At some point, whether you're involved in big discussions in your job, or your life, or just contemplating things like the stuff you hear about big news events, like global warming, comet 3I-Atlas or anything you have to ask the big question. It's a question that's hardly ever asked, which is a shame because it's important everywhere and for all time.
How do you know what you think you know? I assume if you're reading stuff like this you've heard the old line that "when you assume something you make an ass out of you and me." Considering how few people want to be made an ass of, there sure is a lot assuming going on.
In even the "hardest hard sciences" there are stacked assumptions that aren't obvious to the vast majority of us. How do we know the speed of light? We can (and do) measure that. That can be done in a well-equipped laboratory. How do we know the distances to nearby stars, those within "a few" light years? That's more complex but let me jump around that to something that's more fundamental. How do we know how far away another galaxy is? The technique is based on the observation that certain stars vary in brightness over time in such a predictable way that the maximum brightness they will show is the same absolute brightness (in astronomy that's called the star's magnitude). That's saying if you had a sample of those stars, they're all the same magnitude when they're at their brightest. Since the decrease in brightness with distance is constant, the period of the star tells you how bright the light was when it left there and the magnitude at our observatories tells you how much brightness made it here, which tells you the distance.
The assumption buried in there is the laws of nature are the same everywhere, and that's perhaps the biggest assumption there can be. I'm not saying those laws aren't absolutely the same, I'm saying we have no way of knowing that because we can only measure them in this neighborhood. We assume they're the same because it's convenient. There's nothing we could say to answer so many fundamental questions people have. For example, we constantly see things like how far to some galaxy or the size of the universe or all kinds of things. If those laws aren't absolutely the same all of those headlines are meaningless.
Since I did the well-received post about Comet 3I-Atlas last Monday (Oct. 27), let me drag out a point or two from that. One of the arguments about this one is that it has abnormally large amounts of nickel in it, compared to the iron/nickel (Fe/Ni) ratios we're used to. They're saying because it's a comet, every comet should have the same Fe/Ni ratio or it has been changed by some sort of intelligent process. That's assuming every star system everywhere has the exact same elements in the exact same proportions and I see no reason to expect that. Same elements? They're the only ones we know that exist. Same proportions depends on too many factors. High nickel space rocks exist and are often the source of the biggest deposits of the metal here on Earth. But they bounce around in space, some hitting the planets, some never hitting one. The amount of any mineral should vary.
A topic I've seen talked about since I was about 15 is the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion going Supernova "any day now." Since I'm not sure of when I first read nervous stories about this happening, I'll just say it was in 1970 as a "close enough" disclaimer. Close enough to say the star going supernova has been "any day now" for nearly 56 years.
The main thing I remember from reading about Betelgeuse going supernova back then, is that it would be such an incredible disaster there'd be horrible things happening all over Earth. I don't know anything about this girl's videos (TheSpaceChick on this story) but it's the best thing I've bothered to watch. I've seen people talking about this happening on some very specific date in something like next March. SpaceChick's version is the astronomical community says it could blow somewhere between 100,000 and a million years, which in cosmic terms is like tomorrow, while in human time it's more like never.
Without going too far down the global warming/climate cataclysm road, that stuff is based on so many models with entirely PFA (Pulled From Ass) justifications that it's nearly impossible to summarize.
If there's any takeaway from this it's to be aware that even the best "hard science" has many assumptions tied to it. The best thing to talk about are things that can be measured accurately in a small lab. If you can do it yourself on equipment you trust, all the better. Want to measure the speed of light? You need a bright light, a long distance and spinning octagonal mirrors.
For science that can be verified by experiments, I think that a good guide is the most comprehensive result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: if you want to get meaningful results, design a suitable experiment. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out. So much of what is called science these days does not fall in that category and is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Scientific principles can still be followed, but it’s got too much wiggle room to be as demanding as experimental science requires.
ReplyDeleteClimate modeling (in my opinion) doesn’t even rise to this general level. I have written hundreds of software models for a host of different purposes. A colleague once remarked: simulation is like masturbation, if you do it often enough, it begins to seem like the real thing. Without a means to check, correct, and revise models based on actual collected data, I don’t expect the modelers to change.
"So much of what is called science these days does not fall in that category and is descriptive rather than prescriptive."
DeleteThe worst example of bad science these days is hard to choose. There's just so much that's bad. Virtually nothing in the "everybody knows" category of medicine is right - either horribly oversimplified or deliberately done to be deceptive. Cholesterol and heart disease is probably the biggest, which led to "meat is bad", "fat is bad" and we should essentially live on breakfast cereals. I have to admire the vegetarians as the most effective propagandists in world history. A fair question and relatively easy thing to research is if it works for some particular genetic strain and anyone else following it headed for trouble.
There are enormous practical problems with doing the kinds of things they should do with randomized, controlled, trials, like being unethical, or illegal along with being horrifically expensive and slow. But what we have now doesn't deserve the hype it gets.
"Without a means to check, correct, and revise models based on actual collected data, I don’t expect the modelers to change."
I think that's optimistic and kind of you.
If a physicist on a asteroid that is traveling at .6 the speed of light passes another physicist on an asteroid going in the opposite direction at .6 the speed of light and both of them are monitoring the speed of the opposing asteroid, how fast will the equipment show the two asteroids moving?
ReplyDeleteIf a fighter jet going 1.2 times the speed of sound passes overhead but due to overcast you cannot track it visually so you track it by it's sound how fast does it appear to be moving?
Albert Michelson did his experiment around the time Edison was developing his light bulb, around the time electricity was just begining to be used. The article you mentioned lists a couple of other people that made some measurements also. They were all so far ahead of their times.
ReplyDeleteI wish 3i-Atlas was blowing off gold, then we would get answers.
On a prior post, I opined that Trump would use the continuing budget irresolution to effect substantive change. I was wrong. The potential is still just sitting there on Trump's desk unused. Ironically, the President's desk is named the "Resolute" desk, made from the wood of an old British warship named "Resolute".
The statists are better propagandists than the vegetarians -- can you point to any government anywhen whose track record is overall net good? Make sure to count the banning of options which is the goal of monopoly, where a legislature says only a few vendors are permitted to offer a product or service. There are no governments, even the smallest ones, which are net good.
ReplyDeleteWhy did the German minority scapegoats willingly get on the boxcars? You've seen the photos of hundreds of victims herded by a few soldiers. Somebody hacked the primate firmware in their brains with a brain-computer virus. The fox domestication experiments show the wild foxes bite in self-defense, while the domesticated foxes didn't bite, but barked and whined. Apparently barking and whining relieves stress that should be expressed as anger about personal boundaries transgressed. How much of conservative/libertarian writing today is just barking and whining? Victor David Hansen will still be writing one-handed while he's handcuffed to the wall of the boxcar.
I think QAnon was a science fair project by the middle-school aged children of intelligence agencies. The goal was to see how much people could be gotten to believe despite exactly no observable experimental results supporting it. At least the National Enquirer offers photos of extraterrestrials, QAnon doesn't even have that.
Hitler was good guy and a patriot. We know this because Hitler says so in the book he wrote, and his followers point to the claims in the book as evidence. You may think of other examples where the book and the book promoters and the followers and the heresay claims of evidence arrange into one big circular and nondisprovable argument.
Observations from the James Webb telescope disproved Big Bang. Astronomers now claim Big Bang was a metaphor, but everything else in their big book of cosmology is still literally true.
ReplyDeleteGalileo disproved anthropomorphic global warming, which made people wonder what else the church got wrong? So the church deplatformed him.