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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.
I am tired of Slashdot's ceaseless battering of the physics community in the name of sensationalism. This is a blatant attempt to sully the good name of physics just because of the writer's inability to understand it.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
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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.
Of an Ars Technica article posted on the 26th of October, that you can still read here
Sorry, but if that "scoop" section was supposed to make me understand what the story is about you failed. Especially in the case of these need registration stories (why do you still keep publishing tme) it might be a good idea to clearly tell WTF you want to say.
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.
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.
Who says the universe works in numbers? Why do we think that we can bring everything down to math. Maybe it cant be done and we are not exactly wasting time but we wont ever find the end if we simply exploit math.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
The future of programming
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Just as it is with a post to slashdot, being right isnt enough. If a physics paper cannot be understood by physicists, and does not provide insight into anything meaningful or testable then the paper is rightly called gibberish.
The scientists in any branch are always considered the ones that think too much about whichever field they specialize. Physicists think too much about physics, biologists think too much about biology, and computer scientists think too much about computers. As a matter of fact, Albert Einstein had several of the same suit just so he could devote the time thinking about he wanted to wear to something more useful -- like physics. I'm sure most of us have has professors that we considered at least a little eccentric. I had one astronomy prof that never washed in coffee cup in 20 years just to help his body build up his immune system -- the result of thinking on a level that most people don't.
If any one of us were to devote 99% of our time to any one dream, project, or theory like these scientists most of the things we would write on the subject would make little sense to those who didn't think about the subject as much as we did, and consequently, we would be ridiculed as quacks and our writings would be considered gibberish. That is, until our life's work turned into something applicable to the general public (possibly even outside out lifetime), at which point we would be considered geniuses.
This belongs on your virtual refrigerator with nice big virtual magnet.
Dang! That big virtual magnet just erased my virtual disk...
-- Alastair
Did you read the article? It clear that these guys have a shady past at best, previously guilty of plagiarism. Also, a few other noted scientists stated that these guys 'do not know how to do physics' based on their conversations with them. Most of physics does make sense because it is basic laws of motion and gravity. The stuff that is hard for most people to understand are things like quantum physics and theoretical physics.
What?
Well, take e.g. all the matter in the universe. Put it in a measurable space. -> finite density.
Make the space smaller. -> finite, but larger density.
As the space available goes to zero, the density would go against infinity.
However, when the space has shrunk to point size, there is no space anymore. So the density wouldn't be infinite, but (some matter/zero space) undefined. So that's my 0.02 .
Besides, the article focuses more on the integrity of articles printed in scientific journals, and how it is hard to figure out if something is worthwhile or if it is crap when they're so hard to understand.
What?
Agreed. The summary of this article does a horrible job of describing the story. For those who don't wish to read the whole article, here's an excerpt:
Consider Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, French mathematical physicists and twins, who have recently been burning up the physics world with a novel and highly speculative theory about what happened before the Big Bang. Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense.
That said, the article basically gives the history of these two french physicists and why their recent work is controversial. Apparently these two did research trying to describe the momement of (or before?) the Big Bang which really hard and there's quite a bit of arguement within the physics community that the ideas are simply nonsense. So this opens up more arguements about the general quality of current research, of papers being published, of PhD's being given, etc.
Personally, I think the article itself is more gibberish than the research. There's lot of quotes but not much explaination of what the actual problems are and why this is causing such a fuss. Conseqently the article is hard to follow and not well written.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Check out the Guardian's top 10 scientific blunders page. They've got psychologists, physicists, chemists... all working to pull down science's reputation.
'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is logically flawed as a scientific theory since it cannot be disproved.
Um, no, you're confused. If the theory were false, then I could disprove it by performing an experiment where an action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, the theory is hypothetically falsifiable and therefore valid as a theory (it may be incorrect, but at least it is phrased as a valid theory).
If numerous experiments demonstrating action and reaction do not disprove it, then odds are that it is also correct.
But proof of correctness is never absolute (maybe we haven't found the circumstances under which it doesn't hold, yet), while proof of incorrectness is.
-- Alastair
The field of physics is obviously doing a good enough job of sullying itself. You see, despite whether or not the writer understands what's happening, the article talks about scientists and mathemeticians sullying physics:
Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense
Not to mention these quotes from people in and around the field:
1. "Dr. Roman W. Jackiw, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who read and approved Igor Bogdanov's Ph.D. thesis, said he found it speculative but "intriguing.""
2. "Dr. John Baez, a physicist and quantum gravity theorist at the University of California at Riverside, who has conducted a dialogue with the Bogdanov brothers on the Web site math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov, said, "One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics.""
