Category Archives: Physics

What Everyone Should Know About Science

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The topic being adressed at Uncertain Principles, based on an idea from Michael Nielsen

1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts

2) Science is an essential human activity.

3) Anyone can do science.

infer some ellipses between those items; Chad goes into some detail about all of them.

Perhaps what science is not is important, too.

– Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Good thing, too, since we’d all be doing something else with our lives if everything had been answered.

– Science isn’t about faith (of the religious variety). Related to the above, but it’s important to know that science quantifies certainty and uncertainty. Having some uncertainty is not the same thing as having no certainty at all.

(what everyone should know about blogging: When in doubt, link to someone else)

Turning Physics on its Ear

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So yesterday I linked to a couple of anti-relativity sites, and tearing down their arguments might be fun, as gg suggests in the comments. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people who have a beef with some part of physics. And the folks who think physics is in need of an overhaul aren’t limited to their own little websites, or posting to science forums. They write books, too. There’s a discussion about one such author over at Pharyngula (and the same topic popped up today on SFN) but it’s been dealt with pretty thoroughly over at the JREF forum. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not going to raise specific objections here.

But there’s an attitude that is presented, and echoed elsewhere, that the physics is wrong because it doesn’t explain things. And these people are hell-bent on explaining things. But they go about it in the wrong way — they seem to be mortally afraid of making a specific prediction. Of using math in a useful way.

A common refrain goes along the lines of X is not a mathematical model, and it does not, nor does it need to, reduce mathematically to the physics I’m attempting to supplant

And that’s the problem. It’s great that you can “explain” phenomenon A. But can you also “explain” phenomenon B, that doesn’t actually happen? If you can explain anything, then it’s not very useful. A useful explanation can’t be some vague handwave. The strength of the mathematical model is it allows one to actually calculate things. It’s not good enough to explain the bump on my graph. I want to know if the bump should be at 10 eV, because if your explanation puts it at 15 eV, then you’re wrong and need to go back and change something. Your work has to be able to be tested for being wrong in a verifiable way

The Great Deception

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Over at Pharyngula there is a link to a talk summary (not surprisingly, related to evolution) that says

Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.

Wait. I thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was the greatest deception in the history of science

But, whither physics? Surely physics has foisted deception upon mankind, somehow. Ah, relativity to the rescue. Even worse than the evolutionary deception of Piltdown man, apparently

By now, science seems to be
so heavily invested in Relativity and Einstein, that it will be very
hard to admit Relativity has been so obviously wrong. It would be
like admitting to a crime.

Lies in science have happened before virtually on the level of
relativity. In England a claim was made that the origin lay in
Britain, perpetrated by leading experts in the field of paleontology.
What they did was to use a fairly modern skull, filed off key
evidence from an ape lower jaw (joints, teeth), put them together
and claimed they had found it like that. This deception has lasted
for a long time, but not as long as the Relativity deception has.

And in addition

It is simply incredible that a theory with so many deceptions has held the attention of so many of physicists and other scientists from the field of natural and technical sciences for so long, and has managed to retain acceptability and even enter the textbooks for secondary schools and universities.

Actually, relativity and evolution are deceptions that follow from the Copernican deception. Evolution was the followup, and relativity was the third blow.

Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the Darwinian Revolution.

And then, after the Michelson-Morley experiment

Einstein’s Relativity hypothesis rescued heliocentricity from the findings of over 200 experiments which showed that the earth was not moving.

I always enjoy the conspiracy angle. We have so much invested in the deception of relativity that we just can’t afford to abandon it at this point. It takes tremendous effort, covering up such a theory that doesn’t actually work. Good thing it’s just a blind alley of physics, and no science or technology actually uses it.

Interestingly, I couldn’t quickly find the same vitriol-induced confusion over quantum mechanics. Perhaps it’s just that QM is so openly bizarre that despite the fact that there are those out there that decry it, it’s not considered deceptive.

Trivia Time, part I

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Trivia about time, to be precise. Prior to my current job, my knowledge of timekeeping was pretty much knowing how to read and adjust a clock, and because I’m a physicist, Einstein synchronization (basically accounting for propagation delay of light) and the effects of general and special relativity. All of the physics-related exercises with time conjure up a perfect clock, so you don’t have to worry about all the little details that arise when dealing with real-world hardware. Now, I don’t actually do time measurements, I “just” work on building clocks, but there are some things I’ve picked up.

