Pope did not ban the telescope

Nature magazine is the most prestigious science magazine in the world, and it just published this interview:

On NeuroPod this month, a super-high resolution human brain atlas, how to build a brain from a tiny pool of cells, and the scientist who thinks drug laws are the worst case of scientific censorship 'since the Catholic Church banned the telescope'.

No, the Catholic Church never banned the telescope. I guess he is referring to the trial of Galileo, but there was never any disapproval of the telescope or any other scientific instrument. While Galileo made some discoveries with a telescope that he developed and improved, that had almost nothing to do with his dispute with the Church.

Galileo's main argument was that the tides prove the motion of the Earth. He was wrong and the Church correctly said that he was wrong. The Church's position was that he was free to teach and publish alternative astronomical theories, but he could not say that the tides prove the motion of the Earth.

Update: The 2011 movie A Dangerous Method has a similarly false analogy to Galileo. It says:

Freud: All I’m doing is pointing out what experience indicates to me must be the truth. And I can assure you that in 100 years time our work will still be rejected. Columbus, you know, had no idea what country he’d discovered. Like him I’m in the dark. All I know is that I have set foot on the shore and the country exists.

Jung: I think of you more as Galileo and your opponents as those who condemned him by refusing even to put their eye to his telescope.

Freud: In any event I have simply opened a door. It’s for young men like yourself to walk through it.

Jung: I’m sure you have many more doors to open for us.

This is nonsense. No one ever condemned Galileo by refusing to look thru a telescope. No one ever rejected any legitimate scientific work by Freud or Jung either. For the most part, Galileo, Freud, and Jung were criticized for not being able to give cientific support for their claims.

Galileo did a lot of good work. Freud and Jung were quacks.

Origin of the genetic code

I am curious about the origin of the genetic code, as distinct from the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA. The UK Telegraph reports:

That enigma was resolved in 1953, in two scientific articles by James Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge. First, they suggested that the DNA molecule was composed of two parallel spirals that were mirror images of each other, with the sequence of bases on one spiral being matched by the sequence on the other – the double helix. Then, five weeks later, they boldly stated that “the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information”. They argued that the DNA molecule contained a code that told the cell what protein to make.

Immediately, the physicist George Gamow suggested that the code must use sequences of three “letters” or bases. Given that there were 20 amino acids, a two-base code would not work (there are only 16 possible two-letter combinations of the four bases). A three-base code would produce 64 possible combinations – easily enough to encode the 20 amino acids.

Matthew Cobb writes that the genetic code just turned 60 years old:

It had been previously suggested by researchers such as Dounce (1952) and Caldwell and Hinshelwood (1950) that the order of the bases might in some way enable a gene to synthesise proteins, probably by acting as a physical template (Dounce even argued that three bases would correspond to a particular amino acid, which turned out to be right, but not for the physico-chemical reasons that Dounce argued). In 1950, Erwin Chargaff had suggested that a single change in a base could lead to a mutation, but again he viewed this in terms of a physical change to the DNA molecule.

The great step forward made by Watson and Crick in their second paper was to take these pre-existing ideas and reshape them in a less literal form. The sequence of bases was no longer seen in terms of a physical template for protein synthesis, but as something far more abstract – a code carrying genetical information.

Watson and Crick with their model of the DNA molecule. Crick is pointing with a slide-rule. Note the sketch of the double helix, by Crick’s wife Odile, pinned to the wall.

What is intriguing is where this novel interpretation came from. The first person who explicitly suggested that genes contained a ‘code-script’ was the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in 1943. Although his ideas were widely-read, there were few attempts to explore the idea of a ‘code’, because the physical nature of the gene was unknown.

Jerry Coyne interviewed Watson:

Watson was here as an undergraduate, and was first interested in ornithology. He said his interests changed when he read Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What is Life?, which inspired many biologists to work on the molecular basis of inheritance.

So maybe Watson got it from Schroedinger. Here is what that 1944 book said:

“It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state. Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code; so there are, as a rule, two copies of the latter in the fertilized egg cell, which forms the earliest stage of the future individual.”

This seems to be a pretty clear explanation of the concept of chromosomes carrying a genetic code.