3. "Dr. Peter Woit, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University, said of the brothers' work, "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.""
Notice that those credentials don't appear to belong to journalists. Then who is defaming the field of physics? Maybe a physics professor, a physicist, and a mathematician! ;) Interesting.
The reporting does appear to make some physicists uncomfortable, and on slashdot it appears some are trying to push negative focus away from the physics community and onto the journalists -- a good scapegoat because of the "writer's inability to understand it" :-O
However this reaction is not surprising because any of us would do the same to protect our own field. Don't be surprised, but do see it for what it is.
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!
After 10 years of patiently explaining the basics over and over again the advisor was probably ready to get rid of these boneheads by whatever means necessary, even if it meant giving them degrees.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
You, sir, disregard what the great social critic Alan Sokal described as "counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." I couldn't have said it better myself.
Could it be that the authors are simply not interested in employing the hierarchical male-dominated "conflict" paradigm of scientific discourse, but insist rather on a more culturally inclusive paradigm of multiple and divergent truths, realities, modes of existence? Could it be that their truth simply differs from that of their critics, and cannot therefore be profitably discussed on sci.physics.research?
To suggest that Western male physics applies equally in the more authentic nations of the world is a self-evident absurdity. To suggest that it has any relevance to pre-spacetime thermodynamic equilibrium is a characteristically arrogant assumption of the hegemonic mind. Get real, folks!
The fundamental evaluative condition of any paper in the field of theoretical physics is not whether it satisfies some arbitrary, imposed standard of so-called "objective" so-called "truth", but rather whether it is true for the author. High-energy physics, by its very definition, is a purely personal and subjective undertaking. No physical law can possibly be applicable to all observers.
I find it rather pathetic and sad that referees of publications in the physical sciences so often insist on printing only those constructions of "truth" which agree with so-called "experimental evidence", as if such "evidence" (mere columns of numbers) were in some way relevant to the aspirations of marginalized peoples (e.g. the "three meters per second per second" dogma, which has been passed down unchanged, unquestioned, by generations of white male physicists -- don't you think the time has come to abandon that hoary old shibboleth and replace it with something of more vibrant cultural relevance to the developing world?).
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
OK, bare with me, I'm really quite illiterate but I want to know more...
If you squeeze that stuff really tight, there is still no way it has infinite density, because no matter how small that room is it has still a size. Otherwise you could make a infinite mass object out of a single particle by squeezing it in the planck box, right? So unless the actual amount of matter in the universe becomes irrelevant once something is below Planck scale this can't be infinite density as we know it, right?
The other thing is: in order to even have mass and heat you would need particles. How can there be particles on such small a scale?
In order to have heat you need movement. How can you even have movement within the Planck scale? (Note that the article speaks indeed of an "infinitely hot point": heat)
What kind of "information" does a singularity contain? Doubtless (?) it still has to have a mass, but what else?
The other question is, if there was a "time" when the whole universe was compressed like that, this singularity should have been pretty stateless, right? How did it then get the impulse to expand to the shape we are seeing now?
For every a there Exists b such that P(a,b). Disproving such an assertion is impossible
Easily Disproved Assertion: For every real number r there exists a real number x such that r*x = 1. (In other words, all real numbers have a multiplicative inverse.)
Disproof: Let r = 0.
0 * x = 0 for all real numbers x.
Therefore, the assertion is false.
That assertion fits the form you laid out, and yet is clearly disprovable.
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.
In my opinion, no. Even if some sort or cosmic irony dropped a physicist into our time, from 10,000 years in the future, said physicist wouldn't be capable of it.
For one, english as it is spoken today, even with the jargon of the phsyics community, would be inadequate to say anything truly mind-blowing. And if he adds in his own jargon from the year 12k, it would most likely dominate any message he would say. It would truly be gibberish to us, and it wouldn't exactly be unfair to call it nonsense.
"The field of cosmology is a bust, and is never likely to produce anything..."
Such harsh comments coming from an IT Guru.
I guess your infinite experience in the cosmology field has brought you to this conclusion, or are you just too stupid to know any better?
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
John Baez has a good link filled article on the subject. Interestingly, the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity have distanced themselves from the Bogdanovs' article.
You're completely wrong. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a perfectly valid scientific theory. How do you disprove it? Find an action which does not produce an equal and opposite reaction.
You're confusing the idea of testability with the ability to prove a theory correct. No scientific theory can be proven absolutely (i.e. how do we know that when we drop the apple THIS time it won't go up instead of down!), however a good scientific theory makes a prediction, and has a way of disproving it (in this case finding a counter-example).
