But why?
She felt like it.
But why?
She was particularly bored that day.
But why?
Another wizard made her bored.
But why?
The other wizard felt like it.
But why?
The other wizard was feeling bored.
But why?
Goto: Another wizard made her bored… rinse and repeat.
Why is Madeleine Ennis here. I thought she was the only one who was able to replicate her own experiments?
The one that stood out on that list when I first saw it is the homeopathy one (#4). I would guess that 99.9% of scientists familiar with the field correctly know that there was just some measurement anomaly going on, and don’t think there is the slightest bit mysterious about the putative principles of homeopathy.
About the cold fusion item - who is David Nagel, who said of it “The experimental case is bulletproof”? Is the experimental case really bulletproof?
When I visited Hong Kong years ago, a Cantonese-speaking friend told me I only needed to learn one word: pronounced approximately “dim guy”, and meaning “Why?”. That way, I could keep a conversation going for hours, and drive people crazy doing it.
There’s an interesting survey article on the Pioneer anomalous acceleration (by the authors of the original paper pointing out the anomaly), which I think is a good illustration of the scientific approach to an unexpected result. About a quarter of the paper (starting on p.27) is devoted to estimating the possible sources of error: both real effects improperly modeled, and systematic errors in the data collection and analysis. It’s interesting to read about the possible error sources they’ve considered; because the acceleration they measure is so incredibly small, they’ve had to consider some pretty byzantine possibilities. (Even after considering all of these sources, they conclude that the most likely source of the acceleration is a systematic error they haven’t yet considered.)
If later experiments are done to try to measure this effect, they will be carefully designed to limit or avoid as many of these difficult-to-model systematics as possible. Some of these “null experiments,” like the Eotvos experiments measuring the precision of the inverse-square law, are fascinating designs theoretically and measure to incredibly high precision.
Maybe he meant they put their experimental apparatus in a kevlar container?
Well, it listed homeopathy on the list, and then went onto quote:
I’m not sure what doesn’t make sense here, unless it’s how people can read in black in white that homeopathy has never been demonstrated ineffective yet continue to say “woo woo! science has no answer for homeopathy”.
Did you mean “effective” rather than “ineffective?”
-FrL-
Re the Pioneer anomaly: I’ve never heard of this effect being found on the other two spacecraft leaving the solar system, Voyagers I and II. Has anyone looked for it with them? I’d be surprised if no one has.
Assuming that they’ve looked and not found it, shouldn’t that mean that it’s something to do with the two Pioneers and not some new physics?
I saw that article a while back and was interested in the homeopathy claim. The article was published in early 2005 and by late 2005, it became clear that, while Ennis appears to have meant well and tried to do a legitimate scientific study, none of the results have been replicated in further, better controlled studies and the most probably cause of her results were some systematic but unknown error.
I think at this point, this claim can be safely taken off the list but New Scientist were justified in putting it on at the time of publication.
dtilque writes:
> Re the Pioneer anomaly: I’ve never heard of this effect being found on the
> other two spacecraft leaving the solar system, Voyagers I and II. Has anyone
> looked for it with them? I’d be surprised if no one has.
Besides the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, it’s been observed in the Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft (although it’s harder to measure there because they didn’t go as far):
I think that the major weirdnesses in physics and cosmology (the Pioneer anomaly, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic inflation) mean that there’s something basically wrong in our understanding of physics. It’s not that we can’t explain each of these things with a new fudge factor. The problem is that it’s making physics look very shaggy with so many fudge factors. I predict that within twenty years we’re going to have another revolution in physics similar to the development of relativity and quantum physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Homeopathy never scientifically shown effective, yet people still keep saying"that’s very well, but why doesn’t science have an answer for homeopathy?"
While the Pioneer anomoly is debatable (there are a good number of potential explanations which don’t stray from qualitatively well-understood physics), I don’t think any physicist denies that dark matter, dark energy, and inflation represent huge gaping holes in our understanding of physics. I’m not sure I would say that our understanding is “wrong” (for that matter, I wouldn’t say Newton was “wrong”), but it’s at the very least incomplete.
From the preprint I linked above (p.1):
So the effect is harder to see with the Voyagers due to their design.
From Greg Easterbrooke’s TMQ article of 11/27/06 on ESPN.com:
News from Distant Space: Previous TMQs have noted that as telescopes improve, astronomers find supernovae are more common and more destructive than assumed – and this is not necessarily the best possible news. The latest discovery, from a team lead by University of Toronto researcher Andy Howell, is that the “Chandrasekhar limit” on supernova explosions isn’t a limit.
