Sun, 8 January 2006 12:24 pm Comments (0)

Apropos of little but themselves

The prospect of moving in the next few months has made apparent just how much five years’ worth of life in one apartment has led to overflows in our closets and storage spaces. My list of links has gotten the same way. In both cases, rather than categorizing and sorting into the major areas, the easiest place to start is to examine the little trinkets that have little connections other than my own sense of Hmm or Ooh or Heh…

Actually, I suppose those last few are related. What advocates of intelligent design, pseudosciences, and fundamentalist religious views seem to lack is the sense of wonder and excitement of ‘gaps’–it seems they are terrified by the prospect of not having a definite answer for everything right now. Real scientists and thinkers know better: the root of understanding is not knowledge but questions and analysis.

Categories: astronomy, Chicago, physics, politics, science, technology, web, wine, humor, society
Mon, 7 November 2005 12:28 am Comments (1)

Science under seige?

Is the US Becoming Hostile to Science? It certainly seems that way, what with school districts and public officials being being stalked by intelligent design. (Although, apparently America doesn’t have a monopoly on the abuse of, or disdain for, science.)

But just when it seemed that some sanity had been restored by several ID supporters making some fools of themselves in the Dover school-district trial, by the Vatican speaking up to support science, and the urgent need to fight a possible bird-flu pandemic (hmm, it would be sadly ironic if millions of flu deaths were to provide a solid case in support of ongoing natural selection through random mutations.), out comes an attack on fundamental physics. Apparently a Harvard medic is claiming not just a breakthrough in power-generating technology but also that in doing so he’s disproven basic quantum theory. Now, maybe there’s no disputing that his contraption works, and if so that’s great. Perhaps it is coming from a heretofore unknown aspect of physics not properly described by current theory. But that’s a long way from destroying a major underpinning of modern physics, especially given his flimsy reasoning in that direction:

  • This result is impossible given current theory. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time a major theory of science required an adjustment in one area to explain an observation, that doesn’t mean the theory is completely wrong (hell, even some staunch ID campaigners don’t go that far). It might also be that someone made some computational or analytical mistakes, which also wouldn’t be a first.
  • I don’t have years of training in this area, so I’m an outsider who can look at things in a fresh way. Wow, nice bit of sophistry to turn the concept of an ‘expert’ on its ear. By this line of thinking, we would be best served if most people started working in any and all areas except for ones in which they’ve had years of training and experience! Certainly an outsider is helpful to prod people to look anew at topics dismissed in the past as ‘obvious’ or ‘uninteresting’, but that doesn’t seem to apply here as it’s not a qualitiative aspect that is under scrutiny. I can say from experience that even the basic quantum theory of the hydrogen atom is arcane and mathematically complex (there’s a reason it doesn’t usually come up until a junior/senior level physics course), so I’m really skeptical that anyone other than an absolute mathematical savant could suddenly come on the scene and calculate a value that has escaped a century’s worth of theoreticians and empiricists.
  • The entrenched scientists are only interested in protecting their pet theories. Ooh, this one’s a doozy. Certainly, physicsts at that level can sometimes be a petty lot, jealous of their star status as crafters of Important Theories. But ultimately they are interested in knowing the truth of nature. In contrast, this challenge to established quantum theory is coming from a group (filled with business types, not trained scientists, mind you) who want to make money of the technology and thus have every economic incentive to make it appear as if they have some new, profound understanding of the universe. Who do you think might be more worried about prestige and image? Didn’t the Cold Fusion debacle of the late 80’s teach anyone that science is more effective when done by scientists in controlled labs rather than via press release and VC prospectus?
Such rotten reasoning just goes to show that just because someone is a highly trained engineer or medical professional doesn’t necessarily mean they’re as sharp as the general public likes to think they are.

Fortunately, I can say that I took a walk through Battleground God and came through it with the assurance that I view and analyze the world in ways that are at least consistent and rational. Would that I weren’t in the minority in that regard.

