Lateral Thoughts: Sidney Perkowitz

phy sic s wor ld.com

The term meme comes from the Greek word mimeme

(that which is imitated), and it denotes an entity (such
as an idea or symbol) that propagates from mind to mind
within a culture. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling book about evolution, The Selfish
Gene (1976), and Dawkins originally saw memes as functioning like biological genes in their properties of selfreplication, mutation and so on. Not everyone accepts
this analogy, but as a concept, the meme has nevertheless gained wide acceptance. It is routinely used, for
instance, to describe the online process of going viral.
But memes have meatier uses than merely explaining
the replication of cute kitten photos. In a recent study of
scientific memes (Phys. Rev. X 4 041036), Tobias Kuhn of
ETH Zurich and his colleagues used massive computing power to analyse close to 500000 titles and abstracts
from the Physical Review (spanning the period from
1893 to 2008) along with more than 46 million papers in
Web of Science and PubMed. Their goal was to investigate the relationship between how often memes occur
and how far they spread, and they began by finding the
n-grams strings of one to n words that appeared most
often in each database. To evaluate the propagation of
the ideas that these represent, the authors then measured the appearance of each n-gram in papers that cited
other papers that included the same n-gram. Then they
multiplied this propagation score by the n-grams frequency of occurrence to produce a meme score.
After showing that meme scores behaved similarly in
all the databases, the authors focused on physics, listing the 50 highest-scoring physics memes in descending order from loop quantum cosmology down to
Higgsless. One striking feature of the list is the way it
mixes terms such as black hole, which most physicists
could identify and discuss, with narrowly focused ones
like the chemical formula MgB2, the significance of
which is best known within particular research areas (it
is a superconductor). When I asked Kuhn about this,
he replied that the analysis finds relevant phrases not
only on the global level but also for small sub-fields
the scale of distribution does not matter, only the distribution process. This is an advantage, he believes,
because terms that are used across many fields may be
too common to be interesting as memes.
Meme analysis also examines how scientific ideas
percolate into public understanding. A full study of
public memes would be a major project, but the work
by Kuhns team provides clues: 38% of the 50 memes,
they found, appear in physics articles in Wikipedia, and
high-scoring memes correlate with article titles in the
online encyclopedia. These appearances do not guarantee understandability of the concepts, since many Wikipedia articles are quite technical, but they do show that
memes can reach highly popular outlets.
Another way to study the popularity of physics memes
is through the online database Google Ngram, which
contains 500 billion words in several languages, taken
from digitally scanned books. When a user enters a word
or phrase, Ngram plots its incidence as a percentage of
the words in the database versus time for any period
between 1500 and 2008, making it possible to examine
the evolution of words as well as their prevalence.

52

Shut ter stock/oorka

The most popular physics meme ever

To the surprise
of no-one
who has seen
Interstellar, the
Ngram meme
that apparently
best grabs the
popular fancy
is black hole

I used Ngram a few years ago to study scientific and

pseudo-scientific terms (October 2011 p72), but this
time I used it to test the penetration of Kuhns 50 physics memes in the popular consciousness. Initially, I
entered the memes just as they were written, but when I
found some that did not appear or appeared only once,
I also tried alternative forms of words or replaced lowscoring memes with less specialized terms that embody
similar concepts. For instance, loop quantum cosmology does not appear in Ngram but quantum cosmology does. The result is that 22 of the 50 original
memes, or their variants, have spread beyond the physics community to appear as physics-specific terms in
Ngram. They arent especially prevalent in 2008, the
most widespread Ngram physics meme comprised just
0.000024% of the database, compared with the 4.6%
incidence of the word the but they are there.
So what is that most popular meme? To the surprise of
no-one who has seen Interstellar, the Ngram meme that
apparently best grabs the popular fancy is black hole.
The field of runners-up, though, contains a few surprises.
The second most common term is nanotube, followed
by quantum dot, molecular dynamics, traffic flow,
phrases containing Higgs (even before the discovery
of the Higgs particle in 2012) and dark energy. The
Ngram memes are also quite varied, incorporating some
topics that are theoretical or esoteric (quantum entanglement), but also some that are experimental or technological (sonoluminescence, graphene).
My admittedly limited survey shows that important
physics ideas of any kind can enter the general consciousness. This is important at a time when science has
increasingly to show its worth to society, and it could
suggest new ways of presenting science as a public good.
My analysis is also a step towards an idea suggested by
Kuhn, who proposed establishing a monitor of trending
n-grams to keep the public informed about scientific progress. Until such a tool exists, the Ngram physics memes
offer guidance to science-fiction writers: if you include a
spacecraft made of graphene, whose crew somehow use
nanotubes and quantum dots to explore dark energy, black
holes and quantum cosmology, you cant go too far wrong.
Sidney Perkowitz is a physics professor emeritus at Emory University
in Atlanta, Georgia, US, http://sidneyperkowitz.net
P hy sic s Wor ldMay 2015