Asking experts about nothing

From a negative review of a evolution book:

At no point in the book does Meyer ever actually discuss these issues with Marshall, or Davidson, or any of the scientists working deeply in the field. He simply lifts quotes from their papers as they seem convenient to his point.

This is the most disappointing aspect of Meyer’s book. It’s hard to read a book like Darwin’s Doubt in parallel, for example, with a book like New Yorker writer Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? Holt spent months chasing down and interviewing a wide range of philosophers and scientists — simply to get their answer to the age-old question: Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a delightful, thought-provoking read for all the reasons that Meyer’s is not. Holt lets none of his subjects off the hook — politely, but persistently, questioning their opinions and assertions.

And expert opinion is valuable about a meaningless philosophical issue?

I have criticized Holt and his book here, here, here, and here.

I am all in favor of consulting "scientists working deeply in the field", but there is no deep science about why the world exists. There are just religious and other non-scientific beliefs.

But the notion that scientists are not open to the possibility of agent action in the world is not accurate. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a graduate student in astrophysics at Cambridge, discovered a radio signal coming from the Crab Nebula. It was a fantastically rapid pulse — too rapid to be natural, it was first believed. That it might be the work of an intelligence was seriously considered — until the lack of variation in the beacon-like pulses, accompanied soon by the discovery of other sources sending similar beams toward earth, persuaded scientists that there was likely a natural explanation. Ultra-dense stars called “pulsars” are now considered the culprits.

Is this a joke? His best example is that some grad student or unnamed colleague in 1967 considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life?

I have not seen Meyer's book, and I have no idea whether it reflects scholarly opinion about the Cambrian explosion. Any extraterrestial hypothesis would seem far-fetched to me, but maybe not any more far-fetched that what we commonly hear from physicists and what is in Holt's book.

Wallace discovered natural selection

Greg Mayer argues that Darwin did not cheat Wallace out of his rightful place in history, and agrees with the debunking of this:

Since the 1970s, the story of Wallace has become something like this:

While Charles Darwin sat on his revolutionary theory for 20 years, terrified of his conservative contemporaries, Wallace boldly set out to solve the great problem of the origin of species. Not afraid to announce unorthodox views, Wallace published a radically innovative theory of evolution (minus only natural selection) in an 1855 paper.

Then, while on the island of Gilolo and prompted by thoughts about the local races, Wallace hit on the idea of the struggle for existence and natural selection. He immediately wrote up his theory and posted it to Darwin on the next mail steamer.

Darwin, however, withheld the paper for perhaps two weeks before he let it become known. During this time, according to some, Darwin stole some ideas to use in his own otherwise identical theory.

Rather than having Wallace's paper published immediately on its own, which was normal practice at the time, Darwin's friends cooked up a scheme to rob the working-class Wallace of his priority and instead put their friend Darwin first. Papers by both men were read at a scientific meeting in 1858, but Darwin is remembered as the discoverer of the theory because his contribution was placed first.

This is said to be somewhat inaccurate, with the big breakthru happening this way:

In a letter written about two weeks later, Wallace mentioned that over the past four years he had found differently coloured tiger beetles on different islands which exactly matched the colour of the sand or mud where they lived. "Such facts as these puzzled me for a long time, but I have lately worked out a theory which accounts for them naturally."

Wallace already believed that new varieties of animals appeared randomly and frequently, the offspring of their parent species. If lots of varieties of various shades are constantly appearing, how does one come to perfectly match the colour of the environment? He remembered the idea of the struggle for existence. The varieties best suited to survive would be those that happened to be the right colour.

If the environment slowly changed colour, the parent species might go extinct. One of its daughter varieties could then be well adapted and replace it as the species. It could never revert back to the colour of its parent as that was now inferior. Thus through a struggle for existence, randomly generated variants would be sifted to form new species. It was a brilliant breakthrough.

Evolution is a combination of many ideas, some of which pre-dated both Darwin and Wallace. If natural selection is considered to be the big idea, then it appears that Darwin was scooped by Wallace, with Darwin rushing into print to make it appear that he had the idea all along.

Not Einstein's biggest blunder

There are many Einstein misquotes. I removed several from my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics, when I could not authenticate them.