Categories: physics, science, commentary, business
Tue, 25 October 2005 11:44 pm Comments (2)

Telemarketers, crackpots, political sensibility, Saturn satellites

  • From Eric’s links comes this gem of ananti-telemarketing EGBG counterscript. Almost tempting to drop off the Do-Not Call List to try it out. Almost…but not really.
  • Here’s a nice crackpot index to help weed the good physics from the bad. Maybe we should generalize and start applying the same analysis to the nonsense spewing from the mouths of politicians, CEOs, etc.
  • Senate Rule XIV Procedures for Placing Measures Directly on the Senate Calendar
    Septemter 19, 2005:
    Mr. FRIST. Now I ask for its second reading and in order to place the bill on the calendar under rule XIV, I object to my own request.
    Okay, legislative bodies are often where common sense goes to die but…wow.
  • Kansas Law on Gay Sex by Teenagers Is Overturned
    Kansas has been in the crosshairs of ridicule for recent intelligent design silliness, but the state’s Supreme Court showed some wisdom in a ruling against a horribly discriminatory gay-sex law. From the unanimous (!) opinion:
    The moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest.
    That statement needs to be engraved on the desk of every legislator, prosecutor, and judge in every jurisdiction in this country.
  • Via Kos came this set of excerpts of Brent Scrowcroft critiquing Dubya and the neocons. In reading I came to the intriguing, if somewhat disturbing, realization that the neocon ethos espoused by Paul Wolfowitz and others is less an imperialist, modern-day manifest-destiny idea than it is simply an extreme form of a mentality that most U.S. politicians–and many citizens–posess. Two of its essential concepts are that everyone loves freedom and democracy. What American could possibly argue with those points, huh? Except…well, to many people, including right here at home, the most important freedom they desire is the freedom to ensure that no one else–at least no one else they’ll ever have the need or opportunity to deal with–thinks and acts in ways of which they disapprove. Moreover, democracy isn’t necessariliy the ideal form of government, perhaps just the least bad. Arguably public affairs could be better handled philosopher-kings of proper temperment and training than by those chosen by the whims of the public at large, but in a stable, balanced society democracy has the advantage that extreme views tend to be voted out of office before they have a chance to do permanent damage. However, it works out this way because our society has long had the sense of balance and desire for consensus, not the other way around. In a society with a strong bent towards allocation of authority based on pure power or the absoute moral superiority of one group over another, democracy by itself has no mechanism to prevent tyranny of the majority. Where one group claims divine mandate to subjugate another, or multiple ethnic-religious factions have enmity dating back centuries, the introduction of a formally democractic system and the belief that the vast majority are just yearning for the freedom to live in an open, laissez-faire society are hardly guaranteed to suddenly result in well-behaved, friendly nations. We really could use less Pollyanna and more realpolitick in our foreign policy.
  • More Saturnian visual goodness, courtesy Cassini-Huygens:

Categories: astronomy, physics, politics, humor, society
Sat, 2 July 2005 10:48 am Comments (0)

Science questions, melting ice, marketizing, Oyez

Categories: astronomy, physics, politics, science, USA, commentary, law
Thu, 30 June 2005 11:00 pm Comments (0)

Relativity centenary, views of America

  • One century of special relativity: Albert Einstein’s On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies was published on this date in 1905, resulting ever since in astonished cries of “no, the consequences are much too weird to be true” and legions of sci-fi writers dreaming up clever ways to get around the cosmic speed limit.
  • Foreign Policy: In Search of Pro-Americanism
    Imagine that, pro vs. con opinion results are a lot more nuanced than short sound bites suggest. Anyone care to let the politicians in on this secret?
Categories: international, physics, USA, society
Mon, 20 June 2005 11:25 pm Comments (0)