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
The way the Guardian described the Hubble mirror fiasco as a 'gross design flaw' was a little harsh.
As I understand it, the mirror was polished each night, then tested to see if it was the right shape yet. The testing apparatus included a series of lenses (or mirrors) held a fixed distance apart by rods. Turned out that one of those rods had the paint chipped off one end, which resulted in NASA thinking the mirror was perfect when it wasn't.
A blunder, yes, but not a design flaw as such.
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
Mr. Erikson couldn't be more wrong. Cosmology is swimming in experimental data right now, and there's orders-of-magnitude more on the horizon. In fact we have so much data it's a challenge to analyze it all in a computationally reasonable amount of time.
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.
With the Sokal hoax, many physics people jumped up and shouted that Sokal had "proven" that cultural studies was a "bogus" discipline. Now, with this hoax, the same people are backpedalling, saying that this time the issue is "complicated" and that "physics isn't for amateurs." If anything, this hoax seems more damning to me than Sokal.
;)). The paper was published because an established physicist was making bold statements about the philosophical basis of his field. That's not news? Of course, as it turned out, that physicist was a snake in the grass.
Why? In his paper, Sokal didn't pretend to be a literature professor; he claimed at the start he was a physicist. The review board of Social Text weren't physicists and so they couldn't really evaluate the physics part of his paper. Instead, they trusted Sokal that he was following the usual academic honesty and integrity in his assertions. As it turned out, and as we all now know, he wasn't -- he was intentionally distorting his beliefs about physics in order to perpetrate a hoax. What Sokal did was a lot like a researcher falsifying data: review boards usually have no way of knowing whether a submitter has falsified data and so they have to rely on the person's academic integrity, just like the board of Social Text had no way of knowing whether Sokal was sincere in his representation of physics, so they had to trust him.
The Bogdanov brothers, however, published as physicists, about physics, and in journals reviewed by physicists. Not only that, but the people who reviewed them are now spouting inanities like "he worked for ten years, so he deserved a doctorate." (Um, no, he can work for 30 years, but if he doesn't understand the stuff, he doesn't get the doctorate.)
If Sokal had tried to write as a literature professor, I highly doubt his paper would have gotten through. I've read his paper, and quite frankly, it was *not* accepted for what it had to say about cultural studies. The knowledge the paper represents of cultural studies reads like an enthusiastic but over-bold sophomore who just took his/her first class in critical theory (disclosure: I teach critical theory to sophomores, and I've seen those papers
Since this discussion goes back to Sokal's hoax, I recommend looking at Sokal's own work. His own papers are largely about obscure properties of lattice models in statistical mechanics. For much of this kind of work, it is far from clear whether it is relevant to any real physical system, or whether some of the assumptions under which they are proven are even mathematically meaningful or consistent. In mathematics, if you start with inconsistent assumptions, you can prove anything. Sokal's own field would have been another good target for a physics hoax, although string theory clearly beats lattice methods to the punch.
Theoretical physics theorys are the current alchemy or like the early "real science" theorys of the orbits of the planets. In both of thouse cases, some of the smartest humans alive at the time felt they were going down the right path. In once case Keppler came up with something simple and wiped out a huge mess of compex things (that fit the math) and most of the early dye industry was based on alchemy and some of the early compaines basing their dye science on alchemey are still the largest chemical supply compaines. Many of modern chemstry terms still come from that "science".
Modern gravity research shows the current stuff is wrong. This is why gravity probe B is going to be launched but its set up to do some very specific expierments and doesn't do a few key ones. Answer why the GPS sats are slowing down and why voyager is slowing down and why pendulums swing funny during an eclipse and theres a Nobel prize waiting for you.
Richard Feynman said that physics is simple and if its not, the theory headed in the wrong direction.
This was on http://www.incunabula.org/blog a while back
l
o retta.h tml
Links of interest are:
usenet post, along with abstracts from the theses:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R35126F52
Also here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27894.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27963.htm
Very detailed info here and in linked pages:
http://cass.eahosting.com/cass/bogdanov2.htm
And here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html
In particular the link
http://cass.eahosting.com/cass/bogdanov2.htm
is invaluable as it has an email dialogue with the brothers about their
research, and is a work in progress
you can read about sokal here:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/n
First of all, the Bogdanov hoax is not a hoax. It's a goof, a public display of carelessness, by a bunch of physicists who now look very silly.
But let's test your theory--the experiment is in progress. The Sokal hoax trashed the entire Pomo field of cultural studies, cut the number and quality of grad students in half, reduced grant allocations, and so on, and so on.... Let's watch and see if the same thing now happens to physics, shall we?