I exposed New Yorker science writer Jonah Lehrer for using a made-up Einstein quote, but he did not get fired until he got caught making up a Bob Dylan quote. Dylan has a more fact-based following, I guess.

Rebecca J. Rosen writes in The Atlantic magazine:

To make his equations work, in 1917 Einstein introduced an additional term into them, expressed by the Greek letter lambda (λ) -- the "cosmological constant." The new term represented a repulsive force that would counter gravity's attraction, leaving the universe intact.

But in the years that followed, evidence mounted that the belief in the universe's motionlessness was wrong: The universe was, in fact, expanding. Had Einstein stuck with the equation before him, he might have been the one to intuit this central feature of the cosmos, but instead he concocted a contrivance in order to preserve a false assumption. Einstein, the story goes, called it the "biggest blunder" of his entire life, and that phrase (or close variations of it) has been repeated thousands of times, in books and journal articles across the disciplines.

The only problem is: Einstein may never have uttered the phrase "biggest blunder."

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio can find no documentation that puts those words into Einstein's mouth (or, for that matter, his pen). ...

"I'm not saying he didn't regret it," Livio says. "He definitely regretted it. He wrote about that to a number of friends. He thought it was ugly."

But to say it was his "biggest blunder" implies a level of regret that it seems Einstein did not feel. ...

After a visit with the scientist at Princeton on November 16, 1954, Linus Pauling wrote in his diary: "He said that he had made one great mistake -- when he signed the letter to Pres. Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but that there was some justification -- the danger that the Germans would make them."

Einstein was a Communist fellow traveler, and he was opposed to the American opposition to USSR in the Cold War.

Einstein and the black hole firewall paradox

Einstein biographer Dennis Overbye reports in the NY Times about a wacky astrophysics idea:

This time, they say, Einstein might really be wrong.

A high-octane debate has broken out among the world’s physicists about what would happen if you jumped into a black hole, a fearsome gravitational monster that can swallow matter, energy and even light. You would die, of course, but how? Crushed smaller than a dust mote by monstrous gravity, as astronomers and science fiction writers have been telling us for decades? Or flash-fried by a firewall of energy, as an alarming new calculation seems to indicate?

This dire-sounding debate has spawned a profusion of papers, blog posts and workshops over the last year. ...

You might wonder who cares, especially if encountering a black hole is not on your calendar. But some of the basic tenets of modern science and of Einstein’s theory are at stake in the “firewall paradox,” as it is known.

No, there are no basic tenets at stake. The firewall is just a stupid idea with no connection to reallity.

After all, if Einstein hadn’t been troubled a century ago by logical inconsistencies in the Newtonian universe, we might not have GPS systems, which rely on his theory of general relativity to keep time, in our pockets today.

No, GPS would work fine without Einstein. Maybe we would have understanding some of the satellite clock errors, but that's all.

Particle physicists cried foul, saying that this violated a basic tenet of modern science and of quantum theory, that information is always preserved. From the material in the smoke and flames of a burning book, for example, one could figure out whether it was the Bible or the Kama Sutra; the same should be true of the fizz and pop of black holes, these physicists argued. A 30-year controversy ensued.

No, that is not a basic tenet of modern science or quantum theory, There is not a shred of evidence for it. It is not possible to distinguish books from the smoke and flames.

If the firewall argument was right, one of three ideas that lie at the heart and soul of modern physics, had to be wrong. Either information can be lost after all; Einstein’s principle of equivalence is wrong; or quantum field theory, which describes how elementary particles and forces interact, is wrong and needs fixing. Abandoning any one of these would be revolutionary or appalling or both.

I pick information loss. No one has ever even found an experiment that could demoetrate that information was not lost. No need to look at black holes.

The firewall paradox,” he said, “tells us that the conceptual cost of getting information back out of a black hole is even more revolutionary than most of us had believed.”

Crackpot physicists are always talking about ideas being "revolutionary". It is just paradigm-speak for not having any evidence.

Update: See Not Even Wrong for media hype about physicists clinging to another disproven theory, supersymmetry.

Update: That last quote was from Raphael Bousso. Lumo trashes his last paper on the subject.

