Just over a year ago I brought up the subject of Dark Flow: here. That references an 80 Beats blogpost on the subject at Discover Blogs.
Universe Today returned to the subject this weekend with many more replies (so far!): here.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Dark Flow II
Just over a year ago I brought up the subject of Dark Flow: here. That references an 80 Beats blogpost on the subject at Discover Blogs.
Universe Today returned to the subject this weekend with many more replies (so far!): here.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Spock (Leonard Nimoy) Turns 80
Granted, 80 is like entering Adolescence for a Vulcan, as you need 80 years to just get caught up on all the current Mathematics and Science.
I didn't need Spock as an inspiration, as I had Al Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter et. al. as mine, but yah, for a lot of you, this was THE guy.
Click here for all the 80th Birthday details.
Live long, and be sure to kick some serious arse all along the way.
Happy birthday, Leonard.
The Jaguar and the Fox
Hoo-boy, did I have a fun read this morning, just today being introduced to the July 2000 Atlantic Monthly article by Chris Johnson contrasting the careers of Cal Tech colleagues and socialites Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, arguably the 2 best Physicists of the last half of the Twentieth century.
``If I were in charge of the world, all physics students would learn how to do Feynman diagram calculations as college freshmen, while their brains are still fully functioning.'' -John Baez
( For the Mathematically inclined, click here for a sweet Introduction to Feynman Diagrams. )
I am not going to copy'n'paste the entire article, which I strongly recommend for those who haven't read it. Part One can be found here.
However, here are some entertaining snippets from the article:
Many physicists are puzzled and a little annoyed to see their old colleague [Feynman], brilliant as he was, elevated to the level of Einstein. But no one finds the hype more annoying than Murray Gell-Mann. Those who paid attention in physics-for-poets classes may remember Gell-Mann as the man who, working down the hall from Feynman, discovered quarks -- the tiny subparticles from which just about everything is made. (He famously took the spelling from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!") It was Gell-Mann who came up with the Eightfold Way -- an elegant organizing scheme that made sense of the "subatomic zoo," herding some 100 unruly particles into their proper cages. For years a favorite argument among physicists was over "Who is smarter, Murray or Dick?"
But Gell-Mann -- who, in semi-retirement, continues to lecture and write -- has, to his bewilderment and consternation, never become as famous as his old sparring partner. At the Caltech bookstore one is lucky to find a single copy of his book, The Quark and the Jaguar, which did not sell nearly as well as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!," a collection of humorous anecdotes that Gell-Mann snidely calls "Dick's joke book." When Physics World recently asked scientists to name the greatest physicists who ever lived, Feynman came in seventh, just behind Galileo. Gell-Mann didn't make the top ten -- or even get a single vote. When he showed up at President Clinton's millennium New Year's Eve ball squiring the actress Talia Shire (famous for playing Rocky Balboa's wife), the cameras barely blinked.
and
After Gell-Mann and his wife arrived in Pasadena, in the spring of 1955, Dick and Murray, as everyone soon called them, became inseparable. Strolling Caltech's immaculately landscaped campus or dueling at the chalkboard over some calculations, the two scientists discussed physics for hours -- "twisting the tail of the cosmos," as Gell-Mann later put it. But when it came to almost anything but physics, their personalities clashed.
Gell-Mann, who had been raised in a poor family of Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, was determined to become a debonair man about town. He dressed impeccably, lecturing in well-tailored sport coats and ties on even the hottest summer days. He knew just which wines and dishes to order at a restaurant, and paid with his Carte Blanche. Still the overeager schoolboy, he pronounced foreign words perfectly and corrected new acquaintances on the pronunciation of their own names.
And then there was Feynman, tieless, in shirtsleeves, grabbing lunch at a greasy spoon. He had grown up in Far Rockaway, on the outskirts of Queens. Like Gell-Mann, he had never gotten over a need to prove he was the smartest kid on the block. Feynman affected the role of an outsider, a heckler on the sidelines who was ready to deflate anyone who put on airs. Gell-Mann would make a knowing reference to some foreign locale -- pronouncing "Montreal" so that it caught in his throat with an authentic Quebecois growl, or "Beijing" so that it rang like a temple bell -- and Feynman would pretend not to understand him. "Where?" he'd bark back, sounding more like a Brooklyn cabdriver than someone with a Ph.D. from Princeton. The image was as carefully crafted as Gell-Mann's, but few caught on.