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Does that make this a quantum quantum theory? The theory itself is inside a black box (of both existence before big bang singularity, and of the undecipherable explanation of it's creators), and is both simultaniously correct and incorrect at the same time. Sure, we could call it mal-defined or unprovable in this state, but that wouldn't be any fun.
Ryan Fenton
When Geordi, Data and Wesley start talking about how to solve problems people say they talk gibberish, like a mechanics trying to deceipt a customer... it's only high physics that we don't understand today, but in the future will make sense, so they can save the Enterprise again!
I know that because I read (in The Sun, I think) that the Star Trek episodes come from the future in capsule times to Gene Roddenberry (he is a refugee from future). In fact, Star Trek is a soap opera from the future. Gene's relatives send the episodes to him so he doesn't feel so far away from home...
That's enough, if I talk more Ashtar Sheran will send that Xemnu boy to get me... and I have to make a call to these Bogdanov brothers, I have some theories that I wish to share with them.
For example, I make the assertion that "all priests have a blue corpse in their backyard". Using your logic, you can't disprove that, because you can't examine every possible corpse in a given priest's backyard for blueness.
Not quite.
What he's saying is that any given instance of "priest" implies "no corpse in backyard" (or in your version, "does have corpse in backyard"), just like every instance of "action" implies "equal and opposite reaction". The only way to truly prove the priest/corpse thing is to check all priests' backyards for blue corpses, not to check all blue corpses. When you find a priest's backyard which doesn't meet the criteria, then you've disproved the theory. This would take a long time. Checking all actions for equal and opposite reactions is impossible.
Of course, science isn't about proving random logical combinations of conditions. Science not only says "all actions have equal and opposite reactions", but explains _why_. That's the real difference between science and logic.
Heh, I equate these guys as being the trolls of the physics world. Some are better than others, as witnessed on slashdot here. These guys just happen to be very good trolls.
Heck, they even have the same goals. Slashdot trolls aim to show how the mod system sucks, these guys are trying to show how worthless the peer review system is. Ultimately, however, they'll probably be given just as much credit as trolls, i.e. none at all. It's just because they've found a new medium to troll in that they're getting this much attention.
Why do you put Sokal in the same group as Schon? Schon was hedging the data to get prestige and more funding (most likely). Sokal was criticizing the social sciences for their lack of rigor by submitting a parody --- which they published without any fact checking.
So let's get it straight: Schon is a talentless hack; Sokal is a dedicated scientist who wants to see more people acting and thinking rationally. If you don't believe me, check out his website. From personal experience I can tell you that Sokal is a good guy. It makes me sick to see people like you lashing out without even taking time to learn about what you're talking about (actually, people like you were the motivation for Sokal writing that piece.).
Everyone knows that in the beginning there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light'. There was still nothing, but now you could see it.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Why not. If economics can become math (A Beautiful Mind) and psychology can become economics (See this year's Nobel in Economics - it's basically graduate level experimental psychology applied to group economic behavior) then why can't physics become science fiction.
anyone else think those guys pictured in the article look sorta like robots?
sig.
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.
RZ: If the Big Bang were indeed where it all began, may I ask what preceded the Big Bang?
Sci: The universe was shrunk down to a singularity.
RZ: But isn't it correct that a singularity as defined by science is a point at which all the laws of physics break down?
Sci: That is correct.
RZ: Then, technically, your starting point is not scientific either.
[silent panic]
RZ: When a mechanistic view of the universe had held sway, didn't thinkers like David Hume chide philosophers for taking the principle of causality and applying it to a philosophical argument for the existence of God? Didn't he warn that causality could not be extrapolated from science to philosophy?
RZ: Now, when a quantum theory holds sway, randomness in the subatomic world is made a basis for randomness in life. Are you not making the very same extrapolation that you warned us against?
[awkward silence, self-deprecating smile]
Sci: We scientists do seem to retain selective sovereignty over what we allow to be transferred to philosophy and what we don't.
Ah, the dark truth is snookered into revealing itself. Science plays the charade of pursuing truth while spurning the open-mindedness that is necessary to find ultimate truth.
Again, in the words of Zacharias, "The person who demands a sign [from God, a miracle] and at the same time has already determined that anything that cannot be explained scientifically [naturalistically] is meaningless is not merely stacking the deck; he is losing at his own game." (words in brackets in this quote added by me)
Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science, suggests exactly that ... that calculus has gotten us this far but may not get us much further, that many of the problems and discouragements in modern physics stems from the fact that the universe doesn't operate according to calculus, that calculus merely describes some aspects of it and there are other aspects, perhaps even those most fundamental aspects, of the universe that are simply inimical to calculus as a tool to accurately describe them.
