You know what? You’re an even bigger jerk than Tom. And you have just messed up an interesting debate that is giving people pleasure. You and your fellow mods are a disgrace and should be fired immediately. You are incompetent and I refuse to bow to your idiocy. 
You’ve been here for a little over a month, so I won’t summarily ban you, though I will raise the issue with my colleagues. I will however give you a warning for failure to follow a moderator’s instructions.
I am also suspending you for 30 days given the nature of your escalation.
[/moderating]
Getting back to the OP, a couple of thoughts. Apologies in advance for the rambling.
I think there’s a certain impulse, stronger in some people than others, to really think about the world. What’s all this stuff? Why and how are we here? Where did the world come from? Why and how is there so much order and structure? This impulse led–in part–to religious thought and then to natural philosophy and then to science, including modern physics.
The problem is that modern physics is so abstract and complicated that there is no way to understand it, let alone work creatively in it, without doing a ton of work, studying a great deal of abstract math for many years, in a field that will provide an uncertain future.
But people will still have that original impulse, that desire to think creatively about the world. Many of them, like myself, will go “Oh well” and try to pick up the gist of modern science from books and whatnot. But some people won’t be satisfied. So they create their own theories. They may be terrible theories, hopelessly wrong, but they thought of them themselves, and they probably got a lot of pleasure doing so.
People want to think about the world and the world is now closed off from them. Knowledge of the world now belongs to a tiny elite and they are told flat out that they don’t have a prayer of understanding any more than the barest, vaguest outline.( Even knowing some of the skills isn’t enough. I recall reading one physicist saying that the worst of the “Einstein Overturned!” papers he would get came from electrical engineers. I’m not terrible at math–I’m good enough to have a little cottage industry tutoring high school kids–but I know I’ll never truly understand modern physics.) Is it any wonder that some people see that elite as oppressive and rebel against it?
There’s always resistance to elites. We’ve certainly seen that in politics and not just recently either. Populism is always a strong impulse, and rebelling against the scientific establishment is just as appealing as rebelling against the political establishment.
And of course a lot of people don’t like the picture that modern science paints. We’ve gone from being children of the divine, immortal souls that will transcend our bodies and have become mere specks of rotting meat, teeming on a doomed planet floating in an inhospitable void. (As an aside, I always felt like Lovecraft’s cosmic horror was a response to the bleakness of the modern world view.)
A common thread of a lot of amateur pseudoscience is that people have meaning again. We can see it in this thread with the idea that a conscious observer is somehow necessary for the world to exist. Quasi-spiritual beliefs permeate a lot of pseudoscience.
I don’t know what the solution to this is, or if there is a solution.
We don’t have to look; we just happen to be the ones who can look. Yeah, very few scientific theories were about in the age of dinosaurs, but the world kept chugging along according to the same physical properties and behaviors, even with nobody to make observations about ways to describe them.
Had we not bothered with trying to describe, catalog, formalize, and exploit them, they’d still be what they are.
Thank you for this. It perfectly adequately permits me to grok the notion that Classical mechanics is a special case subset of QM.
Buck’s probably okay with that. I’m sure if you text him for his address, you can come pick them up some time in April of the year 31688087814029159.
I’m speaking for him, of course (in addition to assuming one coin toss/sec), so if he’s not okay with it, text me for my address, and we can work out the details…
I occurs to me that, given the presumption of 10[sup]25[/sup] coins, is can be reasonable to assume at all of the coins are tossed in the same second. In light of this, I wish to amend my assumption above to: "assuming one human-verified recording of the coin toss results/sec"
That is all.
“Many like you” has a different meaning from “Many**, such as** you.”
One of them necessarily implies “among whom, we can include you.” The other one doesn’t. I trust we can leave you to figure out which is which.
I think that this is a very good observation, and it brings me back to my thought which is how can science be made more accessible? Clearly from the perspective of working in science it requires a certain degree of ability and training that simply won’t be for everybody. I started off my academic career in physics but due to a total lack of ability for calculus switched to computer science. It made me very sad at the time because I loved physics, although now I’m quite over it and love working in AI so it is all good. But still I guess what I’m saying is I can empathize with wanting to do something and not being able to. So, long story short (too late), what I would like to see if scientific findings be more accessible to the public in a way that spurs interest and conversation. It can’t come from journalists because, bless their hearts, they generally just don’t know how to cover science. Too often, as mentioned earlier, they cover what is going to get clicks/views and even then they don’t always cover the findings very well. I think there needs to more of an effort directly from the scientific community to communicate with the public and not close ourselves off. Any thoughts?
