Verus scientia

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How to identify real science, the better to filter out antiscience.

What is REAL science?

REAL science…
Recognizes its limits – Science only works with phenomena that can be independently verified by observations or empirical tests. This is a practical approach to the study of the natural world that has proven to be extremely conducive to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Since this approach does not rule out the existence of non-verifiable phenomena, any claims about the existence or non-existence of such phenomena are not scientific.

That’s R. E, A and L are at the link.

Can You Spare a Second?

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Why, yes, I can. I just happened to find an extra one floating around here.

The International Earth Orientation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has announced a leap second.

A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2008.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:

2008 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
2008 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
2009 January 1, 0h 0m 0s

The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:

from 2006 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2009 January 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = – 33s
from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = – 34s

The proud parents had previously stated they didn’t care whether the leap second were added or removed, just that it had all of its fingers and toes.

Finger on the Button

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Kill Switches and Remote Control at Schneier.

Don’t be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good “manners” on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music to a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.
“Digital Manners Policies” is a marketing term. Let’s call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It’s not polite, it’s dangerous. It won’t make anyone more secure — or more polite.

Did I Read That Right?

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This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a setup.

Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment

It starts off OK, giving some history, but then there was

Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch.

Force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers (universal affirmatives can only be partially converted, quoth the logician) — you can construct bosonic systems from an even number of fermions. Bosons have integral spin angular momentum, and fermions have half-integral spin, and the statistics that describe their behavior is different. An attempt to bridge the gap between science and a lay explanation that fails because it’s scientifically incorrect.

[helium is] produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Here’s a journalistic archaeologism (it’s certainly not neo-) dangerous radiation. Nuclear radiation in invariably dangerous. Actually alpha radiation is pretty much harmless as an external dose, as it deposits its energy in a very short distance, so it doesn’t tend to penetrate even a layer of dead skin. The source is dangerous when ingested or inhaled. But the Helium nucleus is already stable (it doesn’t decay) even before it picks up the electrons — that makes it electrically neutral, not stable.

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The End of Theory. Not.

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A couple days back, Chris Anderson at Wired posted some junk about large volumes of data making the scientific method obsolete, misapplying George Box’s quote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” I was a little too distracted to respond, but it didn’t exactly escape the notice of the science and skeptic blog-o-icosahedron.

Bee over at Backreaction responds. Several links to other responses at the end.
Update: Good Math Bad Math reacts as well

Wear This Ribbon if You Support (Bad) Astronomy

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But if you can, since it’s 60 LY across, don’t ask me if your butt looks big.

Banner yet wave

[A] ribbon of gas, compressed and glowing due to a shock wave that slammed into it. The shock came from Supernova 1006, a star that detonated 7000 light years away from us. This was not a massive star that exploded, but a low-mass white dwarf, the dense core left over when a star like the Sun runs out of fuel. Still, the forces are roughly the same, with a titanic explosion ripping the star apart and creating eerie, unearthly beauty even in death.

The Camera Adds Ten pounds

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How many cameras are you wearing? (Chandler, to Monica)

candid camera, over at Cocktail Party Physics.

Richmond’s main hypothesis, however, was that the effect stems from the fact that the camera only has one “eye” (i.e., the lens), whereas human beings have two eyes, roughly 7 to 8 centimeters apart. The camera, it seems, lacks depth perception. The result is a kind of “flattening” effect that can make objects seem wider in photographs.

In This Corner, Wearing the Red Trunks . . .

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Particle and wave descriptions of light, duking it out in the early 19th century. What a drag: Arago’s Experiment (1810) over at Skulls in the Stars.

Before 1800, most scientists were proponents of the so-called corpuscular theory of light propagation. In this view, which was championed and solidified by Isaac Newton in his 1704 book Opticks, held that light consisted of a stream of particles. Newton explicitly argued against the wave theory of light and (seemingly) refuted arguments by early wave theory proponents such as Christiaan Huygens. Newton’s arguments, and his personal gravitas, left his particle theory mostly unchallenged until the early 1800s.

Shove Off

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The other day Matt over at Built on Facts had an interesting post, “Pushing Things in Space.” And while it’s rocket science, it’s not really rocket science. It’s Newton’s Third Law in action (and reaction), which is first-semester physics.

There is a lovely scene where the titular robot [Wall-E] uses a fire extinguisher to propel himself through the vacuum of space. There’s no sense in critiquing the physics of a gentle animated film, but it gives us an opportunity to talk about the principal challenge of moving about in space – there’s nothing to push against. On earth you push against the ground with your feet while walking, or with your tires when driving. If you’re in an airplane, the propellers or jet engines pull in still air in front of the plane and push it out the back at high speed. Boats do the same thing with water. It’s just Newton’s laws in action.

Down in the comments, CCPhysicist, aka Dr. Pion, has the real content I want to dissect.

Your remark, “the principal challenge of moving about in space – there’s nothing to push against”, is false. The statement “If you want to push against something, you’ll have to bring it with you” is closer, but still conveys a false concept common in students.

Pushing on the ground does not make you move. It is the ground pushing on you that changes your motion.

I don’t think the statement is false. I think it’s easily misconstrued and is often found to be confusing from the perspective of a beginning student or a reporter. It reminds me of that famous quote that appeared in the New York Times years ago, critiquing Robert Goddard

That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react–to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

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