Time travel, blacklists, terrorism, blog law

  • New model ‘permits time travel’
    Using wave-function collapse to refute certain aspects of time travel. Nifty way to establish the obvious. Of course, its conclusions take away much of the incentive for time travel in the first place. Will that maybe lead to an end to the debates about this time-travel nonsense?
  • The Destiny of Blacklists
    More clear Paul Graham thinking, indicating that internet blacklists are fundamentally prone to abuse. Contains perhaps the most succinct definition of terrorism I’ve seen in a while:
    This is, strictly speaking, terrorism: harming innnocent people as a way to pressure some central authority into doing what you want.
    Would that more people kept that in mind before bandying the term about.
  • EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers
    Rights and responsibilies for the blogosphere
Categories: physics, web, weblog, commentary, travel, law, quotes
Tue, 24 May 2005 10:39 pm Comments (0)

Head-shaking items

  • On the El I saw an ad claiming “Chicagoland houses: starting at $10,000!” Eye-catching, but…huh? A house in the same price range as the blue-book value of my three-year-old Civic? Chicagoland housing prices may range from silly to outrageous, but one shudders at the size and state of a so-called house at that price. You’d probably be better off buying a used car and living in it!
  • The BBC had a story yesterday, picked up by other outlets too, about how a couple analyses indicated that wormholes are unlikely to be usable for predictable travel in spacetime.

    The wormhole-for-time-travel argument essentially says that if we can find (or construct) a stable cosmic wormhole, an example of which has never been observed and the theoretical basis for which isn’t exactly ironclad, and we can locate some (also yet-unobserved) ‘exotic matter’, which would violate many well-established laws of physics, and and can somehow get the two together, then maybe we can keep it open long enough to get to another well-defined point in spacetime.

    Okay, great…but with all those ifs and conjectures, the proper course–until presented with something approaching actual evidence–is to simply smirk and move along. Aren’t there enough real science problems around to investigate, rather than debunking yet another pie-in-the-sky scenario.

Categories: Chicago, physics, society, commentary
Mon, 4 April 2005 11:35 pm Comments (0)

A black hole by any other name is still no place to be

Ah, theorists, they are an entertaining lot–especially the particle-physics types who have morphed into astronomers. Now, there’s no doubt that their approach has yielded important advances (especially when combined with actual observed data), but the veracity of their pronouncements based on hunches and gaps sometimes vies with that of politicians and religious zealots for its pure huh? factor. Quoth George Chapline of LLLNL recently
in Nature:

It’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist.

Okay, black holes as currently conceived are certainly problematic: general relativity predicts a runaway collapse that results in an entity–a spacetime singularity–that GR is completely unable to describe, while out at its encloaking event horizon quantum mechanics predicts an entirely different and incompatible set of circumstances. Chapline’s answer to all this? Neither, it must be ‘dark energy’! Hmm…never mind that dark energy is itself an intellectual black hole, er, black-box placeholder that has only existed since about 1998 to explain the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe. (Okay, maybe you can trace its origins to Einstein’s cosmological constant, but the connection is tenuous and only gives it a little more historic rigor yet no further observational heft.) Could this dark energy be a factor in inflation, accelerating expansion, dark matter, and large-structure formation? Absolutely. But six years of study hardly allows for anything approaching certainty.

Besides, lurking in numerous double-star systems and at the hearts of galaxies lie enormous mass concentrations in very small volumes that cause very severe spacetime (or quantum-field) distorsions. Such nasty places would seem to fit the moniker of ‘black hole’ regardless of whether they are generated by singularities, or dark-energy concentrations, or whatnot. To suggest that they do not exist is ludicrous.

Categories: astronomy, physics, rants
Wed, 2 March 2005 10:19 pm Comments (0)

Overlooked aspect of uncertainty gets its experimental due

The double-slit experiment is a classic one in physics, establishing the wave nature of light and instrumental in showing the wave-particle duality of electrons, but a fascinating new twist was given to it recently when an international team made temporal ’slits’ to demonstrate interference fringing in the time-energy plane. The most groundbreaking thing here is the ability to emit light pulses consisting of only one-and-a-half wavelengths, an amazing feat regardless of its application.

Yet in doing so they finally brought some concrete life to the lesser-known aspect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which heretofore most students learn through mathematics only since the position-velocity version had been easier to prove experimentally. I agree with one of the physicists quoted in the article that the results of this latest experiment need to make it into textbooks, for the effect it so nicely confirms is an important underpinning for theories of phenomena like nuclear detonations, stellar interiors, and the Big Bang.