EPO (Education and Public Outreach) is a part of most scientific projects, but as with anything else, some scientists are much better at it than others, and unfortunately, how good someone is at EPO is seldom a selection criterion for anything.
Things are definitely less closed off than in the past. Anyone interested in physics has research papers freely available online, entire graduate courses freely available online, elementary videos freely available online, etc. 1000 years ago it was probably more difficult for a random peasant to learn physics. Now if you need a few tens of millions of dollars, or even more, to fund your experiment the granting agency is not just going to write a cheque payable to Your Name, but that’s a different story.
As for Public Outreach, there will always be some scientists into that. The journalists already have a list of individuals who are always good for a quote.
IME the quotes are often written by the journalist or a university comms office. Vetting by the scientist will vary.
I agree, though for many such journalists I’d have put my criticism a lot more strongly. It was disappointing the first time I went to dinner years ago with a bunch of such journalists after a press event – I had naively expected a group with a genuine interest in and some knowledge of science and technology, but their primary interest was journalism in the literary sense. They were not aspiring scientists, for the most part they were aspiring writers and poets who had not (yet) managed to get anything published, and I got the impression that if they ever did they’d be out of the science journalism business like a shot.
So when you read a science article in popular media and marvel at how much they got wrong or failed to understand, don’t marvel – it’s no surprise. What I marvel it as that many of them can’t write, either. 
Of course there are exceptions. Apparently the CBC’s Bob McDonald is well regarded. Carl Sagan was perhaps the epitome of the eloquent science communicator. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is trying, with some level of success I suppose, to follow in his footsteps. In controversial areas like climate change where this is so important, there are notable figures like Gavin Schmidt, who heads NASA GISS and is one of the principals at RealClimate.org. Kerry Emanuel has also written some thoughtful articles in mainstream media, and Michael Mann has written a book and made numerous public appearances – in return for which he has been vilified by deniers and threatened by conservative politicians. Due to his public profile and pressure from conservative ideologues, Mann has – rather incredibly – been subject to no fewer than three separate ethics investigations, and fully exonerated by all of them.
I don’t know what the answer is. Many scientists are poor communicators to the lay community, and many more have no interest in doing so. All I can say is that the rare exceptions should be celebrated, and the best of them are national treasures. Perhaps a good start would be if the public could better discriminate between crackpots and real scientists, and stopped criticizing and even persecuting the real scientists just because ignorance inclines them to disagree with them, and started listening and learning instead. This is the situation that prompted New Scientist to run a cover story in their October 29 - November 4, 2011 weekly issue titled “Unscientific America: A Dangerous Retreat from Reason” on the critical need for – and increasing failure of – scientific communication in areas of public interest.
I didn’t say anything earlier so as not to muddy the waters, but I’d sound a note of caution: the “deformation” of one theory into another is somettimes simple, but not always, and in particular the deformation of quantum mechanics to Newtonian mechanics is still an active area of investigation. For example this paper shows taking the limit of h-bar goes to zero is not sufficient to go from quantum mechanics to Newtonian mechanics as quantum mechanics is not deterministic in that limit (though they do conclude that taking the deterministic limit of the theory that results from taking the appropriate limit of quantum mechanics is sufficient to recover Newtonian mechanics).
That is a great question. Locally there is a guy who is a flat earther. I haven’t talked with him, but someone I know has and said he’s sincere. This guy has two vehicles and his house covered with information related to flat-eartherism. I went by his house, he has a display set up in his yard that involves a globe and a water pump and motor to spin the globe in an attempt to demonstrate why the Earth can’t be a rotating sphere. He has a helium filled balloon and an empty balloon next to each other, and the description that gravity isn’t real, it’s buoyancy and density that cause the balloons to behave differently. It staggers my mind how he can miss the fact that it requires gravity for density and buoyancy to cause movement. He says “We call it sea level.” And more nonsense.
I was at the town square a couple days ago and it began to rain, so I stepped up onto one of the covered areas on the old courthouse building. I was joined by a couple of homeless people. One of them started going off on HAARP and how the government was causing Harvey and who ever heard of a hurricane just hanging over one area or going in circles. I avoided that conversation, but look up the path that Ivan took. Rolled in as a cat 3 over Alabama, quickly dropped to a tropical depression, but maintained a center and marched out over the Carolinas, down the coast building back up to a tropical storm, crossed Florida, marched through the Gulf before it finally made landfall again in Louisiana. It wasn’t as strong or big as Harvey, and moved faster so it didn’t drop nearly as much water in one place, but that’s a pretty strange path.