I have noted before that Watson is still bragging about stealing credit from R. Franklin for the chemical structure of DNA, while Franklin is also accused of failing to make the inductive leap. Watson and Crick did figure out that the DNA base pairs are matched, but the real leap was to say that the DNA contained the genetic code. That leap appears to have been make by Schroedinger in 1944.

Wilson and effective field theory

The death of Kenneth G. Wilson has brought attention to effective field theory. Sean M. Carroll explains:

But it might be fun to just do a general discussion of the idea of “effective field theory,” which is crucial to modern physics and owes a lot of its present form to Wilson’s work.

Quantum gravity gets a lot of research attention based on the supposed contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the failure to find a fully renormalizable theory. But there is a perfectly good effective field theory, and no problems at any observable energy scale. A lot of big-shot physicists tell us that there must be a better theory somewhere, but there is no scientific reason for believing that any theory will be better than what we have, or that experiment will ever validate such a theory.

Quantum poll likes Bohm over Bohr

I mentioned previous surveys of foundational attitudes, and now there is another poll of physicists on quantum mechanics.

This poll has 63% saying their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is De-Broglie-Bohm, and 70% saying that Bohr was wrong. It appears that physics has regressed over the last 80 years. The De-Broglie-Bohm interpretation doesn't even make much sense, and has not been extended to enough situations to be useful. It is much stranger than conventional interpretations. It is misguided for reasons that Bohr correctly explained decades ago.

Physics is in a sorry state. It used to be that it was led by people who could reliably tell us what is correct. Okay, they can tell us whether there is a Higgs bozon boson. But why can't they give us better answers to these questions?

Einstein rejected relativity geometrization

I have posted before, and in my book, that the textbook geometrical description of special relativity cannot be attributed to Albert Einstein. My reasons are (1) Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper was no more geometrical than the previous Lorentz theory; (2) Poincare's 1905 paper pre-dated Einstein's and had the spacetime geometry; (3) Minkowski built on Poincare's theory and popularized the spacetime geometry in 1908; and (4) Einstein did not understand the Poincare-Minkowski geometrical 4D approach and badmouthed it.

Einstein did later embrace Minkowski's approach, and used it in his general relativity work. So I assumed that he subscribed to geometrization after about 1910. Besides Minkowski, Einstein got the geometrical view from Grossmann, Levi-Civita, and Hilbert. Those were mathematicians who fully appreciated differential geometry.

However, a new paper, Why Einstein did not believe that General Relativity geometrizes gravity, by Dennis Lehmkuhl, claims:

I argue that, contrary to folklore, Einstein never really cared for geometrizing the gravitational or (subsequently) the electromagnetic field; indeed, he thought that the very statement that General Relativity geometrizes gravity "is not saying anything at all". Instead, I shall show that Einstein saw the "unification" of inertia and gravity as one of the major achievements of General Relativity.

The paper quotes Steven Weinberg:

I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student who asked why the gravitational field is represented by a metric tensor, or why freely falling particles move on geodesics, or why the field equations are generally covariant would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that space-time is a Riemannian manifold.

Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created.

Lehmkuhl says that Weinberg was wrong, and that geometry was not Einstein's view.

Weinberg also had been widely criticized for saying that geometry was not necessary for general relativity, and he has refused to retract that view. Today the geometric view is universal. Even more strangely, his 1972 textbook goes on to say:

But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and that too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics.

Weinberg got the 1979 Nobel Prize for an obscure 1967 paper that was later reinterpreted as giving a geometric model for the weak and electromagnetic interactions. Now all three interactions are best understood in terms of geometrical gauge theory. So Weinberg is famous for a 1967 paper that supposedly geometrized the weak force, but he denied in 1972 that such a thing was possible.

Hermann Weyl is responsible for geometrizing electromagnetism in 1918, along with gravitation. The term "gauge theory" is from Weyl. Einstein was not happy with that view. In 1925, Einstein attacked a Meyerson relativity book for using geometry:

Meyerson sees another essential correspondence between Descartes' theory of physical events and the theory of relativity, namely the reduction of all concepts of the theory to spatial, or rather geometrical, concepts; in relativity theory, however, this is supposed to hold completely only after the subsumption of the electric field in the manner of Weyl's or Eddington's theory. I would like to deal more closely with this last point because I have an entirely different opinion on the matter. I cannot, namely, admit that the assertion that the theory of relativity traces physics back to geometry has a clear meaning.

