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Theoretical Physics Breakthrough or Hoax?
Brooklyn Bob writes "Ever get the feeling that some theoretical physics papers just don't make sense? According to this New York Times article, you may be right. Genius or gibberish? Who knows?" This belongs on your virtual refrigerator with nice big virtual magnet.
Just because you dont understand something, does not mean that it is gibberish. Theoritical physics is not a soap-opera, which any Tom-Dick-harry can analyse.
Theoretical physics is simply that. Always take these things with a grain of salt. Our scientific process is based on questioning assumptions and breaking the rules.
hahah. the physics people are the one's that don't understand - they obviously don't even understand each other anymore (except in their own sub-sub-subfield...)
His colleague Dr. Jackiw compared modern physics to modern art: "One person looks at a piece of art and says it is gibberish; another person looks and says it's wonderful."
:-))
Unfortunately, modern art isn't ultimately graded on if it's falsifiable or not, whereas physics is. Thus, the debate of good/bad art can rage forever without settlement, and that's fine; however, sooner or later, many scientific theories are demonstrated to be false (excepting those which aren't, of course.
Its weird and doesn't make sense because our tiny minds cannot comprehend nor visualize many things. Mathematically we can prove these concepts, however they may be hard to swallow. Do remember that mathematics has proved or hypothesized many things that we have later proven true.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
for something new and interesting. But being frustrated at every turn.
Gone are the days when Newton could spout 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction' and have it universally accepted; it wasn't 'good science' then and it isn't now.
Modern science is far too logically demanding for that sort of pseudo-theory.
In fact, its approaching the point where modern science is about as encouraging of new ideas as modern (analytical) philosophy. Which is to say, not very.
('Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is logically flawed as a scientific theory since it cannot be disproved. At best its an axiom, but it cannot be tested. Problems with universal quantifiers, I'm afraid; For every a there Exists b such that P(a,b). Disproving such an assertion is impossible).
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Going along the same vein with the quote about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic, I have often wondered similar things.
If there was a physicst out there that was obviously intelligent, could he draft a theory that was so far beyond anyone elses comprehension to get seriously attacked, even if he knew it was BS.
For instance, Einstein's original theory of relativity. This wasn't a hoax, but it was wrong. It was, however, too complicated to be argued by the minds of the day. Einstein himself had to find the flaw and correct it.
Are there any physicsts that have garnered so much respect as to allow them to make an outlandish statement with obfuscated proof, and have it be taken as sound?
For those of you trying to support the physics community here, note that this article is not just useless physics bashing. It is about a real problem in all scientific disciplines.
This article is not about criticism of the system, but rather specific criticism of specific people in the system. It is responsibility of the schools and journals, and especially thesis advisors to make sure people are doing adaquate work.
There was an excuse given by these guys' advisor in the article about these guys working for 10 years and they should get a degree for that, even if they didn't exactly display a command of the mathmatics behind their theory.
This is absolute bullshit!
I don't care how long or hard you are working on something. If you want a degree in theoretical physics, you'd damn well better be able to understand your own thesis. If you can't AT LEAST explain it to your advisor, there is no way I can see to give you a PhD.
did either of you even read the fucking article? it isn't slashdot editors or a nytimes reporter who finds physics "hard to understand" that thinks these guys were making it all up -- it's real physicists.
get off your high horse and try again, dork.
The NYT has the fairest registration deal I've ever seen, less intrusive than even Slashdot that nearly everyone here finds acceptable. I've never seen a spam from them, and I do subscribe to a daily news bulletin they provide. For a free service, I think it's fair to provide them the minimal amount of information reg. provides, information they need to justify the service internally and to advertisers -- and it's less trouble than bending over backwards to tunnel around it.
/. -- and a show of support is something I'd encourage. We subscribe to the weekend editions despite online access; there's still something to be said for newsprint.
NYT has arguably the best free (for how much longer?) general news source online -- very frequent cited on
BTW, they do not track what you read; I looked into this, and was paranoid enough to send a specific inquiry. Besides, they don't really know who "you" are.
Sokal published intentionally grabled crap to expose the lack of post-modernist rigor. He knew it was incoherent, the publishers didn't and praised its 'logic'. Sokal is one of the good guys.
Someone wrote a bullshit paper. Editors at some journals were asleep. These editors need to be hauled over hot coals. The journals will lose some respect. But the whole problem was detected by physicists who are perfectly competent to judge what is and isn't bullshit in the field of physics. There's nothing bigger going on. There's no sign of any kind of crisis going on. People just put whatever spin they want on what is really fairly straightforward.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
... you can never really prove that a statement is true by empirical evidence, because you may always find some case later in which the statement is false.So by this reasoning, you can't ever prove that fo is not bar, because you might somehow later find a case in which the fo is bar. ..."so by this reasoning"? That reasoning doesn't apply. That's the whole point!
If you say all sheep are white, and you find a white one, nothing has been proven. Admitted.
If you say all sheep are white, and you find a black one, you have proven the statement wrong.
How can any new evidence alter that falsifacation? Did you observe the sheep wrong, so it's really not black?
If you say all sheep are white, and you find a black one, you have proven the statement wrong.
This sounds pretty straightforward. But now, in order to falsify your theory (all sheep are white) with certainty, you must prove absolutely the statement, "this sheep is black." This is fraught with difficulties (beginning with the exact definition of "sheep" and "black" and spreading out from there), and in fact turns out to be impossible to do with total rigor.