and
The breaking point came in 1985, when Feynman and Ralph Leighton, the son of a Caltech physicist, compiled some of Feynman's tales into "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character, which became a surprise best seller. In story after story Feynman came off as the holy fool seeing through everyone else's pretenses. Flipping through the pages, Gell-Mann found Feynman's account of the theory of the weak nuclear force, the one they had reluctantly collaborated on. "I was very excited," Feynman said. "It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew." Gell-Mann, enraged, said he would sue. In a later edition Feynman conceded that Gell-Mann and two other physicists had also thought of the idea. But the disclaimer didn't heal the wound.
For all his accomplishments, Gell-Mann couldn't be happy until he had written a best seller like Feynman's. Adding to his melancholy, "Surely, You're Joking" was followed in 1988 by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which sold more than nine million copies. To Gell-Mann's colleagues, a book of light-hearted anecdotes told by their intense and pedantic friend seemed a dubious prospect. It would have to be called, one of them said, "Dammit, Murray, You're Right Again!" Others remarked that Gell-Mann, unlike Hawking, didn't have the advantage of being confined to a wheelchair.
"I'm writing a book for peasants," Gell-Mann would say dismissively. As it turned out, he wasn't up to the task. The Quark and the Jaguar became legendary in publishing circles for the size of the advances it attracted -- reported to be more than a million dollars worldwide -- and for the toll in human suffering it took on friends, colleagues, ghostwriters, editors, and, finally, readers. It was the Heaven's Gate of science books.
Submitted late and incomplete, the manuscript, composed one agonizing sentence at a time, was rejected by Bantam Books. Shortly afterward Gell-Mann had a mild heart attack. When the book was finally resold, for substantially less money, it did well, but on a far smaller scale than Feynman's. Gell-Mann just couldn't match Feynman as a storyteller. And although Feynman didn't actually write his own books, many of his lectures, transcribed for the popular-science market, were gems of clarity and color. Feynman thought in pictures, Gell-Mann in abstractions. When Gell-Mann tried to convey his ideas to the public, the explanations often fell flat. Making up funny names for particles, it turned out, wasn't enough.
IN the end, Gell-Mann may turn out to be the more important physicist. The Eightfold Way and quarks now lie at the foundation of the Standard Model -- the theory that explains how matter is made. It is hard to imagine a more far-reaching contribution to understanding the physical world. Trying to pin down Feynman's significance is much harder. He himself considered his Nobel Prize-winning work more of a virtuoso technical performance than a meaningful insight into nature, and it was completed when he was thirty. After that he made scattered contributions -- a theory of a phenomenon called superfluidity, for example. His greatest legacy may be Feynman diagrams, the little pictures that vividly describe particle interactions. (Gell-Mann would deny him even that distinction, obstinately calling them "Stückelberg diagrams," after an obscure Swiss physicist who devised a similar notion.)
Neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann got what he most wanted. Feynman never stopped lamenting that he had missed the thrill of being the first to understand a new truth. Gell-Mann has never become a household name. And the friction between them prevented the kind of alliance that might have led to even greater discoveries -- great enough, perhaps, to satisfy both these impossible men.
``If I were in charge of the world, all physics students would learn how to do Feynman diagram calculations as college freshmen, while their brains are still fully functioning.'' -John Baez
 |
| Hard as he tried, Murray Gell-Mann could never make himself into a legend like his rakish colleague and collaborator, Richard Feynman -- even if he was probably the greater physicist |
( For the Mathematically inclined, click here for a sweet Introduction to Feynman Diagrams. )
I am not going to copy'n'paste the entire article, which I strongly recommend for those who haven't read it. Part One can be found here.
However, here are some entertaining snippets from the article:
Many physicists are puzzled and a little annoyed to see their old colleague [Feynman], brilliant as he was, elevated to the level of Einstein. But no one finds the hype more annoying than Murray Gell-Mann. Those who paid attention in physics-for-poets classes may remember Gell-Mann as the man who, working down the hall from Feynman, discovered quarks -- the tiny subparticles from which just about everything is made. (He famously took the spelling from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!") It was Gell-Mann who came up with the Eightfold Way -- an elegant organizing scheme that made sense of the "subatomic zoo," herding some 100 unruly particles into their proper cages. For years a favorite argument among physicists was over "Who is smarter, Murray or Dick?"