Birth of chaos theory

A new paper on Chaos at Fifty on the history of chaos theory says:

Chaos theory, as we know it today[2], took shape mostly during the last quarter of the 20th century. But researchers had experienced close encounters with the phenomenon as early as the late 1880s, beginning with Henri Poincaré’s studies of the three-body problem in celestial mechanics. Poincaré observed that in such systems “it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. ... Prediction becomes impossible” [3].2

Dynamical systems like the three-body system studied by Poincaré are best described in phase space, in which dimensions correspond to the dynamical variables, such as position and momentum, that allow the system to be described by a set of first-order ordinary differential equations. The prevailing view had long been that, left alone, a conventional classical system will eventually settle toward either a steady state, described by a point in phase space; a periodic state, described by a closed loop; or a quasi-periodic state, which exhibits n > 1 incommensurable periodic modes and is described by an n-dimensional torus in phase space.

The three-body trajectories calculated by Poincaré fit into none of those categories. Rather, he observed that “each curve never intersects itself, but must fold upon itself in very complex fashion so as to intersect infinitely often each apex of the grid. One must be struck by the complexity of this shape, which I do not even attempt to illustrate,” as paraphrased in English in ref.[4], p.414.

What Poincaré refused to draw is now widely known as a homoclinic tangle, a canonical manifestation of chaos having fractal geometry. (An image of the tangle can be seen in figure 4 of the article by David Nolte, PHYSICS TODAY, April 2010, p.33.) Poincaré’s results, independent findings by Jacques Hadamard, and experimental hints of chaos seen by their contemporaries were dismissed by many as pathologies or artifacts of noise or methodological shortcomings and were referred to as a “gallery of monsters” [4]. It would take nearly another century for chao s theory to gain a lasting foothold.

The paper goes on to explain the 1963 paper by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Another paper, Chaos at Fifty Four in 2013, credits a Russian for 1959 work predating Lorenz.

Rapping about DNA

NPR Radio reports on rapping in the classroom:

ADAM COLE, BYLINE: Watson and Crick - they're the guys who first figured out that famous spiral structure of DNA. Before they came on the scene, no one knew what that important molecule looked like. ...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROSALIND FRANKLIN VS. WATSON & CRICK")

GIBSON: (Rapping) (as Rosalind Franklin) It has not escaped notice that you're a jerk. Shoulda got a Nobel for my work.

Funny, but the famous structure is a helix, not a spiral.

The most famous sentence from Watson and Crick started "It has not escaped our notice ...". Yes, Franklin's unpublished (and for many years uncredited) work did not escape their notice. And yes, they were jerks not to tell how they used her work, and not to give public credit.

SciAm article on particles is junk

I cited a SciAm article by German philosopher Meinard Kuhlmannon on "Physicists Debate Whether the World Is Made of Particles or Fields -- or Something Else Entirely", but now that I read the whole article in the print issue, I do not recommend it. If you really want, you can read his Stanford Philosophy encyclopedia article on Quantum Field Theory.

There are indeed good reasons for the debate that have been well-understood since about 1930. The best argument against the particle model is the double-slit experiment, as that is what convinced everyone that light is a wave back in about 1800. The best argument against the field model is that the bubble chamber pictures show discrete tracks. But Kuhlmannon has none of this, and gives entirely fallacious arguments. Then he plunges into idle speculation on some issues of no physical consequence.

Kuhlmannon's first argument against particles is that a particle in your body might really be in outer space somewhere, with some very small probability. It is true that quantum mechanics assigns absurdly small non-zero probabilities to absurdly unlikely events. That is how probabilities work. But nothing like that has ever been observed. Even if it had been, it has nothing to do with particles, and would not be evidence for or against particles.

His second argument against particles is that if a particle is localized in space for a stationary observer, then the localization will look different for a moving observer. Yes, but what else would anyone expect? This is not an argument.

His main argument against fields is that they are represented by operators like square root, and they have to be applied to state vectors to get real values. But this argument is nonsense. The operators are linear, and not like square root, and all versions of quantum mechanics require applying operators to state vectors. Whether you use particles or fields, you need operators and state vectors.

I don't know how so many experts could be so confused about quantum mechanics. The material is explained well in many textbooks. You could just read the Wikipedia article on wave–particle duality.