Nathan Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, founder of the controversial patent asset company Intellectual Ventures and the main author of the six-volume, 2,300-page Modernist Cuisine cookbook, which explores the science of cooking. Currently, he is taking on Nasa over its measurement of asteroid sizes.
For the past couple of years, you’ve been fighting with Nasa about its analysis of near-Earth asteroid size. You’ve just published a 33-page scientific paper criticising the methods used by its Neowise project team to estimate the size and other properties of approximately 164,000 asteroids. You have also published a long blog post explaining the problem. Where did Nasa go wrong and is it over or underestimating size?
Nasa’s Wise space telescope [Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] measured the asteroids in four different wavelengths in the infrared. My main beef is with how they analysed that data. What I think happened is they made some poor choices of statistical methods. Then, to cover that up, they didn’t publish a lot of the information that would help someone else replicate it. I’m afraid they have both over- and underestimated. The effect changes depending on the size of the asteroid and what it’s made of. The studies were advertised as being accurate to plus or minus 10%. In fact, it is more like 30-35%. That’s if you look overall. If you look at specific subsets some of them are off by more than 100%. It’s kind of a mess.
Why does it matter? As you admit in your blogpost, obsessively arguing over the size of rocks that are millions of miles away may appear esoteric.
Asteroids are very important. They tell us a lot about the origin of the solar system. The work of hundreds of scientists has been based on this Neowise data. Also, a major asteroid impact will affect life on Earth at some point, just as it has multiple times in the past. The data are critical to assessing this risk. If there is a mistake by a factor of two in the diameter, which there are for a bunch, that’s a mistake of a factor of eight in the energy.
You must have spent many hours and a lot of money working on this. You even hired lawyers to help lodge freedom of information requests. Has it been worth it?
I am guilty of being stubborn. Once this started, I was left with a stark choice: give up or keep going. If they had ever said: “You probably have a point, we’ll look into it in our next version”, I probably would have stopped. But because of the way they reacted, I felt I couldn’t let it go. I am not hoping for it, but if in those thousands of asteroids there is [one] heading towards us and we can better estimate its size, I will feel vindicated.
Nasa’s reported response has been to stand by the data and the analysis performed by the Neowise team. Can we trust Nasa after this?
They need to have an independent investigation of these results. When my preprint paper came out in 2016, they said: “You shouldn’t believe it because it’s not peer-reviewed.” Well, now it has been peer reviewed. How Nasa handles it at this stage will be very telling. People have suggested to me the reason Nasa doesn’t want to admit that anything is wrong with the data is that they’re afraid it would hurt the chances of Neocam, an approximately $500m (£380m) telescope to find asteroids that might hit Earth proposed by the same group who did the Neowise analysis.
This isn’t the first time you have found fault in scientists’ analyses. In 2013, you challenged estimates of the growth rate of dinosaurs, which led to some corrections by the papers’ authors. Do you enjoy being a thorn in their side?
Agatha Christie books and other mystery novels feature an amateur crime solver: a “Miss Marple”. That’s me, it seems. In the case of the dinosaurs, I made some material changes in the field. I feel the same thing will happen with the asteroids. When I wrote the paper [challenging the dinosaur analysis], a lot of other dinosaur people said: “I’m glad you did that, I suspected the numbers were wrong.” But either they weren’t confident enough with statistics, or they were afraid. Similarly, when my asteroid preprint first came out, I got emails from several people in that community saying the same. It’s hugely liberating [to be an outsider]. The fact that I have already given myself tenure at the University of Nathan, I don’t have to worry about looking for grants like others might.
In 2015, you built this robotic model of a dinosaur tail that showed a dinosaur could break the sound barrier when it cracked its tail. You also fund palaeontology digs and I believe you keep a lifesize T-rex skeleton in your living room. Are you working on anything dinosaur-related at the moment?
One thing is a big comparative study to try to understand why dinosaurs got so damn big. A lot of it has to do not with why dinosaurs got so big, but why mammals are small. Mammals have some problems when they’re very large – like pregnancy – that dinosaurs didn’t have. For dinosaurs, laying eggs made it a lot easier to be big.
In 2000, you left Microsoft and set up Intellectual Ventures, which primarily buys and licenses patents. The business is often vilified as one of the world’s biggest “patent trolls”. Why do you think people find it so loathsome?