But Gell-Mann -- who, in semi-retirement, continues to lecture and write -- has, to his bewilderment and consternation, never become as famous as his old sparring partner. At the Caltech bookstore one is lucky to find a single copy of his book, The Quark and the Jaguar, which did not sell nearly as well as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!," a collection of humorous anecdotes that Gell-Mann snidely calls "Dick's joke book." When Physics World recently asked scientists to name the greatest physicists who ever lived, Feynman came in seventh, just behind Galileo. Gell-Mann didn't make the top ten -- or even get a single vote. When he showed up at President Clinton's millennium New Year's Eve ball squiring the actress Talia Shire (famous for playing Rocky Balboa's wife), the cameras barely blinked.
and
After Gell-Mann and his wife arrived in Pasadena, in the spring of 1955, Dick and Murray, as everyone soon called them, became inseparable. Strolling Caltech's immaculately landscaped campus or dueling at the chalkboard over some calculations, the two scientists discussed physics for hours -- "twisting the tail of the cosmos," as Gell-Mann later put it. But when it came to almost anything but physics, their personalities clashed.
Gell-Mann, who had been raised in a poor family of Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, was determined to become a debonair man about town. He dressed impeccably, lecturing in well-tailored sport coats and ties on even the hottest summer days. He knew just which wines and dishes to order at a restaurant, and paid with his Carte Blanche. Still the overeager schoolboy, he pronounced foreign words perfectly and corrected new acquaintances on the pronunciation of their own names.
And then there was Feynman, tieless, in shirtsleeves, grabbing lunch at a greasy spoon. He had grown up in Far Rockaway, on the outskirts of Queens. Like Gell-Mann, he had never gotten over a need to prove he was the smartest kid on the block. Feynman affected the role of an outsider, a heckler on the sidelines who was ready to deflate anyone who put on airs. Gell-Mann would make a knowing reference to some foreign locale -- pronouncing "Montreal" so that it caught in his throat with an authentic Quebecois growl, or "Beijing" so that it rang like a temple bell -- and Feynman would pretend not to understand him. "Where?" he'd bark back, sounding more like a Brooklyn cabdriver than someone with a Ph.D. from Princeton. The image was as carefully crafted as Gell-Mann's, but few caught on.
and
The breaking point came in 1985, when Feynman and Ralph Leighton, the son of a Caltech physicist, compiled some of Feynman's tales into "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character, which became a surprise best seller. In story after story Feynman came off as the holy fool seeing through everyone else's pretenses. Flipping through the pages, Gell-Mann found Feynman's account of the theory of the weak nuclear force, the one they had reluctantly collaborated on. "I was very excited," Feynman said. "It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew." Gell-Mann, enraged, said he would sue. In a later edition Feynman conceded that Gell-Mann and two other physicists had also thought of the idea. But the disclaimer didn't heal the wound.
For all his accomplishments, Gell-Mann couldn't be happy until he had written a best seller like Feynman's. Adding to his melancholy, "Surely, You're Joking" was followed in 1988 by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which sold more than nine million copies. To Gell-Mann's colleagues, a book of light-hearted anecdotes told by their intense and pedantic friend seemed a dubious prospect. It would have to be called, one of them said, "Dammit, Murray, You're Right Again!" Others remarked that Gell-Mann, unlike Hawking, didn't have the advantage of being confined to a wheelchair.
"I'm writing a book for peasants," Gell-Mann would say dismissively. As it turned out, he wasn't up to the task. The Quark and the Jaguar became legendary in publishing circles for the size of the advances it attracted -- reported to be more than a million dollars worldwide -- and for the toll in human suffering it took on friends, colleagues, ghostwriters, editors, and, finally, readers. It was the Heaven's Gate of science books.
Submitted late and incomplete, the manuscript, composed one agonizing sentence at a time, was rejected by Bantam Books. Shortly afterward Gell-Mann had a mild heart attack. When the book was finally resold, for substantially less money, it did well, but on a far smaller scale than Feynman's. Gell-Mann just couldn't match Feynman as a storyteller. And although Feynman didn't actually write his own books, many of his lectures, transcribed for the popular-science market, were gems of clarity and color. Feynman thought in pictures, Gell-Mann in abstractions. When Gell-Mann tried to convey his ideas to the public, the explanations often fell flat. Making up funny names for particles, it turned out, wasn't enough.
