The Relativity of Wrong (1989) | Hacker News Reader

The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

chem.tufts.edu

55 pointsdedalus16 comments

This is something that getting into analysis courses and finding your way into higher level physics and chemistry classes drives home. It's perfectly valid to use a scientific theory that has been shown to be incorrect on some scale - so long as you are not in that scale. Yes, relativity is a better understanding of gravity than Newton's inverse square law, but it's still pretty valid for me to take the acceleration due to gravity as 9.8 meters/second^2 (which is an even lower level approximation) because I live on the surface of the Earth. If I am designing cars, or roads, or buildings, or (most) airplanes, or sewer systems, this is a pretty good assumption. Having been trained as a physicist, there is nothing the community would love more than results which show we need to develop new theories - mostly because that means more work for physicists. At any rate, I love Asimov's writing.

Serious philosophers of science (a la Popper and Poincare) had a succinct term for more-or-less right: verisimilitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude

I always enjoy finding the right word for summing up a heretofore real but fuzzy concept.

I enjoy it as well. Having various precisely descriptive words does a lot to help my thoughts flow nicely. Thanks for adding another to my collection.

To be fair... the relativity of wrong supports the Lit major's point: if wrongness is relative, you probably shouldn't make binary statements along the lines of "previously we did not understand the basis of the universe, and now we do." Relativity is less wrong than Newtonian mechanics, but it's still fair to say Newtonian mechanics is an "incomplete" view of the universe.

I'd want to see what Asimov wrote in the original essay before saying that it supports the letter writer's point. "...We finally got the basis of the universe straight" is a brief summary of whatever was originally stated, and is only included to introduce the overall point of this essay.

I would guess, since Asimov was a pretty smart fellow who understood this stuff pretty well, that the original statement was more along the lines of saying how great it was to live in an age where so many fundamental things about the universe are now understood. Things like relativity and quantum mechanics may be superseded by new things, but they'll remain fairly accurate understandings of what they're meant to describe, analogous to the spherical earth he mentions later.

"it's still fair to say Newtonian mechanics is an "incomplete" view of the universe"

The arguments back and forth on this fascinate me. On one hand, on some scales, Newtonian mechanics is "correct enough" to give results that work, and so in that sense it is just "incomplete" in that its domain is restricted. On the other, relativity and QM change everything. These new theories may reduce to Newtonian mechanics given certain assumptions, but Newtonian physics says things about the structure of spacetime that are incorrect (e.g. velocity is not additive). In this sense, one can fairly say that Newton's mechanics are not just incomplete, but wrong.

I think the biggest difference is that Newtonian mechanics tells us how forces act but it doesn't say anything at all about what forces there are. Newtonian gravitation gave one source of forces, but the rest were ad hoc: two objects don't intersect so there must be a normal force and we observe sliding objects to slow down so there must be a friction force. Now we think we have a complete list of all forces that arise, ever.

In particular to the question at hand Newtonian physics has a very hard time explaining the galactic and super-galactic structure we see. Without relativity, dark matter, and dark energy, those structures are not clear conclusions and certainly Newtonian gravity does not arrive at those conclusions. I think it very fair that Asimov points to the 20th century as where we sussed out the structure of space.

I think you mean astrophysical, rather than galactic? Galactic structures are well-explained by Newtonian gravity (assuming dark matter, but that's independent of whether you describe gravity as Newton or Einstein did). Large-scale structure, too, I thought. Compact objects---black holes, quasars, neutron stars, etc---and details of the galactic core need GR. But you get it mostly right without it, I thought.

The point is that dark matter is still a 20th century theory, meaning that the structure of galaxies is understood only with 20th century theories. If you read the letter carefully, you'll find that was the original claim made by Asimov.

Can I get a group opinion on a related question? Would that be appropriate?

I got into a debate with someone over falsifiability. I claimed that the falsifiability of a claim is relative to the person hearing it, and he claimed it was an intrinsic property of the claim itself.

I said that the claim "I am currently sitting on a couch" is falsifiable to my family, and potentially my neighbors, but not to a peasant in north korea. He disagreed, rather profanely and insultingly, and the debate disintegrated, because of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. But I'd still like to know what a more level-headed and calm group of people think on the subject.

Falsifiablity is generally treated more like a philosophical idea than a practical concern.

Consider how relativity made several real predictions about things in the universe, but no human was yet able to test them. In principle relativity was considered falsifiable we just couldn't test it yet. When the 1918 eclipse came about and we could measure the deviation of light from it expected course by traveling through the gravity well of the sun, we had a real test and it was relatively inexpensive and easy compared to to some scientific endeavors (it was still not easy for the teams involved but it was no large hadron collider).

This lets us permanently discard ideas that are in principle not falsifiable. These ideas are categorically useless from the perspective of actually understanding the world, like capricious invisible wish granting unicorns that live in my garage or any typical conception of god.

Falsifiability is generally taken as an intrinsic property of the claim in science and philosophy. "Is there any possible way" rather than "is there any reasonable way".

What if funding is very one-sided on an issue? Why can't a Scientific field get caught in a 'local minimum' for centuries?

I fail to see the connection between your questions and the article. Can you elaborate?

It seems like Asimov was totally trolled by the English lit. guy :) Good read nonetheless. I fondly remember the days of handwritten communication. It's a shame that we still live in the world where belief systems trump facts and facts are relegated to opinions.

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