pianist and conductor throughout the United States, Canada, the former Soviet Union, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina and Brazil.
He is also a crossover artist, a “musical schizophrenic,” as he described himself, skilled in jazz and classical piano.
“The emergence of jazz as a musical language over the past hundred plus years has allowed us an avenue to express ourselves musically in the moment, dealing with uncertain results at the end, but inside a vocabulary that allows us to express ourselves the same way we express ourselves with language,” Delony said.
Delony ended his presentation with a jazz song called “Alone Together,” which he said was an apt choice in today’s COVID-19 world.
Open Science Methods and Practices: A Psychologist’s Journey
Emily Elliott is an LSU psychology professor, a cognitive psychologist who specializes in children’s memory and an advocate for open science, a movement to make scientific research more accessible to the general public.
Elliott recently conducted a study on children’s memory development that used open science methods and practices.
Her lab aimed to replicate a hallmark study in 1966 that found that children’s memory improves as they get older because they learn how to “rehearse.”
Elliott explained rehearsal with the example of memorizing a license plate number.
When we need to memorize a series of numbers, we rehearse them in our head so we don’t forget. However, this ability to rehearse doesn’t appear in children until around the age of seven.
The 1966 study has been cited over 1,000 times, but there haven’t been many studies that directly replicate its findings. Elliott and her colleagues wanted to replicate the study to see if the results generalized, but they wanted to do it in a way that supported open science methods.
“The idea behind it is it’s no longer the lone scientist in a tower and then they come out and reveal their brilliance to the world,” Elliot said. “It’s a team. We’re going to use as many tools that are free and available to the public —they’re not behind a paywall or .edu email address.”
Elliott and her colleagues decided to use a registered replication report for their study. A registered replication report allows an experiment to be easily replicated across research labs. It allows for larger sample sizes and the replication of findings, which is vital for research, especially in a field such as psychology where there are so many variables.
While the original study utilized one research lab and 60 children participants, Elliott’s research project involved 17 labs from across the world and 977 child participants.
The original research results were “sort of upheld,” Elliott said, but there were significant differences that could be researched further.
Elliott said transparent and accessible knowledge through collaboration is important in dealing with uncertainty in her field and science in general.
“This [project] never would have been feasible without open access,” she said. “Perhaps open science can help us deal with uncertainty.”
Epistemological Implications of Chaos Theory
Chair of LSU’s Chemistry Department John Pojman has long been interested in the idea of chaos.
Chaotic systems are numerical systems that do not repeat but still have an underlying structure.
“When we talk about chaos, we don’t mean randomness,” Pojman said. “Like when [Delony] talked about playing the piano, he wasn’t randomly hitting notes, he was doing it in some sort of structure. It’s not random, but it’s still not periodic. It will never actually repeat.”
These systems, for example, a model of a population of living organisms, are also extremely sensitive to its initial conditions.
Pojman used an interactive model to demonstrate this. The difference of .492 and .493 in the starting conditions of a population model led to significantly different results (numerical behavior) after 15 generations.
This demonstrates what’s called extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, and it places a fundamental limit on what we can know, according to Pojman.
Pojman extended this idea to the solar system.
“You’d have to know the mass and the position and the velocity of all the planets with incredible precision,” he said. “And the answer is, that’s not possible. It’s not a practical limit. It’s not that you just can’t measure it well enough. There is a fundamental limit.”
This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which proved mathematically that there’s a fundamental limit to how precisely we can know the position and momentum of an object.
“The bad news is that even if we have a certain model for a system that is chaotic, there is a fundamental limit to how far in the future we can predict its behavior,” Pojman said. “However, it’s not all bad news. Although you may not be able to make incredibly long predictions, it’s also not random.”
Even in chaotic systems, Pojman said, there is some underlying order.
“You can’t predict if you start at an arbitrary point six months in advance or a year in advance, but you will be able to make short-term predictions because it’s not random,” Pojman said.
He gave the example of weather, which is believed to be a chaotic system.
“It allows some predictability,” Pojman said, “but it requires us to gather much more data.”
When asked about the idea of uncertainty fueling anti-scientific sentiment, Pojman gave the example of the recent landing of NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars, explaining that the technology we use does not involve chaotic systems.
“They landed this thing millions of miles away and have a video coming back of it landing, and you would say maybe in principle we can’t predict the path of Mars indefinitely in the future, but we sure can land something on Mars today,” he said.