Categories: physics, technology
Thu, 20 January 2005 8:15 pm Comments (0)

Supported by? Or just not definitively inconsistent with?

I’ve always read with mild amusement the claims of the fantastical things the science populizers love to parlay as ‘consistent with the laws of physics’. Reading this latest one claiming it might be possible to escape the deep freeze brought on by the Hubble expansion, I think I’ve figured out why I always find myself shaking my head. Dunno why this epiphany happened tonight, but I noticed several things in this article…

…astrophysicists often use the classification of Type I, II and III civilisations…ranked [by] their energy consumption. One might expect that a Type III civilisation, using the full power of its unimaginably vast galactic resources would be able to evade the big freeze….To do this, an advanced civilisation will first have to discover the laws of quantum gravity, which may or may not turn out to be string theory…

plus several occurances along the lines of ‘an advanced civilization might…’

Well now, I’ve never heard of those ‘often used’ civilization types, but perhaps I didn’t talk to the proper astrophysicists during my years in grad school. Anyway, snide remarks aside, just that little snippet is already well down the path that leads from fact to fancy:

  • Note how quickly we’ve gone from the abstract classification of a ‘type III civilization’ to the assumption that one exists (after all, we haven’t proven they don’t exist, right?) and then on to using them as the
    agents of our proposed escape scheme. Furthermore, since they’re ‘type III’, they can obviously engineer any process they need because they must have access to ‘unimaginably vast’ energy resources. Ergo, they must have the ability to create conditions through which to violate any of the ‘laws’ that we, with our primitive, backassward physics, think describe the universe. Ri-ight.
  • Yet, even this astoundingly advanced (whatever that means) race that has managed to solve fundamental mass-energy-field paradoxes needs help. They can achieve the goal we set for them if they learn some stuff about something that might exist and may allow for the effects we want to see. Wow, that’s an awful lot of conditionals and postulates that have to align just so. Hmm…how many ifs does it take to make a line of thought no longer worthy of serious consideration?

Ignoring these little gems, let’s move on to the ‘real’ physics that such articles love to sprinkle in to lend an air of legitimacy:

Negative energy, however, has been seen in the laboratory in the form of the Casimir effect. Normally, the force between two uncharged parallel plates should be zero. But if quantum fluctuations outside the plates are greater than the fluctuations between the plates, a net compression force will be created. … This was first predicted in 1948 and measured in 1958. However, the Casimir energy is tiny…[t]o make use of the Casimir effect would require advanced technology to squeeze these parallel plates to very small separations. If one were to reshape these parallel plates into a sphere
with a double lining, and use vast amounts of energy to press these spherical plates together, enough negative energy might be generated for the interior of the sphere to separate from the rest of the universe.
Now, this Casimir effect may be true and useful, but, as often happens, the author quickly goes awry through the subtle error inherent in extrapolation. Like many wormhole-and-timewarp fancies, the author has missed (or ignored) a major idea that cuts across several aspects of revolutions in physics during the last century or so: exotic (or even mundane) effects aren’t always scale-invariant! Time dilation and quantum tunneling are only significant on extreme scales (near-light speeds and subatomic distances, respectively), and similarly just because the Casimir effect is real on submillimeter scales doesn’t necessarily mean it will be so on person-sized or planetary ones (no matter how much energy you have at your disposal). Do the mathematics bear out the use of the Casimir effect in this way?

Moreover, just because some scientist or other proposed a self-consistent theory for something doesn’t mean it will ever bear out. Plenty of bizzare effects have been predicted from the edges of physical theory, and many of them have fizzled out upon experiment–or even more careful logical analysis!

Sigh. Sometimes I lament that the world might be more fun if my brain didn’t have this annoying habit of so quickly bringing logic and knowledge to bear on concepts I hear or read. Why must I ruin a good story with something so silly as a reality check?

Categories: astronomy, physics, rants