I’ve said this before, the problem with analogies is that they are inherently flawed. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be an analogy, they would be the thing you’re trying to describe. The trick is to understand the point of and limitations of the analogy, and not try to extend it beyond the limited element it is trying to show.
Yes, sometimes a popular analogy becomes the simple way to help laypeople understand, even if the analogy or description is completely invalid. Scientists must make an effort to avoid that. But it’s tricky, because coming up with explanations or visualizations is tricky, and even more tricky is valid simplified explanations.
I have been hanging out on Twitter supporting my wife’s book on vaccines, and saw many examples of non-experts thinking they knew a lot more than they did. I broke it down into four classes:
- The non-expert has a financial or philosophical stake in not understanding. Those include homeopaths lecturing about the evils of vaccine as well as extreme “health” food vendors - extreme in the sense of eat my food and you won’t get cancer.
- Bizarre appeals to authority. No one seems to google some of the sources of the outlandish claims. One guy had died in the mid-70s. Another was a woman who had taken one term of pre-med in eastern Europe, got a degree and worked in geology in Australia for many years, and then set herself up as an expert in medicine. At the most absurd, people would post quotes from Putin attacking vaccination as if we should be impressed.
- The most honest, if still wrong, were the “the plural of anecdote is not data” ones. Women (mostly women) would not accept that a bad reaction from their kids did not mean that vaccines were going to hurt most people, and it also did not make them experts.
- Finally, lack of logical thinking. The claim was that mercury in MMR caused autism. Mercury was removed 10 and more years ago. Autism kept increasing. No conclusion was drawn. Not that this type caused any problems.
These are the people who fall for dihydrous oxide as a dangerous chemical. They are the people for whom correlation does equal causation. Or that something posted on a website or anti-vaxx “journal” had equal validity to something published in Science or Nature.
Unfortunately even the good guys did not understand the root of the fallacies all that well. Some good graphs and links to real studies, but none of the critical zeroing in on stupid arguments we’re so used to here. Though I tried.
Actually, the MMR never had mercury in it - it’s a live vaccine, which means that use of the mercury preservative used in non-live vaccines would actually stop the MMR from working (see this cite https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html)
(back in the day, the US antivaxxers believed that mercury preservatives in non-MMR vaccines were the cause of bad vaccine effects, while UK antivaxxers were focused on MMR - but over the years, it seems that the two groups have merged, without allowing any facts to contaminate their arguments).
Andy L, that sounds about right - conflate two mutually exclusive claims into one. The people spreading the disinformation don’t learn the details of the claims they are making, just the buzzwords, so once you get to buzzwords, it’s easy to add “MMR vaccines” to “vaccines have mercury in them”.
I’m sure there’s a segment that even believes that because MMR “had mercury before it was removed 10 years ago”, the continued increase in autism cases is some sort of “vaccine memory” kind of like the “water memory” proposed for homeopathy.
They’re not wrong, did you see Harvey?
Enough of that stuff in your rivers and streams can cause them to flood.
It is dangerous! When I tell you that its more formal name is protium oxide, and more fully written out as [sup]1[/sup]H[sub]2[/sub]O, and that too much of it can kill you, you begin to realize that this stuff is scary as shit. And don’t even get me started about its close relative deuterium oxide ([sup]2[/sup]H[sub]2[/sub]O, or D[sub]2[/sub]O), composed of a simple isotope of H. That stuff has been shown to inhibit enzyme reactions and cell division and in sufficient quantity it can induce cytotoxic poisoning. Yet the only difference between [sup]1[/sup]H[sub]2[/sub]O and [sup]2[/sup]H[sub]2[/sub]O is a neutron, which is really tiny, so it might fall in there without you even noticing!
Furthermore, deuterium oxide has been used as an essential component of some nuclear reactors that were subsequently used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. During World War II, Norweigan resistance fighters were known to have sacrificed their lives to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis.
All of this underscores the importance of understanding science. That’s why those of us who understand science are extremely wary of protium oxide and its isotopic sibling which we know is used to make atomic bombs. We are also well aware that protium oxide is present in many vaccines and in genetically modified foods, and we act accordingly. Also, we know how to construct proper thought control helmets to prevent aliens from controlling our brains.