... because figuring out the universe and how it works is hard, and humans seem to always crave easy answers.
Of course, he extends Fredkin's notion of using cellular automata rules (and variations on cellular automata) as a different tool with which aspects of the universe not amenable to calculus could be more accurately described, modelled, and predicted.
Since math is a human invention, it would not be terribly surprising to discover the natural world not necessarilly conducive to a complete and full description using only that tool, but somehow, if we ever do hack through to whatever lies beneath, we'll find even a combination of Newton's calculus, Fredkin's cellular automata, and who knows what other analytical tools we come up with, when taken together, will probably still be inadequate to describe and unify the whole thing.
Which of course is why so many people cop out with the whole God mythos
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
As a scientist, reading this article in the New York Times is rather troubling. The "text" produced by the science is an incredibly accurate rendition of the truth of the universe we live in. As further experiments and exploration continues, our understanding becomes ever richer and more detailed. This is the basis for a fascinating intellectual persuit. But also, the understanding produced by the social enterprise of science, as influenced by experiments, has led directly to important technological advances that shape our society. Ignore the arcane musings of physicists as you will, but it is difficult to ignore their impact! Finally, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard has written extensively about the fact that humans communicate through symbols and images that are essentially simulacra removed from objective truth. This leaves in his words, the "desert of the real". As far as I am concerned, say what you will about other academic subjects, but you can consider science to be an oasis, firmly rooted in the desert of the real. You post-modernist punks can take that to the bank! :-)
... 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?
We're sort of saying the same things. I'll let it rest at that.
Science does not explain "why" everything happens. We know, for instance, that matter has a property called "mass", and everything with "mass" has a force called "gravity" acting on it, but we don't really know how it works. Some laws are empirical, meaning that they describe the world, and are correct in that way... but they don't come with an explanation.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own
.htm, said it was now his "working hypothesis" that the Bogdanovs had done something interesting.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Everyone who ever wondered whether physicists were just making it all up when they talked about extra dimensions, dark matter and even multiple universes might take comfort in hearing that scientists themselves don't always seem to know.
Consider Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, French mathematical physicists and twins, who have recently been burning up the physics world with a novel and highly speculative theory about what happened before the Big Bang. Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense.
The uproar began late last month when rumors, denied by the brothers, began ricocheting around the Internet that they had constructed an elaborate hoax à la that of Dr. Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who published a nonsense article about quantum gravity in the cultural journal Social Text in 1994. The story was that the pair, who are 53 and better known as the writers and producers of a popular television show in the 1970's and 80's in which they appeared as what might be called science clowns, had posed as string theorists to obtain fraudulent doctorates.
Until then, few physicists had noticed the brothers' theses or their journal articles, which purport to exploit something called the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition. It implies a mathematical connection between infinite temperature and imaginary time (don't ask) to probe the state of the universe at its very beginning. Suddenly physicists were trying to figure out what sentences like this meant, if anything: "Then we suggest that the (pre-)spacetime is in thermodynamic equilibrium at the Planck-scale and is therefore subject to the KMS condition."
Dr. Roman W. Jackiw, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who read and approved Igor Bogdanov's Ph.D. thesis, said he found it speculative but "intriguing."
But Dr. John Baez, a physicist and quantum gravity theorist at the University of California at Riverside, who has conducted a dialogue with the Bogdanov brothers on the Web site math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov, said, "One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics."
Dr. Peter Woit, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University, said of the brothers' work, "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature."
Indeed, the problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense goes beyond the Bogdanovs, say some physicists, who worry that far too much junk goes past the referees who vet articles for the scientific journals and the examiners who approve Ph.D's.
"The bigger issue is about scientific integrity, and how theoretical physics gets judged," said Dr. Frank Wilczek, another M.I.T. physicist and editor of Annals of Physics, where one of the Bogdanov papers appeared. "Do people really have a mastery of the field as a whole?"
How the Bogdanovs came to this pass is perhaps a cautionary tale about the way physics is done today. Born in 1949 in a castle in Gascogne, they described themselves as descendants of Russian and Austrian nobility. After studying applied mathematics at the Institute of Political Science and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the brothers carved out careers for themselves as writers and producers of their science television show, "Temps X" ("Time X").
A particularly murky episode in their careers began in 1991, when they published "God and Science," a book based on conversations with the French philosopher Dr. Jean Guitton. The book was a best seller in France, but the authors were sued for plagiarism by Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, who claimed they had copied passages from his 1988 book, "The Secret Melody, and Man Created the Universe." The brothers countersued, arguing that Dr. Thuan had borrowed from their earlier writings and Dr. Guitton's.