This is a very subtle issue, though, and for a long time people thought that Popper had it right. Then, of course, they falsified his theory ;-). When Kuhn first came on the scene, he received a lot of objections along the lines of your comment, and was accused of undermining the basis of science and turning it into a mere popularity contest. The problem is, no matter how clearly you think you've falsified a theory, the proponents of that theory can always come up with some kind of wild assumption or argument to save their theory. The trick is, at some point these assumptions get unwieldy, cumbersome, ugly, and awkward (e.g. the increasing number of circular orbits needed to save the old Ptolemaic theory of the solar system from the attack being made on it by Copernicus and co...), and eventually you just have to say, "well, yeah, it could be like that, technically, but it's just silly!"
This means that in the end you have to make an essentially esthetic judgement about the elegance and simplicity of the theory. This judgment is informed by reasonable criteria but is not made on the basis of strict logic.
I think this is cool, myself, it makes science a form of art.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
I bet most nonphysics /. readers will find the original Bogdanov papers quite difficult to read, and perhaps the theses even more so since they are in French. But I can show here some very simple things that will make nonphysics reader very suspicious about the Bogdanov twin's work.
As some /. readers have pointed out already, John Baez, the UCI physics prof, criticizes a very specific passage from one thesis, involving the Foucault pendulum part. You don't have to read everything, just see that Bogdanov mentions the pendulum and topology in one breath! here I quote from Baez's webpage:
"It goes on to discuss the supposed connection between N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment, which he claims "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". If you know some physics you'll find this statement slightly odd.
After several pages he concludes: We draw from the above that whatever the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space S3, that of Euclidean space E4 (described by the family of instantons Ibeta of whatever radius beta), and, finally, that of Lorentzian space-time M4.
Zounds! He took that pendulum and rode it right off into hyperspace..."
And this Foucault pendulum quote you can obtain directly from one Bogdanov thesis.
The Foucault pendulum bit is on page 49/162 of the thesis, in French. It's easy to read and probably will parse in babelfish.
So what's the big hoopla about Foucault's pendulum and the supergravity stuff? Well, Foucault's pendulum, contrary to the Bogdanov thesis that it's not understood in classical mechanics, is really well understood, at least the regular ole' Foucault pendulum. It's basically a free-swinging pendulum, that over time, rotates its plane of swinging because of the Coriolis force. You can check it out in any decent undergrad mechanics text, such as my dusty copy of Marion/Thornton classical dynamics, page 399, where the solution is quietly sitting. Or you can read this little web tidbit.
That a PHD physics candidate would be trying to tell us there is some connection between the very earthly, understood Foucault pendulum, and the big bang (initial singularity) really stretches the imagination! But again, this just makes one suspicious, and doesn't prove anything.
Yup, we have a crank at my university.
He pushes his incorrect Gravity theory that inserts a gravitational potential term into the field equations.
Upon talking to him it becomes absolutely clear that he hasn't the slightest clue as to the fundamentals of Riemannian Geometry. I.E. he makes claims about the fallacy of GR that would prove Riemannian Geometry to be false as well. And we all know that you can prove physics to be wrong but math is axiomatic and perfect by design.
I don't take Gravity until next year and even I can tell that he is full of shit.
But he was once an experimentalist and now he has tenor. So what the hell can you do.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
ahaile has already pointed largely the same point, but it is worth reiterating. Back when Sokal published his paper, the whole right-wing "Cultural Literacy" schtick was a current "debate." For the most part, the "debate" consisted of a bunch of right-wingers like E.D.Hirsch and the truly deplorable William Bennet bemoaning the teaching of non-white authors in college and/or teachers who are leftists (they never admitted that's quite what they are about, but it is).
Sokal is not nearly such a bad guy as those right-wingers. He's actually a decent liberal, but one raised in a particular scientistic, positivist intellectual tradition. Alan Sokal is a physicist, after all (although that is not sufficient, many in the occupation understand humanities better). But caught in that anti-Postmodernism ferver of the early 1990s, Sokal decided to make fun of the journal _Social Text_ (and the general field, by implication)
_Social Text_ is not really the most prestigious journal in that general area, but it's not bad. It is refereed, but that doesn't mean as much in any journal as what outside people tend to think. You don't have to be RIGHT, or even original, to right for "good" academic journals... just write well enough, and pick a topic the editor are interested in. For a lot of them, you also have to wait years for publication to roll around... they are behind schedule by huge amounts.
But even for what moderation means at _Social Text_, Sokal did not go through it. He knew some editors, and approached them saying "I'm a well known physicist, and I'd like you to fast track something I want to write." The _Social Text_ editors liked the idea of reaching out to that other academic community, so they agreed. But the refereeing in this case consisted of making sure the sentences were grammatical, the words spelled right, and the subject matter generally what Sokal had suggested informally. The same paper WOULD NOT have been published if submitted for blind review.
So the hoax basically amounts to this: people tend to grant some leeway to their friends. True enough, but hardly an indictment of cultural studies, the humanities, postmodernism, multiculturalism, or whatever it is that is supposed to have been shown to be foolish.
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It's well-known that journalists prefer bad news whenever possible.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The Sokal hoax was nothing to do with "determinism". It was aimed at the postmodern (ab)use of scientific terminology with no regard to meaning.
Sokal is a robust defender of the idea that the experimental method is a useful way to study reality, rather than one narrative amongst many which are equally valid. He is an "objectivist" rather than a "relativist". Determinism doesn't really come into it - I'm sure he is familiar with quantum theory.