A clock will have an oscillator in it, and some way of counting the oscillations. Time is the phase of these oscillations — one “tick” represents one cycle or some number of cycles. The derivative is the frequency, and if you take another derivative you get the rate of change of the frequency, which is the drift. Which sounds just like kinematics — the basic equation that describes all of this looks just like basic kinematics, as long as the rate of change of your frequency is a constant. And that brings up a point commonly fumbled by the popular press: leap seconds are often described as being added because the earth’s rotation is slowing. And while it’s true that over long times, the rate is slowing, that term could be zero and you’d still have to add leap seconds. The frequency represented by an earth that has slowed (but is no longer slowing) is different than that of atomic time, and so one will accumulate a phase difference (i.e. one will run slow compared to the other). That the rotation rate is slowing means that we will add leap seconds more often, assuming other effects on the rotation rate don’t mask this.

The above assumes “perfect” clocks. However, in all real processes that we measure, there is noise. Different kinds of noise, too, depending on the systems being measured. The best you can hope for is random, (i.e. white) noise, which gets averaged down as you take more measurements, and varies with the inverse square root of the number of data points (in this case, time). There are noise processes that average down faster, but eventually white frequency noise will dominate, and then the best case is that there are no other noise processes that dominate at longer times (like flicker or drift).

You integrate white frequency noise to get the effect on the phase, or time. The integral of this white noise gives you a random walk. That is, for any two real clocks, with exactly the same frequency, the best you can do is have them random-walk with respect to each other. They will never stay synchronized.

From the "What would happen if?" Files

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A friend emailed me with a link about the LHC, and poses this question:

If one of their micro-black holes gets away from them, will the lab go “moob!”?

(Back when he and I were teaching nuclear stuff for the navy, it was standard practice to represent pair-production as going “foop!”)

Crackpots Are Always Right

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It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to scam a few spacebucks out of somebody, and the ones driven by some ideology, there’s a whole host of folks who won’t let go if their pet hypothesis that disproves relativity or quantum mechanics or whatever.

The process of science is to disprove things, and most things get disproven. Benjamin Schumacher has written a nice little summary of it, and how it tends to pervade our thinking.

On occasion, some idea of ours turns out to be right, and then we’ve made a discovery. These occasions are wonderful and gratifying, of course. They are also rare, because most new ideas are wrong. The trick is to be verifiably wrong most of the time. If our ideas are verifiably wrong, then we can eventually get rid of them

The main factor that distinguishes the behavior of scientists is that scientists tend not to take it personally when contrary data is presented that slays our pet theory, while a crank takes it as a huge insult. They don’t like getting rid of their wrong ideas, except when somehow it doesn’t affect their conclusions at all.

Basic Research

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An essay on basic research and budgets and making a case for the necessity of funding.

In truth, fundamental research is a necessity, not a luxury. Most of the technological developments made in the past 100 years have been fuelled by fundamental research into science.

It’s mostly about “Big Physics” and there’s a lot that can be discussed about the value of funding “big” vs “small” physics, which (to me) is a separate issue. Pulling funding of basic research is extremely short-sighted. What is getting lost is that applied research depends a lot on basic research having found interesting things about nature, that the applied research then exploits. It’s not exclusive, of course — you can have applied research find something new and exciting. But it’s a question of where you’re looking and what pressures are upon you. If you, as an applied science researcher, see or could see some interesting/unexplained signal in your apparatus, you aren’t likely to investigate it if it negatively impacts the deadline for finishing your project. It’s probably not a priority unless it’s an anomaly that threatens a milestone. You are better off with a person doing basic research, who is free to go and look at whatever they want, and for whom funding can be available if they do quality research.

The other problem is with beancounters that don’t understand the scientific process but unfortunately decide funding. I recall observing a review board when I was a postdoc at an accelerator lab, and there was a government representative on the review board (prioritizing funding and beam time). After the director gave an overall briefing of the lab, and highlighted some of the significant discoveries that had been made over the years, the government rep asked what discoveries were going to be made in the upcoming year. That’s the kind of question that makes my shoulders slump forward and my head hang. As my thesis advisor said on more than one occasion, “if we knew the answer, it wouldn’t be called research.”

via Physics and Physicists