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Author | Topic: The Man Behind the Curtain | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
In this month's issue of American Scientist Tony Rothman writes in The Man Behind the Curtain that science is much more insubstantial than we like to admit, to wit:
Tony Rothman writes: I want to get down to the basics. I want to learn the fundamentals. I want to understand the laws that govern the behavior of the universe. Thousands of admissions officers and physics department chairs have smiled over such words set down by aspiring physicists in their college-application essays, and that is hardly surprising, for every future physicist writes that essay, articulating the sentiments of all of us who choose physics as a career: to touch the fundamentals, to learn how the universe operates. It is also the view the field holds of itself and the way physics is taught: Physics is the most fundamental of the natural sciences; it explains Nature at its deepest level; the edifice it strives to construct is all-encompassing, free of internal contradictions, conceptually compelling andabove allbeautiful. The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward. Wow! What an indictment! His main point is that we confuse describing with understanding. He makes his case with great dexterity, and the column is a great read. I honestly don't know what to think, so I throw it open. (Is It Science? is probably the best place.) --Percy
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3974 Joined: |
Thread copied here from the The Man Behind the Curtain thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.
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Phat Member Posts: 18299 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
I had to google this man whose name I did not know and was delighted to find that he is an author of many books! I found this excerpt and just read it. (From Rothmans book, Everything's Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology.)
What made you choose to bring him up? (I like learning new stuff)
Percy writes: His main point is that we confuse describing with understanding... At times, I find myself unable to even describe something adequately. From the article: Rothman writes: Ahh good. a man who says that there are not very many easy or complete answers! Now we are getting somewhere The great swindle of introductory physics is that every problem has an exact answer. Not only that, students are expected to find it. Such an approach inculcates our charges with an expectation that is, in fact, exactly contrary to the true state of the world. Vanishingly few problems in physics have exact solutions and a physicist’s career is one of finding approximations and hopefully not being too embarrassed by them. Edited by Phat, : altering a point Edited by Phat, :
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nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Percy writes:
I have trouble taking that indictment seriously.Wow! What an indictment! Obviously I don't agree with Rothman. As I see it, Rothman misunderstands how science works. Nancy Cartwright has a 1983 book "How the laws of physics lie," where she brings up some of the same points about the laws of science not being accurate descriptions of reality. But Cartwright reaches a very different conclusion from Rothman. She concludes that the laws of physics are presented as they are, because physics works better that way. So Cartwright sees as a positive, what Rothman sees as a negative. The conventional wisdom sees scientific laws as descriptions, found by observation and induction. Cartwright sees the laws as idealization rather than as descriptions. I see the laws as statements of methodology, rather than as descriptions. Rothman is apparently going by the conventional wisdom. And when he sees evidence that does not fit the conventional wisdom, he concludes that there is something wrong with science; he should instead have concluded that there is something wrong with the conventional wisdom. Here's an example:
Rothman writes:
Rothman sees the edifice of science crumbling, because it has to resort to the use of a fudge. By contrast, I see that as a success of science. What Rothman sees as a fudge, I see as a data value that one can measure with some degree of precision. An ideal spring oscillates forever, but anyone who has ever watched a real-world spring knows that forever usually lasts just a few seconds. We account for this mathematically by inserting a frictional term into the spring equation and the fix accords well with observations. But the insertion is completely ad hoc, adjustable by hand, and to claim that such a fudge somehow explains the behavior of springs is simple vanity. The conventional wisdom and, it appears, Rothman's view, is that science works well because scientists have been able to somehow tune into magical laws that govern the universe. By contrast, I see science as working well because it has vastly increased the amount of data about the world, and with more and better data we can make better predictions. So Rothman sees that "fudge" as a failure of the magical governing rules and as a failure for science as he envisions it. And I see that fudge as a data point, a measurement that we can extract from the situation, a measurement that improves the accuracy of our predictions. I'll also comment on a point where I think Rothman is just wrong.
