Slashdot Mirror
Getting Lost In the Scientific Woods Is Good For You
StartsWithABang writes: Wandering into the woods unprepared and without a plan sounds like a terrible idea. But if you're interested in scientific exploration at the frontiers, confronting the unknown with whatever you happen to have at your disposal, you have to take that risk. You have to be willing to take those steps. And you have to be okay with putting your best ideas out there — for all to see — knowing full well that you might get the entire thing wrong. Sometimes, that's indeed what happens. Some of the most revered and famous scientific minds in history confronted the great mysteries of nature, and came away having done nothing but set us back many years by leading the field down a blind alley. But other times, the greatest leaps forward in our understanding occur as a result. The article shares some notable examples, and explains why this is vital for scientific progress.
..is finding the paths untread.
That's pretty much the definition of what science is. I'm not even clear what they think the alternative might be that would still qualify as science.
And it works whether 'lost in the woods' is meant literally and metaphorically.
"No blah blah blah!" -- James T. Kirk
So now I first check the poster before the summary. There's a couple that can be safely ignored. Either because they don't have anything to say, or because they insist on summarising other people's work on an unreadable hipster website. NEXT!
However, ignorance is also the domain of the ignorant.
It's okay not to be aware that someone has investigated an area before, or even to ignore people because you have a hint they may be wrong because of some anomaly. But ignorance of the in-depth side of what you're ignoring is dangerous.
As such, you aren't aware that information cannot travel faster than c (lower-case). The wavefront of a particular wave might be seen to but it cannot be usefully used to transmit information (or objects, or anything) faster than c. That's why nobody's bothered to look further into your phenomenon - we realised the limit and have no reason to doubt it. And the plasma antenna stuff is unrelated, sorry.
Getting a firm grasp of a topic you choose to ignore is vital.
To be honest, even without a firm grasp on the intricacies of space-time, light-speed, and relativity, your post just seems like nonsense anyway.
There has rarely (I would state never but I'm a scientist in my mind, so I can't without proof that's true) been a time in history when someone has found something that everyone else had totally ignored. They may have not believed it. They may have not fully understood the principles underlying it. They may have been uninterested and didn't pursue the details further. They may have been unable to test it. But scientific revolutions don't happen because some guy in a shed decided to ignore quantum physics and stamp his own path.
They happen because that guy looks at the established science in another way, or digs into a hole in the science that nobody had looked into before, or finds a hole that nobody else had seen. That doesn't happen from guesses and ignorance of what the previous science held true. The gentleman scientist of yesteryear could "know" all of known science at the time, or as near as damn it. Thus people like Newton etc. were coming from a position of knowledge and expanding it. Nowadays, you can spend your life following just one tiny branch of any particular science, so it's all the easier to be ignorant.
I'm sorry, but you read like a crackpot. Determined that someone with no scientific knowledge will walk in and spot a hole in relativity. It's not what happens. What happens is that patent clerks get up to speed on the latest science, go one step further (which is the really hard part, and the reason such people get to be called Doctor or Professor of the relevant science - those titles confer the knowledge that you found something in academia that nobody else knew, no matter how trivial), and realise the science wasn't "wrong" so much as "incomplete".
I have any number of personal hypotheses about scientific phenomena, it entertains my head to have them and even if they are misconceptions, they help me understand "my" science. When my doctorate-holding or lecture-giving friends come round, I keep my mouth shut. Because I'm certain that they are beliefs held from a position of ignorance of the relevant science and that bringing me up to speed (which would, inevitably, explain my theories into the bin) would take the length of their career.
If you've ever received the answer "It doesn't quite work like that", then you need to dig further yourself.
It's a sad fact that even from the doctors and professors of science I know, the number of "breakthroughs", no matter how tiny, is infinitesimally small. I don't claim to come close to their knowledge on the basics, I've never found something new to science in my life, and I don't think I could understand most of what I try to. Or why it's wrong.
Pet theories are nice pets. When you have the knowledge to prove them true, you'll have the knowledge to abandon them just as easily. Until then, I suggest you err on the side of abandonment.
Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Until, that is, you truly have something that a science journal is willing to publish.