I fundamentally think what we do is good. It is hard for me to get too worked up about figuring out why it is bad. Any patent holder who enforces their rights gets called a patent troll. Silicon Valley feels very threatened by anything that could challenge its authority. If you are one of the big companies, like Google or Apple, almost no one can challenge you in the market that you’re in. But if somebody has a patent, they can ask for a bunch of money. The more you can get a return from an invention, the better off the world will be. It will lead to more inventions being funded and more inventing.
How many patents do you have?
I’d guess altogether we have around 30,000. Around 3,000 of those my company invented. Personally I probably have about 800. It changes every Tuesday, which is the day the patent office issues patents. We still only have a drop in the bucket. There are around 4m active US patents.
Intellectual Ventures also has this “global good” arm that is collaborating with Bill Gates. What are some of the inventions coming out of that and how close are they to fruition?
We’ve invented a vaccine container that keeps vaccine cold even without refrigeration. That has played a crucial role in the Ebola outbreaks and has been rolled out across Africa for other diseases. It has made an enormous difference in people’s lives. One that’s coming is we’ve invented a very cheap, noninvasive test for cervical cancer. It does remarkably better than any other technique. We designed it for developing countries but there is interest in using it here in the US, too. We take a picture of the cervix. We have a machine-learning algorithm that learned how to diagnose cervical cancer by looking at pictures. Our latest thing is a plastic speculum, a rubber band, and an iPhone. It’s really cheap and it only takes a minute. We’re working on diagnostic trials.
You also have commercial spinouts from Intellectual Ventures. One of them is developing a new kind of nuclear reactor. What’s different about it and where are you towards building it?
For a very long time there was really not that much effort put in to designing radical new kinds of reactors. Instead, everyone made tiny little modifications to old reactors. We realised that, so we got into the game. There are a tremendous number of opportunities that one has to make reactors that are cheaper, safer, and which can do really cool things like burn nuclear waste as fuel. That’s really important because the world has thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste sitting around that is otherwise a big problem.Turning that into fuel that would be fantastic and we are looking at projects in China and other parts of the world. Nuclear reactors take a long time to build, but we’re hoping in the 2020s we’ll see our first.
President Trump is going after China’s intellectual property theft. Given your experience, can he succeed in curbing it?
The theft of intellectual property by Chinese companies is a very serious issue. It’s not just private companies in China or little companies. A large amount of it is state-owned enterprise. So, it really is the Chinese government doing it. Exactly how to solve that issue, I don’t know. You need the Chinese government to be very serious about it, but so far they haven’t been. In my experience in business, you mostly do better with negotiating in quiet diplomacy, not with brinksmanship. But I’ve never built luxury hotels and golf courses. Maybe it is different there.
Your cookbooks, most recently Modernist Bread, cost hundreds of dollars, weigh kilograms and are full of striking photos that you took. You’re in Brazil researching your next book, about pizza. What does Brazil have to do with pizza?
The US has had pizza since lots of immigrants from Italy brought it with them in the late 19th century. Well, so, too, for Brazil and Argentina, which is our next stop. One of the things about pizza is, when it goes to some new area, people tend to mutate it and develop their own unique style. One of the styles of Brazilian pizza is an ultra-thin crust: thinner than a cracker, and stiff, with a thin layer of toppings. Also, because they have lots of tropical ingredients, you get pizzas with bananas on. Sliced hard-boiled eggs are also pretty common.
You use innovative photography techniques and custom-made equipment to show food in a whole different way. Many people post pictures of their brunch on Instagram. Do you have any tips for better shots?
It’s really hard to get a good shot with the flash that’s on your cell phone, so you usually want to turn that off. Very bright, directional light also usually looks bad: you get harsh shadows. You want a broad light source near your food. Get near a window. Of course, some restaurants, for reasons I still don’t understand, make it so damn dark. I think it’s supposed to be romantic or something.
What’s next due a “Nathaning”?
It is really hard for me to predict what’s going to be next. Many of the things I am doing now I wouldn’t have predicted I would be doing a couple years ago. On the cooking front, at some point we have to address dessert, but we haven’t figured out how yet. We’re still working on pizza.