Rothman writes:
It's been a while since I studied gravity. But I am pretty sure that infinite force only occurs if the two "objects" are point masses. That is, they must have diameter zero, so must have infinite density. So there is no pathology in Newton's law of gravity. The pathology is in Rothman's assumption of point masses and infinite density. The maxim might be taken to heart a few weeks later in a freshman course when instructors introduce their students to Newton’s law of gravity. The famous law works exquisitely well, of course, but a singular strangeness goes unremarked. According to the equation, if two objects become infinitely close to one another, the force of attraction between them becomes infinite. Infinite forces don’t appear in Natureat least we hope they don’tand we dismiss this pathology with the observation that real objects have a finite size and their centers never get so close to each other that we need to worry. A bit more detail. If I dig a deep shaft into the earth, and climb down that shaft, the gravitational force that I experience is only that due to the part of the earth that is nearer to the center than I am. The gravitational attraction of the parts farther from the center than my position turn out to cancel out. I am guessing that Rothman is not aware of that, and mistakenly assumes that the gravitational attractions is the same as if all of the mass were concentrated at the center of gravity. Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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cavediver Member (Idle past 3665 days) Posts: 4129 From: UK Joined: |
I have to say I largely agree with nwr. But my first impression is actually rather more harsh: anyone who hasn't twigged by sixth form (Age: 16-18 highschool) that physics is a constant tale of successive "lies", should not be studying physics. We used to have a saying at school: "if it smells, it's chemistry. if it moves, it's biology. and if it's fudged, it's physics"
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
Obviously I don't agree with Rothman. As I see it, Rothman misunderstands how science works. Heh - coming from you, almost everybody misunderstands how science works.
A bit more detail. If I dig a deep shaft into the earth, and climb down that shaft, the gravitational force that I experience is only that due to the part of the earth that is nearer to the center than I am. The gravitational attraction of the parts farther from the center than my position turn out to cancel out. I am guessing that Rothman is not aware of that, and mistakenly assumes that the gravitational attractions is the same as if all of the mass were concentrated at the center of gravity. Since he is a cosmologist that has taught at Harvard and Princeton I am fairly sure he doesn't make that mistaken assumption. He's just pointing out that technically the gravitational attraction of two bodies approaches infinity as the distance between them approaches zero in Newtons law of universal gravitation.
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granpa Member (Idle past 2363 days) Posts: 128 Joined: |
point particles are part of the standard model
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
What if Rothman is really only saying that our success in modeling and describing mathematically too often fools us into conveying an impression that we understand more than we do. That we by nature focus more on our successes than our conundrums and communicate a confidence that ignores some of the most perplexing mysteries.
I don't think he's saying we actually do know less than we think we do, which would be a sort of creationist-style position that the presence of anything unknown throws everything into uncertainty, but that we too often aren't honest about it. I think this point is made most clear when he talks about pendulums, which he comes back to a few times. He talks about the difficulty of modeling pendulum motion outside a narrow swing range, and then escalates the problem by replacing the pendulum shaft with a spring. Later he talks about the chaotic behavior of a double pendulum. I get the impression that what he's really criticizing isn't our conceit in believing we know more than we do, but rather the failure of science education to convey a sense of the uncertainty and mystery that can lie in even the most mundane everyday things like friction and gravity and pendulums. --Percy
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nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
granpa writes:
Sure. But they are idealizations. Nobody supposes that point particles actually exist. And therefore the problem of infinite gravitational force doesn't actually exist, so is a non-problem.point particles are part of the standard model Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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granpa Member (Idle past 2363 days) Posts: 128 Joined: |
Point particle - Wikipedia
quote:
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nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Percy writes:
Well, perhaps that's what he means. But in that case, he chose a rather poor way of saying it.What if Rothman is really only saying that our success in modeling and describing mathematically too often fools us into conveying an impression that we understand more than we do. When I hear of a physicist talking of ToE (theory of everything), I sense the gleam in his eye that shows that he knows that he is talking of an imagined ideal rather than of anything actually known or knowable. I do think that there is a problem with science journalists who often seem tone deaf and just don't get it. They take obviously speculative statements of scientists as if they are reports of known science. And I suspect there is some feedback, in the sense that this reaction of the journalists encourages scientists to go further out on a limb in their speculative statements. I doubt that many of the scientists are confused. My own theory of everything predicts that there never will be a theory of everything. Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 370 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