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the leading 20th-century astronomers, won a Nobel Prize for his 1930s studies that maintained the most common category of exploding stars, called the Type Ia supernova, could not exceed about 1.4 times the mass of our sun; this seemed to impose an upper boundary on the amount of destruction such a supernova explosion could cause. But the Toronto researchers observed a Type Ia supernova, dubbed SNLS-03D3bb, that reached about two solar masses before detonating, and thus released far more radiation than was thought possible. There’s another implication. Partly owing to Chandrasekhar’s arguments, it was assumed all Type Ia supernovae explode with about the same luminosity, meaning their light level could be used to estimate the expanse between the Milky Way and distant galaxies. (If they’re all giving off approximately the same amount of light, relative measurements allow you to estimate how far away they are.) Current estimates of the size and age of the universe, and its rate of expansion, rely on the assumption that Type Ia supernovae obey the Chandrasekhar limit. If it turns out this class of exploding stars varies significantly, all bets might be off about how large and old the universe is, or its rate of expansion.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
He thought there was a limit to the destructive power of nature. Umm, looks like he thought wrong.
Now consider this. Since Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that the universe was not static but expanding, theorists have debated whether the expansion would continue forever, gradually slow down or eventually reverse as gravity overcame the outward momentum of the Big Bang and pulled the stuff of the firmament back to its starting point. (The latter conjecture is called the Big Crunch.) Researchers using Type Ia supernova as measuring sticks declared in 1998 that cosmic expansion was accelerating, which nobody’s theory predicted. The galaxies could not be speeding up unless energy were somehow being added to them, which caused cosmologists to speculate that mysterious “dark energy” permeates the universe and functions as the mirror image of gravity. No physicist has offered even the vaguest explanation of where dark energy originates or what powers it. (General relativity theory does offer an explanation of how gravity derives its power to pull.) Yet even though the dark energy concept requires you to believe that most of the energy of the universe is undetectable and so far inexplicable, physicists rapidly have accepted the idea that dark energy exists and even might be the dominant force of the cosmos. What if it turns out the universe is not accelerating, that the apparent rising rate of expansion is a data error caused by the false assumption that all Type Ia supernovas have a standard brightness? Then physicists will have to announce that dark energy never existed in the first place. But trust us, we’re experts!
Is all of that from the cited article (from ESPN? ESPN covers science?) or was some of that your own commentary on the article?
-FrL-
sorry, that’s all from the article.
A better source than ESPN for this unusual supernova. Nature subscribers can also get the full journal article.
Certainly, this new supernova is a puzzle. There must be some explanation for how it was able to exceed the Chandra mass. But until we know what that explanation is, it would be very premature to throw out the accelerating Universe results. First, this is very likely to be a very rare situation: In those cases where we have independant measurements of the distance to a supernova, all type-1a supernovae ever seen have been consistent in their brightness and initial mass. And the accelerating Universe results were derived from observations of a great many supernovae. In order to throw off the results by the amount which would be required, a strong majority of the supernovae in the data set would have to be of this apparently unusual type. And even if this were the case, there are other measurements of the dark energy content of the Universe completely independant of supernovae, and they all (given the current understanding) agree fairly closely. So I’ll be watching with interest for further developments, here, but I don’t think it really means too much for cosmology.
I don’t know if anyone’s still reading this thread, but still wanted to add that I think the homeopathy ‘results’ are, by far, the potentially most earth-shattering or paradigm shaking. In other words, all the other phenomena on the list, while not making sense, would “merely” require adjustmens and refinements to the current thinking in their respective areas. Such adjustments could be quite large, and call for a major overhaul of thinking, but still would all lie safely within the realm of established science.
On the other hand, the homeopathy results, if true, would require not just some tinkering or extension of current thought, but would mandate the creation of an entirely new set of physical laws to account for the mechanism and behaviour of the findings (a set of laws that would be totally unique and without precedent in the area on which to build - indeed, the area wouldn’t have existed until that point).
Not only would the laws governing them be entirely novel, but the processes, mechanisms, and phenomena they govern would, likewise, be unique. Such processes would have been completely unknown and unexpected prior to the validation of the relevant experimental results. The closest analogy I can think of is to imagine an experiment that convincingly showed the effectiveness of prayer to cure, say, cancer or a set of experiments that unequivocally prove the existence of ESP. Such experimental results would place you completely outside the realm of all current science.
A quick bio on the author:
Gregg Easterbrook is the author of “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” and other books. He is also a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
He has a weekly article where he lambastes stupid decisions by NFL players and coaches, raves about cheerleaders, and often discusses news from the worlds of physics, marketing, and science fiction.
Here is his article from last week with the above quoted passage: