The Man Behind the Curtain

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: 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

Thread copied here from the The Man Behind the Curtain thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

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) At times, I find myself unable to even describe something adequately.From the article: Ahh good. a man who says that there are not very many easy or complete answers! Now we are getting somewhere Edited by Phat, : altering a pointEdited by Phat, :

I have trouble taking that indictment seriously.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 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.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. 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.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.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

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"

Heh - coming from you, almost everybody misunderstands how science works. 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.

point particles are part of the standard model

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

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.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

Point particle - Wikipedia

quote:

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In quantum mechanics, there is a distinction between an elementary particle (also called "point particle") and a composite particle. An elementary particle, such as an electron, quark, or photon, is a particle with no internal structure, whereas a composite particle, such as a proton or neutron, has an internal structure (see figure). However, neither elementary nor composite particles are spatially localized, because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The particle wavepacket always occupies a nonzero volume. For example, see atomic orbital: The electron is an elementary particle, but its quantum states form three-dimensional patterns.

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Nevertheless, there is good reason that an elementary particle is often called a point particle. Even if an elementary particle has a delocalized wavepacket, the wavepacket is in fact a quantum superposition of quantum states wherein the particle is exactly localized. This is not true for a composite particle, which can never be represented as a superposition of exactly-localized quantum states. It is in this sense that physicists can discuss the intrinsic "size" of a particle: The size of its internal structure, not the size of its wavepacket. The "size" of an elementary particle, in this sense, is exactly zero.

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For example, for the electron, experimental evidence shows that the size of an electron is less than 10-18 m.[6] This is consistent with the expected value of exactly zero. (This should not be confused with the classical electron radius, which, despite the name, is unrelated to the actual size of an electron.)

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Well, perhaps that's what he means. But in that case, he chose a rather poor way of saying it.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.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

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.

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: And he clarifies his topic in the third paragraph: 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

Interesting.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.

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Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

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?