IN the end, Gell-Mann may turn out to be the more important physicist. The Eightfold Way and quarks now lie at the foundation of the Standard Model -- the theory that explains how matter is made. It is hard to imagine a more far-reaching contribution to understanding the physical world. Trying to pin down Feynman's significance is much harder. He himself considered his Nobel Prize-winning work more of a virtuoso technical performance than a meaningful insight into nature, and it was completed when he was thirty. After that he made scattered contributions -- a theory of a phenomenon called superfluidity, for example. His greatest legacy may be Feynman diagrams, the little pictures that vividly describe particle interactions. (Gell-Mann would deny him even that distinction, obstinately calling them "Stückelberg diagrams," after an obscure Swiss physicist who devised a similar notion.)
Neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann got what he most wanted. Feynman never stopped lamenting that he had missed the thrill of being the first to understand a new truth. Gell-Mann has never become a household name. And the friction between them prevented the kind of alliance that might have led to even greater discoveries -- great enough, perhaps, to satisfy both these impossible men.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
George Carlin on SCIENTISTS
Warning: This won't be pretty ......
SCIENCE FRICTION
I'm getting sick of "scientific progress." Scientists are easily the least responsible class in society. If you're one of those "green" assholes who run around worrying about the condition of the planet all the time, you might as well go ahead and blame it on the scientists. They're the ones who fouled the nest. Without them, none of the bad shit gets done. Self-important, asshole scientists, most of them working for the Pentagon or big business, creating harmful products we don't need. They don't care what they produce as long as they get to publish their fuckin' papers.
And the idealistic ones? The ones who won't have anything to do with the weapons makers and greed-heads? The ones involved in "pure research"? They lay the groundwork for the truly dangerous scientists who move in later and apply the knowledge commercially. Scientists have consistently assaulted and violated your planet. That's why you have AIDS, that's why you have a hole in your ozone layer, that's why the atmosphere is overheating, that's why you have toxic and nuclear waste, and that's why everything has a thin coating of oil on it. And next, they're going to turn these irresponsible motherfuckers loose on human genetic engineering. That ought to be a real treat. Scientists. The only ones worth a fuck are theoretical physicists. At least they're nuts.
 |
| Cardinal Carlin (from "Dogma") |
SCIENCE FRICTION
I'm getting sick of "scientific progress." Scientists are easily the least responsible class in society. If you're one of those "green" assholes who run around worrying about the condition of the planet all the time, you might as well go ahead and blame it on the scientists. They're the ones who fouled the nest. Without them, none of the bad shit gets done. Self-important, asshole scientists, most of them working for the Pentagon or big business, creating harmful products we don't need. They don't care what they produce as long as they get to publish their fuckin' papers.
And the idealistic ones? The ones who won't have anything to do with the weapons makers and greed-heads? The ones involved in "pure research"? They lay the groundwork for the truly dangerous scientists who move in later and apply the knowledge commercially. Scientists have consistently assaulted and violated your planet. That's why you have AIDS, that's why you have a hole in your ozone layer, that's why the atmosphere is overheating, that's why you have toxic and nuclear waste, and that's why everything has a thin coating of oil on it. And next, they're going to turn these irresponsible motherfuckers loose on human genetic engineering. That ought to be a real treat. Scientists. The only ones worth a fuck are theoretical physicists. At least they're nuts.
 |
| Buddy Christ (from "Dogma") |
Phenomenology in Science
 |
| Phenomenology of Information |
The term phenomenology in science is used to describe a body of knowledge which relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other, in a way which is consistent with fundamental theory, but is not directly derived from theory. For example, we find the following definition in the Concise Dictionary of Physics:
Phenomenological Theory. A theory which expresses mathematically the results of observed phenomena without paying detailed attention to their fundamental significance.[1]The name is derived from phenomenon (from Greek φαινόμενoν, pl. φαινόμενα - phenomena and -λογία - -logia, translated as "study of" or "research") which is any occurrence that is observable.