The case was eventually settled out of court in 1995, according to a settlement document provided by the brothers, with both sides renouncing any damages and paying their own court costs. Dr. Thuan, whose book is being reissued in the United States this winter, failed to respond to requests for an interview.
It was during the writing of the book, the brothers say, that they had a brainstorm for a theory of the so-called initial singularity, the infinitely dense, infinitely hot point into which all space and time were squeezed when the universe began, where normal physics breaks down. They returned to college to pursue Ph.D.'s, something they say they had always intended to do, but had been delayed by the unexpected success of their television show.
After two years at the University of Bordeaux, they moved to the University of Bourgogne and apprenticed themselves to Dr. Moshe Flato, founder of the journal Letters in Mathematical Physics and a prominent theorist known for his unconventional ways. When Dr. Flato died in 1998, a longtime associate, Dr. Daniel Sternheimer, a mathematician at C.N.R.S., the French center for scientific research, took over as the twins' adviser.
For the most part, however, the brothers were left to work on their own without much supervision, "pursuing ideas that are quite a bit out of the mainstream," said Dr. Jacobus Verbaarschot, a physicist now at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the examiners for Grichka Bogdanov's doctoral thesis in 1999.
Dr. Sternheimer described the twins as stubborn "wunderkids" with very high I.Q.'s, who have a hard time understanding that they are not "the Einstein brothers" and prone to shooting themselves in the foot with vague statements and an "impressionistic" style. He called teaching them "like teaching My Fair Lady to speak with an Oxford accent."
Certainly they did not come off as the Einstein brothers in their dissertations. In June 1999, Grichka was granted a Ph.D. in mathematics by the École Polytechnique in Paris but with an "honorable," the lowest passing grade.
Igor, however, failed. The examining committee agreed that he could try again if he had three papers published in peer-reviewed journals, a common litmus test of legitimacy, Dr. Jackiw said.
"One has to have trust in the community," he explained. Igor's thesis had many things Dr. Jackiw didn't understand, but he found it intriguing. "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense," he said. "It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."
Igor got his degree in theoretical physics from the University of Bourgogne in July, also with the lowest possible grade, one that is seldom given, Dr. Sternheimer said.
"These guys worked for 10 years without pay," he said. "They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days."
The brothers have since returned to television, producing two-minute spots for a French series called "Rayons-X" ("X-Rays"). That would have been the end of it, except for the hoax rumors.
Dr. Sternheimer called the dispute "a storm in a teacup."
"They don't deserve so much interest, they don't deserve so much hatred," he said.
The aftermath has been bruising for both the Bogdanovs and for physics. Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk, a Polish theoretical physicist who has been conducting a dialogue with the brothers and other physicists on his Web site, cassiopaea.org/cass/bog-sternheimer
But the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity repudiated their publication of a Bogdanov paper, saying it "does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal," although they declined to retract it, inviting readers to send comments to the journal instead.
Dr. Wilczek stressed that the publication of a paper by the Bogdanovs in Annals of Physics had occurred before his tenure and that he had been raising standards. Describing it as a deeply theoretical work, he said that while it was "not a stellar addition to the physics literature," it was not at first glance clearly nonsensical.
"It's a difficult subject," he said. "The paper has a lot of the right buzz words. Referees rely on the good will of the authors." The paper is essentially impossible to read, like "Finnegans Wake," he added.
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."
When physics talks about the universe before the Big Bang, it is completely speculative, he said, adding, "I would be very careful before calling something nonsense, especially if I didn't understand it."
Physicists were no more unanimous on the greater lesson of the whole affair. "This says something profound about what happens to theoretical physics in the absence of the discipline of experiment," Dr. Wilczek said.
Dr. Baez and others have suggested that the system administering the brothers' degrees and publishing their papers was lax. "I do think that the examiners, referees and editors do have something to answer for in this case," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, citing what he said were obvious errors in the referees' reports for the brothers' papers.
But others, especially in France, disagree. "What they did or what they have written seems to show that they are not better (but not worse) than several theoretical physicists friends of ours who often use some mathematical terminology that they do not master well enough," said Dr. Robert Coquereaux, director of research at C.N.R.S., in a statement posted on Dr. Jackiw's Web site.
But Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., took issue with this view. "It is easy to judge, even from the abstract alone, that these papers are nutty," he said, noting that the physics community had ignored them until the hoax brouhaha.
Dr. Coquereaux and others said that the "publish or perish" ethos of academic research in the United States had contributed to the spread of unintelligible papers.
