Daily Archives: October 12, 2011

Going On and On and On About Archaeology

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Tiny drone helps reveal ancient royal burial sites

The machine tested in a remote area in Russia called Tuekta was a four-propeller “quadrocopter”: the battery-powered Microdrone md4-200. The fact it is small — the axis of its rotors is about 27 inches (70 cm) — and weighs about 35 ounces (1,000 grams) made it easy to transport, and researchers said it was very easy to fly, stabilizing itself constantly and keeping at a given height and position unless ordered to do otherwise. The engine also generated almost no vibrations, they added, so that photographs taken from the camera mounted under it were relatively sharp. Depending on the wind, temperature and its payload, the drone’s maximum flight time is about 20 minutes.

What Science Isn't

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Opinion: Charles Krauthammer: The neutrino that rocked the universe

If quantum mechanics were a challenge to human sensibilities, this pesky Swiss-Italian neutrino is their undoing. It means that Einstein’s relativity — a theory of uncommon beauty upon which all of physics has been built for 100 years — is wrong. Not just inaccurate. Not just flawed. But deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong.

Sigh. Charles Krauthammer is deeply, fundamentally, (but possibly) describably wrong. This shows a very basic misunderstanding of the process of science — the same class of misunderstanding in which people than that popular opinion drives science, or that deciding on a truth and then looking for evidence to support it (and ignoring the contradictions) is science.

There are different kinds of wrong. The things that are deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong are flat-out abandoned. The luminiferous aether was fundamentally wrong — there is no preferred reference frame for the universe. Classical physics is wrong, too, but 1/2 mv^2 is still used as a formula for kinetic energy and it works as long as the speeds are much smaller than that of light. In another area of relativity we know that Newton’s law of gravitation is wrong as well, but it’s good enough to send spacecraft to the moon and other planets. This is science: we quantify wrong, and there’s a difference between not correct and there’s a discrepancy in the nth decimal place. Even if the neutrino data turns out to be correct, it will require a modification of relativity, not an abandonment of it. GPS signals — intimately dependent upon both gravitational and kinematic effects of relativity — are still be able to give you your location, something I checked empirically this past weekend. Relativity works in so many situations; it’s not wrong in that regard.

It would be exciting if this ends up being correct, but it will not end with us kicking relativity to the curb — it will give us new physics in addition to the physics we have, rather than instead of the physics we now have. Any new theory will look just like relativity under the situations we’ve already tested. Charles Krauthammer writes mainly about politics. He should stick to his day job.