Contents |
Phenomenology in physical sciences
There are cases in physics when it is not possible to derive a theory for describing observed results from the known first principles (such as Newton's laws of motion or Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism). There may be several reasons for this. For example, the underlying theory is not yet discovered, or the mathematics to describe the observations is too complex. In these cases sometimes simple algebraic expressions may be used to model the observations or experimental results. The algebraic model is then used to make predictions about the results of other observations or experiments. If the predictions made by the algebraic model are sufficiently accurate, they are often adopted by the scientific community despite the fact that the algebraic expressions themselves cannot be (or have not yet been) derived from the fundamental theory of that domain of knowledge.The boundaries between theory and phenomenology, and between phenomenology and experiment, are fuzzy. Some philosophers of science, and in particular Nancy Cartwright argue that any fundamental laws of Nature are merely phenomenological generalizations.[2]
Examples in physics
The examples below are in chronological order.- Second law of thermodynamics: Prior to the development of statistical mechanics by Ludwig Boltzmann (1896), this law was phenomenological. For instance, spontaneous net flow of heat from a lower temperature to a higher temperature had never been observed and this fact served as the basis of the second law.
- Rutherford model also known as planetary model (1911) describes the structure of an atom based on the experimental results. It has a number of essential modern features, including a relatively high central charge concentrated into a very small volume in comparison to the rest of the atom. It resembles the planetary system, a known physical object larger by several orders of magnitude. It was superseded in 1913 by the Bohr model, which used some of the early quantum mechanical results to give locational structure to the behavior of the orbiting electrons, confining them to certain circular (and later elliptical) orbits.
- Landau theory of second order phase transitions (1936).
- Bloch equations (1946).
- Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity (1950).
- Modified Newtonian dynamics (1983)
Phenomenology in social statistics
In the science of statistics, the collection of quantifiable data from people involves a phenomenological step.Namely, in order to obtain that data, survey questions must be designed to collect measurable responses which are categorized in a logically sound and practical way, such that the form in which the questions are asked does not bias the results. If this is not done, data distortions due to question-wording effects (response error) occur, and the data obtained may have no validity at all, because observations are counted up which do not have the same meaning (it would be like "adding up apples and pears") [3] A prerequisite of a good survey is that all respondents are really able to give a definite and unambiguous answer to the questions, and that they understand what is asked of them in the same way. One could, for example, ask farmers, "How much risk do you run on your farm?" with a scale of response options ranging, for example, from "a lot of risk" to "no risk".
But this yields quantitatively meaningless data which is not objective, since the interpretations of "how much risk" by farmers could focus, for example, on the number, size, frequency, severity or consequence of risks, and each farmer will have his own idiosyncratic idea about that. All farmers may suffer, for example, from a lack of rainfall, but some will personally consider it a large risk, others a low risk and some not a risk at all. Furthermore, in actually asking the questions of respondents and subsequently coding the responses to numerical values, a technique must be found to ensure that no misinterpretation occurs of a type that would lead to errors. In other words, in designing the survey instrument, the researcher must somehow find a satisfactory "bridge" of meaning between the logical and practical requirements of the survey statistician, a statistical classification scheme, the awareness of respondents and the processors of the raw data. Finding this "bridge" involves an abstraction process which necessarily goes beyond logical inference, theory and experiment and involves an element of "art", because it must establish an appropriate connection between the language used, the intersubjective interactions between the surveyor and the respondent, and how respondents and those who process the data construct the meaning of what is being asked of them. For this cognitive process, it is impossible to provide a standard procedure which will always work, only "rules of thumb"; it requires a "practical" human insight [4].
See also
- Empirical relationship
- Heterophenomenology
- Particle physics phenomenology
- Phenomenology in Philosophy
- Phenomenology in Psychology
References
- ^ Thewlis, J. (Ed.) (1973). Concise Dictionary of Physics. Oxford: Pergamon Press, p. 248.
- ^ Cartwright, Nancy, intro., How the Laws of Physics Lie, 1984, Oxford U.
- ^ see, e.g., Nicolaas J. Molenaar, "Non-Experimental Research on the Effects on the Wording of Questions in Survey Interviews". Quality & Quantity, 16, no 2 (1982) 69-90 and Norman M. Bradburn and Seymour Sudman, Response Effects in Surveys : A Review and Synthesis. Chicago, Aldene Pub. Co., 1974.
- ^ See Stanley Payne, The Art of Asking Questions. Princeton: Pinceton University Press, 1980
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)