What happens if you hold a slinky at the top end, let it extend, and then drop it?
Two videos: set up and solution, but in the second video another question is asked. As with a previous video in this series, you can click on the answer in the second video to load the answer to the question.
Merton’s description of this community value is a bit more subtle. He notes that disinterestedness is different from altruism, and that scientists needn’t be saints.
The best way to understand disinterestedness might be to think of how a scientist working within her tribe is different from an expert out in the world dealing with laypeople. The expert, knowing more than the layperson, could exploit the layperson’s ignorance or his tendency to trust the judgment of the expert. The expert, in other words, could put one over on the layperson for her own benefit. This is how snake oil gets sold.
The scientist working within the tribe of science can expect no such advantage. Thus, trying to put one over on other scientists is a strategy that shouldn’t get you far.
There’s a bit on hucksterism, and there’s actually a double-whammy here. Not only do you have people willing to misrepresent the science to prey on people unable to distinguish the quantum snake oil from shinola, but in the advertising game Janet mentions they will use anecdotal evidence — they won’t say the gizmo cures your ailment, they will have someone tell you how they used the gizmo and their ailment cleared up. They invite you to draw a conclusion that they won’t state, knowing that most people aren’t scientifically literate to know that it’s intellectual entrapment (inviting a correlation/causation and/or post hoc ergo propter hoc error).
Journalists and politicians are complicit in this game as well, in different ways. When journalists, in their quest for balance, interview scientists on the opposite side of a claim, they give the appearance of a divide that often isn’t there. And there always seems to be some person with credentials — an expert — who will take a contrary position. This leaves us open to people using science in reverse: using ideology to decide what the right answer is for their story or for government policy, and the going out and finding an expert who will support that position.
Driverless car navigates Berlin streets
The vehicle maneuvers through traffic on its own using a sophisticated combination of devices, including a computer, electronics and a precision satellite navigation system in the trunk, a camera in the front, and laser scanners on the roof and around the front and rear bumpers.
Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light, According to One Experiment
I chose this particular link because of the headline, specifically the addendum According to One Experiment. If it’s not reproducible, then it will go down in the annals of science as a fluke measurement.
[T]he result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.”
It’s important to note that the experimenters are not claiming to have overturned relativity and are calling for independent confirmation. If you read otherwise, that’s the journalists or editors trying to show some scientific cleavage.
Another reason I chose this article was that they mentioned how the timing was done, because that’s a likely candidate for introducing error.
Jung, who is spokesperson for a similar experiment in Japan called T2K, says the tricky part is accurately measuring the time between when the neutrinos are born by slamming a burst of protons into a solid target and when they actually reach the detector. That timing relies on the global positioning system, and the GPS measurements can have uncertainties of tens of nanoseconds. “I would be very interested in how they got a 10-nanosecond uncertainty, because from the systematics of GPS and the electronics, I think that’s a very hard number to get.”
Some other commentary: This Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Evidence!
Update: Here is the CERN press release
Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration’s result is available on the preprint server arxiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
Work begins on Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Work has gotten underway on Plan 28, a project to create Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the never-built successor to the Difference Engine. The Analytical Engine was to have been a general purpose computer, and Ada Lovelace designed the first-ever programming language to run on it. Many factors led to its never being completed — the state of the art in precision engineering in Babbage’s day, finance woes, and so forth.