Einstein's famous 1916 general relativity paper had a lot of differential geometry explanations along with the physics, and had no references, so many people assumed that he invented it all. Historians know that hs not true, but until now they at least thought that Einstein believed in the geometrical approach.

Lehmkuhl makes a convincing argument. It should convince Einstein historians that he did not accept the geometrical view, or even admit that it had meaning.

In another new paper, Brown and Lehmkuhl argue:

(But it is worth stressing here that Einstein did not view GR as furnishing a geometric explanation of gravitational phenomena; he continued to reject the notion of space, or space-time, as providing the cause of inertia.89)

89 For details of Einstein’s arguments against seeing GR as a ‘geometrization of gravity’, see Lehmkuhl [n.d.]; for related arguments, see Anderson [1999] and Brown [2009].

They also quote Einstein as writing in a letter:

You consider the transition to special relativity as the most essential thought of relativity, not the transition to general relativity. I consider the reverse to be correct. I see the most essential thing in the overcoming of the inertial system, a thing which acts upon all processes, but undergoes no reaction. The concept is in principle no better than that of the centre of the universe in Aristotelian physics.

To me, the big idea of relativity is the 4-dimensional geometry, with special relativity being the flat spacetime (with curved circle bundle) and general relativity being curved spacetime. The special relativity has been more important because it affected most of physics, while general relativity just affects cosmology.

It seems weird for historians to change their minds about Einstein long after his death. He frequently talked and wrote about his discoveries, so how could anyone get it wrong? It was decades after his death that historians decided that he did not follow Michelson-Morley. And they still cannot explain how he avoided discussing Poincare.

To a lot of physicists today, general relativity is a great theory because it geometrizes gravity. Now we know that was not Einstein's view.

In my view, the geometrization of all four fundamental forces is probably the greatest achievement of 20th century theoretical physics. Perhaps more credit should be given to those responsible for these discoveries, and less to those who did not even believe in them afterwards

Accusing Higgs of adhocness

A new philosphy paper, Philosophical perspectives on ad hoc-hypotheses and the Higgs mechanism, argues:

The ad hoc-charge against the SMHM [“Standard Model Higgs Mechanism”] is interesting from a philosophical point of view on several grounds. First, the claim that our currently best theory of fundamental particle physics is based on an ad hoc-hypothesis sounds alarming and is certainly worthy of consideration in itself. Second, there exists a longstanding philosophical debate about the notion of adhocness, to which eminent philosophers of science such as Popper, Lakatos, Schaffner, Grünbaum, Leplin and others have made important contributions. This gives rise to the question of whether the SMHM qualifies as “ad hoc” according to any of these philosophers’ accounts of adhocness, and what the possible ramifications would be. Third, it seems natural to ask what impact the recent experimental discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC has on the status of the ad hoc-charge against the SMHM.

This concept of adhocness may seem stupid, but it is the main reason those philosophers of science credit Einstein for special relativity. See for examples Brush, Singh, Hawking, Zahar, Kacser, Kragh, and Rigden.

Einstein made his reputation on his most famous paper, his 1905 special relativity paper. But he had trouble explaining how it was an advance over previous work. Lorentz had the FitzGerald contraction, local time, constant speed of light, rejection of aether motion, relativistic mass, transformation of Maxwell's equations, and explanation of Michelson-Morley. Besides all that, Poincare had the clock synchronization, relativity principle, viewing the aether as a convention, E=mc², Lorentz group, spacetime, non-Euclidean geometry, electromagnetic covariance, and gravity waves. Others at the time described Einstein's paper as just a presentation of Lorentz's theory, and no one thought that it was as advanced as Poincare's work.