Sure. But they are idealizations. Nobody supposes that point particles actually exist. And therefore the problem of infinite gravitational force doesn't actually exist, so is a non-problem. This is the part that always brings out my RCA dog look. I read an explanation of the nature of matter that describes how point like particles cause mass to exist but then turn around and read that ‘nobody supposes that point particles actually exist.’ Or that the shape of the universe may be a shape that cannot actually exist inside the universe. Or that there is no difference between space and the 'things' that appear to exist inside it. Or that the universe may have an infinite or finite past but has always existed. Or the conflict between GR and Quantum theory. It leads me to the conclusion that there is such a thing as conflicting truths. Now it is possible, even likely, that I do not understand what the real conflicts are but it is reassureing to hear the erudite confirm that there actually are conflicts.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
nwr writes: Well, perhaps that's what he means. But in that case, he chose a rather poor way of saying it. Well, maybe that's my fault by how I described the column in the OP and by the portion I chose to excerpt, which didn't mention science education. But he does mention science education in the first paragraph:
I want to get down to the basics. I want to learn the fundamentals. I want to understand the laws that govern the behavior of the universe. Thousands of admissions officers and physics department chairs have smiled over such words set down by aspiring physicists in their college-application essays, and that is hardly surprising, for every future physicist writes that essay, articulating the sentiments of all of us who choose physics as a career: to touch the fundamentals, to learn how the universe operates. And he clarifies his topic in the third paragraph:
Of course many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holeslet us say abyssesare planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender. I focused on the indictment in the second paragraph because that was what seemed controversial. But concerning what he says about science education, I encountered the pendulum in high physics, and I don't think I would have reacted very favorably had there been much focus on what we can't model about the pendulum. I viewed physics pretty much the way the article says, as providing hard answers about the universe, and telling me that in some realms of physics the answers were as flexible as essay questions would have put me off. I eventually gravitated toward programming, which has even higher determinism than I thought physics had at the time, but as became apparent to me gradually over time, when it comes to determinism we often fool ourselves. As the King of Siam said, "Sometimes I am not sure of what I absolutely know." So I'm not so sure the author is correct that the undergraduate level is the right place to reveal all of physics' dark little secrets. It might be best if they learn them gradually. I think many who go to seminary follow a similar path of a gradually emerging uncertainty that they accept and become comfortable with over time, but which would have been alienating if revealed earlier and all at once. --Percy
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nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Percy writes:
Interesting.But concerning what he says about science education, I encountered the pendulum in high physics, and I don't think I would have reacted very favorably had there been much focus on what we can't model about the pendulum. I viewed physics pretty much the way the article says, as providing hard answers about the universe, and telling me that in some realms of physics the answers were as flexible as essay questions would have put me off. I eventually gravitated toward programming, which has even higher determinism than I thought physics had at the time, but as became apparent to me gradually over time, when it comes to determinism we often fool ourselves. As the King of Siam said, "Sometimes I am not sure of what I absolutely know." My interest in physics started in elementary school, thanks to a teacher who introduced me to science. I spent many hours in the local public library reading books on science (mainly physics, but at a level that didn't require advanced math). In high school, we started physics in the first year, and continued through high school. Perhaps my different outlook reflects the way I learned of physics. I never did think physics was about "laws that govern the behavior of the universe." I remember when hearing of Boyle's law (probably in the first year of high school), my own conclusion was that no actual gas behaves that way. It could at most be an approximation. Nature doesn't match that kind of perfect ideal. And when I later heard of Hooke's law, I similarly concluded that there is probably nothing in the world that is perfectly elastic. When I learned of Newton's laws, it was clear to me that those laws were definitions, and therefore they could be mathematically exact in a disorderly world, because they were definitional rather than observational. I often find myself puzzled that most people see it differently, and have what seems to me to be a seriously flawed view of science and of how science works. Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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Straggler Member Posts: 10333 From: London England Joined: |
Nwr writes: I often find myself puzzled that most people see it differently, and have what seems to me to be a seriously flawed view of science and of how science works. You certainly have a unique view. Consider three theories. The first theory explains all known observations and predicts a series of subsequent observations (as a logical consequence of the theory) that are demonstrably correct. The second theory explains all known observations and predicts a series of subsequent observations (as a logical consequence of the theory) that are demonstrably false. The third theory explains all know observations but makes no predictions whatsoever. Which theory is superior and what do we mean by "superior" in terms of the theory in question best reflecting reality?
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