"There is a tradition of formally obscure but extremely serious and competent theoretical work in Europe," said Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and gravitational theorist at the University of Marseille and the University of Pittsburgh. But there was a tradition of letting every wild idea go in the United States, he added. He described the brothers' papers as "really empty."
The Bogdanovs said they were still hopeful that their ideas would be recognized and useful in physics. As they said in an e-mail message: "Nonsense in the morning may make sense in the evening or the following day."
Of course you have chosen an example case which is fairly clear-cut. You can probably get away with saying that there is a very high probablity that the statement is false. My point is that you can never know with absolute certainty. This is the objection commonly held, in philosophy of science, to obsolete Popper's theories in favor of those of Kuhn and his followers, who coined the word "paradigm" and elaborated the idea of a "paradigm shift" to describe the real process of theory selection in science.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Let me state this in terms even you can understand. Let P be a statement in first order logic (it may involve free variables). Falsifiable(P) means the same as Satisfiable(not P). Now, assume P is Newtons third law. In other words, we want to show that not P is satisfiable. For this we have to imigine a universe in which there exist an action without an equal and opposite reaction. And as has been stated numerous times, that is not especially hard to imagine even under more formal systems...
for every action a,
there exists an reaction b,
such that b is equal and opposite to a.
You're not actually formulating one of Newton's laws, you're just saying that an equal and opposite reaction exists... not making the implication that the reaction that will be observed will be the equal and opposite one.
What would work:
Let X,Y be actions.
For all X, there exists a (unique) Y such that X is equal and opposite to Y and that X occuring implies that Y will also occur.
I'm going to ignore the "unique existential quantifier" on Y (leave it as an existential) since the only thing it says is that "only one equal and opposite reaction exists".
To negate my proposition (sans uniqueness), we have (using parentheses for grouping):
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))).
So, all you have to do is find one instance where X occurs and Y (the equal and opposite) does not occur, and you're done. You can also find an instance where a reaction occurs, but it is not equal and opposite.
Okay, if you really want the uniqueness:
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))) or (there exists a Z such that (Z is equal and opposite to X) and (Z is not equal to Y))
So therefore, if you can find two reactions that are equal and opposite, but aren't the same, you've also found a counterexample... I'm not counting on that being very useful.
--
Apologies for any errors... I'm easily distracted by shiny objects.
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
The point of my post is that the scientific method is not applicable to whatever happened before the Big Bang. To force science to answer questions about what happened between the "dormant" singularity and the Big Bang is to attribute causality to randomness, which encroaches on philosophical conjecture.
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.
Dude, lighten up. Didn't you notice the name Alan Sokal in that pile of "postmodern" rubbish?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Science "community" is getting larger, hence
fraud is getting out of hand. I am a physics
grad student and between this, the Schon saga
and the Ninov debacle, this has been a bad year
for physics. But I wager it will only get worse
because physics is growing. My fear is that
beyond a certain size, we will not be able to
maintain knowledge in a coherent state between
all practitioners.
Well, invert that.
Suppose you find an action with a very visible opposite reaction, but one that is far from equal -- i.e. of much greater magnitude.
Now of course, since this defies scientific observation up until this time, the onus is going to be on you to show that you didn't have some hidden extra action 'a' that accounts for the extra magnitude 'b'. That and to make sure your particular experiment can be replicated so others can satisfy themselves that there's no extra inputs.
Logically your case and this are equivalent: on the one hand you're asking to "prove the absence of an output", on the other you're asking to "prove the absence of an extra input".
But of course, you can't prove a negative.
In the case of an experiment demonstrating an action with no reaction, it isn't up to the experimenter to go to absurd lengths to prove it (but at least reasonable lengths). Rather the onus is on those wishing to maintain that "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" to duplicate the experiment and point out just where that reaction is happening; either that or restate the theory ("the reaction occurs as a burst of magic momentum particles which are almost impossible to detect but account for the missing momentum" -- substitute "neutrinos" for "magic momentum particles" and you've pretty much got an example from real physics).
-- Alastair
True enough, but it does narrow the domain of things to test. If the assumptions have proved themselves in other experiments, it's a good bet the problem is with the theory. Conversely, coming up with a different method for testing either the theory or the assumptions could show where the problem is.
Either way you learn something about how things really work.
-- Alastair
It's not begging the question, it's defining the term.
You seem to be confusing the difference between a theory being false (ie, incorrect) and falsifiable (ie, an experiment could be devised which, given a certain result, would show the theory to be incorrect). A theory can be either, both, or neither.
Falsifiable means that it is possible to prove it wrong (if it is wrong); that for a given test, there will be some result which, if it occurs, proves the hypothesis wrong. Sure, it's hard to imagine that happening in any test of action/reaction, simply because of the amount of collective experience we've had with it working. If the billiard balls don't ricochet the way we expect, we're inclined to suspect a problem with the balls or the table, not with Newton's Third Law.