Einstein's response was that Lorentz's theory was "ad hoc", and that he did not understand Poincare's 4D theory. Philosophers gradually picked up on this concept, and now a majority of Einstein scholars agree. They say that Lorentz was ad hoc in the sense that he paid close attention to experiments like Michelson-Morley. Einstein's innovation, they say, was to present relativity as a paradigm shift that ignores experiment. They blame Lorentz and Poincare for failing to be true believers in the new relativity religion, because they both said that experimental evidence could prove them wrong.

Philosophers went on to say that the great scientific revolutions are reworkings of previous theories that have no measurable advantages. Einstein's genius was to detach himself from the physical world. Theoretical physicists have largely adopted this view, and get most excited about untestable ideas like string theory, multiverse, many-worlds, etc.

All of this is horribly misguided. Special relativity comes to us from Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski. Einstein had almost zero influence on the creation or acceptance of the theory. Lorentz and Poincare were very much concerned with explaining the physical world when they developed the theory. Those who use Einstein as an example of the merits of incommensurable paradigm shifts are just wrong.

(Einstein was influential in acceptance of general relativity, but that was because he pointed to empirical evidence. With hard evidence, it was not one of those Kuhnian paradigm shifts that the philosophers love.)

All of this is detailed in my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics, and on this blog.

So the invention of the Higgs mechanism in the 1960s was ad hoc in the sense that it was an attempt to explain how a gauge field could be short-range, and the weak and strong forces were observed to be short-range. How is this a criticism? Of course physicists respond to data when formulating their theories. That is how it has always been done, until Einstein wasted away his post-1925 life on unified field theories, and string theorists took over in 1980 or so.

Physics has gone too far

Science writer Jim Baggott is plugging a new book, Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. I liked his 2010 book, The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments. He debates string theorist Mike Duff, and there is commentary by Lumo and Woit. Baggott argues:

There are no clues in the available scientific data about how these problems might be solved, and theorists have been obliged to speculate. But, in Farewell to Reality, I argue that in their ambition to develop a "theory of everything", some theorists have crossed a line. The resulting theories, such as superstring theory (or M-theory), are not grounded in empirical data and produce no real predictions, so they can't be tested. Albert Einstein once warned: "Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally by pure thought without any empirical foundations – in short, by metaphysics." Now, metaphysics is not science. Yet a string of recent bestselling popular science books, supported by press articles, radio and television documentaries, have helped to create the impression that this is all accepted scientific fact. Physics has gone too far.

Duff replies with phony history lessons:

Quantum theory, for example, was largely driven by empirical results, whereas Einstein's general theory of relativity was more a product of speculation and thought experiments (contrary to what your quote implies). Speculation, then, is a vital part of the scientific process. When Paul Dirac wrote down his equation describing how quantum particles behave he wasn't just explaining the electron, whose properties had been well established in experiments. His equation also predicted the hitherto undreamed-of positron, and hence the whole concept of antimatter.

Quantum theory was driven by data, but so was relativity and Dirac's theory. Poincare first conceived relativistic gravity in order to understand the finite propagation of gravity and the precession of Mercury's orbit.

Duff also says:

It is a common fallacy that physics is only about what has already been confirmed in experiments. The Higgs boson had no foundation in empirical reality when it was predicted in 1964. ...

Theories rarely spring fully formed from the minds of their discoverers. Chapter 2 of your book reminds us that it took 30 years of quantum entanglement (Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", proposed in 1935) before John Bell made a falsifiable prediction and another 20 before Alain Aspect tested it experimentally. Was all the entanglement research done in the meantime, including Einstein's, unscientific metaphysics? I don't think so.

The Higgs mechanism was proposed as a way of explaining the short-range nature of nuclear forces. Yes, the particle was only found 50 years later.

Einstein's quantum work was unscientific metaphysics. Einstein and Bell were trying to prove quantum mechanics wrong by showing some supposedly counter-intuitive aspects of it. If they had turned out to be right, and they had inspired someone to disprove quantum mechanics wrong, then I guess I would have had to admit that they were onto something. But it is clear now that they were barking up the wrong tree. It was also the opinion of the leading physicists at the time of Einstein and Bell that they were barking up the wrong tree.

Baggott is right that theoretical physics has become Fairy Tale Physics, as explained in this podcast or my book.