Who will fund you when you're "lost in the woods"?
...makes you stronger, that still holds some merit to it.
I'm an old bugger by now, and I can tell you this is quite right. It's like teaching a kid the difference from right and wrong, from bad and good, the kid touches the stove...burns himself a little - life lesson learned, sure beats hearing about it in theory.
Same thing with me, instead of always being politically correct here at Slashdot, I throw some stuff out there. I know how to hoist easy modpoints, any one who have been here for a long time knows the cheap tricks, heck...I've cheapened out myself once in a while, but the really cool stuff happens when you toss out there the content of your heart, risky...yep - troll away - but you'll never truly know unless your theories gets peer reviews.
In animation class, a wise teacher asked me - does anyone else than your mother & friends love your work? Show your work to your worst enemy...and if he is silent, you've done good!
So yes, by all means - take a chance. You may not get another one.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
A paper about the 12th decimal place of a century old observation written by 35 authors so the university/employer market can keep expanding?
You ought to read up on some of the crazy things you have to account for in order to make extremely accurate observations. It's not as trivial as you make it sound.
"Science is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." -- Werner von Braun
this attitude will get you killed in space.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
And that is merely wrong. While a lot of engineering goes into these experiments, accounting for error is also a scientific process.
However, ignorance is also the domain of the ignorant.
It's okay not to be aware that someone has investigated an area before, or even to ignore people because you have a hint they may be wrong because of some anomaly. But ignorance of the in-depth side of what you're ignoring is dangerous.
There has rarely (I would state never but I'm a scientist in my mind, so I can't without proof that's true) been a time in history when someone has found something that everyone else had totally ignored
I am not saying your statements are wrong, merely giving one example I have learned of that it the contrary to the norm. The inventor of the Frazier lens wanted to make a lens that could have infinite depth of field. He wanted the closest things and the furthest thing to all be in focus at the same time. He was an amateur in the field and didn't know the physics or math of how lenses work. When he went around to universities asking about how to do what he wanted he was told over and over that it was impossible and that it could never work. So instead he spent many years in his garage making his own lens systems (walking into the woods) and experimenting. He ended up creating a new lens system that accomplishes what he wanted. This is how he described his invention in a documentary when it was first created. Wikipedia now says that some of the things he uses to get the infinite DoF have been around before, so perhaps it was more of a rediscovery or a combining multiple things into one system to get the effect desired. Still, the experts in the field said it was impossible to do, but he did it anyway.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Often in science discoveries are made different from the original goal. Much like Columbus looking for a shorter route to India and "discovering" the Americas. With Einstein as mentioned in the article, it was more like asking the right question such as, "What if the speed of light is independent of the observer?"
All different.
This was so vapid and banal, I checked to see if the byline was Bennett Haselton.
Then again, it wasn't a 6000-word opus, so I should have known better.
Yes, it's intellectually useful to be challenged. And?
-Styopa
But it's hardly "new", is it?
If it weren't new, then that digit would already be known.
About 300 experiments have tried to determine the value of the Newtonian gravitational constant, G, so far, but large discrepancies in the results have made it impossible to know its value precisely. The weakness of the gravitational interaction and the impossibility of shielding the effects of gravity make it very difficult to measure G while keeping systematic effects under control. Most previous experiments performed were based on the torsion pendulum or torsion balance scheme as in the experiment by Cavendish in 1798, and in all cases macroscopic masses were used. Here we report the precise determination of G using laser-cooled atoms and quantum interferometry. We obtain the value G = 6.67191(99) x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 with a relative uncertainty of 150 parts per million (the combined standard uncertainty is given in parentheses). Our value differs by 1.5 combined standard deviations from the current recommended value of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology. A conceptually different experiment such as ours helps to identify the systematic errors that have proved elusive in previous experiments, thus improving the confidence in the value of G. There is no definitive relationship between G and the other fundamental constants, and there is no theoretical prediction for its value, against which to test experimental results. Improving the precision with which we know G has not only a pure metrological interest, but is also important because of the key role that G has in theories of gravitation, cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics and in geophysical models.