But that's a psychological barrier to falsifiability, not a logical one.
-- Alastair
Rethinking Everything. The above quote is on page 4.
Software Wars
No Einsteins theory was not wrong. It explained (demonstrably and provably [as it was when they tested it during an eclipse]) more and better (more detailed, more accurately) how the universe worked than previous theories. Thus it replaced newtonian physics...becasue it was more accurate and explained thing newtonian physics couldn't.
That things could be explained better, hell, everyone knows that. Every theory is expected to be replaced by a better one. But at the time it was the most complete and accurate model we had. So therefore that one gets used in place of others wich are less accurate and explain less.
And, btw, it wasn't Einstein who corrected his theory. It was Hubble who found evidence that an earlier version of Einstein's theory (the one which included the cosmological constant) was actually the one which explained the state of the universe more accurately.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Yup! But I must disagree with the last part of your statement: if the theory is (mathematically or otherwise) provable, it ceases to be a theory and becomes a proof.
If that were not the case, you couldn't accept a proof of oncorrectness.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Yes, and there are hardly anything that's more testable in science than Newton's laws.
Logics just a tool.
Yet, you are the one who bring an argument that could be taken right out of Erasmus Montanus mouth to the table.
Study Goedel.
While surely a worthwile study, it also has little to do with the issue at hand, which is about the definition and interpretation of falsifiability. Despite your claims to the contrary, you seem to have a fundamental lack of understanding of even the most simple logical concepts.
It's well-known that journalists prefer bad news whenever possible.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If numerous experiments demonstrating action and reaction do not disprove it, then odds are that it is also correct.
Unfortunately that is just not true, if you compare the finite number of performed experiments against the infinite number of unperformed experiments you end up with the conclusion that your theory actually has zero change of being correct. So not only is proof of correctness not absolute, any kind of trend towards correctness can not be shown either.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Well, unless the theory is entirely within the domain of mathematics, it isn't mathematically "provable" in some absolute sense because first you'd have to prove that the mathematics correlates with reality.
;-)
Good luck
More practically, though, we agree that certain theories and mathematics correlate with reality within certain bounds and domains. Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics holds as a reasonable approximation of the macroscopic world we routinely experience, but both break down at the relativistic and quantum levels.
Things get interesting when we find a theory doesn't work in a domain that we previously thought it would. That's an area where our mathematical models don't correlate with reality.
-- Alastair
The problem, among other, is that top-tier papers are expensive to produce. These folks have their own staff around the country and abroad, have specialists in many fields, the most sought-after columnists, etc. etc. I notice immediately in other papers that I'm mostly reading AP and Reuters, and they do a good job but don't break as much news.
Even if they make a larger fraction of their money off ads, most won't be profitable without subscriptions as well. And, of course, NYT isn't even asking for subscriptions, yet.
The paper NYT is quite expensive to subscribe to. The WP, which is local to me, just raised its newsstand price from 25 to 35 cents, a big jump %-wise that suggests they really do need that money (why endanger circulation?).
Most on point, NYT Digital has been losing money and laying off as they decide their next move in a declining advertising market. I've read similar stories elsewhere. The future is bleak -- look what happened to banner advertising
All the demographic info does is allow anonymous targeted marketing, which advertisers will pay more. So by signing up you indirectly increase their revenue.
Yeah, there are better ways to handle the log-ins, but I have the feeling the next step will be worse -- more intrusive ads or, most likely, paid-only access. I value being able to compare what different news sources are saying, but would hate to have to pay for each and every one.
You're still confusing the terms.
Perhaps deliberately.
Have a nice day.
-- Alastair
Ummmmm.... No.
But this horse is as dead as the armadillo on a
Mack's grille, so why lead it to water?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
True...but the cool thing is when that happens, we just figure out what does correlate :) For relativistc speeds, Einstein provided the groundwork...and now the race is on to provide that for the quantum world (and much work has been done already). Next step will be to combine the two...and then what's left? We'll have described all of (easily observed) reality.
:) ).
:)
No doubt we'll find something else after that which doesn't fit (more dimensions, multiple universes, the place lost socks go to, whatever) but we'll create new models which approximate reality to a finer and finer degree, until finer approximation gives no real benefit and/or understanding (or until we need a model the size of the universe [scale 1:1] to understand the universe
Hey, at least it keeps us off the streets
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
From the article it sounds like they just got an A for effort because they did 10 years of work so they were just given the doctorate, but they didn't actually meet the requirements for it.
What?